Nashville, TN – Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti led 31 state attorneys general in a letter today to Congressional leadership urging them to pass the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act (“KOSA”), crucial legislation protecting children from online harm, before the end of the year.
The coalition letter emphasized the urgent need to address the growing crisis of youth mental health linked to social media use, with studies showing minors spend more than five hours daily online.
“As the chief legal officers of our states, we’ve seen firsthand how social media companies prioritize profits over our kids’ safety,” said Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. “While our offices individually pursue investigations and lawsuits against platforms like Meta and TikTok, we are glad to support the Senate’s bipartisan effort to empower our federal enforcement partners. KOSA provides additional tools to protect our children’s mental health from the negative effects of social media.”
The attorneys general highlighted several key provisions of KOSA that would enhance online protections for minors:
- Mandatory default safety settings: Requiring platforms to automatically enable their strongest safety protections for minors rather than burying these features behind opt-in screens;
- Addiction prevention: Allowing young users and their parents to disable manipulative design features and algorithmic recommendations that keep children endlessly scrolling;
- Parental empowerment: Providing parents with new tools to identify harmful behaviors and improved capabilities to report dangerous content.
This push for federal legislation comes as many state attorneys general offices launched investigations and lawsuits against major social media platforms like Meta and TikTok for their targeting of underage users.
Tennessee is joined in this letter to Congressional leadership by the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming.
You can view the letter here.
