Published On: November 21, 2024Categories: Press Release

HELENA – Attorney General Austin Knudsen joined a coalition of 30 attorneys general in urging Congressional leadership to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), before the end of the year. The legislation will establish better safeguards for minors online and aid state-level efforts Montana has already taken to protect children from the threats they face on social media.

“Many social media platforms target minors, resulting in a national youth mental health catastrophe. These platforms make their products addictive to minor users, and then profit from selling minor user data to advertisers. These platforms fail to disclose the addicting nature of their products, nor the harms associated with increased social media use. Instead, minor users receive endless tailored and toxic content,” the attorneys general wrote. “This is why many of our Offices commenced investigations and lawsuits against Meta and TikTok for harming minors. We encourage Congress to act to aid our state-level efforts.”

The attorneys general highlighted several key provisions of KOSA that would enhance online protections for minors:

  • Mandatory default safety settings: Requiring platforms to automatically enable their strongest safety protections for minors rather than burying these features behind opt-in screens;
  • Addiction prevention: Allowing young users and their parents to disable manipulative design features and algorithmic recommendations that keep children endlessly scrolling;
  • Parental empowerment: Providing parents with new tools to identify harmful behaviors and improved capabilities to report dangerous content.

The letter encourages Congress to act to aid state-level efforts against these social media platforms and actions they take that could harm children. If the act is passed, state attorneys general could take civil actions to protect their constituents.

“This is a great improvement over the earlier version that did not provide for state enforcement. The states have been consistently acting to vigorously protect kids from online dangers using their existing consumer protection authority, and we look forward to further collaboration. These changes will help create a safer online environment that reduces harm to kids,” the attorneys general wrote.

For years, Attorney General Knudsen has been taking steps to keep children safe online and get parents the information they need to help parents protect their children from being force-fed harmful content online. Most recently, he filed a lawsuit against TikTok for sharing addictive and harmful content with children and teens. In December of 2023, he filed a lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, alleging that Instagram was intentionally designed to be addictive, particularly to minors, and that this addiction harms Montana minors by substantially affecting their mental health.

Click here to read the letter.