John,

HUGE news — after months and months of work on Capitol Hill to elevate the conversation among policymakers, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) (S. 1409) is seeing a surge of momentum in the Senate.

It was announced earlier today that there are now 62 cosponsors on KOSA — a huge jump of 15 additional senators from both sides of the aisle — and that new changes were made to further strengthen the bill. This is amazing progress.

What’s also amazing is that you — the Issue One community — played a part in making it happen. We’ve sent emails about this issue, alerting folks to contact their senators, and you’ve continued to show up. You made your voice heard and the letters sent helped move the needle. In short, this progress wouldn’t have happened without the help of this community.

After what we heard the other week during the latest Big Tech CEO hearing, it’s clear that it’s time to put kids before profits and hold social media companies accountable for the harms posed to children. We need guardrails put in place to protect kids online. KOSA is a bipartisan bill that would help do that.

KOSA would make tech companies design safer platforms for children to ensure a healthy relationship between social media and our communities. It would place the health and well-being of children before Big Tech profits, establish responsible safeguards by default, and disable addictive features on sites. Here at Issue One, we see these changes as crucial to ensuring a safer and healthier future for our democracy.

There’s still more work to do as we push to pass KOSA, but we wanted to share this important update with the Issue One community and thank you for helping us beat the drum on this critical issue.

With Gratitude,
The Issue One Team

P.S. Read the statement we released in response to the news!