By Jason Kelley

For the past two years, Congress has been trying to revise the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to address criticisms from EFF, human and digital rights organizations, LGBTQ groups, and others, that the core provisions of the bill will censor the internet for everyone and harm young people. All of those changes fail to solve KOSA's inherent censorship problem: As long as the "duty of care" remains in the bill, it will still force platforms to censor perfectly legal content. (You can read our analyses here and here.)

Despite never addressing this central problem, some members of Congress are convinced that a new change will avoid censoring the internet: KOSA's liability is now theoretically triggered only for content that is recommended to users under 18, rather than content that they specifically search for. But that's still censorship—and it fundamentally misunderstands how search works online.