After January 6, Big Tech companies banned Donald Trump from every major platform simultaneously – no trial, no appeal, no warning.
Now the same Congress that cheered those bans just voted to build the infrastructure that makes the next one permanent.
Hidden inside a child safety bill moving toward the House floor is a surveillance scheme that has nothing to do with protecting children.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone announced a bipartisan deal on the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act – a package bundling together more than a dozen individual bills, including the Kids Online Safety Act, COPPA 2.0, the SAFE Bots Act, and the No Fentanyl on Social Media Act.
The child safety provisions are real. Platforms would be required to default safety settings to maximum for minors, restrict addictive design features, give parents oversight tools, and block AI chatbots from impersonating doctors or therapists to children.
The KIDS Act defines "knows" a user is a minor as "knows or should have known." That legal standard – embedded across multiple sections covering social media platforms, AI chatbots, and gaming services – creates legal liability for any platform that fails to identify underage users.
The bill simultaneously states it does not require age verification.
A platform cannot be held legally responsible for failing to know a user's age while being told it doesn't have to check. The only rational compliance response is to verify everyone – every account, every login, every American who wants to go online.
Identity-based age verification – the method platforms would use to satisfy this standard – means submitting a government-issued ID, a date of birth, or biometric data to a third-party vendor. That vendor stores it. That vendor can be hacked, subpoenaed, acquired, or pressured by a federal agency with a national security letter.
Texas already ran this experiment. The state built age verification infrastructure for online platforms, and this month hackers pulled the driver's license and passport numbers of more than 3 million people from a Texas government system.
The records came from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department – people who went fishing, not people who did anything online.
Driver's license and passport numbers do not expire. Those 3 million Texans cannot reset them like a password.
Discord learned the same lesson in October 2025 when attackers accessed a third-party vendor and exposed the government ID images of users who had uploaded them for age verification. Discord's own support pages had stated it did not permanently store identity documents. Seventy thousand government IDs leaked anyway.
Each age check creates another database, and each database is a breach waiting to happen. The KIDS Act scales that risk to every American adult who uses a covered platform.
Australia banned users under 16 from social media entirely in 2024. Within weeks, teenagers were routing around the restrictions with VPNs at scale.
The platforms did what they were told. The surveillance infrastructure collected data on millions of adults and stopped exactly zero determined minors.
Congress watched that experiment fail in real time. The KIDS Act advances anyway – because the database was never the side effect. It was the point.
They Already Tried to Shut Conservatives Off the Internet Once
The bill's authors included language promising compliance requirements will not compromise strong encryption. Privacy advocates have documented for years why that reassurance is hollow – building systems that identify categories of users drives platforms toward weakening encryption, regardless of what the statute says.
A national database of verified internet users is an operational threat to free speech, not a theoretical one. After January 6, 2021, Facebook and Twitter suspended Trump within days. YouTube followed. Apple and Google pulled Parler from their app stores entirely. Payment processors cut off conservative organizations.
All of it happened without a government order – and without a verified identity database linking every American's legal name to their online accounts.
The KIDS Act creates that database. The question of who controls it, and what they do with it, is not answered anywhere in the bill's text.
What Happens When the KIDS Act Reaches the Senate
The KIDS Act passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee in March on a 28 to 24 party-line vote with zero Democratic support. This weeks bipartisan deal adds Democratic votes for a floor push, but senators who wrote the underlying legislation have already declared the House version dead on arrival.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn is separately negotiating with the White House on a deal that would include a legally enforceable duty of care – requiring platforms to exercise reasonable care in designing products to prevent documented harms to minors. That provision was stripped from the House bill entirely.
The Senate Commerce Committee is expected to mark up its own version in mid-July.
Congress has promised child safety legislation since the original Children's Online Privacy Protection Act passed in 1998.
The bill that cleared committee shields platforms from lawsuits, hands tech companies a federal mandate to collect identity documents from every adult online, and was already proven ineffective by the country that tried it first.
The database is coming. The only question left is who gets to use it.
Sources:
- Punchbowl News, "House strikes bipartisan KOSA deal," June 22, 2026.
- Washington Times, "House committee leaders strike elusive bipartisan deal on kids' online safety legislation," June 22, 2026.
- Reclaim the Net, "Texas Just Leaked 3 Million Driver's Licenses and Passports," June 2026.
- Reclaim the Net, "Texas Sues Discord, Seeks Mandatory Age Verification," May 2026.
- House Energy and Commerce Committee, "Chairman Guthrie and Ranking Member Pallone Announce Agreement on Bipartisan Kids' Safety Package," June 22, 2026.
- TechTimes, "House KIDS Act Deal Drops KOSA Duty of Care, Adds Age Verification for All Users," June 23, 2026.
- IAPP, "US Energy and Commerce Committee advances KIDS Act to full House vote," March 6, 2026.
