Legislation
Youth Online Safety is Complex. Many Bills Needed to Fix Many Harms
- Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). Reintroduced in the Senate in May 2025.
- Requires social media platforms to provide minors with options to protect their information, disable addictive product features, and opt out of personalized algorithmic recommendations.
- Platforms are required to enable the strongest privacy settings for kids by default.
- Gives parents new controls to help protect their children and spot harmful behaviors, and provides parents and educators with a dedicated channel to report harmful behavior.
- Creates a duty for online platforms to prevent and mitigate specific dangers to minors, including promotion of suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, and advertisements for certain illegal products (e.g. tobacco and alcohol).
- KOSA has been vetted thoroughly by child safety and tech policy experts. The bill preserves everyone’s free speech rights while holding platforms accountable for their addictive and dangerous design. KOSA is supported by major tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, Snap, and X.
- DEFIANCE Act, reintroduced in the US House in May 2025, provides civil remedies for victims of sexually explicit deepfakes the power to take civil action against those who make or distribute the imagery.
- No Fakes Act protects the voice and visual likeness of all individuals from unauthorized recreations by generative artificial intelligence.
- Take It Down provides federal criminal penalties for the publication of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), including AI-generated NCII (or “deepfake revenge pornography”), and requires social media and similar websites to remove such content within 48 hours of notice from a victim. Take It Down was signed into law on May 19, 2025.
Parent/Caregiver Strategies to Reduce Social Media Harms
Learn about online harms that children/teens face 24/7, check out Fairplay's Online Harms Prevention Action Kit
- Dr Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and author of "The Anxious Generation and Dr. Jean Twenge, a research psychologist and author of the books, iGen and Generations, have made recommendations to help parents and caregivers help their kids.
- No Smartphones Before High School. Invest in cell phones/watches with talk and text capability only.
- No social media before 16. Teens/tweens want to use social media platforms because their friends are using them. If parents and caregivers unite and discourage social media use for all kids under 16, peer pressure to use these platforms will be reduced.
- Phone‐free schools. Cell phones are disruptive to the educational environment and can be disruptive during an emergency. More information and resources are available through the Phone-Free Schools Movement. The National School Safety and Security Services recommends that school administrators and crisis team members have cell phones, but student use of cell phones can lead to telephone systems overload, unintentional spread of misinformation (rumors) and possible delays in school evacuations and other emergency responses.
- Request schools and after-school activity coordinators not to use social media platforms for school announcements (including extra curricular activities), teacher homework assignments, etc.
- No Cell Phones in Bedrooms to promote sleep. Adequate sleep is essential to teen's mental health. Removing distractions that keep them awake can help.
Online is "Real Life."
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About Social Media Harms
Our Vision
The mission of Social Media Harms is spread awareness regarding online harms and to promote U.S. state & federal regulations that require technology companies to design products with the highest possible privacy and safety features by default.