Dec. 12, 2024, 6:01 p.m.
In a last-ditch-attempt to get the Kids Online Safety Act passed during the lame-duck session, Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal turned to a new power broker in national politics: Elon Musk.
The two senators approached Musk and his associate Linda Yaccarino—the CEO of Musk-owned X, formerly known as Twitter—to make some edits to the bill in the hopes of winning over House GOP leadership, who have refused to take up the bill after it overwhelmingly passed the Senate.
“Led by X, the new changes made to the Kids Online Safety Act strengthen the bill while safeguarding free speech online and ensuring it is not used to stifle expression,” Blackburn and Blumenthal said in a press release. “We thank Elon and Linda for their bold leadership and commitment to protecting children online and for helping us get this bill across the finish line this Congress. We appreciate that this endorsement and revised text reflects their publicly stated goal of furthering free speech without fear of censorship.”
X had already endorsed KOSA, but the new language seemed to inject new momentum into the effort, with Donald Trump Jr., Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Musk himself all calling on the House to pass the new version of the bill.
But not even a nudge by Musk turned out to be enough for now. House Speaker Mike Johnson indicated Tuesday that KOSA will have to wait until the next session of Congress.
“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 conservative voices, for example,” Johnson said. “I think all of us, 100 percent of us, support the principle behind it, but you've got to get this one right, when you’re dealing with the regulation of free speech.”
Johnson added that he was confident a Republican majority in both chambers can get a version of the bill passed next year.
Regardless of the bill’s fate, some members of Congress and government watchdogs worry that other lawmakers looking to win the backing of the White House and GOP leaders for certain priorities or legislation might try to go around the traditional levers of Congress and directly curry favor with Musk, Trump’s self-dubbed “first buddy.”
“Marsha Blackburn was seeing that the bill was languishing in the House, and she made a kind of a 'Hail Mary' pass to Elon to see if that display would get it over the finish line,” said Adam Kovacevich, the founder and CEO of the tech-backed Chamber of Progress, which opposes KOSA.
Despite passing the Senate 91-3 in July, KOSA has long been the target of critics on both sides of the aisle.
The bill requires online platforms that will likely be visited by children to protect against a long list of potential harms, including addictive behavior, mental health disorders that may be linked to online use, online bullying, and sexual predation.
Some Democrats and left-leaning think tanks have warned that the “duty of care” section of the bill would allow radical Republican state attorney generals or an equally conservative Federal Trade Commission to block access to pro-LGBTQ online content.
The concerns from the Right are linked to the ongoing theory that social media sites intentionally seek to censor conservative speech. Multiple studies into that theory have not found evidence of systemic online censorship against conservatives.
The updated version of the bill created with the input of Musk and X focuses on the conservative complaints. It adds new language to the duty-of-care section that would block anyone in the government from using the bill to censor speech based on viewpoint.
The changes have done little to convince outside groups that opposed the bill to change their minds.
“In substance, it's not particularly different than the previous version that passed the Senate,” said Josh Withrow, a resident fellow on technology and innovation at the libertarian-leaning R Street Institute. “As long as something like this duty of care is present in the bill that imposes liability for such vague problems as … mental distress … it's pretty difficult to imagine how you could write that in a way that wouldn't impact content and that wouldn't therefore start running into First Amendment problems.”
But for many, the most significant change is how overtly Musk and X were centered in the press release and tied to the legislation. Beyond the initial press release, both Blumenthal and Blackburn have repeatedly evoked Musk’s name to try and build support for KOSA.
“Our bill, really, should appeal to advocates of free expression and the First Amendment, such as it has to Elon Musk, who is the foremost champion of free speech in the tech industry,” Blumenthal said on CNBC Thursday. Musk has repeatedly sued and removed users, including journalists and organizations, from X seemingly in attempts to silence critics.
Corporate lobbying is not new, but the overt praise of an individual in the hopes that his force of personality will help get a bill across the finish line is, said Jeff Hauser, founder and executive director of the government watchdog Revolving Door Project.
“Referencing corporate support is not in and of itself innovative, but relying so heavily on the specific imprimatur of a specific individual? That strikes me as unique,” Hauser said. “I think it's unprecedented, and I don't think it's the last time we're going to hear about that.”
Hauser said he expects Musk to attempt to influence the debate around other spaces important to him and his businesses: artificial intelligence, electric-vehicle subsidies, and NASA.
During the 2024 election cycle, Musk and organizations he controls spent more than $277 million to help return Trump to the White House and ensure GOP majorities in both chambers of Congress, The New York Times reported. In return, Trump has made him the co-lead of the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency tasked with slashing the federal budget.
“Musk's power is probably as great as anyone in at least the last 100 years in politics who is not president or a leader of one of the branches of Congress,” Hauser said. “He is close with Donald Trump. That's obviously a source of power. He is the richest person in the world, and throws money around in sums that couldn't be spent before Citizens United, and he owns Twitter, which is an incredibly influential platform.”
Musk will likely be a major influence on tech policy as long as he remains a close ally to Trump. While Trump has remained loyal to some of his allies over the years, he has often turned against them when they took too much of the spotlight or were no longer viewed as useful.
“Politicians try to use whatever power centers they can find to advance their goals,” Kovacevich said. “Right now, Elon is unquestionably a power center. We don't know whether that will continue.”
