By Caitlin Babcock
On Monday night, the House of Representatives passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act on a bipartisan basis, 267-117. The sweeping children’s safety package combines text from over a dozen other bills. Its provisions, among others, include blocking platforms from using children’s personal data for targeted ads and requiring AI chatbots to provide crisis intervention resources if the child prompts the chatbot about self-harm or suicide.
It also includes a small line saying that the legislation does not “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.”
[. . .]“AI debates have given a huge boost and brought a lot of attention to a lot of these questions [around duty of care],” says Ashkhen Kazaryan, a senior legal fellow at the Future of Free Speech at Vanderbilt University. (She previously worked on Meta’s content regulation team.)
[. . .]Dr. Kazaryan, the legal scholar from Vanderbilt, shares those concerns. Under duty of care, she says, platforms would have to make judgments about issues protected under the First Amendment, such as whether body positivity is a form of healthy self-love or a promoter of obesity.
“You don’t want government deciding what speeches or items of speech are wrong,” she says.
She is also concerned that, if companies fear retaliation, they will overcorrect and in an overabundance of caution eliminate valuable content.
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Ashkhen Kazaryan is a Senior Legal Fellow at The Future of Free Speech, where she leads initiatives to protect free expression and shape policies that uphold the First Amendment in the digital age.