The United States House of Representatives passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act on 29 June 2026 in a 267–117 bipartisan vote, combining 14 digital safety proposals including a revised Kids Online Safety Act. The package establishes new requirements for social media platforms and AI chatbots, mandating age verification obligations, restrictions on targeted advertising to minors, safeguards for underage users, and enhanced parental controls, with enforcement vested in the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general.
Rather than empowering parents with surgical intervention at the moment of contact, the KIDS Act imposes sweeping age-verification gates that burden every user, drive children to unregulated platforms beyond institutional reach, and offer no protection against the harms—grooming, sextortion, image-based abuse—that occur inside direct messages after a minor has gained access. Real-time contact filtering that flags a predator's opening gambit, intercepts coercive image requests before a child complies, and surfaces escalating threat patterns to a parent or safeguarding team would have prevented the exploitation the Act seeks to address, without the constitutional friction, mass privacy collection, and displacement risk inherent in blanket under-18 registration bans.
