This Wednesday, August 5, the Senate Commerce Committee will consider five important bills designed to protect children from growing dangers in the digital world. All Girls Allowed supports every one of them and encourages you to do the same.
Technology has incredible potential to benefit our children. It can help them learn, create, research, solve problems, and explore new ideas.
But we should never sacrifice the safety of our children in the pursuit of technological advancement.
Too many children have already been harmed by technologies that were developed without adequate safeguards for young users. In some cases, protections have been treated as an afterthought, added only after children experienced serious consequences from harmful content, addictive designs, manipulation, exploitation, or dangerous interactions with AI.
THIS must change.
The Senate Commerce Committee is taking an important step this Wednesday by considering five bipartisan child-safety bills that address different—and increasingly urgent—threats facing children online.
Five Bills, Five Critical Areas of Protection
1. Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) - S. 1748
The Kids Online Safety Act would require covered platforms to provide stronger safety and privacy protections for minors, including safer default settings, parental controls, and changes to certain addictive design features.
Children should not have to navigate digital environments designed to maximize their attention and engagement at the expense of their well-being.
Technology companies should have a responsibility to make their products safer for children—not simply more engaging.
2. CHATBOT Act - S. 4407
AI chatbots can be helpful tools, but they can also create serious risks for children, including exposure to inappropriate content, manipulative interactions, and addictive engagement.
The CHATBOT Act would give parents greater control over their children's interactions with AI chatbots, including parental consent and controls over access and use. The legislation also addresses manipulative design features and targeted advertising to children.
Parents—not algorithms—should have the primary authority over how their children interact with powerful AI systems.
3. Youth AI Privacy Act - S. 4199
Children's data deserves special protection.
The Youth AI Privacy Act would establish safeguards for AI systems made available to minors, including requirements related to safe design.
Our children's personal information, conversations, preferences, and behavioral data should not become raw material for companies seeking to maximize engagement or profit.
4. SCREEN Act - S. 737
Children need protection from harmful digital content—including sexually explicit and other inappropriate material.
The SCREEN Act would require certain interactive online services to implement technology-based age-verification measures to determine whether users are minors.
Age verification is an important part of creating safer digital environments. We already recognize that children should not have unrestricted access to harmful substances such as alcohol and tobacco. The digital world should not be treated as a place where children can freely access harmful material simply because it is delivered through a screen.
Of course, age-verification systems must be designed with privacy and security in mind. Protecting children should never require creating unnecessary new risks to their personal information.
5. Children's Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act of 2026 - S. 5171
AI is moving beyond phones and computers and into children's toys.
The Children's Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act would require a study of AI-enabled toys and the development of a joint action plan addressing their marketing and sale.
Parents should be able to trust that a toy marketed to their child is designed with that child's safety in mind.
Together, these bills improve the safety of the digital landscape
Each of these bills addresses a different area of risk.
Our children need protection from:
- AI systems that can manipulate, influence, or expose them to harmful content.
- Digital platforms designed to encourage excessive or addictive engagement.
- Sexual and other harmful material that should not be accessible to minors.
- The collection and misuse of children's personal data.
- Emerging technologies, including AI-enabled toys, that can interact directly with children.
Taken together, these five bills represent meaningful progress toward making digital spaces safer for children.
And this is urgently needed.
We should not wait for another generation of children to be harmed before we decide that safety should have been built into these technologies from the beginning.
Innovation and child safety are not competing goals
We can advance technology while also demanding that the people creating and deploying it take responsibility for protecting children.
Our children should not be the test subjects for an experiment in what happens when powerful technologies are released without adequate safeguards.
Safety cannot be an afterthought. It must be built in from the beginning.
What You Can Do
The Senate Commerce Committee is scheduled to consider these bills on Wednesday, August 5.
📣 Contact Senators on the Commerce Committee
Especially Senators in your state to let them know you support these five child-safety bills and urge them to advance them. You can use this simple message:
Please support and advance S. 1748, S. 4407, S. 4199, S. 737, and S. 5171 to strengthen protections for children in the digital world.
Please make your voice heard before Wednesday August 5th at 10am eastern.
👀 Watch the Senate Commerce Committee Markup
You can also watch the committee's proceedings and see these bills considered directly.
Wednesday, August 5 at 10:00 a.m. ET
Follow the Senate Commerce Committee's official markup page here for the livestream and proceeding information.
Our Children Deserve Better
The digital world is now a central part of childhood. We must protect our young people where they live, learn, play, communicate, and increasingly interact with artificial intelligence.
Children deserve technology designed with their safety in mind.
Parents deserve meaningful tools to protect their children.
And technology companies should be held accountable for the products they put in children's hands.
This Wednesday, the Senate has an opportunity to take an important step forward.
Let's urge our Senators to protect our children—and to make child safety a fundamental requirement of the digital future.
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