With KOSA passed, the information i can access as a minor will be limited and censored, under the guise of "protecting me", which is the responsibility of my parents, NOT the government. I have learned so much about the world and about myself through social media, and without the diverse world i have seen, i would be a completely different, and much worse, person. For a country that prides itself in the free speech and freedom of its peoples, this bill goes against everything we stand for! - Alan, 15  

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If information is put through a filter, that’s bad. Any and all points of view should be accessible, even if harmful so everyone can get an understanding of all situations. Not to mention, as a young neurodivergent and queer person, I’m sure the information I’d be able to acquire and use to help myself would be severely impacted. I want to be free like anyone else. - Sunny, 15 

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How young people feel about the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) matters. It will primarily affect them, and many, many teenagers oppose the bill. Some have been calling and emailing legislators to tell them how they feel. Others have been posting their concerns about the bill on social media. These teenagers have been baring their souls to explain how important social media access is to them, but lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, including us, have mostly been the ones talking about the bill and about what’s best for kids, and often we’re not hearing from minors in these debates at all. We should be — these young voices should be essential when talking about KOSA.

So, a few weeks ago, we asked some of the young advocates fighting to stop the Kids Online Safety Act a few questions:  

- How has access to social media improved your life? What do you gain from it? 

- What would you lose if KOSA passed? How would your life be different if it was already law? 

Within a week we received over 3,000 responses. As of today, we have received over 5,000.

These answers are critical for legislators to hear. Below, you can read some of these comments, sorted into the following themes (though they often overlap):  

• KOSA Will Harm Rights That Young People Know They Ought to Have 
• KOSA Could Impact Young People’s Artistic Education and Opportunities 
• KOSA Will Hurt Young People’s Ability to Find Community Online 
• KOSA Could Seriously Hinder People’s Self-Discovery  
• KOSA Could Stop Young People from Learning True News and Valuable Information 

These comments show that thoughtful young people are deeply concerned about the proposed law's fallout, and that many who would be affected think it will harm them, not help them. Over 700 of those who responded reported that they were currently sixteen or under—the age under which KOSA’s liability is applicable. The average age of those who answered the survey was 20 (of those who gave their age—the question was optional, and about 60% of people responded).  In addition to these two questions, we also asked those taking the survey if they were comfortable sharing their email address for any journalist who might want to speak with them; unfortunately much coverage usually only mentions one or two of the young people who would be most affected. So, journalists: We have contact info for over 300 young people who would be happy to speak to you about why social media matters to them, and why they oppose KOSA.

Individually, these answers show that social media, despite its current problems, offer an overall positive experience for many, many young people. It helps people living in remote areas find connection; it helps those in abusive situations find solace and escape; it offers education in history, art, health, and world events for those who wouldn’t otherwise have it; it helps people learn about themselves and the world around them. (Research also suggests that social media is more helpful than harmful for young people.) 

And as a whole, these answers tell a story that is 180° different from that which is regularly told by politicians and the media. In those stories, it is accepted as fact that the majority of young people’s experiences on social media platforms are harmful. But from these responses, it is clear that many, many young people also experience help, education, friendship, and a sense of belonging there—precisely because social media allows them to explore, something KOSA is likely to hinder. These kids are deeply engaged in the world around them through these platforms, and genuinely concerned that a law like KOSA could take that away from them and from other young people.  

Here are just a few of the thousands of reasons they’re worried.  

Note: We are sharing individuals’ opinions, without editing. We do not necessarily endorse them or their interpretation of KOSA.

KOSA Will Harm Rights That Young People Know They Ought to Have 

One of the most important things that would be lost is the freedom of speech - a given right that is crucial to a healthy, functioning environment. Not every speech is morally okay, but regulating what speech is deemed "acceptable" constricts people's rights; a clear violation of the First Amendment. Those who need or want to access certain information are not allowed to - not because the information will harm them or others, but for the reason that a certain portion of people disagree with the information. If the country only ran on what select people believed, we would be a bland, monotonous place. This country thrives on diversity, whether it be race, gender, sex, or any other personal belief. If KOSA was passed, I would lose my safe spaces, places where I can go to for mental health, places that make me feel more like a human than just some girl. No more would I be able to fight for ideas and beliefs I hold, nor enjoy my time on the internet either. - Anonymous, 16 

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I, and many of my friends, grew up in an Internet where remaining anonymous was common sense, and where revealing your identity was foolish and dangerous, something only to be done sparingly, with a trusted ally at your side, meeting at a common, crowded public space like a convention or a college cafeteria. This bill spits in the face of these very practical instincts, forces you to dox yourself, and if you don’t want to be outed, you must be forced to withdraw from your communities. From your friends and allies. From the space you have made for yourself, somewhere you can truly be yourself with little judgment, where you can find out who you really are, alongside people who might be wildly different from you in some ways, and exactly like you in others. I am fortunate to have parents who are kind and accepting of who I am. I know many people are nowhere near as lucky as me. - Maeve, 25 

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I couldn't do activism through social media and I couldn't connect with other queer individuals due to censorship and that would lead to loneliness, depression other mental health issues, and even suicide for some individuals such as myself. For some of us the internet is the only way to the world outside of our hateful environments, our only hope. Representation matters, and by KOSA passing queer children would see less of age appropriate representation and they would feel more alone. Not to mention that KOSA passing would lead to people being uninformed about things and it would start an era of censorship on the internet and by looking at the past censorship is never good, its a gateway to genocide and a way for the government to control. – Sage, 15 

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Privacy, censorship, and freedom of speech are not just theoretical concepts to young people. Their rights are often already restricted, and they see the internet as a place where they can begin to learn about, understand, and exercise those freedoms. They know why censorship is dangerous; they understand why forcing people to identify themselves online is dangerous; they know the value of free speech and privacy, and they know what they’ve gained from an internet that doesn’t have guardrails put up by various government censors.  

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TELL CONGRESS: OPPOSE THE KIDS ONLINE SAFETY ACT

KOSA Could Impact Young People’s Artistic Education and Opportunities 

I found so many friends and new interests from social media. Inspirations for my art I find online, like others who have an art style I admire, or models who do poses I want to draw. I can connect with my friends, send them funny videos and pictures. I use social media to keep up with my favorite YouTubers, content creators, shows, books. When my dad gets drunk and hard to be around or my parents are arguing, I can go on YouTube or Instagram and watch something funny to laugh instead. It gives me a lot of comfort, being able to distract myself from my sometimes upsetting home life. I get to see what life is like for the billions of other people on this planet, in different cities, states, countries. I get to share my life with my friends too, freely speaking my thoughts, sharing pictures, videos, etc.  
I have found my favorite YouTubers from other social media platforms like tiktok, this happened maybe about a year ago, and since then I think this is the happiest I have been in a while. Since joining social media I have become a much more open minded person, it made me interested in what others lives are like. It also brought awareness and educated me about others who are suffering in the world like hunger, poor quality of life, etc. Posting on social media also made me more confident in my art, in the past year my drawing skills have immensely improved and I’m shocked at myself. Because I wanted to make better fan art, inspire others, and make them happy with my art. I have been introduce to many styles of clothing that have helped develop my own fun clothing style. It powers my dreams and makes me want to try hard when I see videos shared by people who have worked hard and made it. - Anonymous, 15 

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As a kid I was able to interact in queer and disabled and fandom spaces, so even as a disabled introverted child who wasn’t popular with my peers I still didn’t feel lonely. The internet is arguably a safer way to interact with other fans of media than going to cons with strangers, as long as internet safety is really taught to kids. I also get inspiration for my art and writing from things I’ve only discovered online, and as an artist I can’t make money without the internet and even minors do commissions. The issue isn’t that the internet is unsafe, it’s that internet safety isn’t taught anymore. - Rachel, 19 

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i am an artist, and sharing my things online makes me feel happy and good about myself. i love seeing other people online and knowing that they like what i make. when i make art, im always nervous to show other people. but when i post it online i feel like im a part of something, and that im in a community where i feel that i belong. – Anonymous, 15 

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Social media has saved my life, just like it has for many young people. I have found safe spaces and motivation because of social media, and I have never encountered anything negative or harmful to me. With social media I have been able to share my creativity (writing, art, and music) and thoughts safely without feeling like I'm being held back or oppressed. My creations have been able to inspire and reach so many people, just like how other people's work have reached me. Recently, I have also been able to help the library I volunteer at through the help of social media. 
What I do in life and all my future plans (career, school, volunteer projects, etc.) surrounds social media, and without it I wouldn't be able to share what I do and learn more to improve my works and life. I wouldn't be able to connect with wonderful artists, musicians, and writers like I do now. I would be lost and feel like I don't have a reason to do what I do. If KOSA is passed, I wouldn't be able to get the help I need in order to survive. I've made so many friends who have been saved because of social media, and if this bill gets passed they will also be affected. Guess what? They wouldn't be able to get the help they need either. 
If KOSA was already a law when I was just a bit younger, I wouldn't even be alive. I wouldn't have been able to reach help when I needed it. I wouldn't have been able to share my mind with the world. Social media was the reason I was able to receive help when I was undergoing abuse and almost died. If KOSA was already a law, I would've taken my life, or my abuser would have done it before I could. If KOSA becomes a law now, I'm certain that the likeliness of that happening to kids of any age will increase. – Anonymous, 15 

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A huge number of young artists say they use social media to improve their skills, and in many cases, the avenue by which they discovered their interest in a type of art or music. Young people are rightfully worried that the magic moment where you first stumble upon an artist or a style that changes your entire life will be less and less common for future generations if KOSA passes. We agree: KOSA would likely lead platforms to limit that opportunity for young people to experience unexpected things, forcing their online experiences into a much smaller box under the guise of protecting them.  

Also, a lot of young people told us they wanted to, or were developing, an online business—often an art business. Under KOSA, young people could have less opportunities in the online communities where artists share their work and build a customer base, and a harder time navigating the various communities where they can share their art.  

KOSA Will Hurt Young People’s Ability to Find Community Online 

Social media has allowed me to connect with some of my closest friends ever, probably deeper than some people in real life. i get to talk about anything i want unimpeded and people accept me for who i am. in my deepest and darkest moments, knowing that i had somewhere to go was truly more relieving than anything else. i've never had the courage to commit suicide, but still, if it weren't for social media, i probably wouldn't be here, mentally & emotionally at least. 
i'd lose the space that accepts me. i'd lose the only place where i can be me. in life, i put up a mask to appease my parents and in some cases, my friends. with how extreme the u.s. is becoming these days, i could even lose my life. i would live my days in fear. i'm terrified of how fast this country is changing and if this bill passes, saying i would fall into despair would be an understatement. people say to "be yourself", but they don't understand that if i were to be my true self tomorrow, i could be killed. – march, 14 

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Without the internet, and especially the rhythm gaming community which I found through Discord, I would've most likely killed myself at 13. My time on here has not been perfect, as has anyone's but without the internet I wouldn't have been the person I am today. I wouldn't have gotten help recognizing that what my biological parents were doing to me was abuse, the support I've received for my identity (as queer youth) and the way I view things, with ways to help people all around the world and be a more mindful ally, activist, and thinker, and I wouldn't have met my mom. 
I love my chosen mom. We met at a Dance Dance Revolution tournament in April of last year and have been friends ever since. When I told her that she was the first person I saw as a mother figure in my life back in November, I was bawling my eyes out. I'm her mije, and she's my mom. love her so much that saying that doesn't even begin to express exactly how much I love her.  
I love all my chosen family from the rhythm gaming community, my older sisters and siblings, I love them all. I have a few, some I talk with more regularly than others. Even if they and I may not talk as much as we used to, I still love them. They mean so much to me. – X86, 15 

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i spent my time in public school from ages 9-13 getting physically and emotionally abused by special ed aides, i remember a few months after i left public school for good, i saw a post online that made me realize that what i went through wasn’t normal. if it wasn’t for the internet, i wouldn’t have come to terms with my autism, i would have still hated myself due to not knowing that i was genderqueer, my mental health would be significantly worse, and i would probably still be self harming, which is something i stopped doing at 13. besides the trauma and mental health side of things, something important to know is that spaces for teenagers to hang out have been eradicated years ago, minors can’t go to malls unless they’re with their parents, anti loitering laws are everywhere, and schools aren’t exactly the best place for teenagers to hang out, especially considering queer teens who were murdered by bullies (such as brianna ghey or nex benedict), the internet has become the third space that teenagers have flocked to as a result. – Anonymous, 17 

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KOSA is anti-community. People online don’t only connect over shared interests in art and music—they also connect over the difficult parts of their lives. Over and over again, young people told us that one of the most valuable parts of social media was learning that they were not alone in their troubles. Finding others in similar circumstances gave them a community, as well as ideas to improve their situations, and even opportunities to escape dangerous situations.  

KOSA will make this harder. As platforms limit the types of recommendations and public content they feel safe sharing with young people, those who would otherwise find communities or potential friends will not be as likely to do so. A number of young people explained that they simply would never have been able to overcome some of the worst parts of their lives alone, and they are concerned that KOSA’s passage would stop others from ever finding the help they did. 

KOSA Could Seriously Hinder People’s Self-Discovery  

I am a transgender person, and when I was a preteen, looking down the barrel of the gun of puberty, I was miserable. I didn't know what was wrong I just knew I'd rather do anything else but go through puberty. The internet taught me what that was. They told me it was okay. There were things like haircuts and binders that I could use now and medical treatment I could use when I grew up to fix things. The internet was there for me too when I was questioning my sexuality and again when my mental health was crashing and even again when I was realizing I'm not neurotypical. The internet is a crucial source of information for preteens and beyond and you cannot take it away. You cannot take away their only realistically reachable source of information for what the close-minded or undereducated adults around them don't know. - Jay, 17 

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Social media has improved my life so much and led to how I met my best friend, I’ve known them for 6+ years now and they mean so much to me. Access to social media really helps me connect with people similar to me and that make me feel like less of an outcast among my peers, being able to communicate with other neurodivergent queer kids who like similar interests to me. Social media makes me feel like I’m actually apart of a community that won’t judge me for who I am. I feel like I can actually be myself and find others like me without being harassed or bullied, I can share my art with others and find people like me in a way I can’t in other spaces. The internet & social media raised me when my parents were busy and unavailable and genuinely shaped the way I am today and the person I’ve become. – Anonymous, 14 

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The censorship likely to come from this bill would mean I would not see others who have similar struggles to me. The vagueness of KOSA allows for state attorney generals to decide what is and is not appropriate for children to see, a power that should never be placed in the hands of one person. If issues like LGBT rights and mental health were censored by KOSA, I would have never realized that I AM NOT ALONE. There are problems with children and the internet but KOSA is not the solution. I urge the senate to rethink this bill, and come up with solutions that actually protect children, not put them in more danger, and make them feel ever more alone. - Rae, 16 

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KOSA would effectively censor anything the government deems "harmful," which could be anything from queerness and fandom spaces to anything else that deviates from "the norm." People would lose support systems, education, and in some cases, any way to find out about who they are. I'll stop beating around the bush, if it wasn't for places online, I would never have discovered my own queerness. My parents and the small circle of adults I know would be my only connection to "grown-up" opinions, exposing me to a narrow range of beliefs I would likely be forced to adopt. Any kids in positions like mine would have no place to speak out or ask questions, and anything they bring up would put them at risk. Schools and families can only teach so much, and in this age of information, why can't kids be trusted to learn things on their own? - Anonymous, 15 

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Social media helped me escape a very traumatic childhood and helped me connect with others. quite frankly, it saved me from being brainwashed. – Milo, 16 

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Social media introduced me to lifelong friends and communities of like-minded people; in an abusive home, online social media in the 2010s provided a haven of privacy, safety, and information. I honed my creativity, nurtured my interests and developed my identity through relating and talking to people to whom I would otherwise have been totally isolated from. Also, unrestricted internet access actually taught me how to spot shady websites and inappropriate content FAR more effectively than if censorship had been at play like it is today. 
A couple of the friends I made online, as young as thirteen, were adults; and being friends with adults who knew I was a child, who practiced safe boundaries with me yet treated me with respect, helped me recognise unhealthy patterns in predatory adults. I have befriended mothers and fathers online through games and forums, and they were instrumental in preventing me being groomed by actual pedophiles. Had it not been for them, I would have wound up terribly abused by an "in real life" adult "friend". Instead, I recognised the differences in how he was treating me (infantilising yet praising) vs how my adult friends had treated me (like a human being), and slowly tapered off the friendship and safely cut contact. 
As I grew older, I found a wealth of resources on safe sex and sexual health education online. Again, if not for these discoveries, I would most certainly have wound up abused and/or pregnant as a teenager. I was never taught about consent, safe sex, menstruation, cervical health, breast health, my own anatomy, puberty, etc. as a child or teenager. What I found online-- typically on Tumblr and written with an alarming degree of normalcy-- helped me understand my body and my boundaries far more effectively than "the talk" or in-school sex ed ever did. I learned that the things that made me panic were actually normal; the ins and outs of puberty and development, and, crucially, that my comfort mattered most. I was comfortable and unashamed of being a virgin my entire teen years because I knew it was okay that I wasn't ready. When I was ready, at twenty-one, I knew how to communicate with my partner and establish safe boundaries, and knew to check in and talk afterwards to make sure we both felt safe and happy. I knew there was no judgement for crying after sex and that it didn't necessarily mean I wasn't okay. I also knew about physical post-sex care; e.g. going to the bathroom and cleaning oneself safely. 
AGAIN, I would NOT have known any of this if not for social media. AT ALL. And seeing these topics did NOT turn me into a dreaded teenage whore; if anything, they prevented it by teaching me safety and self-care. 
I also found help with depression, anxiety, and eating disorders-- learning to define them enabled me to seek help. I would not have had this without online spaces and social media. As aforementioned too, learning, sometimes through trial of fire, to safely navigate the web and differentiate between safe and unsafe sites was far more effective without censored content. Censorship only hurts children; it has never, ever helped them. How else was I to know what I was experiencing at home was wrong? To call it "abuse"? I never would have found that out. I also would never have discovered how to establish safe sexual AND social boundaries, or how to stand up for myself, or how to handle harassment, or how to discover my own interests and identity through media. The list goes on and on and on. – June, 21 

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One of the claims that KOSA’s proponents make is that it won’t stop young people from finding the things they already want to search for. But we read dozens and dozens of comments from people who didn’t know something about themselves until they heard others discussing it—a mental health diagnosis, their sexuality, that they were being abused, that they had an eating disorder, and much, much more.  

Censorship that stops you from looking through a library is still dangerous even if it doesn’t stop you from checking out the books you already know. It’s still a problem to stop young people in particular from finding new things that they didn’t know they were looking for.   

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TELL CONGRESS: OPPOSE THE KIDS ONLINE SAFETY ACT

KOSA Could Stop Young People from Getting Accurate News and Valuable Information 

Social media taught me to be curious. It taught me caution and trust and faith and that simply being me is enough. It brought me up where my parents failed, it allowed me to look into stories that assured me I am not alone where I am now. I would be fucking dead right now if it weren't for the stories of my fellow transgender folk out there, assuring me that it gets better.  
I'm young and I'm not smart but I know without social media, myself and plenty of the people I hold dear in person and online would not be alive. We wouldn't have news of the atrocities happening overseas that the news doesn't report on, we wouldn't have mentors to help teach us where our parents failed. - Anonymous, 16 

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Through social media, I've learned about news and current events that weren't taught at school or home, things like politics or controversial topics that taught me nuance and solidified my concept of ethics. I learned about my identity and found numerous communities filled with people I could socialize with and relate to. I could talk about my interests with people who loved them just as much as I did. I found out about numerous different perspectives and cultures and experienced art and film like I never had before. My empathy and media literacy greatly improved with experience. I was also able to gain skills in gathering information and proper defences against misinformation. More technically, I learned how to organize my computer and work with files, programs, applications, etc; I could find guides on how to pursue my hobbies and improve my skills (I'm a self-taught artist, and I learned almost everything I know from things like YouTube or Tumblr for free). - Anonymous, 15 

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A huge portion of my political identity has been shaped by news and information I could only find on social media because the mainstream news outlets wouldn’t cover it. (Climate Change, International Crisis, Corrupt Systems, etc.) KOSA seems to be intentionally working to stunt all of this. It’s horrifying. So much of modern life takes place on the internet, and to strip that away from kids is just another way to prevent them from formulating their own thoughts and ideas that the people in power are afraid of. Deeply sinister. I probably would have never learned about KOSA if it were in place! That’s terrifying! - Sarge, 17 

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I’ve met many of my friends from [social media] and it has improved my mental health by giving me resources. I used to have an eating disorder and didn’t even realize it until I saw others on social media talking about it in a nuanced way and from personal experience. - Anonymous, 15 

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Many young people told us that they’re worried KOSA will result in more biased news online, and a less diverse information ecosystem. This seems inevitable—we’ve written before that almost any content could fit into the categories that politicians believe will cause minors anxiety or depression, and so carrying that content could be legally dangerous for a platform. That could include truthful news about what’s going on in the world, including wars, gun violence, and climate change. 

“Preventing and mitigating” depression and anxiety isn’t a goal of any other outlet, and it shouldn’t be required for social media platforms. People have a right to access information—both news and opinion— in an open and democratic society, and sometimes that information is depressing or anxiety-inducing. To truly “prevent and mitigate” self-destructive behaviors, we must look beyond the media to systems that allow all humans to have self-respect, a healthy environment, and healthy relationships—not hiding truthful information that is disappointing.  

Young People’s Voices Matter 

While KOSA’s sponsors intend to help these young people, those who responded to the survey don’t see it that way. You may have noticed that it’s impossible to limit these complex and detailed responses into single categories—many childhood abuse victims found help as well as arts education on social media; many children connected to communities that they otherwise couldn’t and learned something essential about themselves in doing so. Many understand that KOSA would endanger their privacy, and also know it could harm marginalized kids the most.  

In reading thousands of these comments, it becomes clear that social media itself was not in itself a solution to the issues they experienced. What helped these young people was other people. Social media was where they were able to find and stay connected with those friends, communities, artists, activists, and educators. When you look at it this way, of course KOSA seems absurd: social media has become an essential element of young peoples’ lives, and they are scared to death that if the law passes, that part of their lives will disappear. Older teens and twenty-somethings, meanwhile, worry that if the law had been passed a decade ago, they never would have become the person that they did. And all of these fears are reasonable.  

There were thousands more comments like those above. We hope this helps balance the conversation, because if young people’s voices are suppressed now—and if KOSA becomes law—it will be much more difficult for them to elevate their voices in the future.  

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TELL CONGRESS: OPPOSE THE KIDS ONLINE SAFETY ACT

Why EFF Does Not Think Recent Changes Ameliorate KOSA’s Censorship 

The latest version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) did not change our critical view of the legislation. The changes have led some organizations to drop their opposition to the bill, but we still believe it is a dangerous and unconstitutional censorship bill that would empower state officials to target services and online content they do not like. We respect that different groups can come to their own conclusions about how KOSA will affect everyone’s ability to access lawful speech online. EFF, however, remains steadfast in our long-held view that imposing a vague duty of care on a broad swath of online services to mitigate specific harms based on the content of online speech will result in those services imposing age verification and content restrictions. At least one group has characterized EFF’s concerns as spreading “disinformation.” We are not. But to ensure that everyone understands why EFF continues to oppose KOSA, we wanted to break down our interpretation of the bill in more detail and compare our views to those of others—both advocates and critics.  

Below, we walk through some of the most common criticisms we’ve gotten—and those criticisms the bill has received—to help explain our view of its likely impacts.  

KOSA’s Effectiveness  

First, and most importantly: We have serious and important disagreements with KOSA’s advocates on whether it will prevent future harm to children online. We are deeply saddened by the stories so many supporters and parents have shared about how their children were harmed online. And we want to keep talking to those parents, supporters, and lawmakers about ways in which EFF can work with them to prevent harm to children online, just as we will continue to talk with people who advocate for the benefits of social media. We believe, and have advocated for, comprehensive privacy protections as a better way to begin to address harms done to young people (and old) who have been targeted by platforms’ predatory business practices.  

A line of U.S. Supreme Court cases involving efforts to prevent book sellers from disseminating certain speech, which resulted in broad, unconstitutional censorship, shows why KOSA is unconstitutional. 

EFF does not think KOSA is the right approach to protecting children online, however. As we’ve said before, we think that in practice, KOSA is likely to exacerbate the risks of children being harmed online because it will place barriers on their ability to access lawful speech about addiction, eating disorders, bullying, and other important topics. We also think those restrictions will stifle minors who are trying  to find their own communities online.  We do not think that language added to KOSA to address that censorship concern solves the problem. We also don’t think that focusing KOSA’s regulation on design elements of online services addresses the First Amendment problems of the bill, either. 

Our views of KOSA’s harmful consequences are grounded in EFF’s 34-year history of both making policy for the internet and seeing how legislation plays out once it’s passed. This is also not our first time seeing the vast difference between how a piece of legislation is promoted and what it does in practice. Recently we saw this same dynamic with FOSTA/SESTA, which was promoted by politicians and the parents of  child sex trafficking victims as the way to prevent future harms. Sadly, even the politicians who initially championed it now agree that this law was not only ineffective at reducing sex trafficking online, but also created additional dangers for those same victims as well as others.   

KOSA’s Duty of Care  

KOSA’s core component requires an online platform or service that is likely to be accessed by young people to “exercise reasonable care in the creation and implementation of any design feature to prevent and mitigate” various harms to minors. These enumerated harms include: 

• mental health disorders (anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors) 
• patterns of use that indicate or encourage addiction-like behaviors  
• physical violence, online bullying, and harassment 

Based on our understanding of the First Amendment and how all online platforms and services regulated by KOSA will navigate their legal risk, we believe that KOSA will lead to broad online censorship of lawful speech, including content designed to help children navigate and overcome the very same harms KOSA identifies.  

A line of U.S. Supreme Court cases involving efforts to prevent book sellers from disseminating certain speech, which resulted in broad, unconstitutional censorship, shows why KOSA is unconstitutional. 

In Smith v. California, the Supreme Court struck down an ordinance that made it a crime for a book seller to possess obscene material. The court ruled that even though obscene material is not protected by the First Amendment, the ordinance’s imposition of liability based on the mere presence of that material had a broader censorious effect because a book seller “will tend to restrict the books he sells to those he has inspected; and thus the State will have imposed a restriction upon the distribution of constitutionally protected, as well as obscene literature.” The court recognized that the “ordinance tends to impose a severe limitation on the public’s access to constitutionally protected material” because a distributor of others’ speech will react by limiting access to any borderline content that could get it into legal trouble.  

Online services have even less ability to read through the millions (or sometimes billions) of pieces of content on their services than a bookseller or distributor

In Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court struck down a government effort to limit the distribution of material that a state commission had deemed objectionable to minors. The commission would send notices to book distributors that identified various books and magazines they believed were objectionable and sent copies of their lists to local and state law enforcement. Book distributors reacted to these notices by stopping the circulation of the materials identified by the commission. The Supreme Court held that the commission’s efforts violated the First Amendment and once more recognized that by targeting a distributor of others’ speech, the commission’s “capacity for suppression of constitutionally protected publications” was vast.  

KOSA’s duty of care creates a more far-reaching censorship threat than those that the Supreme Court struck down in Smith and Bantam Books. KOSA makes online services that host our digital speech liable should they fail to exercise reasonable care in removing or restricting minors’ access to lawful content on the topics KOSA identifies. KOSA is worse than the ordinance in Smith because the First Amendment generally protects speech about addiction, suicide, eating disorders, and the other topics KOSA singles out.  

We think that online services will react to KOSA’s new liability in much the same way as the bookstore in Smith and the book distributer in Bantam Books: They will limit minors’ access to or simply remove any speech that might touch on the topics KOSA identifies, even when much of that speech is protected by the First Amendment. Worse, online services have even less ability to read through the millions (or sometimes billions) of pieces of content on their services than a bookseller or distributor who had to review hundreds or thousands of books.  To comply, we expect that platforms will deploy blunt tools, either by gating off entire portions of their site to prevent minors from accessing them (more on this below) or by deploying automated filters that will over-censor speech, including speech that may be beneficial to minors seeking help with addictions or other problems KOSA identifies. (Regardless of their claims, it is not possible for a service to accurately pinpoint the content KOSA describes with automated tools.) 

But as the Supreme Court ruled in Smith and Bantam Books, the First Amendment prohibits Congress from enacting a law that results in such broad censorship precisely because it limits the distribution of, and access to, lawful speech.  

Moreover, the fact that KOSA singles out certain legal content—for example, speech concerning bullying—means that the bill creates content-based restrictions that are presumptively unconstitutional. The government bears the burden of showing that KOSA’s content restrictions advance a compelling government interest, are narrowly tailored to that interest, and are the least speech-restrictive means of advancing that interest. KOSA cannot satisfy this exacting standard.  

The fact that KOSA singles out certain legal content—for example, speech concerning bullying—means that the bill creates content-based restrictions that are presumptively unconstitutional. 

EFF agrees that the government has a compelling interest in protecting children from being harmed online. But KOSA’s broad requirement that platforms and services face liability for showing speech concerning particular topics to minors is not narrowly tailored to that interest. As said above, the broad censorship that will result will effectively limit access to a wide range of lawful speech on topics such as addiction, bullying, and eating disorders. The fact that KOSA will sweep up so much speech shows that it is far from the least speech-restrictive alternative, too.  

Why the Rule of Construction Doesn’t Solve the Censorship Concern 

In response to censorship concerns about the duty of care, KOSA’s authors added a rule of construction stating that nothing in the duty of care “shall be construed to require a covered platform to prevent or preclude:”  

• minors from deliberately or independently searching for content, or 
• the platforms or services from providing resources that prevent or mitigate the harms KOSA identifies, “including evidence-based information and clinical resources." 

We understand that some interpret this language as a safeguard for online services that limits their liability if a minor happens across information on topics that KOSA identifies, and consequently, platforms hosting content aimed at mitigating addiction, bullying, or other identified harms can take comfort that they will not be sued under KOSA. 

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But EFF does not believe the rule of construction will limit KOSA’s censorship, in either a practical or constitutional sense. As a practical matter, it’s not clear how an online service will be able to rely on the rule of construction’s safeguards given the diverse amount of content it likely hosts.  

Take for example an online forum in which users discuss drug and alcohol abuse. It is likely to contain a range of content and views by users, some of which might describe addiction, drug use, and treatment, including negative and positive views on those points. KOSA’s rule of construction might protect the forum from a minor’s initial search for content that leads them to the forum. But once that minor starts interacting with the forum, they are likely to encounter the types of content KOSA proscribes, and the service may face liability if there is a later claim that the minor was harmed. In short, KOSA does not clarify that the initial search for the forum precludes any liability should the minor interact with the forum and experience harm later. It is also not clear how a service would prove that the minor found the forum via a search. 

The near-impossible standard required to review such a large volume of content, coupled with liability for letting any harmful content through, is precisely the scenario that the Supreme Court feared

Further, the rule of construction’s protections for the forum, should it provide only resources regarding preventing or mitigating drug and alcohol abuse based on evidence-based information and clinical resources, is unlikely to be helpful. That provision assumes that the forum has the resources to review all existing content on the forum and effectively screen all future content to only permit user-generated content concerning mitigation or prevention of substance abuse. The rule of construction also requires the forum to have the subject-matter expertise necessary to judge what content is or isn’t clinically correct and evidence-based. And even that assumes that there is broad scientific consensus about all aspects of substance abuse, including its causes (which there is not). 

Given that practical uncertainty and the potential hazard of getting anything wrong when it comes to minors’ access to that content, we think that the substance abuse forum will react much like the bookseller and distributor in the Supreme Court cases did: It will simply take steps to limit the ability for minors to access the content, a far easier and safer alternative than  making case-by-case expert decisions regarding every piece of content on the forum. 

EFF also does not believe that the Supreme Court’s decisions in Smith and Bantam Books would have been different if there had been similar KOSA-like safeguards incorporated into the regulations at issue. For example, even if the obscenity ordinance at issue in Smith had made an exception letting bookstores  sell scientific books with detailed pictures of human anatomy, the bookstore still would have to exhaustively review every book it sold and separate the obscene books from the scientific. The Supreme Court rejected such burdens as offensive to the First Amendment: “It would be altogether unreasonable to demand so near an approach to omniscience.” 

The near-impossible standard required to review such a large volume of content, coupled with liability for letting any harmful content through, is precisely the scenario that the Supreme Court feared. “The bookseller's self-censorship, compelled by the State, would be a censorship affecting the whole public, hardly less virulent for being privately administered,” the court wrote in Smith. “Through it, the distribution of all books, both obscene and not obscene, would be impeded.” 

Those same First Amendment concerns are exponentially greater for online services hosting everyone’s speech. That is why we do not believe that KOSA’s rule of construction will prevent the broader censorship that results from the bill’s duty of care. 

Finally, we do not believe the rule of construction helps the government overcome its burden on strict scrutiny to show that KOSA is narrowly tailored or restricts less speech than necessary. Instead, the rule of construction actually heightens KOSA’s violation of the First Amendment by preferencing certain viewpoints over others. The rule of construction here creates a legal preference for viewpoints that seek to mitigate the various identified harms, and punishes viewpoints that are neutral or even mildly positive of those harms. While EFF agrees that such speech may be awful, the First Amendment does not permit the government to make these viewpoint-based distinctions without satisfying strict scrutiny. It cannot meet that heavy burden with KOSA.  

KOSA's Focus on Design Features Doesn’t Change Our First Amendment Concerns 

KOSA supporters argue that because the duty of care and other provisions of KOSA concern an online service or platforms’ design features, the bill raises no First Amendment issues. We disagree.  

It’s true enough that KOSA creates liability for services that fail to “exercise reasonable care in the creation and implementation of any design feature” to prevent the bill’s enumerated harms. But the features themselves are not what KOSA's duty of care deems harmful. Rather, the provision specifically links the design features to minors’ access to the enumerated content that KOSA deems harmful. In that way, the design features serve as little more than a distraction. The duty of care provision is not concerned per se with any design choice generally, but only those design choices that fail to mitigate minors’ access to information about depression, eating disorders, and the other identified content. 

Once again, the Supreme Court’s decision in Smith shows why it’s incorrect to argue that KOSA’s regulation of design features avoids the First Amendment concerns. If the ordinance at issue in Smith regulated the way in which bookstores were designed, and imposed liability based on where booksellers placed certain offending books in their stores—for example, in the front window—we  suspect that the Supreme Court would have recognized, rightly, that the design restriction was little more than an indirect effort to unconstitutionally regulate the content. The same holds true for KOSA.  

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KOSA Doesn’t “Mandate” Age-Gating, But It Heavily Pushes Platforms to Do So and Provides Few Other Avenues to Comply 

KOSA was amended in May 2023 to include language that was meant to ease concerns about age verification; in particular, it included explicit language that age verification is not required under the “Privacy Protections” section of the bill. The bill now states that a covered platform is not required to implement an age gating or age verification functionality to comply with KOSA.  

EFF acknowledges the text of the bill and has been clear in our messaging that nothing in the proposal explicitly requires services to implement age verification. Yet it's hard to see this change as anything other than a technical dodge that will be contradicted in practice.  

KOSA creates liability for any regulated platform or service that presents certain content to minors that the bill deems harmful to them. To comply with that new liability, those platforms and services’ options are limited. As we see them, the options are either to filter content for known minors or to gate content so only adults can access it. In either scenario, the linchpin is the platform knowing every user’s age  so it can identify its minor users and either filter the content they see or  exclude them from any content that could be deemed harmful under the law.  

EFF acknowledges the text of the bill and has been clear in our messaging that nothing in the proposal explicitly requires services to implement age verification.

There’s really no way to do that without implementing age verification. Regardless of what this section of the bill says, there’s no way for platforms to block either categories of content or design features for minors without knowing the minors are minors.  

We also don’t think KOSA lets platforms  claim ignorance if they take steps to never learn the ages of their users. If a 16-year-old user misidentifies herself as an adult and the platform does not use age verification, it could still be held liable because it should have “reasonably known” her age. The platform’s ignorance thus could work against it later, perversely incentivizing the services to implement age verification at the outset. 

EFF Remains Concerned About State Attorneys General Enforcing KOSA 

Another change that KOSA’s sponsors made  this year was to remove the ability of state attorneys general to enforce KOSA’s duty of care standard. We respect that some groups believe this addresses  concerns that some states would misuse KOSA to target minors’ access to any information that state officials dislike, including LGBTQIA+ or sex education information. We disagree that this modest change prevents this harm. KOSA still lets state attorneys general  enforce other provisions, including a section requiring certain “safeguards for minors.” Among the safeguards is a requirement that platforms “limit design features” that lead to minors spending more time on a service, including the ability to scroll through content, be notified of other content or messages, or auto playing content.  

But letting an attorney general  enforce KOSA’s requirement of design safeguards could be used as a proxy for targeting services that host content certain officials dislike.  The attorney general would simply target the same content or service it disfavored, butinstead of claiming that it violated KOSA’s duty to care, the official instead would argue that the service failed to prevent harmful design features that minors in their state used, such as notifications or endless scrolling. We think the outcome will be the same: states are likely to use KOSA to target speech about sexual health, abortion, LBGTQIA+ topics, and a variety of other information. 

KOSA Applies to Broad Swaths of the Internet, Not Just the Big Social Media Platforms 

Many sites, platforms, apps, and games would have to follow KOSA’s requirements. It applies to “an online platform, online video game, messaging application, or video streaming service that connects to the internet and that is used, or is reasonably likely to be used, by a minor.”  

There are some important exceptions—it doesn’t apply to services that only provide direct or group messages only, such as Signal, or to schools, libraries, nonprofits, or to ISP’s like Comcast generally. This is good—some critics of KOSA have been concerned that it would apply to websites like Archive of Our Own (AO3), a fanfiction site that allows users to read and share their work, but AO3 is a nonprofit, so it would not be covered.  

But  a wide variety of niche online services that are for-profit  would still be regulated by KOSA. Ravelry, for example, is an online platform focused on knitters, but it is a business.   

And it is an open question whether the comment and community portions of major mainstream news and sports websites are subject to KOSA. The bill exempts news and sports websites, with the huge caveat that they are exempt only so long as they are “not otherwise an online platform.” KOSA defines “online platform” as “any public-facing website, online service, online application, or mobile application that predominantly provides a community forum for user generated content.” It’s easily arguable that the New York Times’ or ESPN’s comment and forum sections are predominantly designed as places for user-generated content. Would KOSA apply only to those interactive spaces or does the exception to the exception mean the entire sites are subject to the law? The language of the bill is unclear. 

Not All of KOSA’s Critics Are Right, Either 

Just as we don’t agree on KOSA’s likely outcomes with many of its supporters, we also don’t agree with every critic regarding KOSA’s consequences. This isn’t surprising—the law is broad, and a major complaint is that it remains unclear how its vague language would be interpreted. So let’s address some of the more common misconceptions about the bill. 

Large Social Media May Not Entirely Block Young People, But Smaller Services Might 

Some people have concerns that KOSA will result in minors not being able to use social media at all. We believe a more likely scenario is that the major platforms would offer different experiences to different age groups.  

They already do this in some ways—Meta currently places teens into the most restrictive content control setting on Instagram and Facebook. The company specifically updated these settings for many of the categories included in KOSA, including suicide, self-harm, and eating disorder content. Their update describes precisely what we worry KOSA would require by law: “While we allow people to share content discussing their own struggles with suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, our policy is not to recommend this content and we have been focused on ways to make it harder to find.” TikTok also has blocked some videos for users under 18. To be clear, this content filtering as a result of KOSA will be harmful and would violate the First Amendment.  

Though large platforms will likely react this way, many smaller platforms will not be capable of this kind of content filtering. They very well may decide blocking young people entirely is the easiest way to protect themselves from liability. We cannot know how every platform will react if KOSA is enacted, but smaller platforms that do not already use complex automated content moderation tools will likely find it financially burdensome to implement both age verification tools and content moderation tools.  

KOSA Won’t Necessarily Make Your Real Name Public by Default 

One recurring fear that critics of KOSA have shared is that they will no longer to be able to use platforms anonymously. We believe this is true, but there is some nuance to it. No one should have to hand over their driver's license—or, worse, provide biometric information—just to access lawful speech on websites. But there's nothing in KOSA that would require online platforms to publicly tie your real name to your username.  

Still, once someone shares information to verify their age, there’s no way for them to be certain that the data they’re handing over is not going to be retained and used by the website, or further shared or even sold. As we’ve said, KOSA doesn't technically require age verification but we think it’s the most likely outcome. Users still will be forced to trust that the website they visit, or its third-party verification service, won’t misuse their private data, including their name, age, or biometric information. Given the numerous  data privacy blunders we’ve seen from companies like Meta in the past, and the general concern with data privacy that Congress seems to share with the general public (and with EFF), we believe this outcome to be extremely dangerous. Simply put: Sharing your private info with a company doesn’t necessarily make it public, but it makes it far more likely to become public than if you hadn’t shared it in the first place.   

We Agree With Supporters: Government Should Study Social Media’s Effects on Minors 

We know tensions are high; this is an incredibly important topic, and an emotional one. EFF does not have all the right answers regarding how to address the ways in which young people can be harmed online. Which is why we agree with KOSA’s supporters that the government should conduct much greater research on these issues. We believe that comprehensive fact-finding is the first step to both identifying the problems and legislative solutions. A provision of KOSA does require the National Academy of Sciences to research these issues and issue reports to the public. But KOSA gets this process backwards. It creates solutions to general concerns about young people being harmed without first doing the work necessary to show that the bill’s provisions address those problems. As we have said repeatedly, we do not think KOSA will address harms to young people online. We think it will exacerbate them.  

Even if your stance on KOSA is different from ours, we hope we are all working toward the same goal: an internet that supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world. We don’t believe KOSA will get us there, but neither will ad hominem attacks. To that end,  we look forward to more detailed analyses of the bill from its supporters, and to continuing thoughtful engagement from anyone interested in working on this critical issue. 

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The authors of the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) unveiled an amended version this week, but it’s still an unconstitutional censorship bill that continues to empower state officials to target services and online content they do not like. We are asking everyone reading this to oppose this latest version, and to demand that their representatives oppose it—even if you have already done so. 

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KOSA remains a dangerous bill that would allow the government to decide what types of information can be shared and read online by everyone. It would still require an enormous number of websites, apps, and online platforms to filter and block legal, and important, speech. It would almost certainly still result in age verification requirements. Some of its provisions have changed over time, and its latest changes are detailed below. But those improvements do not cure KOSA’s core First Amendment problems. Moreover, a close review shows that state attorneys general still have a great deal of power to target online services and speech they do not like, which we think will harm children seeking access to basic health information and a variety of other content that officials deem harmful to minors.  

We’ll dive into the details of KOSA’s latest changes, but first we want to remind everyone of the stakes. KOSA is still a censorship bill and it will still harm a large number of minors who have First Amendment rights to access lawful speech online. It will endanger young people and impede the rights of everyone who uses the platforms, services, and websites affected by the bill. Based on our previous analyses, statements by its authors and various interest groups, as well as the overall politicization of youth education and online activity, we believe the following groups—to name just a few—will be endangered:  

• LGBTQ+ Youth will be at risk of having content, educational material, and their own online identities erased.  
• Young people searching for sexual health and reproductive rights information will find their search results stymied. 
• Teens and children in historically oppressed and marginalized groups will be unable to locate information about their history and shared experiences. 
• Activist youth on either side of the aisle, such as those fighting for changes to climate laws, gun laws, or religious rights, will be siloed, and unable to advocate and connect on platforms.  
• Young people seeking mental health help and information will be blocked from finding it, because even discussions of suicide, depression, anxiety, and eating disorders will be hidden from them. 
• Teens hoping to combat the problem of addiction—either their own, or that of their friends, families, and neighbors, will not have the resources they need to do so.  
• Any young person seeking truthful news or information that could be considered depressing will find it harder to educate themselves and engage in current events and honest discussion. 
• Adults in any of these groups who are unwilling to share their identities will find themselves shunted onto a second-class internet alongside the young people who have been denied access to this information. 

What’s Changed in the Latest (2024) Version of KOSA 

In its impact, the latest version of KOSA is not meaningfully different from those previous versions. The “duty of care” censorship section remains in the bill, though modified as we will explain below. The latest version removes the authority of state attorneys general to sue or prosecute people for not complying with the “duty of care.” But KOSA still permits these state officials to enforce other part of the bill based on their political whims and we expect those officials to use this new law to the same censorious ends as they would have of previous versions. And the legal requirements of KOSA are still only possible for sites to safely follow if they restrict access to content based on age, effectively mandating age verification.   

KOSA is still a censorship bill and it will still harm a large number of minors

Duty of Care is Still a Duty of Censorship 

Previously, KOSA outlined a wide collection of harms to minors that platforms had a duty to prevent and mitigate through “the design and operation” of their product. This includes self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and bullying, among others. This seemingly anodyne requirement—that apps and websites must take measures to prevent some truly awful things from happening—would have led to overbroad censorship on otherwise legal, important topics for everyone as we’ve explained before.  

The updated duty of care says that a platform shall “exercise reasonable care in the creation and implementation of any design feature” to prevent and mitigate those harms. The difference is subtle, and ultimately, unimportant. There is no case law defining what is “reasonable care” in this context. This language still means increased liability merely for hosting and distributing otherwise legal content that the government—in this case the FTC—claims is harmful.  

Design Feature Liability 

The bigger textual change is that the bill now includes a definition of a “design feature,” which the bill requires platforms to limit for minors. The “design feature” of products that could lead to liability is defined as: 

any feature or component of a covered platform that will encourage or increase the frequency, time spent, or activity of minors on the covered platform, or activity of minors on the covered platform. 

Design features include but are not limited to 

(A) infinite scrolling or auto play; 

(B) rewards for time spent on the platform; 

(C) notifications; 

(D) personalized recommendation systems; 

(E) in-game purchases; or 

(F) appearance altering filters. 

These design features are a mix of basic elements and those that may be used to keep visitors on a site or platform. There are several problems with this provision. First, it’s not clear when offering basic features that many users rely on, such as notifications, by itself creates a harm. But that points to the fundamental problem of this provision. KOSA is essentially trying to use features of a service as a proxy to create liability for speech online that the bill’s authors do not like. But the list of harmful designs shows that the legislators backing KOSA want to regulate online content, not just design.   

For example, if an online service presented an endless scroll of math problems for children to complete, or rewarded children with virtual stickers and other prizes for reading digital children’s books, would lawmakers consider those design features harmful? Of course not. Infinite scroll and autoplay are generally not a concern for legislators. It’s that these lawmakers do not like some lawful content that is accessible via online service’s features. 

What KOSA tries to do here then is to launder restrictions on content that lawmakers do not like through liability for supposedly harmful “design features.” But the First Amendment still prohibits Congress from indirectly trying to censor lawful speech it disfavors.  

We shouldn’t kid ourselves that the latest version of KOSA will stop state officials from targeting vulnerable communities.

Allowing the government to ban content designs is a dangerous idea. If the FTC decided that direct messages, or encrypted messages, were leading to harm for minors—under this language they could bring an enforcement action against a platform that allowed users to send such messages. 

Regardless of whether we like infinite scroll or auto-play on platforms, these design features are protected by the First Amendment; just like the design features we do like. If the government tried to limit an online newspaper from using an infinite scroll feature or auto-playing videos, that case would be struck down. KOSA’s latest variant is no different.   

Attorneys General Can Still Use KOSA to Enact Political Agendas 

As we mentioned above, the enforcement available to attorneys general has been narrowed to no longer include the duty of care. But due to the rule of construction and the fact that attorneys general can still enforce other portions of KOSA, this is cold comfort. 

For example, it is true enough that the amendments to KOSA prohibit a state from targeting an online service based on claims that in hosting LGBTQ content that it violated KOSA’s duty of care. Yet that same official could use another provision of KOSA—which allows them to file suits based on failures in a platform’s design—to target the same content. The state attorney general could simply claim that they are not targeting the LGBTQ content, but rather the fact that the content was made available to minors via notifications, recommendations, or other features of a service. 

We shouldn’t kid ourselves that the latest version of KOSA will stop state officials from targeting vulnerable communities. And KOSA leaves all of the bill’s censorial powers with the FTC, a five-person commission nominated by the president. This still allows a small group of federal officials appointed by the President to decide what content is dangerous for young people. Placing this enforcement power with the FTC is still a First Amendment problem: no government official, state or federal, has the power to dictate by law what people can read online.  

The Long Fight Against KOSA Continues in 2024 

For two years now, EFF has laid out the clear arguments against this bill. KOSA creates liability if an online service fails to perfectly police a variety of content that the bill deems harmful to minors. Services have little room to make any mistakes if some content is later deemed harmful to minors and, as a result, are likely to restrict access to a broad spectrum of lawful speech, including information about health issues like eating disorders, drug addiction, and anxiety.  

The fight against KOSA has amassed an enormous coalition of people of all ages and all walks of life who know that censorship is not the right approach to protecting people online, and that the promise of the internet is one that must apply equally to everyone, regardless of age. Some of the people who have advocated against KOSA from day one have now graduated high school or college. But every time this bill returns, more people learn why we must stop it from becoming law.   

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TELL CONGRESS: OPPOSE THE KIDS ONLINE SAFETY ACT

We cannot afford to allow the government to decide what information is available online. Please contact your representatives today to tell them to stop the Kids Online Safety Act from moving forward. 

Lawmakers, schools districts, educational technology companies and others keep rolling out legislation and software that threatens students’ privacy, free speech, and access to social media, in the name of “protecting” children. At EFF, we fought back against this overreach and demand accountability and transparency.

Bad bills and invasive monitoring systems, though sometimes well-meaning, hurt students rather than protect them from the perceived dangers of the internet and social media. We saw many efforts to bar young people, and students, from digital spaces, censor what they are allowed to see and share online, and monitor and control when and how they can do it. This makes it increasingly difficult for them to access information about everything from gun violence and drug abuse to politics and LGBTQ+ topics, all because some software or elected official considers these topics “harmful.”

In response, we doubled down on exposing faulty surveillance software, long a problem in many schools across the country. We launched a new project called the Red Flag Machine, an interactive quiz and report demonstrating the absurd inefficiency—and potential dangers—of student surveillance software that schools across the country use and that routinely invades the privacy of millions of children.

We’ll continue to fight student surveillance and censorship, and we are heartened to see students fighting back

The project grew out of our investigation of GoGuardian, computer monitoring software used in about 11,500 schools to surveil about 27 million students—mostly in middle and high school—according to the company. The software allows school officials and teachers to monitor student’s computers and devices, talk to them via chat or webcam, block sites considered “offensive,” and get alerts when students access content that the software, or the school, deems harmful or explicit.

Our investigation showed that the software inaccurately flags massive amounts of useful material. The software flagged sites about black authors and artists, the Holocaust, and the LGBTQ+ rights movement. The software flagged the official Marine Corps’ fitness guide and the bios of the cast of Shark Tank. Bible.com was flagged because the text of Genesis 3 contained the word “naked.” We found thousands more examples of mis-flagged sites.

EFF built the Red Flag Machine to expose the ludicrous results of GoGuardian’s flagging algorithm. In addition to reading our research about the software, you can take a quiz that presents websites flagged by the software, and guess which of five possible words triggered the flag. The results would be funny if they were not so potentially harmful.

Congress Takes Aim At Students and Young People

Meanwhile, Congress this year resurrected the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that would increase surveillance and restrict access to information in the name of protecting children online—including students. KOSA would give power to state attorneys general to decide what content on many popular online platforms is dangerous for young people, and would enable censorship and surveillance. Sites would likely be required to block important educational content, often made by young people themselves, about how to deal with anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, physical violence, online bullying and harassment, sexual exploitation and abuse, and suicidal thoughts. We urged Congress to reject this bill and encouraged people to tell their senators and representative that KOSA will censor the internet but not help kids. 

We also called out the brazen Eyes on the Board Act, which aims to end social media use entirely in schools. This heavy-handed bill would cut some federal funding to any school that doesn’t block all social media platforms. We can understand the desire to ensure students are focusing on schoolwork when in class, but this bill tells teachers and school officials how to do their jobs, and enforces unnecessary censorship.

Many schools already don’t allow device use in the classroom and block social media sites and other content on school issued devices. Too much social media is not a problem that teachers and administrators need the government to correct—they already have the tools and know-how to do it.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen a slew of state bills that also seek to control what students and young people can access online. There are bills in Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Montana, to name just a few, and keeping up with all this bad legislation is like a game of whack a mole.

Finally, teachers and school administrators are grappling with whether generative AI use should be allowed, and if they should deploy detection tools to find students who have used it. We think the answer to both is no. AI detection tools are very inaccurate and carry significant risks of falsely flagging students for plagiarism. And AI use is growing exponentially and will likely have significant impact on students’ lives and futures. They should be learning about and exploring generative AI now to understand some of the benefits and flaws. Demonizing it only deprives students from gaining knowledge about a technology that may change the world around us.

We’ll continue to fight student surveillance and censorship, and we are heartened to see students fighting back against efforts to supposedly protect children that actually give government control over who gets to see what content. It has never been more important for young people to defend our democracy and we’re excited to be joining with them. 

If you’re interested in learning more about protecting your privacy at school, take a look at our Surveillance Self-Defense guide on privacy for students.

This blog is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2023.

Young people’s access to social media continues to be under attack by overreaching politicians. The latest effort, Senator Ted Cruz’s blunt “Eyes on the Board” Act, aims to end social media’s use entirely in schools. This heavy-handed plan to cut federal funding to any school that doesn’t block all social media platforms may have good intentions—like ensuring kids are able to focus on school work when they’re behind a desk—but the ramifications of such a bill would be bleak, and it’s not clear that it would solve any actual problem.

Eyes on the Board would prohibit any school from receiving any federal E-Rate funding subsidies if it also allows access to social media. Schools and libraries that receive this funding are already required to install internet filters; the Children’s Internet Protection Act, or CIPA, requires that these schools must block or filter Internet access to “visual depictions” that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors, as well as requiring the monitoring of the online activities of minors for the same purpose. In return, the E-Rate program subsidizes internet services for schools and libraries in districts with high rates of poverty. 

This bill is a brazen attempt to censor information and to control how schools and teachers educate.

First, it’s not clear that there is a problem here that needs fixing. In practice, most schools choose to block much, much more than social media sites. This is a problem—these filters likely stop students from accessing educational information, and many tools flag students for accessing sites that aren’t blocked, endangering their privacy. Some students’ only access to the internet is during school hours, and others’ only internet-capable device is issued by their school, making these website blocks and flags particularly troubling. 

So it’s very, very likely that many schools already block social media if they find it disruptive. In our recent research, it was common for schools to do so. And according to the American Library Association’s last “School Libraries Count!” survey, conducted a decade ago, social media platforms were the most likely type of content to be blocked, with 88% of schools reporting that they did so. Again, it’s unclear what problem this bill purports to solve. But it is clear that Congress requiring that schools block social media platforms entirely, by government decree, is far more prohibitive than necessary to keep students’ “eyes on the board.” 

In short: too much social media access, via school networks or devices, is not a problem that teachers and administrators need the government to correct. If it is a problem, schools already have the tools to fix it, and twenty years after CIPA, they know generally how to do so. And if a school wants to allow access to platforms that an enormous percentage of students already use—to help guide them on its usage, or teach them about its privacy settings, for example—they should be allowed to do so without risking the loss of federal funding. 

Second, the broad scope of this bill would ban any access to a website whose primary purpose is to allow users to communicate user-generated content to the public, including even those that are explicitly educational or designed for young people. Banning students from using any social media, even educational platforms, is a massive overreach. 

No senator should consider moving this bill forward.

Third, the bill is also unconstitutional. A government prohibition on accessing a whole category of speech–social media speech, the vast majority of which is fully legal–is a restriction on speech that would be unlikely to survive strict scrutiny under the Supreme Court’s First Amendment precedent. As we have written about other bills that attack young people’s access to content on social media platforms, young people have First Amendment rights to speak online and to access others’ speech, whether via social media or another channel. The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that states and Congress cannot use concerns about children to ban them from expressing themselves or accessing information, and has ruled that there is no children’s exception to the First Amendment.   

Though some senators may see social media as distracting or even dangerous, it can play a useful role in society and young people’s lives. Many protests by young people against police brutality and gun violence have been organized using social media. Half of U.S. adults get news from social media, at least sometimes; likely even more teens get their news this way. Those students in lower-income communities may depend on school devices or school broadband to access valuable information on social media, and for many, this bill amounts to a flatout ban. 

People intending to limit access to information are already challenging books in schools and libraries in increasing numbers around the country. The author of this bill, Sen. Cruz, has been involved in these efforts. It is conceivable that challenges of books in schools and libraries could evolve into challenges of websites on the open internet. For now, students and library patrons can and will turn to the internet when books are pulled off shelves. 

This bill is a brazen attempt to censor information and to control how schools and teachers educate, and it would harm marginalized communities and children the most. No senator should consider moving this bill forward.

Generative AI gained widespread attention earlier this year, but one group has had to reckon with it more quickly than most: educators. Teachers and school administrators have struggled with two big questions: should the use of generative AI be banned? And should a school implement new tools to detect when students have used generative AI? EFF believes the answer to both of these questions is no.

AI Detection Tools Harm Students

For decades, students have had to defend themselves from an increasing variety of invasive technology in schools—from disciplinary tech like student monitoring software, remote proctoring tools, and comprehensive learning management systems, to surveillance tech like cameras, face recognition, and other biometrics. “AI detection” software is a new generation of inaccurate and dangerous tech that’s being added to the mix.

Tools such as GPTZero and TurnItIn that use AI detection claim that they can determine (with varying levels of accuracy) whether a student’s writing was likely to have been created by a generative AI tool. But these detection tools are so inaccurate as to be dangerous, and have already led to false charges of plagiarism. As with remote proctoring, this software looks for signals that may not indicate cheating at all. For example, they are more likely to flag writing as AI-created when the word choice is fairly predictable and the sentences are less complex—and as a result, research has already shown that false positives are more frequent for some groups of students, such as non-native speakers. 

Instead of demonizing it, schools should help students by teaching them how this potentially useful technology works and when it’s appropriate to use it. 

There is often no source document to prove one way or another whether a student used AI in writing. As AI writing tools improve and are able to reflect all the variations of human writing, the possibility that an opposing tool will be able to detect whether AI was involved in writing with any kind of worthwhile accuracy will likely diminish. If the past is prologue, then some schools may combat the growing availability of AI for writing with greater surveillance and increasingly inaccurate disciplinary charges. Students, administrators, and teachers should fight back against this. 

If you are a student wrongly accused of using generative AI without authorization for your school work, the Washington Post has a good primer for how to respond. To protect yourself from accusations, you may also want to save your drafts, or use a document management system that does so automatically.

Bans on Generative AI Access in Schools Hurt Students

Before AI detection tools were more widely available, some of the largest districts in the country, including New York Public Schools and Los Angeles Unified, had banned access to large language model AI tools like ChatGPT outright due to cheating fears. Thankfully, many schools have since done an about face, and are beginning to see the value in teaching about them, instead. New York City Public Schools lifted its ban after only four months, and the number of schools with a policy and curriculum that includes them is growing. New York City Public School’s Chancellor wrote that the school system “will encourage and support our educators and students as they learn about and explore this game-changing technology while also creating a repository and community to share their findings across our schools.” This is the correct approach, and one that all schools should take. 

This is not an endorsement of generative AI tools, as they have plenty of problems, but outright bans only stop students from using them while physically in school—where teachers could actually explain how they work and their pros and cons—and obviously won’t stop their use the majority of the time. Instead, they will only stop students who don’t have access to the internet or a personal device outside of school from using them. 

These bans are not surprising. There is a long history of school administrators and teachers blocking the use of a new technology, especially around the internet. For decades after they became accessible to the average student,  educators argued about whether students should be allowed calculators in the classroom. Schools have banned search engines; they have banned Wikipedia—all of which have a potentially useful place in education, and one that teachers are well-positioned to explain the nuances of. If a tool is effective at creating shortcuts for students, then teachers and administrators should consider emphasizing how it works, what it can do, and, importantly, what it cannot do. (And in the case of many online tools, what data it may collect). Hopefully, schools will take a different trajectory with generative AI technology.

Artificial intelligence will likely impact students throughout their lives. The school environment  presents a good opportunity to help them understand some of the benefits and flaws of such tools. Instead of demonizing it, schools should help students by teaching them how this potentially useful technology works and when it’s appropriate to use it. 

Over the last year, state and federal legislatures have tried to pass—and in some cases succeeded in passing—legislation that bars young people from digital spaces, censors what they are allowed to see and share online, and monitors and controls when and how they can do it. 

EFF and many other digital rights and civil liberties organizations have fought back against these bills, but the sheer number is alarming. At times it can be nearly overwhelming: there are bills in Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Montana; there are federal bills like the Kids Online Safety Act and the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act. And there’s legislation beyond the U.S., like the UK’s Online Safety Bill. 

JOIN EFF AT the neon level 

Young people, too, have fought back. In the long run, we believe we’ll win, together—and because of your help. We’ve won before: In the 1990’s, Congress enacted sweeping legislation that would have curtailed online rights for people of all ages. But that law was aimed, like much of today’s legislation, at young people like you. Along with the ACLU, we challenged the law and won core protections for internet rights in a Supreme Court case, Reno v. ACLU, that recognized that free speech on the Internet merits the highest standards of Constitutional protection. The Court’s decision was its first involving the Internet. 

Even before that, EFF was fighting on the side of teens living on the cutting edge of the ‘net (or however they described it then). In 1990, a Secret Service dragnet called Operation Sundevil seized more than 40 computers from young people in 14 American cities. EFF was formed in part to protect those youths.

So the current struggle isn’t new. As before, young people are targeted by governments, schools, and sometimes parents, who either don’t understand or won’t admit the value that online spaces, and technology generally, offer, no matter your age. 

And, as before, today’s youth aren’t handing over their rights. Tens of thousands of you have vocally opposed flawed censorship bills like KOSA. You’re using the digital tools that governments want to strip you of to fight back, rallying together on Discords and across social media to protect online rights. 

If we don’t succeed in legislatures, know that we will push back in courts, and we will continue building technology for a safe, encrypted internet that anyone, of any age, can access without fear of surveillance or government censorship. 

If you’re a young person eager to help protect your online rights, we’ve put together a few of our favorite ways below to help guide you. We hope you’ll join us, however you can.

Here’s How to Take Your Rights With You When You Go Online—At Any Age

Join EFF at a Special “Neon” Level Membership for Just $18

The huge numbers of young people working hard to oppose the Kids Online Safety Act has been inspiring. Whatever happens, EFF will be there to keep fighting—and you can help us keep up the fight by becoming an EFF member. 

We’ve created a special Neon membership level for anyone under 18 that’s the lowest price we’ve ever offered–just $18 for a year’s membership. If you can, help support the activists, technologists, and attorneys defending privacy, digital creativity, and internet freedom for everyone by becoming an EFF member with a one-time donation. You’ll get a sticker pack (see below), insider briefings, and more. 

JOIN EFF at the neon level 

We aren’t verifying any ages for this membership level because we trust you. (And, because we oppose online age verification laws—read more about why here.)

Gift a Neon Membership 

Not a young person, but have one in your life that cares about digital rights? You can also gift a Neon membership! Membership helps us build better tech, better laws, and a better internet at a time when the world needs it most. Every generation must fight for their rights, and now, that battle is online. If you know a teen that cares about the internet and technology, help make them an EFF member! 

Speak Up with EFF’s Action Center

Young people—and people of every age—have already sent thousands of messages to Congress this year advocating against dangerous bills that would limit their access to online spaces, their privacy, and their ability to speak out online. If you haven’t done so, make sure that legislators writing bills that affect your digital life hear from you by visiting EFF’s Action Center, where you can quickly send messages to your representatives at the federal and state level (and sometimes outside of the U.S., if you live elsewhere). Take our action for KOSA today if you haven’t yet: 

TAKE ACTION

TELL CONGRESS: OPPOSE THE KIDS ONLINE SAFETY ACT

Other bills that might interest you, as of October 2023, are the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act and the RESTRICT Act. 

If you’re under 18, you should know that many more pieces of legislation at the state level have passed or are pending this year that would impact you. You can always reach out to your representatives even if we don’t have an Action Center message available by finding the legislation here, for example, and the contact info of your rep on their website.

Protect Your Privacy with Surveillance Self-Defense

Protecting yourself online as a young person is often more complicated than it is for others. In addition to threats to your privacy posed by governments and companies, you may also want to protect some private information from schools, peers, and even parents. EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense hub is a great place to start learning how to think about privacy, and what steps you can take to ensure information about you doesn’t go anywhere you don’t want. 

Fight for Strong Student Rights

Schools have become a breeding ground for surveillance. In 2023, most kids can tell you: surveillance cameras in school buildings are passé. Nearly all online activity in school is filtered and flagged. Children are accused of cheating by algorithms and given little recourse to prove their innocence. Facial recognition and other dangerous, biased biometric scanning is becoming more and more common.

But it’s not all bad. Courts have expanded some student rights recently. And you can fight back in other ways. For a broad overview, use our Privacy for Students guide to understand how potential surveillance and censorship impacts you, and what to do about it. If it fits, consider following that guide up with our LGBTQ Youth module. 

If you want to know more, take a deep dive into one of the most common surveillance tools in schools—student monitoring software—with our Red Flag Machine project and quiz. We analyzed public records from GoGuardian, a tool used in thousands of schools to monitor the online activity of millions of students, and what we learned is honestly shocking. 

And don’t forget to follow our other Student Privacy work. We regularly dissect developments in school surveillance, monitoring, censorship, and how they can impact you. 

Start a Local Tech or Digital Rights Group 

Don’t work alone! If you have friends or know others in your area that care about the benefits of technology, the internet, digital rights—or think they just might be interested in them—why not form a club? It can be particularly powerful to share why important issues like free speech, privacy, and creativity matter to you, and having a group behind you if you contact a representative can add more weight to your message. Depending on the group you form, you might also consider joining the EFA! (See below.)

Not sure how to meet with other folks in your area? Why not join an already-started online Discord server of young people fighting back against online censorship, or start your own?

Find Allies or Join other Grassroots Groups in the Electronic Frontier Alliance

The Electronic Frontier Alliance is a grassroots network of community and campus organizations across the United States working to educate our neighbors about the importance of digital rights. Groups of young people can be a great fit for the EFA, which includes chapters of Encode Justice, campus groups in computer science, hacking, tech, and more. You can find allies, or if you build your own group, join up with others. On our EFA site you’ll find toolkits on event organizing, talking to media, activism, and more. 

Speak out on Social Media

Social networks are great platforms for getting your message out into the world, cultivating a like-minded community, staying on top of breaking news and issues, and building a name for yourself. Not sure how to make it happen? We’ve got a toolkit to get you started! Also, do a quick search for some of the issues you care about—like “KOSA,” for example—and take a look at what others are saying. (Young TikTok users have made hundreds of videos describing what’s wrong with KOSA, and Tumblr—yes, Tumblr—has multiple anti-KOSA blogs that have gone viral multiple times.) You can always join in the conversation that way. 

Teach Digital Privacy with SEC 

If you’ve been thinking about digital privacy for a while now, you may want to consider sharing that information with others. The Security Education Companion is a great place to start if you’re looking for lesson plans to teach digital security to others.

In College (or Will Be Soon)? Take the Tor University Challenge

In the Tor University Challenge, you can help advance human rights with free and open-source technology, empowering users to defend against mass surveillance and internet censorship. Tor is a service that helps you to protect your anonymity while using the Internet. It has two parts: the Tor Browser that you can download that allows you to use the Internet anonymously, and the volunteer network of computers that makes it possible for that software to work. Universities are great places to run Tor Relays because they have fast, stable connections and computer science and IT departments that can work with students to keep a relay running, while learning hands-on cybersecurity experience and thinking about global policy, law, and society. 

Visit Tor University to get started. 

Learn about Local Surveillance and Fight Back 

Young people don’t just have to worry about government censorship and school surveillance. Law enforcement agencies routinely deploy advanced surveillance technologies in our communities that can be aimed at anyone, but are particularly dangerous for young black and brown people. Our Street-Level Surveillance resources are designed for members of the public, advocacy organizations, journalists, defense attorneys, and policymakers who often are not getting the straight story from police representatives or the vendors marketing this equipment. But at any age, it’s worth learning how automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, and other police equipment works.

Don’t stop there. Our Atlas of Surveillance documents the police tech that’s actually being deployed in individual communities. Search our database of police tech by entering a city, county, state or agency in the United States. 

Follow EFF

Stay educated about what’s happening in the tech world by following EFF. Sign up for our once- or twice-monthly email newsletter, EFFector. Follow us on Meta, Mastodon, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, Twitch, YouTube, and Twitter. Listen to our podcast, How to Fix the Internet, for candid discussions of digital rights issues with some of the smartest people working in the field. 

There are so many ways for people of all ages to fight for and protect the internet for themselves and others. (Just take a look at some of the ways we’ve fought for privacy, free speech, and creativity over the years: an airship, an airplane, and a badger; encrypting pretty much the entire web and also cracking insecure encryption to prove a point; putting together a speculative fiction collection and making a virtual reality game—to name just a few.)

Whether you’re new to the fight, or you’ve been online for decades—we’re glad to have you.

This post was co-authored by legal intern Kate Prince.

Jump to our detailed report about GoGuardian and student monitoring tools.

GoGuardian is a student monitoring tool that watches over twenty-seven million students across ten thousand schools, but what it does exactly, and how well it works, isn’t easy for students to know. To learn more about its functionality, accuracy, and impact on students, we filed dozens of public records requests and analyzed tens of thousands of results from the software. Using data from multiple schools in both red and blue states, what we uncovered was that, by design, GoGuardian is a red flag machine—its false positives heavily outweigh its ability to accurately determine whether the content of a site is harmful. This results in tens of thousands of students being flagged for viewing content that is not only benign, but often, educational or informative. 

We identified multiple categories of non-explicit content that are regularly marked as harmful or dangerous, including: College application sites and college websites; counseling and therapy sites; sites with information about drug abuse; sites with information about LGBTQ issues; sexual health sites; sites with information about gun violence; sites about historical topics; sites about political parties and figures; medical and health sites; news sites; and general educational sites. 

To illustrate the shocking absurdity of GoGuardian's flagging algorithm, we have built the Red Flag Machine quiz. Derived from real GoGuardian data, visitors are presented with websites that were flagged and asked to guess what keywords triggered the alert. We have also written a detailed report on our findings, available online here (and downloadable here). 

But the inaccurate flagging is just one of the dangers of the software. 

How Does Student Monitoring Software Work? 

Along with apps like Gaggle and Bark, GoGuardian is used to proactively monitor primarily middle and high school students, giving schools access to an enormous amount of sensitive student data which the company can also access. In some cases, this has even given teachers the ability to view student webcam footage without their consent when they are in their homes. In others, this sort of software has inaccurately mischaracterized student behavior as dangerous or even outed students to their families.

Though some privacy invasions and errors may be written off as the unintentional costs of protecting students, even commonly used features of these monitoring apps are cause for concern. GoGuardian lets school officials track trends in student search histories. It identifies supposedly “at risk” students and gathers location data on where and when a device is being used, allowing anyone with access to the data to create a comprehensive profile of the student. It flags students for mundane activity, and sends alerts to school officials, parents, and potentially, police.

These companies tout their ability to make the lives of administrators and teachers easier and their students safer. Instead of having to dash around a classroom to check everyone’s computers, teachers can instead sit down and watch a real-time stream of their students’ online activity. They can block sites, get alerts when students are off task, and directly message those who might need help. And during the pandemic, many of these tools were offered to schools free of charge—exacerbating the surveillance while minimizing students’ and parents’ opportunity to push back. Along with the increased use of school issued devices, which are more common in marginalized communities, this has created an atmosphere of hypercharged spying on students.

This problem isn’t new. In 2015, EFF submitted a complaint to the FTC that Google’s Apps for Education (GAFE) software suite was collecting and data mining school children’s personal information, including their Internet searches. In a partial victory, Google changed its tune and began explicitly stating that even though they do collect information on students’ use of non-GAFE services, they treat that information as “student personal information” and do not use it to target ads.

But the landscape has shifted since then. The use of “edtech” software has grown considerably, and with monitoring-specific apps like GoGuardian and Gaggle, students are being taught by our schools that they have no right to privacy and that they can always be monitored.  

Knowing how you’re being surveilled—and how accurate that surveillance is—must be the first step to fighting back, and protecting your privacy.  This blog is a run-down of some of the most common GoGuardian features.

GoGuardian Admin is God Mode for School Administrators

School administrators using GoGuardian’s “Admin” tool have nearly unfettered access to huge amounts of data about students, including browsing histories, documents, videos, app and extension data, and content filtering and alerts. It’s unclear why so much data is available to administrators, but GoGuardian makes it easy for school admins to view detailed information about students that could follow them for the rest of their lives. (The Center for Democracy And Technology has released multiple reports indicating that student monitoring software like GoGuardian is primarily used for disciplinary, rather than safety, reasons.) Administrators can also set up “alerts” for when a student is viewing “offensive” content, though it’s not clear what is and is not “offensive,” to whom. These alerts could be used to stifle a student’s First Amendment right to information--for example, if a school decides that anything from an opposing political party or anything related to the LGBTQ community is harmful, it can prevent students from viewing it. These flags and filters can be applied to all students, or individualized for specific students, and allow administrators to see everything a student looks at online. 

GoGuardian claims that they de-identify data before sharing it with third parties or other entities. But this data can easily be traced back to an individual. This means advertisers could target students based on their internet usage, something explicitly prohibited by federal law and in the student privacy pledge taken by many EdTech companies. 

GoGuardian Teacher: A 24/7 Lesson in Surveillance

GoGuardian gives teachers a real-time feed of their students’ screens, and allows them to block any websites for individuals or groups. Students have no way of opting out of scenes and do not have to confirm that they know they are being monitored. The only indication is the appearance of an extension in their browser. 

This monitoring can happen whether or not a student is on school grounds. “Scenes” can last for eight hours and can be scheduled in advance to start at any time of the day or night, and if a teacher schedules a scene to start immediately after the next, then they could monitor a student 24/7. During a scene, GoGuardian collects minute by minute records of what is on a student’s screen and what tabs they have open, all of which can be easily viewed in a timeline.

GoGuardian takes no responsibility for these potential abuses of their technology, instead putting the onus on school administrators to anticipate abuse and put systems in place to prevent them. In the meantime GoGuardian is still accessing and collecting the data. 

GoGuardian Beacon: Replacing Social Workers with Big Brother

GoGuardian’s “Beacon” tool supposedly uses machine learning and AI to monitor student behavior for flagged key terms, track their history, and provide analysis on their likelihood to commit harmful acts to themselves or others. GoGuardian claims it can detect students who are at risk and “identify students’ online behaviors that could be indicative of suicide or self-harm.” Instead of spending money on an investment in social workers and counselors, people who are trained to detect this same behavior, GoGuardian claims that schools can rely on its tools to do it with algorithms.

GoGuardian touts anecdotal evidence of the system working, but from our research, the flagging inside of Beacon may not be much more accurate than its other flagging features. And while schools can determine to whom Beacon sends alerts, but if those staffers are not trained in mental health, they may not be able to determine whether the alert is accurate.This could lead to inappropriate interventions by school administrators who erroneously believe a student is in the “active planning” stage of a harmful act. If a student is accused of planning a school shooting when in reality they were researching weapons used during historical events, or planning a suicide when they were not, that student will likely not trust the administration in the future and feel their privacy has been violated. You can learn more about GoGuardian Beacon from this detailed documentary by VICE News.

Protecting Students First

Schools should be safe places for students, but they must also be places where students feel safe exploring ideas. Student monitoring software not only hinders that exploration, but endangers those who are already vulnerable. We know it will be an uphill battle to protect students from surveillance software. Still, we hope this research will help people in positions of authority, such as government officials and school administrators, as well as parents and students, to push for the companies that make this software to improve, or to abandon their use entirely.

TAKE the red flag machine quiz

Learn more about our findings in our detailed report.