The latest congressional hearing on “protecting children online” opened as you would expect: the same characters, the same script, a few new buzzwords, and a familiar moral panic to which the answer is mass surveillance and censorship.
The Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade had convened to discuss a set of draft bills packaged as the “Kids Online Safety Package.” The name alone sounded like a software update against civil liberties.
The hearing was called “Legislative Solutions to Protect Children and Teens Online.” Everyone on the dais seemed eager to prove they were on the side of the kids, which meant, as usual, promising to make the internet less free for everyone else.
Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), who chaired the hearing, kicked things off by assuring everyone that the proposed bills were “mindful of the Constitution’s protections for free speech.”
He then reminded the audience that “laws with good intentions have been struck down for violating the First Amendment” and added, with all the solemnity of a man about to make that same mistake again, that “a law that gets struck down in court does not protect a child.”
They know these bills are legally risky, but they’re going to do it anyway.
Bilirakis’s point was echoed later by House Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY), who claimed the bills had been “curated to withstand constitutional challenges.” That word, curated, was doing a lot of work.
Guthrie went on to insist that “age verification is needed…even before logging in” to trigger privacy protections under COPPA 2.0.
The irony of requiring people to surrender their private information in order to be protected from privacy violations was lost in the shuffle.
Guthrie praised the TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed by President Trump in May, as a model of legislative virtue, despite the fact that digital rights groups have flagged it for censorship risks and missing safeguards. “Countless other harms exist,” Guthrie warned, “and it is our responsibility to find a solution.”
The phrase “find a solution” is Capitol Hill’s version of the blue screen of death: a signal that the machine has crashed, but no one wants to admit it.
The only people complaining were Democrats, and not because the bills threatened privacy or free expression. Their gripe was that the bills didn’t go far enough.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) called the current proposals “really frustrating,” adding that “the legislation that has been offered by the Republicans does not do the job” and “we have a long, long way to go to protect our children.”
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) joined in, labeling the Republican-backed versions of COPPA and KOSA “weak,” “ineffectual,” and “a slap in the face to the parents, the experts, and the advocates.”
She called for Congress to strengthen the bills, which in practice means adding even more enforcement power to age verification and content moderation regimes.
Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA) said the proposals had been “gutted and co-opted by Big Tech.” That line played well for cameras, but it rang hollow coming from a party that spent years demanding that tech companies police speech harder and faster.
It was a bipartisan competition to see who could sound more outraged about the dangers of screens.
The private sector witnesses tried to slow the rush toward universal ID checks.
Paul Lekas of the Software & Information Industry Association gently reminded lawmakers that while the Supreme Court had upheld some forms of age verification for “unprotected sexually explicit material,” broader mandates could be unconstitutional.
He offered “age estimation” as a compromise, a technology that guesses your age from data like facial features or online behavior, a system that sounds like surveillance with a smile.
Kate Ruane from the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) took a sharper tone. She warned that the bills carried “significant privacy risks” and lacked “sufficient guardrails to protect and require security practices within the age assurance requirements.”
In other words, the proposals could create a sprawling, insecure ID infrastructure in the name of keeping kids safe.
Still, CDT, an organization that has previously supported crackdowns on “disinformation,” wasn’t opposed to the idea of more regulation. They just wanted it done right. Every side at this hearing had a version of “we agree with censorship, but only ours.”
Marc Berkman, CEO of the Organization for Social Media Safety, did his part for the cause, declaring that “we need to find consensus and pass meaningful social media safety legislation this year to protect our children.”
The phrase “meaningful legislation” is another Beltway placeholder, something you say when the substance doesn’t hold up but the sentiment polls well.
Joel Thayer of the Digital Progress Institute endorsed the whole package, particularly the App Store Accountability Act, the SCREEN Act, and KOSA. His testimony provided cover for lawmakers eager to claim bipartisanship while ignoring the reality that the bills collectively amount to a new system of mandatory content filters and identity checks.
Then came Rep. Neal Dunn (R-FL), who pitched his Safe Messaging for Kids Act like a public service announcement from 1999.
Dunn warned that ephemeral messages, the kind that disappear after you send them, were a “dangerous feature.”
His bill would ban social media platforms from offering them to “any user they know is a minor under 17.”
That standard all but forces companies to collect proof of age from everyone or treat all users like minors.
The hearing was supposedly about protecting children, but every fix circled back to tagging and tracking everyone.
Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-CA) wrapped up the policy side with a tidy summary: age verification, he said, is “key to the protections we’re trying to provide here.”
His preferred version would happen at the operating system level, meaning your phone, computer, or console would verify your age for everything else.
By the end, it was hard to tell whether lawmakers believed their own talking points or were simply keeping up with the moral fashion of the day. The hearing wasn’t about solving anything; it was about signaling concern. Each side spoke about protecting children while ignoring the real tension between privacy, speech, and power.
As always, the session ended without progress and without reflection on what happens when the government starts requiring people to prove who they are to speak, read, or log in.
