WASHINGTON, DC – Today, The Tech Oversight Project blasted Google and Meta for engaging in a multi-million-dollar campaign to kill off reasonable and bipartisan protections for minors online. In a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, reporting shows that Google and Meta rolled out a deceptive campaign through lobbyists, trade associations, and paid spokespeople – often without disclosing financial ties – to try to quash the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and weaken key provisions that would safeguard minors against online sex trafficking, sexual predators, and illegal drugs.
“Google and Meta have been caught red-handed trying to torpedo protections for kids by spreading lies and stoking fears about KOSA backed by millions in paid spokespeople, lobbying contracts, and shady trade groups. Any politician mimicking these deceptive arguments ought to know that they are playing right into Big Tech’s hands. There’s no excuse now to pass the Kids Online Safety Act into law before more children die,” said Sacha Haworth, Executive Director of The Tech Oversight Project.
Key Facts:
- Meta and Google have spent nearly $90 million alone (excluding outside lobbyists and trade associations) to block federal legislation protecting minors online.
- This year, a key focus of Meta and Google’s lobbying efforts is to dismantle the duty of care provisions of KOSA, which would compel large social media platforms to keep minors safe from sex trafficking, sexual predators, and illicit drugs.
- According to multiple sources, Big Tech lobbyist Tripp Baird, who has failed to disclose that he is lobbying on KOSA, contacted Congressional staff about reservations conservative lawmakers may have had about the bill.
- Former Scalise staffer and current Google and Meta lobbyist Matt Bravo has distributed unsigned memos to Congressional staffers attacking the duty of care provisions of KOSA.
- Organizations with ties to Google and Meta began an op-ed and letter-to-the-editor campaign to stoke opposition to the bipartisan bill. Many authors failed to disclose that they received funding from the tech giants.
Excerpts from the piece are below:
WSJ: Inside Big Tech’s Bid to Sink the Online Kid Safety Bill
Georgia Wells, Kristina Peterson, Natalie Andrews // November 17, 2024
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When the Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act in a nearly unanimous vote in July, it was a rare moment of bipartisan unity, suggesting overwhelming agreement that new rules are needed to protect children from potential harm online.
More than three months later, the bill is stalled in the House, snarled by intensifying conservative concerns and a record-breaking lobbying effort by technology companies.
Instagram-owner Meta Platforms and Alphabet, parent of Google and its YouTube video service, have led the charge. Meta and Alphabet’s Google unit have poured nearly $90 million over the past three years into lobbying about a range of topics that include the bill, according to federal disclosures. Lobbyists are required to disclose the issues they are advocating for, but federal disclosures don’t specify the amount spent on each issue.
The bill, which would be the first major federal legislation about child safety online since 1998, started as a collaboration between Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.). It gained momentum in part because of harrowing stories shared about grieving families who attributed their children’s suffering to experiences on social media. The earlier law, called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, was intended to protect the privacy of children ages 12 and under.
The new bill would assign to platforms what it calls a “duty of care,” essentially putting a legal onus on them to take steps to address mental-health disorders, addiction-like behaviors, bullying, sexual exploitation and more.
Meta Platforms and Alphabet are leaning on culture-war issues to try to leverage divisions among lawmakers, according to lawmakers and people familiar with the matter. For liberal lawmakers, they focus on LGBTQ expression, amplifying worries that officials could censor queer youth. With conservative lawmakers they talk about how they fear antiabortion positions could be censored.
The rear-guard effort shows the stakes for the companies: Assigning a duty of care would hold the companies liable for design decisions. Tech companies historically were largely exempted from responsibility for harms their platforms caused.
“On the left and the right, they’ve tried to say whatever the cultural red flag is,” said Alix Fraser, who leads a bipartisan group trying to address social-media harm at Issue One, an organization that advocates reducing money in politics.
Broadly, the tech companies have invested record-breaking amounts of money into their lobbying efforts this year, according to Issue One.
Nontech companies are also objecting, for reasons including concerns about determining the ages of users. News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, has spent about $1.9 million lobbying in the past two years on topics that included the bill.
Maurine Molak, whose son David died in 2016, said he had become addicted to social media and online gaming. She cited aspects of the apps, including infinite scrolling, push notifications and intermittent rewards, which she says made it harder for David to log off and disrupted his sleep.
After peers started bullying him on Instagram and other apps, his parents helped him transfer schools. The posts followed him so much that people David didn’t know piled on, Molak said. Friends of David’s tried to report the posts to Instagram and say they didn’t hear back. Shortly after, David took his own life.
The Kids Online Safety Act aims to hold companies accountable for design decisions that can cause harm to young users such as the ones that hooked David and amplified his bullies. It also would require companies to address user reports of imminent harm.
A spokesman for Meta said better legislation would focus on the role of parents and app stores rather than on Meta. “Federal legislation should require app stores to get parents’ approval whenever their teens under 16 download apps,” the spokesman said.
Meta added restrictions for teen accounts in September, including automatically making youth accounts private, following years of complaints from parents and youth advocates that the company didn’t do enough to protect its most vulnerable users.
A spokeswoman for Alphabet pointed to protections that Alphabet has already introduced, such as not letting videos play automatically for young users, and said the company continues to work with lawmakers on the bill.
The influence campaign
When it became clear in 2022 that lawmakers were going to try to regulate social-media companies, executives at Meta brainstormed messaging they could use with critics, according to people familiar with the conversations. One of their early talking points was the idea that regulation could harm the free expression of LGBTQ minors, the people said.
Meta and Alphabet contacted LGBTQ advocacy groups with this message.
In late 2022, an Alphabet employee and a lobbyist representing Alphabet started reaching out to Senate offices to express concerns with the state of the proposed legislation. Their top priority was to limit the duty-of-care language in the bill, according to people familiar with the matter.
As the Senate prepared to vote this past July, lobbyists representing Meta and Alphabet stepped up their outreach to conservative members of the House who control the chamber.
At a regular meeting of conservative congressional staffers that month, Tripp Baird, founder of a boutique lobbying firm that represents Meta and Alphabet, asked whether conservatives there had a problem with the legislation, according to people present at the meeting. Baird hasn’t filed lobbying disclosure reports for Meta or Alphabet related to the bill.
Then the lobbying accelerated. Days later, another lobbyist who represents Meta and Alphabet and formerly worked for House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R., La.), Matt Bravo of S-3 Group, distributed unsigned paper memos to conservative congressional staffers.
The act “is a wolf in sheep’s clothing for the pro-life movement,” the memo said, according to a copy of the memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. It “gives new dangerous powers to Biden to shut down pro-life activities.”
Republicans maintained control of the House in the recent election, although their majority will be narrow.
GOP leaders stall the bill
The bill hit hurdles in the House, an unusual outcome for legislation that cleared the Senate with nearly unanimous support. The hard-line conservative Freedom Caucus and House GOP leaders began raising concerns. In addition to Scalise, both House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) expressed reservations.
The Energy and Commerce Committee’s hearing on the child safety bill, as well as privacy legislation, was abruptly canceled in late June, largely because of concerns over the privacy bill, according to House GOP aides.
Over the summer, Scalise worked with Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R., Fla.) on changing the bill’s duty-of-care provision, according to a GOP leadership aide. Conservatives, including some in the Freedom Caucus, worried the bill would ultimately give the Federal Trade Commission too much power in regulating online content and ultimately censor conservative voices, according to aides and an email blast sent by the Freedom Caucus.
Amid the ground effort, essays arguing against the Kids Online Safety Act also started appearing in trade publications and other outlets. Some authors didn’t disclose ties to Meta and Alphabet.
When the committee finally considered the bill in September, it passed it on a voice vote—a sign of wavering support for legislation that lawmakers didn’t want to back on the record, aides said. Many House Republicans still have reservations about it, according to lawmakers.
House GOP leadership aides said the bill is unlikely to get a stand-alone vote this year, given the crush of other must-pass legislation during the weeks Congress will be in session after the election. That would effectively kill the bill for this session, unless Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) presses to include the measure as part of a year-end package—a move that is less likely when a measure is controversial.
Parent Survivors
“As a parent survivor, to feel like you’re being toyed with is unconscionable,” said Molak.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, at a Senate hearing in January, apologized to parent survivors in the audience for everything they’d gone through. He pledged the company would work to ensure that no more parents would have to endure the kind of loss that Molak and others live with.
South Carolina GOP state Rep. Brandon Guffey, who lost a son to suicide after he was extorted online, said it has been demoralizing to watch GOP lawmakers work to water down or block the bill.
In response, Guffey recorded a radio ad that played in Louisiana—Scalise and Johnson’s home state—that was paid for by Issue One Action, the nonpartisan group’s advocacy arm. “I couldn’t protect my son, but now it’s my mission to make sure all kids are protected,” Guffey said in the ad.