Attorney General James leads bipartisan coalition urging Congress to pass Kids Online Safety Act
Guardii Analysis
New York Attorney General Letitia James joined a bipartisan coalition of 32 state attorneys general in November 2024 calling on Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require online platforms to default to the highest-possible safety settings for all accounts belonging to minors and introduce new tools for parents to better protect children from emerging technologies and features employed by social media companies. The coalition emphasised the need for federal action to address platform design choices that expose children to harm.
Default safety settings mandated by statute create a baseline standard but do not address the real-time threat environment children face in direct messages and private channels. Detection systems of the kind Guardii operates fill the operational space between account configuration and live contact: when an adult circumvents platform restrictions to initiate sexualised conversation with a minor, or when a peer begins sustained harassment or coercion, the anti-grooming, anti-sextortion and cyberbullying filters surface the conversation to a parent, school counsellor or platform trust-and-safety team in time to prevent escalation, translating regulatory intent into protective action at the point of contact.