Congress and Social Media: Bills, Section 230, and TikTok

Congress and social media policy in 2025 and 2026 comes down to this: one law signed, several child-safety bills moving through committees, a live threat to sunset Section 230, an unresolved TikTok divestiture, and a Supreme Court that has both loosened and tightened the constitutional limits on regulation. Bipartisan agreement that something must change is real; agreement on specifics is not.

The One Law That Passed: The Take It Down Act

The most concrete legislative achievement of the 119th Congress on social media is the Take It Down Act, signed into law on May 19, 2025. Sponsored by Senators Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar, it criminalizes the nonconsensual publication of intimate images, including AI-generated deepfakes, and requires platforms to remove such content within 48 hours of receiving a report.¹ The Senate passed it by unanimous consent; the House vote was 409–2.²

The law reaches any website or app that hosts user-generated content. Platforms must set up a process for reporting unauthorized intimate imagery, and violators face criminal penalties including prison time and mandatory restitution. The FTC enforces the removal requirement and has requested $10 million in its fiscal year 2026 budget to run that program.³ Critics note the law lacks a counter-notice mechanism of the sort found in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which they say could let bad actors weaponize reports to suppress lawful content. The Take It Down Act contains no preemption clause, so state nonconsensual intimate imagery laws continue to operate alongside it.²

Child-Safety Bills Moving Through Congress

Child safety is where most of the legislative energy sits. Several bills advance on parallel tracks, each targeting a different piece of the problem.

Kids Off Social Media Act

S.278, from Senators Brian Schatz, Ted Cruz, Chris Murphy, and Katie Britt, would ban social media accounts for children under 13 and prohibit algorithmic content recommendations for anyone under 17.⁴ Users under 17 could still browse chronologically or search directly; they would not receive personalized feeds. A House companion is led by Representatives Anna Paulina Luna and Kim Schrier.⁵

The bill does not require new age-verification systems or government IDs. Platforms are obligated to act on a user’s age only if they already have that information, such as a date of birth given at sign-up.⁴ The Senate Commerce Committee reported the bill in June 2025. It has not received a floor vote.⁶

Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)

KOSA passed the Senate in the 118th Congress and stalled in the House. It was reintroduced in May 2025 as S.1748 by Senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal, with backing from Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.⁷ The bill imposes a duty of care on platforms to mitigate harms to minors, including cyberbullying, mental health disorders, and sexual exploitation, and requires accessible safety tools and the ability to delete a minor’s account and personal data.

The 2025 version adds a First Amendment carve-out barring enforcement based on the viewpoint of protected speech, a response to conservative concern that the duty-of-care standard could be used to suppress political content.⁷ Despite bipartisan sponsorship, KOSA has stalled amid heavy industry lobbying.⁸

COPPA 2.0 and the KIDS Act

The Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, called COPPA 2.0, extends existing children’s privacy law to users under 17, bans targeted advertising to minors, and creates an “eraser button” for deleting personal data.⁹ The Senate version (S.836), led by Senator Edward Markey with 21 bipartisan cosponsors, passed by unanimous consent on March 5, 2026, and awaits House action.¹⁰

In the House, those provisions were folded into a broader bill called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, announced as a bipartisan compromise by Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone on June 22, 2026.¹¹ The compromise dropped a duty-of-care provision and would allow states to pass social media laws offering greater protection than the federal standard.¹²

Three House Bills Reported Out of Committee

In March 2026, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to send three online safety bills to the full House:

The KIDS Act (H.R. 7757), reported 28–24, incorporating updated COPPA protections.
Sammy’s Law (H.R. 2657), reported 36–16, requiring large platforms to provide real-time access to third-party safety software that can notify parents of risky behavior.
The App Store Accountability Act (H.R. 3149), reported 26–23, requiring app stores to verify a user’s age category and obtain parental consent before minors can download apps.

The narrow margins on two of the three show how much harder specifics are than principle.¹³ A House subcommittee reviewed 19 separate digital media bills in the 119th Congress, from narrow measures like the No Fentanyl on Social Media Act to broader frameworks like the Algorithmic Transparency and Choice Act, which would default minors to “input-transparent” algorithms and let all users opt out of personalized recommendations.⁹

Section 230 and the Sunset Threat

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the 1996 law shielding platforms from liability for most user-generated content, remains in the background of every social media debate. Ten proposals to amend or repeal it were introduced in the first months of the 119th Congress.¹⁴

The most prominent is the Sunset Section 230 Act (S.3546), introduced by Senator Lindsey Graham with cosponsors including Senators Durbin, Grassley, Blackburn, and Blumenthal. It would sunset Section 230 entirely on January 1, 2027, unless Congress enacts a replacement.¹⁵ A House companion exists.¹⁶ The strategy is a forcing mechanism: if Congress cannot agree on a replacement, the shield lapses. Both bills sit in committee.

Where the TikTok Divestiture Landed

The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act passed with lopsided bipartisan margins in 2024, 352–65 in the House and 79–18 in the Senate, and required ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations or face a ban.¹⁷ In January 2025 the Supreme Court upheld the law, finding it narrowly tailored to serve the government’s interest in preventing a foreign adversary from accessing the data of TikTok’s 170 million American users.

Enforcement then stretched out. The Trump administration delayed the deadline through a series of executive orders running from January through September 2025.¹⁸ In September 2025 the President declared that a framework agreement was a qualified divestiture, and by January 2026 ByteDance had spun off the U.S. operations into a new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. ByteDance retained a 19.9% stake; Silver Lake, Oracle, and MGX each hold 15%.¹⁹

Congressional scrutiny did not end there. In May 2026 Senator Markey sent a formal inquiry to TikTok USDS demanding details on the algorithmic licensing arrangement with ByteDance, raising concern that an ongoing operational relationship on the recommendation algorithm undermines the divestiture.²⁰ Unlike the earlier Project Texas arrangement, the new entity is not under continued oversight from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.¹⁹

Supreme Court Rulings That Set the Boundaries

Congress is legislating against a shifting constitutional backdrop. In Moody v. NetChoice (2024), the Court affirmed that social media platforms exercise First Amendment rights when curating and recommending content, rejecting the idea of a “social media exception to the First Amendment.”²¹ Texas and Florida laws limiting platform moderation were remanded rather than struck down.

Then in June 2025 the Court pivoted in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, upholding a Texas law that requires age verification for websites publishing sexually explicit material. The 6–3 decision applied intermediate scrutiny rather than the strict scrutiny that has traditionally governed content-based speech restrictions, a shift dissenting Justice Kagan called result-driven.²¹ Twenty-five states have enacted similar age-verification laws, and the ruling validated their approach. Legal scholars caution that the decision was grounded specifically in the tradition of keeping obscene material from minors and does not automatically extend to broader social media age-verification mandates.²²

For Congress, that means a more permissive environment for age-related rules, with limits. KOSA does not explicitly mandate age verification, but compliance would likely result in platforms gate-keeping by age in practice, and how courts treat de facto age-gating is an open question.²²

How Federal Bills Interact With State Laws

At least sixteen states have enacted laws regulating minors’ access to social media, and more have pursued age-verification or age-appropriate design legislation since 2024.²³ Most have been enjoined by courts applying strict scrutiny, though Paxton may change that going forward.

Congress has not settled how a federal standard would interact with those state laws. The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s June 2026 compromise explicitly allows states to enact greater protections than the federal baseline.¹² The KIDS Act draft uses “conflicts with” preemption language, the same standard as the existing COPPA statute, rather than a broader “relates to” standard that would sweep more state laws aside.¹¹ Practically, that means state laws are likely to keep operating on top of any federal standard Congress eventually enacts.

1
Congress.gov. TAKE IT DOWN Act – All Info
2
National Association of Attorneys General. Congress’s Attempt To Criminalize Nonconsensual Intimate Imagery
3
Federal Trade Commission. FY 2026 Congressional Budget Justification
4
Senator Brian Schatz. Kids Off Social Media Act
5
Representative Anna Paulina Luna. Congress Introduces Landmark Bipartisan Bill To Protect Children Online
6
GovTrack. S. 278: Kids Off Social Media Act
7
EDUCAUSE. Senate Reintroduces Kids Online Safety Act
8
Spectrum News. Congress Stalls Social Media Legislation
9
Davis Wright Tremaine. Federal Online Safety Legislation Hits Congress
10
GovTrack. S. 836: Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act
11
Future of Privacy Forum. Redline Comparison of the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act
12
AOL News. US House Committee Reaches Bipartisan Agreement
13
House Energy and Commerce Committee. Full Committee Markup Recap
14
Lawfare. What Has Congress Been Doing on Section 230
15
Congress.gov. S. 3546 – Sunset Section 230 Act
16
Congress.gov. H.R. 6746 – Sunset To Reform Section 230 Act
17
Supreme Court of the United States. TikTok Inc. v. Garland
18
White House. Saving TikTok While Protecting National Security
19
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Five Takeaways From the TikTok Deal
20
Senator Edward Markey. Letter to TikTok USDS
21
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Supreme Court
22
Cato Institute. What Happens Next for Age Verification After Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton
23
Harvard Law Review. Content Neutrality for Kids: Intermediate Scrutiny for Social Media Age Verification Laws