Senator Coons applauds bipartisan Senate passage of online privacy bill

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) today commended the Senate on passing the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which requires social media companies to take increased measures to better protect children from harmful content. The bill, which Senator Coons cosponsored, passed the Senate by a vote of 91-3.

"The Kids Online Safety Act installs much-needed safeguards to protect kids from cyberbullying and sexual exploitation online that have ruined far too many lives," said Senator Coons. "Today, the Senate took a giant, bipartisan step toward ensuring our children can harness the power and benefits of the internet in a safe and secure way, but efforts to hold social media companies accountable cannot end here. I hope the Senate will build on this bipartisan momentum by swiftly taking up and passing my bipartisan Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA) so that researchers and the public have the data they need to understand the impact social media platforms have on our children and our society."

A member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Coons has been a leader on efforts to strike a balance between sensible regulations and the need for innovation and creativity in the tech and social media sectors. Last year, Senators Coons and Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-La.) reintroduced PATA with four bipartisan cosponsors. The bill would require social media companies to be more transparent with the public and researchers about the impact they are having. The Washington Post has called PATA a "step towards solving our social media woes."

Last week, Senators Coons and Cassidy led a bipartisan letter to Meta raising concerns about the company's decision to end access to CrowdTangle, a transparency tool that provides researchers and journalists access to view and study public content on a variety of Meta-owned platforms that has yielded information on a wide spectrum of issues, including foreign influence campaigns, terrorism threats, and mental health crises.