The Senate Commerce Committee unanimously advanced the Kids Online Safety Act on Aug. 5, 2026, a day after a Bloomberg investigation revealed TikTok withheld a safety feature from millions of users, including a teenage boy who later died by suicide.
“The voices of survivor parents and advocates supporting KOSA have clearly been heard by the Senate Commerce Committee,” said Haley McNamara, Executive Director and Chief Strategy Officer of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE).
“Now the full Senate must pass KOSA with its strong ‘Duty of Care’ provision that will compel tech platforms to design their platforms with children in mind and hold them accountable for online harms,” McNamara continued. “The Senate previously passed KOSA 91-3, and there’s no reason this shouldn’t pass again.”
For Movieguide® readers who’ve spent years teaching their kids to think critically about what shows up on a screen, this fight feels personal. NCOSE, founded in 1962, has become one of the loudest voices insisting tech giants treat children’s safety as a design requirement rather than an afterthought, and Movieguide® has followed that fight closely, previously reporting on NCOSE’s objections to a weaker, House-passed alternative called the KIDS Act.
The Bloomberg investigation that prompted McNamara’s statement found TikTok deliberately disabled protective content filters for roughly 15 million American users as part of a yearlong internal experiment measuring engagement. Chase Nasca, a 16-year-old from Long Island, sat in that unprotected group; after watching more than 7,500 videos over two weeks, nearly one in ten of them normalizing self-harm, he died by suicide in February 2022.
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TikTok buried its own internal report on the incident for over a year, and CEO Shou Chew told Congress in May 2023 that the platform didn’t cause suicides, despite his own company’s findings suggesting otherwise.
Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), KOSA’s lead sponsors, called Wednesday’s vote “a major victory for the courageous families who refused to give up.” The two lawmakers added that the Senate has “repeatedly shown” bipartisan support for a bill that creates a genuine duty of care against “addictive algorithms and harmful product design.”
The committee advanced three companion bills alongside KOSA: the Youth AI Privacy Act, the Children’s Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act and the CHATBOT Act, which targets exploitative AI chatbots aimed at kids.
“We commend the Committee for also passing the CHATBOT Act and several other AI chatbot bills,” McNamara said. “It’s crucial that children are protected from AI exploitation and other harms that chatbots have delivered to them.”
Movieguide® has also asked whether TikTok’s algorithm is truly engineered to exploit vulnerable users or simply amplifies ordinary engagement patterns better than anyone else’s, a question that stays murky given how little any platform discloses about its own recommendation engine. Wednesday’s vote doesn’t settle that debate, but it does put real legislative weight behind the idea that platforms should answer for the harm either way.
KOSA now heads to the full Senate carrying 76 cosponsors, a rare bit of bipartisan agreement in an otherwise gridlocked Congress. Whether that support produces a law with real teeth, or another watered-down compromise like the House’s KIDS Act, will say a lot about whether Washington actually means to protect children online or just wants credit for trying.
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