House KIDS Act Deal Drops KOSA Duty of Care, Adds Age Verification for All Users
Guardii Analysis
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and Ranking Member Frank Pallone announced on June 22, 2026, that they had consolidated the Kids Online Safety Act, COPPA 2.0, a data broker registry, and more than a dozen child-safety bills into a single legislative package. The House version removes the duty of care provision present in the Senate version of KOSA, which would have created a legally enforceable obligation for platforms to prevent specific documented harms to minors including promotion of eating disorders, self-harm, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation. In its place, the House KIDS Act requires platforms to submit to annual safety audits, set minors' accounts to maximum privacy and safety by default, disable design features engineered to drive compulsive use, block private messaging for children under 13, and prohibit disappearing-message features for teens under 17.
Annual audits document platform behaviour after the fact but do not stop a grooming sequence or sextortion threat as it unfolds. Real-time anti-grooming and anti-sextortion detection can identify escalation, coercion and age-inappropriate contact before a child is harmed, blocking hostile inbound messages and surfacing acute risk to the adult or agency best positioned to intervene. Guardii, backed by Startmate, monitors conversation shape and seriousness across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other services without handing anyone a feed of what was said, enabling platforms to exercise reasonable care in practice by addressing the underlying threat pattern rather than waiting for regulatory review.