Sen. Rand Paul stopped a bipartisan attempt to pass the Kids Online Safety Act by unanimous consent, forcing supporters to pursue another legislative route for a bill that would impose new duties on online platforms and direct federal agencies to study device-level age verification.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Sen. Rand Paul blocked an attempt to move the Kids Online Safety Act through the Senate without a recorded roll-call vote Wednesday, objecting to a bipartisan unanimous-consent request and arguing that the legislation’s “duty of care” standard could lead online platforms to restrict constitutionally protected speech.
Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., sought unanimous consent to pass S. 1748 before senators departed Washington ahead of the November midterm elections. The Senate’s official daily record confirms that Paul, R-Ky., objected to the request. Because unanimous consent requires the absence of an objection, Paul’s move prevented the bill from clearing the chamber through that expedited procedure.
The objection does not permanently defeat KOSA, nor does it mean the legislation can only advance through a roll-call vote. Senate leaders could attempt another unanimous-consent agreement, schedule the bill through regular floor procedures or pursue another legislative vehicle. The immediate attempt, however, failed just as the Senate was preparing to leave Washington until after the election, leaving supporters with a shrinking legislative calendar.
Paul used his floor remarks to explain that his objection centered on First Amendment concerns, particularly the Senate bill’s requirement that covered platforms exercise reasonable care when designing features that could contribute to specified harms involving minors.
“I have no doubt that the authors of this bill genuinely want to protect children,” Paul said, before calling the measure “a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences.” His objections echoed arguments he has made in previous debates over KOSA, including that platforms could respond to potential liability by restricting lawful content rather than risk government enforcement. Paul has argued publicly that the legislation’s mental-health provisions are too broad and could encourage platforms to suppress protected speech.
“Free minds and parental guidance are the best means to protect our children online,” Paul has said in opposing previous versions of the legislation.
Blumenthal disputed that interpretation on the Senate floor, maintaining that KOSA targets the design of online products rather than viewpoints or protected expression. Supporters say the legislation is intended to address features such as compulsive-use mechanisms, algorithmic recommendations and other platform designs they contend can contribute to harms involving children.
The latest Senate version, S. 1748, was introduced by Blackburn with Blumenthal and has drawn broad bipartisan sponsorship. The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee advanced the measure by voice vote on Aug. 5 after adopting an amended substitute. The committee action sent the bill to the full Senate, setting up Wednesday’s unsuccessful effort to move it by unanimous consent.
At the center of the dispute is KOSA’s “duty of care.” Under the Senate legislation, covered platforms would be required to “exercise reasonable care in the creation and implementation of any design feature” to prevent and mitigate reasonably foreseeable harms to minors when the platform’s design contributes to those harms.
According to an August analysis by the Congressional Research Service, those harms include eating disorders, substance-use disorders, suicidal behaviors, certain clinically diagnosable depressive and anxiety disorders associated with compulsive use, sexual exploitation, physical violence and patterns indicating compulsive platform use.
The bill would also require safeguards and parental tools, stronger default protections for minors, controls over personalized recommendations and independent audits of covered platforms.
The question of how a company determines whether a user is a minor has become one of the legislation’s most contested elements.
S. 1748 defines “know” or “knows” to include actual knowledge or knowledge “fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances.” Under the measure, the Federal Trade Commission or a state attorney general making that determination would have to rely on competent and reliable evidence and consider whether a reasonable and prudent person would have known that a particular user was a minor.
The legislation simultaneously contains an explicit privacy limitation stating that the measure should not be interpreted to require a platform to collect age-related personal information it does not already collect or to implement age-gating or age-verification technology.
That distinction is central to the debate. KOSA does not directly order social media companies to require identification documents or verify every user’s age. The Congressional Research Service noted that both the Senate legislation and the House’s separate online-safety provisions expressly state they should not be construed as requiring age verification. CRS also said some companies could nevertheless choose to employ age-assurance or verification technologies to identify minors and reduce the risk of noncompliance.
That possibility drives one of the principal arguments made by KOSA opponents. Critics contend that if legal obligations depend on whether a user is a child, platforms may have an incentive to determine the age of a much broader portion of their user base, potentially encouraging widespread use of age-assurance technology.
Such systems can take different forms and do not necessarily require government identification. Existing age-assurance techniques can include government IDs, payment information, third-party databases, facial age estimation, device information or other signals. The privacy and accuracy implications differ significantly depending on the method.
The Senate legislation goes further by specifically ordering the federal government to examine age-verification technology. Under S. 1748, the secretary of commerce, working with the Federal Communications Commission and FTC, would conduct a study evaluating “the most technologically feasible methods and options for developing systems to verify age at the device or operating system level.”
The study would examine what data such systems might require, their accuracy, accessibility, privacy and data-security implications, possible hardware or software changes and their effects on competition. It would also consider devices already owned by consumers. A report would be due to Congress within one year of enactment.
The FTC would separately have 18 months to issue guidance on implementing parts of the law, including examples involving the use of age indicators or inferences and the standard for determining when a platform has knowledge fairly implied by objective circumstances that a user is a minor.
Those provisions have led privacy and civil-liberties organizations to warn that the legislation could create indirect pressure for age assurance even though it contains language denying that age verification is mandatory. Supporters counter that the privacy language was included precisely to prevent KOSA from becoming an identification requirement and argue that companies already possess numerous signals about the ages of their users.
The current dispute follows several years of attempts to enact KOSA. Blackburn and Blumenthal first introduced the proposal in 2022 following congressional hearings and disclosures about the effects of social media on young users.
A previous version advanced much further in 2024, when the Senate approved KOSA and an update to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by a 91-3 vote. The legislation subsequently stalled in the House amid disagreements over free speech, enforcement and the duty-of-care language.
The current Congress has taken a different path in the House. On June 29, representatives passed H.R. 7757, the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, or KIDS Act, by a 267-117 vote under suspension of the rules. The House clerk recorded 267 lawmakers voting in favor and 117 opposed. The measure was received by the Senate and referred to the Commerce Committee on July 13.
The House package combines numerous child-internet proposals, including a modified version of KOSA, an update to federal children’s privacy law, chatbot protections and the SCREEN Act.
The House’s KOSA provisions differ significantly from the Senate bill. Most notably, the House removed the Senate’s duty-of-care requirement, a change Blumenthal and Blackburn have criticized as weakening the legislation. The House instead requires covered platforms to establish and enforce policies addressing specified dangers to minors while providing safeguards, parental controls and other protections for users they know or should know are minors.
The House package does contain an explicit age-verification mandate elsewhere, but it is narrower than requiring every internet platform to identify every user. Its SCREEN Act provisions require covered sites with specified amounts of sexual material considered harmful to minors to use commercially available technology to verify users’ ages and prevent minors from accessing that material.
That distinction separates the House’s general kids-online-safety provisions, which say they do not themselves mandate age verification, from the separate adult-content provisions contained in the larger package.
The competing versions leave the House and Senate with significant differences to resolve before any legislation could reach the president.
KOSA’s supporters argue the Senate’s stronger duty of care is essential because voluntary industry safeguards have failed to adequately address addictive design, exploitation and other dangers involving minors. Blackburn and Blumenthal said after the Commerce Committee vote that the provision was necessary to protect children from “online predators, addictive algorithms, and harmful product design.” Their statement described the requirement as central to the Senate proposal.
Opponents span parts of the political spectrum and include groups concerned about free expression, privacy and government regulation of online content. Their argument is that broad liability tied to mental-health or other harms could encourage companies to remove material that is lawful but controversial, particularly when platforms cannot know in advance how regulators or courts might apply the standard.
Paul has made that concern the centerpiece of his opposition, arguing that even if lawmakers intend to regulate only product design, design and content are often intertwined on social media platforms.
Technology companies have also shifted positions as the legislation has evolved. Meta, which opposed earlier versions, dropped its opposition in 2026 amid broader negotiations over technology regulation. Axios reported that the change came during discussions involving federal treatment of state AI regulation and age-assurance responsibilities involving app stores. Digital-rights group Fight for the Future said Meta joined Microsoft, Apple, X, Snap and Pinterest among companies supporting KOSA, though those companies have differed over specific regulatory approaches and implementation details.
Meta’s changing position has itself become part of the broader dispute. Reuters reported in June that the company was lobbying Congress for federal protections affecting child-harm lawsuits as negotiations surrounding KOSA continued, while Meta said its proposal was intended to establish uniform national standards rather than blanket immunity.
For now, none of the competing federal proposals has become law.
Paul’s objection Wednesday means the Senate version cannot advance through the unanimous-consent request Blumenthal and Blackburn attempted before the recess. The legislation remains pending, and supporters can renew their push when senators return after the Nov. 3 elections.
The next stage will determine whether lawmakers can reconcile two substantially different approaches: a Senate bill built around a legally enforceable duty of care and a House package that drops that provision while imposing a separate age-verification mandate on certain adult-content sites.
Paul’s intervention ensures that, at least for now, the Senate will not settle that debate simply by unanimous consent.
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