Dear Liberty Activist,

Click HERE to urge Congress to protect free speech and end consideration of KOSA this year!

It’s another lame duck session of Congress following an election, and naturally, that means outgoing members who will no longer serve another term have big plans about what should be passed before President Joe Biden leaves office. 

In 2018, after Republicans were defeated in the midterms, one of the first items for consideration was passing legislation to form a new obscure agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), ostensibly to secure dams, refineries and other infrastructure against cyberattacks, but whose true aim lay in coercing social media companies to censor the accounts and content of regular Americans for expressing their opinions.

Now, a similar danger has emerged with legislation, the so-called Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). As currently written, the bill allows the Federal Trade Commission to regulate and states to sue websites over the content on their platforms, posing clear First Amendment concerns, in order to restrict what children might see on the internet. It proposes age verification, effectively and ultimately requiring government identification in order to access anything on the web.

Fortunately, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is putting the brakes on and pushing the legislation into 2025, when a Republican Congress with President Donald Trump will have a better opportunity to consider its implications. Speaking with reporters on Dec. 10, Johnson warned, “There's still some concern about the free speech components of that, and whether it might lead to further censorship by the government of valid, you know, conservative voices…”

And so, he’s just going to wait until next year: “We are very optimistic that it’s not done this year, that we can do that early next year with our Republican majorities…”

But again, the bill, despite being rewritten numerous times now, still puts the FTC in charge of regulating any app or website kids might have access to — which is all of them — and then giving every state Attorney General the power to bring civil actions against websites over content, a clear contradiction of Johnson’s admonition. 

You know what to do! Let’s get on Voter Voice and urge Congress to reject KOSA this year! 

Each of us has seen and perhaps even experienced the result of the federal government coercing social media to deny access to information on issues as broad as Covid, election integrity and Russiagate, and instinctively know that creating a federal government censorship regime can only end badly. Note that the federal government does not require the same identification requirements for voters.

Congress needs to heed Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s reservations about this legislation’s impact on free speech, and instead push the Kids Online Safety Act to the next Congress and the Trump administration to ensure that kids’ online safety is protected as much as possible while the First Amendment’s requirement that Congress shall make no laws abridging free speech is not violated.

Let’s keep fighting!

For Liberty,

Rick Manning
 President 
 Americans for Limited Government
https://www.votervoice.net/AFLG/Campaigns/119491/Respond