Exactly one week ago, the House Energy and Commerce Committee struck a bipartisan deal on the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, a package of online safety bills that contains the much-maligned and controversial Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), among thirteen other bills. This compromise may be well-intended, but legislators can find no sufficiently suitable compromise—one that actually solves the problem—because they have misdiagnosed the issue and are working backwards from a faulty premise.
Policymakers assume a strong relationship between online activity and mental health issues—but the research does not bear that assumption. As recent research from the American Consumer Institute makes clear, the findings across the literature of social media and mental health are weak, mixed, and poorly generalizable. The evidence is so weak that even the positive effects are small and weak.
Any correlation below 0.3 is considered weak, and the strongest studies referenced by scholars have associations of 0.20. Longitudinal studies are inconclusive due to methodological problems, such as self-reporting data and inconsistent time intervals. Experimental studies, by far the strongest method, have focused on adults, not teens, while also showing only small effects and failing to check for pre-existing mental health conditions among their samples. Together, all of the types of studies create an evidentiary landscape that would strike any academic as uncertain and incomplete—but that has not stopped Congress.
These weaknesses are particularly problematic for bills like the KIDS Act, which would restrict internet usage of kids and adults alike: limit messaging tools; crack down on access to nebulously defined design features; and restrict content recommendations, all under the implicit premise that these are harmful for kids.
Fortunately, the House bill gets one important feature right: it excludes the duty of care provision, which would have planted a seed of litigation against companies if they couldn’t fulfill certain obligations that the law defined. That had direct effects on consumers, as the threat of litigation creates broad liability claims that would have made companies act cautiously, ultimately leading to restrictions and limitations on platform design features and consumer content.
The bill also raises First Amendment concerns, increases the odds of data breaches, and overall limits how the free and open internet operates. Those tradeoffs would be easier to justify had the evidence shown these harms were widespread. They do not. Yet, policymakers have continued to push the idea, nonetheless.
Sadly, for all of its supposed tradeoffs, the KIDS Act will not keep kids safe online.
That is because technology use generally and social media use specifically is far less predictive of negative mental health outcomes than family environment, socioec-onomic status, and even lack of sleep. The KIDS Act therefore leaves consumers with few positive and most of the downsides.
Congress’s latest bipartisan deal should be assessed based on the evidence that supports the policy, not on the intentions of policymakers, however noble they may be. Good intentions do not excuse bad policy.
Pablo Garcia Quint is a technology policy analyst with the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. Follow Pablo on X @gq_pablo