US introduces bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act amendment requiring duty of care

Bipartisan sponsors have introduced amendments to the Kids Online Safety Act that would impose a duty of care on platforms to prevent and mitigate harms to minors, including sexual exploitation, bullying and content promoting self-harm or suicide. The amended bill requires platforms to provide minors with safeguards such as granular privacy controls, options to opt out of algorithmic recommendations, and tools to limit contact from unknown adults. The legislation has cleared committee and awaits a floor vote, with support from child-safety advocates and opposition from some civil-liberties groups concerned about content moderation overreach.

Duty of care becomes operational only when platforms can identify risk in real time. Guardii detects the behavioural signatures of grooming, sextortion and cyberbullying as they emerge in direct-message threads on Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, flagging sustained targeting, coercion and escalation without requiring human moderators to read every exchange. For a parent or school, the system surfaces a child in acute distress or under predatory contact at the moment intervention can prevent harm. For a platform subject to statutory duties, this pattern-based approach demonstrates active, scalable mitigation of the specific harms named in legislation like KOSA, while avoiding the constitutional and operational risks of broad content filtering.