The House is not planning to take up Senate-passed legislation to protect children from potentially harmful online content without addressing GOP concerns the bill could lead to censorship or other unintended consequences. 

And changes won’t come easy. It’s unclear whether lawmakers can negotiate a compromise on an issue they largely agree is important but tricky to legislate, House aides and outside stakeholders told The Washington Times. 

“There’s support across the board for high-level policy goals around keeping kids safe, protecting kids online,” Mark Brennan, partner at Hogan Lovells and leader of the firm’s tech regulatory team, said. “It’s in some ways a notable reflection of the problems with this legislation … that there are such a wide array of constituents that are expressing significant concerns.”

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The Senate navigated through some of those concerns as it passed legislation last month in an overwhelming 91-3 bipartisan vote that combined two bills, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and an update to the 1998 Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0). But issues the opponents raised about free speech and privacy remain a significant obstacle in the House.

KOSA would require social media companies to enable the strongest privacy settings for kids by default and to disable automated algorithms and features that show addictive products, among other provisions designed to protect children from potentially harmful online content.

The measure would impose a “duty of care” requiring online companies to design content offerings that protect minors from specific harms, including suicide, mental health disorders, substance abuse, violence, bullying and sexual exploitation. The Federal Trade Commission would be empowered to bring enforcement actions against companies that don’t meet KOSA’s standards.

COPPA 2.0 would update an existing law that prohibits online services from collecting certain personal information from kids without parental consent. It would raise the age at which the prohibition ends from 13 to 17 and tighten the standard under which companies are expected to enforce it.

Supporters want the House to take up the Senate-passed legislation after the chamber returns from its summer recess in September. But quick action is unlikely, with House Republicans declining to consider it as is.

“We’ve heard concerns from across our conference that the Senate bill cannot be brought in its current form,” a House GOP leadership aide, who requested anonymity to share private discussions about the bill, said. “It could lead to censorship of conservative speech, such as pro-life views, is almost certainly unconstitutional, and grants sweeping new authority to unelected bureaucrats at the FTC.”

That is not to say some GOP leaders are uninterested in getting something done.

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office pointed to comments he made to CNBC in July backing the goals of the legislation. 

“Obviously, we need to protect children with regard to online activity,” he said. “The internet is the wild wild west and some of these reforms are overdue.”

House Energy and Commerce Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rogers told The Times last month that she still wants to advance the child online safety legislation through her committee but needs to have conversations with leadership about the best way forward. 

The committee had been scheduled to mark up KOSA and a broader data privacy measure in June, but Ms. McMorris Rogers canceled the session after leadership started raising concerns, particularly with the broader privacy bill. 

Some outside observers predict the child online safety legislation is dead, at least for this Congress.

Yaël Ossowski, deputy director of Consumer Choice Center, a nonpartisan consumer advocacy group, said that everything he’s heard suggests the measure will not advance in the House. He cited opposition from Freedom Caucus members and other Republicans “who are just very, very skeptical of giving government any more power.”

“We’ve had a lot of influence from government recently on social media firms, and that has led to a lot of censorship,” Mr. Ossowski said. “And our kind of fear is that if KOSA goes forward, you’re going to have that as the standard practice.”

House opposition to the legislation was always expected to be greater than in the Senate, said Ash Johnson, senior policy manager at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational institute. She agreed it is unlikely a compromise would come together this year, especially before the November election.

“It’s all been very slow moving, and so I kind of expect that to continue, although I’m open to being surprised,” she said.

One of the major concerns is the bills are vague and leave companies with too many questions to navigate, starting with determining who using their sites is a minor. States that have passed their own online safety legislation have run into similar issues. 

“The state bills, for example, have practically landed with companies all but required to do government IDs and similar age verification,” Mr. Brennan said. “That’s a significant First Amendment concern, not only for minors, who may not even have IDs, by the way, but for the adults that are seeking to access lawful content but have to have personal data collected.”

Mr. Ossowski said the increase in data collection would effectively end anonymity on the internet. 

“It would give an avenue for government agencies, police agencies and its politically affiliated organization to basically go after that data, whether through legal subpoena or jawboning to get that information,” he said. “That would necessarily mean that many of the social media platforms would be very hesitant to allow X or Y speech on their platform.”

Without clarity on how to implement the duty of care and other new content moderation standards in the bill, companies — or the executive branch in writing the regulations — could overcorrect into censorship territory.

“Giving the government the power to determine what counts as harmful to children or harmful in general is definitely tricky because we, generally speaking, don’t want the government to weigh in on what speech is ‘good’ or ‘bad, but we obviously do want to protect children. And so it’s a really tricky balancing act,” Ms. Johnson said.

She said lawmakers are hesitant to act on any legislation moderating online content while court litigation challenging social media laws passed by Florida and Texas is still outstanding. The cases made their way to the Supreme Court, which sent them back to the lower courts with instructions to more broadly review the First Amendment implications of the state laws.

“We don’t really know where the needle is going to land on that,” Ms. Johnson said.

She suggested lawmakers seeking a compromise remove the content moderation provisions altogether and pass the less controversial provisions in the bill. Those include provisions requiring companies to implement parental controls and optional privacy and safety settings for minors and to publish more information on the availability of those safeguards. 

“I think those are all really good measures and would make a huge difference,” Ms. Johnson said.

The bill’s supporters in the House remain hopeful for action in the coming months. 

Rep. Gus Bilirakis, the lead GOP sponsor of the House version of KOSA, said he will do “whatever it takes” to build on the Senate’s success and “get meaningful legislation across the finish line.”

“I’m an eternal optimist – choosing to see opportunities where others might see challenges,” the Florida Republican said in a statement. “It is critical that we implement better safeguards for children while empowering parents with the tools they need to keep kids safe.”