US Senate FINALLY Passes Online Protection Laws For Children

After years of doing nothing, the US Senate has finally passed a pair of bills that would strengthen protections for minor on social media websites, protecting them from harmful content and hopefully preventing their data from being stolen. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Order a copy of Mike Papantonio's new book at

Subscribe to stay connected to our stories

Support us by becoming a member on YouTube

Or Support us on Patreon

Buy Ring of Fire merch

Find us on social media!

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

After years of doing nothing, the US Senate has finally passed a pair of bills that would strengthen protections from minors on social media websites, protecting them from harmful content and hopefully preventing their data from being stolen. Their parents' data included, by the way. Right? Go ahead and pick that up if you would.

So we've got these two bills that passed the Senate last week. You have KOSA and COPPA 2.0. and basically what they do in these two separate bills, the first one is basically protecting from the harmful content, which of course, we have seen time and time again. We've talked about these studies. These children are seeing images of eating disorders, almost glamorizing this self emulation type thing. We see coercing children to harm themselves or to harm others. And finally, the Senate says, well, wait a minute. That's pretty bad. We gotta put a stop to that. The second one, the COPPA 2.0 is the one that works even further to protect the data and of course, it puts it on the social media companies, this is now your responsibility, and if you do not comply, there are going to be legal consequences. But, you know, we know how that goes.

Passes 91 to 3. That's incredible. In the Senate passes 91 to 3. Wyden, obviously, Wyden is bought and owned by the industry. The tech industry. He's in Oregon. I mean, he has huge connections. You got Paul, Paul who's always talking about the risk of censorship. He voted against it. Mike Lee from Utah. I don't know where he comes up. I couldn't figure out where he lines up in it, probably on a censorship issue. But the truth is, this has been kicking around, another thing that's been kicking around, and the argument is, we're they're worried about the mental health of these kids. Right. They're saying that we're really affecting the mental health. But when you stand back and look at what they're saying, I can't make a distinction here. Maybe you can help me with it. What's the distinction between Facebook and Meta and everybody else that's doing the same thing? I mean, all this, they're doing exactly the same thing. They're taking information and selling it to the public.

Right. Well, and this legislation does cover any kind of social media outlet. And I think the kind of overall take on what they're doing here is they're bringing it the same way they do with the ratings on television shows, the ratings that they do on movies, on music, video games. And it just says, okay, this is another avenue where children are seeking entertainment. So we need to make sure, because we regulate everything else too this way, we have to do it this way. So it's, this one in particular is not targeted towards any specific company. It's the broad brush.

My point is this, my point is the reason it's called the TikTok legislation. I mean, it was all, it all centered around TikTok.

Of course.

Because they're Chinese. And only point I was making, there's no difference. You see, this has been going on with Meta. It's been going on with Instagram, Facebook, you name it. They've been doing this for years, but now they found this way to say, look, this is different. This is Chinese. And so we really have to do something about it. Does it do anything to 230 at all? Does it loosen the strain of 230?

It kind of impacts it. It doesn't specifically impact it, but you can kind of make the leap that it could impact 230.

I promise you it will.

I hope it does.

I do too. As a lawyer, I'm looking at it and saying, it's mighty close to saying, no, you don't have immunity when you do this and there's children that commit suicide, children that are bullied, and it ends up with a murder. Children who have addiction issues, whatever it may be, you're moving mighty close to the 230 protection that the industry's had.