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Floor Speech

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Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, if good intentions created good laws, there would be no need for congressional debate. I have no doubt that the authors of the bill on the floor genuinely want to protect children, but the bill they have written promises to be Pandora's box of unintended consequences.

The Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA, would impose an unprecedented duty of care on internet platforms to mitigate certain harms associated with mental health, such as anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.

While proponents of the bill claim that the bill is not designed to regulate content, imposing a duty of care on the internet platforms associated with mental health can only lead to one outcome: the stifling of First Amendment-protected speech.

Today's children live in a world far different from the one I grew up in, and I am the first in line to tell kids: Go outside and touch grass. With the internet, though, today's children do have some advantages. They have the world at their fingertips, and that can often be a good thing. Just about any question can be answered through the internet by finding a scholarly article or a how-to video with a simple search. Doctors' and therapists' offices close at night and on weekends, but support groups are available 24 hours a day online, 7 days a week, for people who share similar concerns or who have had the same health problems. People can connect, share information, and help each other more easily than ever before. That is the beauty of technological progress.

But the world can also be an ugly place. Like any other tool, the internet can be misused, and parents must be vigilant. Parents must be vigilant in protecting their kids online. It is perhaps understandable that those who sit in this body might seek a government solution to protect children from any harms that may result from spending too much time on the internet, but before we impose a drastic, first-of-its- kind, legal duty on online platforms, we should ensure that the positive aspects of the internet are preserved. That means we have to ensure that the First Amendment rights are protected and that these platforms are provided with clear rules so they can comply with the law. Unfortunately, this bill fails to do that in almost every respect.

As currently written, this bill is far too vague, and many of its provisions are completely undefined. The bill creates a Board that is empowered to regulate content that might affect mental health. Yet KOSA, the bill, does not explicitly define the term ``mental health disorder.'' Instead, it references the fifth edition of the ``Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders'' or ``the most current successor edition.'' So we are going to regulate items on the internet that might cause anxiety or might affect mental health based on a definition that evolves over time in a book, that we are never going to vote on again. It is going to be decided by whoever writes the DSM sixth, seventh, and eighth versions for mental health.

Written this way, not only would someone looking at the law not know what the definition is, but even more concerning, this definition could change without any input from Congress. When the diagnostic manual changes, the law will then be changed according to what the new definition of ``mental health'' is. The scope of one of the most expansive pieces of Federal tech legislation could drastically change overnight. Congress may not even realize it until after it has already happened. If the diagnostic manual on mental health changes the definition, the law changes, and Congress will have had no input on what the definition of ``mental health'' is.

None of my colleagues would be comfortable with a definition that effectively delegates--or should be comfortable with a definition that effectively delegates Congress's legislative authority to an unaccountable third party.

Second, the bill would impose an unprecedented duty of care on internet platforms to mitigate certain harms. It sounds good. They want to mitigate harms such as anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. But the legislation doesn't define what it considers harmful to minors, and everyone will have a different belief as to what causes harm, much less how online platforms should go about protecting minors from that harm.

The sponsors of the bill will tell you this is not out of a desire to regulate content, but the requirement that platforms mitigate undefined harms to mental health belies the bill's effect to regulate online content. How can you mitigate the effects of things that might cause anxiety, because they all involve content? This bill will be setting up a Board to regulate the content of the internet.

Imposing a duty of care on online platforms to mitigate harms associated with mental health can only lead to one outcome: the stifling of constitutionally protected speech.

For example, if online services use endless scrolling to promote Shakespeare's works or algebra problems or the history of the Roman Empire, would any lawmaker consider that to be harmful? I doubt it, and that is because the website design does not do the harm.

So then you say: We are going to address the design of the website and not the content, but the only way you can mitigate the so-called harm is by mitigating the content. It is content, not design, that this bill will regulate.

Last year, Harvard Medical School's magazine published a story called ``Climate Anxiety; The existential threat posed by climate change is deeply troubling to many young people.'' So this bill is going to regulate anxiety. What makes your kid anxious? Well, climate change makes a lot of kids anxious. Are we going to regulate the discussion of climate change for minors?

This article mentioned that among a cohort of more than 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25, 60 percent of them are described as being very worried about the climate, and nearly half said they have anxiety affecting their daily functioning because they are worried about the climate. Are we going to protect them by censoring and removing content about climate change?

The world's most famous climate activist, Greta Thunberg, famously suffers from climate anxiety. Should platforms have stopped her from seeing things about climate warming or cooling or whatever the conjecture is this year? Should they remove that because it makes Greta Thunberg anxious? She has admitted that, as a teenager, Greta wouldn't eat. She didn't eat for nearly a year. She lost weight. Some say her growth was stunted. Should we remove climate change discussion from teenagers because it creates anxiety? This bill has the potential to do that.

Under this bill, Greta Thunberg would have been considered a minor, and she could have been deprived from engaging in the online debates that made her famous but also made her anxious.

Anxiety and eating disorders are two of the undefined harms that this bill expects internet platforms to prevent and mitigate. Are those sites going to allow discussion and debate about the climate? Are they even going to allow the discussion of a person's story about overcoming an eating disorder? That certainly could make people anxious.

What if you hear the story of someone with anorexia, and it makes you think that you are an anorexic? Instead of getting the moral that it was a bad idea to engage in this sort of psychological problem, it may cause you to be anxious because you now have to address the situation. Could that be regulated? Under this bill, it could.

What will happen is the fear of liability, the fear of lawsuits, the fear of what will happen under the penalties of this bill are going to cause people to censor themselves. Online platforms will be forced or feel themselves forced or coerced to censor themselves.

There is a question: Will pictures of thin models be tolerated lest it result in an eating disorder for the people who see them? There is a discussion of this all over. Now everybody sees, you know, the obese models who are now hired for Sports Illustrated in order to not cause anxiety. Well, if that is done voluntarily by a magazine, by all means, but if we are going to coerce these online platforms and say ``you can't show people who are too thin,'' what is too thin? That is one of the results that could happen from this bill.

What about violent images of war? I think even adults are made anxious by that, but what of kids? Should we restrict images of war? There is a war going on in Gaza, and there are a lot of young people with opinions on that. Should we say, ``Well, young people shouldn't be allowed to see images of Gaza because it might make them anxious''?

Should we silence discussions about gun rights from either side--from the right or the left--because it might cause people anxiety? I would think that if you had been in a school where there was a school shooting, every time you would read about it, it would probably cause you anxiety. Should this be something that parents should try to address? or colleges? psychiatrists? By all means, parents should be involved in what their kids do online, but once the government sets it up, it depends on who is on the Board.

If the Democrats are in power--and they aren't really fond of the Second Amendment--if they are in power, my guess is the people they appoint to the Board will believe that gun ownership or gun use is wrong and causes anxiety and shouldn't be on children's sites. Conversely, when the Republicans are in charge--and we are more for allowing the Constitution to be applied through the Second Amendment to gun ownership--we probably would want to police people telling kids they are not allowed to. It works both ways. There is enough to hate this bill from the right and the left because the government shouldn't be making these blanket decisions.

What of online discussions of sexuality? Would pro-gay or anti-gay discussion cause anxiety in teenagers? I would think it might. This bill would allow the children's online safety to regulate things that cause anxiety. If a discussion of sexuality causes anxiety, it would be eligible under this bill for mitigation.

They didn't want to use ``censorship'' because it sounds bad, but that is what they want to do. They are appointing a committee called the children's online safety council, which will be able to censor things that cause anxiety: climate change, sexuality.

What about pro-life messaging? Should pro-life discussions cause anxiety in teenage mothers considering abortion? I am guessing that whole scenario from either the pro-life or the pro-abortion, you know, perspective is full of anxiety. But are we going to protect the teenage mom who might be offended that a pregnancy center is offering her a way out or is offering her a lifeline to have her child, because maybe somebody else thinks that she should have an abortion? Maybe she decides one way or another, but it is anxiety. That is probably full of more anxiety than most of us can imagine, but are we going to ban teenagers from seeing that?

This is insane. This bill is not well thought out. This bill is Pandora's box for censorship. In truth, this bill opens the door to nearly limitless content regulation as people can and will argue that most any piece of content could contribute to some form of mental health disorder.

In addition, financial concerns may cause online forums to eliminate all anxiety-inducing content for all users, regardless of age, if the expense for policing teenagers is prohibitive. So think about it. If we make this onerous process that adds a great deal of cost to the people developing the websites and they have to be liable and the State attorneys general can sue them, which this bill allows, maybe they say, ``Gosh, is it worth my while having any discussion of anxiety-producing content?'' which basically means things that are controversial. ``Maybe we should stay away from that.'' Maybe there will be a self-policing effect to this bill where people are going to say, ``I am not going to do it for my adult users because I don't want to be sued.''

The bill gives the unlimited right and cause of action for every State attorney general. Some of them are on the far left, some of them are on the far right, and you can imagine each of them has their own pet cause to want to sue to say: You should take this content down.

This bill does not merely regulate the internet; it threatens to stifle important and diverse discussions that are essential to a free society. And who is empowered to help make these decisions? The task is entrusted to a newly established speech police. This bill would create a kids' online safety council--aka speech police--to decide what constitutes harm to minors and what platforms would have to do to address the harm.

So the harms are broadly defined--mental health, anxiety, gambling, alcohol--but then the specifics of how it is going to be regulated are left to this new regulatory body. This is what many on the right have referred to as giving the power to bureaucrats.

There was a famous case called the Chevron case where they said the government should give deference to anything created by government. That is under review now, but this is the same problem. You are giving power to this new group that can censor that is virtually unlimited and ill-defined. These are the types of decisions that should be made by parents and families, not unelected bureaucrats serving as a censorship committee.

Those are not the only deficiencies of this bill. The bill seeks to protect minors from beer and gambling ads on certain online platforms-- not everywhere, just in some places. So we are going to put this duty on some platforms that your kid can't watch gambling ads and can't watch beer ads, but on other platforms, we won't. So there will be a differential to financial cost. Some places won't have to pay anything, and other places will have to pay an amount to figure out how to set up a website that doesn't let kids watch golf with gambling commercials.

The bill seeks to protect kids from beer and gambling ads on certain online platforms, such as Facebook or Hulu. But if those same minors turn their phone off and turn their TV on, they can jolly well watch as much PGA with the announcer saying: FanDuel says gamble on Bryson DeChambeau this week or Rory McIlroy.

This is a bizarre bill. We are going to make it illegal to talk about certain things online or to advertise online for gambling or beer, but your kid can simply turn the TV on and watch PGA, which is full of ads.

You can have a variety of opinions on whether we should have gambling ads on TV, but they are perfectly legal. So we are going to punish certain groups on the internet and still say your kid can just turn the TV on--that is bizarre. It is just completely meaningless and bizarre.

Your kid can watch the Super Bowl with about a thousand beer commercials on it. And I haven't really heard of a lot of people jumping up and down and saying we should ban the Super Bowl or we should say the Super Bowl can't have beer ads. But that is what this says.

So with all the stuff your kid can watch on TV, he is now going to be limited--not on the whole internet, because you can go to PGA.com, and it has got an exemption because it is primarily news on sports. So they carved out all of these exemptions, and then there are going to be certain areas you can't go to on the internet. So this is a punishment bill for certain aspects of the internet, not all of the internet, because there are a lot of exceptions, and not for TV.

This is a crazy notion. Yet you are going to see it pass overwhelmingly today because of the title: Kids Online Safety Act. Who could oppose that?

There are some tragic stories of people who have committed suicide or died because of things that happened on the internet. No one is here to discount that. But it has to be thoughtful, how we fix it.

Is removing all discussion of climate change, abortion, gambling ads, and beer ads going to do anything that would have addressed the life of any of the children who tragically lost their lives? I think not.

This is a hand-fisted bill that will not fix the problem but will be the first big bill to regulate speech online. It doesn't make any sense.

Should we prevent online platforms from showing kids the same content they can and do see on TV? Should sports viewership be effectively relegated to the preinternet age? You can watch golf on TV; you can't watch golf on a streaming service.

Even if it were possible to shield minors from every piece of content that might cause anxiety, depression, or eating disorders, it still is not enough to comply with KOSA--KOSA is the bill--because KOSA requires websites to treat differently individuals that the platform knows or should have known are minors. As you can realize, it is not easy to tell what someone's age is online.

The standard had been that if there were rules for minors, you had to know they were a minor, and you had to know you were broadcasting adult content to a minor. But it is kind of hard to enforce. So they are going to change the standard from ``you knew it was a minor'' to ``you should have known it was a minor.''

This means that the media platforms that earnestly try to comply with the law could be punished because the government thinks it ``should have known'' a user was a minor. This dumbing down of the standard will broaden the fear of this bill, broaden the impact of this bill, and lead to countless lawsuits.

This bill, then, does not just apply to minors. A ``should have known'' standard means that this bill is an internetwide regulation. Every website will have to figure out who and how old they are so they don't get in the way of the speech police or they don't get in the way of being sued by the attorney general from that State.

This is opening pandora's box. It is not going to be just sites that might have kids. It is every website, every streaming service that is now going to have to police themselves at a cost and live in fear of these people coming after them.

Adults and minors alike better get comfortable with providing a form of ID every time they wish to visit a website. This knowledge standard destroys the notion of internet privacy and interactivity.

I raised several questions about this bill today, but no one--not even the sponsors of this bill--can answer these questions honestly because they don't know the answers. They are creating something that is going to create the regulation of the internet.

This is the problem of most of the legislation in Washington. They are not creating the censorship standards. They are creating an autonomous body that will regulate things that cause anxiety. They haven't told us what causes anxiety.

So I have given you examples. They are not in the bill because the bill doesn't tell what this new body is going to regulate. It says things that cause anxiety, things that might involve gambling or beer or eating disorders. It could be any of those things. But they are just going to tell you that we are going to let this body decide.

So the Senate is not going to decide what they are going to censor today. They are going to create a committee today that then will be the censorship committee, and, at a later date, we will decide what they want to censor. This is an insane encroachment on the First Amendment.

The inability to answer these questions is a result of several vague provisions in this bill, and once enacted into law, these questions will not be answered by elected representatives. They will be answered by unelected bureaucrats who are on this council, who will make the decision as to what will be censored.

There are good reasons to think that the courts will strike this bill down. They would have a host of reasons to do so. Vagueness pervades the bill. The most meaningful terms are undefined, making compliance with the bill nearly impossible. Even if we discount the many and obvious First Amendment violations inherent in this bill, the courts will likely find this bill void for vagueness. We can only hope so.

But we should not rely on the courts to save America from this poorly drafted bill. The Senate can reject this bill today and force the sponsors to at least provide greater clarity of the bill.

This bill, KOSA, is a Trojan horse. It purports to protect our children by claiming limitless ability to regulate speech and depriving them of the benefits of the internet, which include engaging with like- minded individuals, expressing themselves freely, as well as participating in debates among others with different opinions.

Government mandates and censorship will not protect children online. The internet may pose new problems, but there is an age-old solution to this issue. Free minds and parental guidance are the best means to protect our children online.

Opposition to this bill is bipartisan, from advocates on the right to the left. A pro-life organization, Students for Life Action, commented on this bill stating:

Once again, a piece of federal legislation with broad powers and vague definitions threatens pro-life speech. . . . those targeted by a weaponized federal government will always include pro-life Americans, defending mothers and their children--born and [unborn].

Students for Life Action concluded their statement by saying:

Already the pro-life generation faces discrimination, deplatforming, and short and long term bans on social media on the whims of others. Students for Life calls for a No vote on [this bill] to prevent viewpoint discrimination from becoming federal policy at the FTC.

So you could say: I don't really care. I am on the other side of that issue. I am a liberal, and I am pro-abortion. I don't care what pro- life students say.

Well, maybe you should care what the ACLU has to say about this. The ACLU brought more than 300 high school students to Capitol Hill to urge Congress to vote no on this bill because, to quote the ACLU, ``it would give the government the power to decide what content is dangerous to young people, enabling censorship and endangering access to important resources, like gender identity support, mental health materials, and reproductive healthcare.''

So here you have it. You have people on one side who are pro-life, like myself, who are worried that pro-life language will be stifled because it might cause anxiety on teenagers. But you have people on the other side, such as the ACLU, who would have--I believe when they refer to ``reproductive healthcare'' they are talking about abortion. They are worried that people in favor of abortion would be stifled as well.

This bill is opposed from the right and the left by anybody who is thoughtful about freedom of speech, about freedom of association, about freedom of discussion of ideas online.

In the next few minutes, I will ask unanimous consent to have an amendment to this bill. What you will notice is, while the supporters of this bill will come forward and say, ``It doesn't do that; it doesn't do that,'' one thing that is for certain is they won't allow amendments to this. So there will be no amendments to this bill.

The reason I am asking for an amendment from the floor is because they have already said privately they will not allow amendments.

One reason they won't allow amendments is, when I read the content of my amendment, people would be aghast that anybody could vote against it. And a vote against it would be deeply damaging for people running for office, Republican or Democrat.

The bill contains too many flaws as is. Even my one amendment wouldn't fix this bill, but at least put people on the record who don't believe that there should be restrictions for limiting religious or social speech.

The Senate should tackle the most glaring problem with this bill: that it will silence political, social, and religious speech.

My amendment seeks to address this concern, shared by many in the pro-life movement, as well as anyone who values the principles of free speech. My amendment merely states that no regulations that will be put forward by this magical and mysterious new censorship police that will be in the future--who we don't know who they are, and we don't know what they will be regulating--but if my amendment were to pass, they will not be allowed to regulate, and it will not apply to political, social, and religious speech. Another name for that would be constitutionally protected speech.

My amendment is intended to address the legitimate concern that the bill threatens free speech online. If the supporters of this legislation really want to leave content alone, they will allow the amendment. So the fact that they will deny me this amendment effectively tells Americans they don't want any dissent, and they acknowledge that this is a bill of censorship.

They don't want anything to mitigate or lessen the ability for the committee to censor you. So they will not allow this amendment. They won't even allow a vote on it because they are afraid to be on record. Really, the sponsors of the bill are here today, and they will rebut my words. I would like them to state publicly for all of us how they would vote on the amendment and why they are blocking the amendment.

If the supporters of this legislation really do want to leave content alone, they will welcome and vote for my amendment to protect political, social, and religious speech.

2073, amendment No. 3022 be set aside, and it be in order for me to call up my amendment No. 3085. I further ask that, at a time to be determined by the majority leader in consultation with the Republican leader, there be 30 minutes of debate, equally divided between the proponents and opponents of my amendment; finally, that following the use or yielding back of that time, the Senate vote on my amendment No. 3085 with no intervening action or debate.

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Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, a few comments on the support the authors of the bill have come forward with.

The discussion is that State attorneys are not empowered when, in actuality, if you read the bill, the State attorneys are empowered. They are specifically referred to in the bill, and they are specifically empowered to sue if and when the Child Online Safety Committee promulgates rules to the FTC. This is specifically given to all these State attorneys, but also the rulemaking authority is given in the bill.

State attorneys general will also be allowed to sue even if no rule is made. This does empower State attorneys general across the Nation to sue over whether or not people are adequately suppressing or censoring speech based on anxiety. So that is a factual dispute we have with the authors.

One of the authors says: We can't trust the online people. We can't trust the people hosting these platforms.

Well, of course you can't. That is why you are supposed to be parents. That is why you are supposed to be involved with your church and community and you are supposed to try to police. Everything is imperfect, but you are supposed to try. It isn't the government.

So he says: We can't trust them.

But, you know what, I have also heard another comment: Trust us; we are from the government. Trust us; we are going to give this Child Online Safety Committee unlimited, unchecked power to regulate anything that causes your teenager to feel anxiety--from climate change to sexuality to who knows what to eating disorders to thin models to gambling on the PGA or any website, or beer commercials. This is Pandora's box, and we need to be aware of what it actually does allow to occur.

The rule of construction, the amendment that is being blocked, is typical. This is a bill to block free speech. So in order to pass a bill to block free speech, you block the free speech on the floor of the Senate and disallow amendments.

Who in America would think it would be wrong to limit this bill and to protect political, social, and religious speech? That is what they are actually saying. They won't allow amendment on it, but they are not for exempting political, social, or religious speech. What does that mean? It means they conclude that the bill will allow regulation of political, social, and religious speech.

Mark my words: We will revisit this issue. The court is either going to strike this thing down or we are going to come back here in a year or two, and people are going to go: Oh, my God. Did anybody read the bill before they passed it?

They have 70 cosponsors because nobody reads the bills. Nobody thinks of the implications of the bill. The bill gives virtually unlimited purview to the Children's Online Safety Committee to determine what causes anxiety.

Everything causes anxiety in teenagers. Every controversial subject could potentially cause anxiety. This is a huge mistake to give this authority to unelected bureaucrats--who we don't know who they are yet or who will appoint them--who will make the decisions over what causes anxiety.

So while these people--I grant them good motives. I grant them wanting to do the best for people. I grant that there are terrible and tragic cases where children have committed suicide or otherwise, but this isn't the answer. The answer isn't to abbreviate or take away the precious rights guaranteed under the First Amendment.

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