The vote landed on a Monday night. 267 to 117. Forty-seven members just sat on their hands, abstaining entirely. The legislation is moving, sure, but don’t think for a second that this thing is settled. Not even close.
The bill, called the KIDS Act for short, crawled out of the House Energy and Commerce committee as some sort of bipartisan compromise. POLITICO says so, and usually that’s enough to buy you a beer in DC. What does it actually do? It limits how minors can use disappearing messages. It forces AI chatbots to admit they aren’t human. And yes. It demands age verification for porn sites.
Age verification isn’t a formality. You’re looking at submitting a government ID. Maybe a facial scan.
It packages parts from fourteen different digital safety bills, including the controversial KOSA. But it strips out the “duty of care.”
That’s the big fight right now. The Senate wanted platforms to actively prevent harm related to self-harm, eating disorders and drugs. This House version? It doesn’t. Senator Maria Cantwell thinks that’s a mistake. Senator Marsha Blackburn thinks the same thing, despite having helped write the original bill. Why drop it? Nobody seems to know for sure, except maybe the lawyers drafting the language.
KOSA has always been radioactive. Back in 2023, Sen. Blackburn suggested that shielding kids from “transgender influence” was a priority. That comment hung in the air, making LGBTQ advocates nervous that the bill might silently target queer content. The Electronic Frontier Foundation never liked it anyway. They called the age verification stuff a “giant censorship machine” that also happens to be terrible for privacy. Jason Kelley said that back in the day. He probably still means it.
Then you have the state attorneys general. In May 2026 (which feels recent but isn’t), a group of 45 of them warned that this federal package might override state laws that are actually stronger. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Corretz cared about this. She voted against the bill. The concern “weighed heavily” on her. A nice way of saying she hated it.
Age verification is broken. Here’s the data.
We can ignore the politics for a second and look at the tech. Age verification, the way the KIDS Act wants to do it, simply does not work. The data from 2025 makes it brutally clear.
Researchers looked at Google Trends in states that already had these laws. What happened to Pornhub traffic? It dropped 51 percent. Great. Right? No. People didn’t stop looking at porn. They just moved.
Searches for XVideos—which ignores these rules—spiked by 48.1 percent. VPN usage climbed 23.6 percent as users tried to mask their locations. Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, told Mashable that traffic in Louisiana fell 80 percent after verification rules kicked in. They had a simple explanation for it: “These people did not stop looking at porn.” They just went somewhere darker. Sites that don’t verify, don’t moderate and definitely don’t care if you are a child.
The researchers admitted they couldn’t track minor-specific behavior. They couldn’t tell if kids were migrating too. But another study in late 2025 found similar patterns. The walls leak.
So where does this go?
The House says yes. The Senate hasn’t said anything yet. With the August recess eating up the calendar, the window is closing fast.
Will the KIDS Act survive in the Senate? Probably not in its current shape. The missing “duty of care” and the obvious failure of age verification are huge potholes. Senators are already looking at them. The bill might get chopped up, delayed, or killed by the friction between how the House wanted safety and how the Senate actually wants to define it.
The legislation advances. The internet keeps shifting. And somewhere in between, a chatbot is still lying to you about being human.
