For years, protecting kids online has been touted as one of the only issues Republicans and Democrats could agree on. Last year, nearly the entire Senate voted to pass a substantive kids online safety bill in an exceedingly rare show of bipartisanship. Right before the vote to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), then-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) praised the joint effort, saying, “It shows the chamber can work on something important, that no one let partisanship get in the way of passing this important legislation.”
But an event this week in Washington previewed how that conversation may take a different tone under President Donald Trump’s second term – one where anti-porn rules, conservative family values, and a push for parents’ rights take center stage.
The Federal Trade Commission workshop held on Wednesday – billed as “The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families” – was more aggressively partisan than past tech-focused events. Originally announced with the milder tagline “Monopolizing Kids’ Time Online” at the end of the Biden administration, the Trump-era event deprioritized the academics and industry stakeholders found at similar …
