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The Kids Online Safety Act has passed out of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, despite a last-minute amendment that removed specific mental health-related rules among other changes. It’s significantly different from the Senate version, and we’re likely to see more debate before a full House vote.

It wasn’t clear the House would take up KOSA after its Senate passage, but the legislation — along with the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act — is midway down the list of 16 bills slated for consideration by the House Committee on Energy & Commerce starting at 10AM ET today. You can find the committee stream below.

Attorney Daniel Tenny frames the government’s objection to TikTok. “It gathers a lot of information” and “it uses that information to try to assess what sorts of videos and other content is going to be of interest,” Tenny says. “That same data is extremely valuable to a foreign adversary.”

The Department of Justice filed a very redacted transcript of the classified briefing House lawmakers received before passing the bill that could ban TikTok unless it spins out from its Chinese owner. If you squint around the blocks of blacked-out text, you can kind of start to see how the DOJ will likely defend the bill in oral arguments on September 16th.

A judge partially blocked a Texas law that would mandate filters for minors on social media. But other rules about parental consent and data collection are still in force, and Meta, for one, tells The Verge it will be making changes:

In today’s issue of Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick argues that the lively Brazilian community of X users may find a home on Bluesky, but not so much on Threads, whose heavy-handed algorithmically sorted user interface doesn’t click with Brazilian internet culture.

After announcing last week that it would have to “temporarily cease operations” due to the ban of X in Brazil, popular celebrity-watching account @21metgala — which is apparently run entirely by Brazilian admins — is back, with the caveat that its connection is “unstable.”

Okay, maybe not so measured, but worth reading. Law blogger and Verge favorite Eric Goldman on the recent moderation ruling against TikTok:

Following a similar order against the attorney general of Texas, Judge Amit Mehta has blocked an investigation into Media Matters For America by Missouri AG Andrew Bailey, who alleged MMFA broke the law with critical reports about Elon Musk’s X. X’s similarly speech-chilling lawsuit against MMFA remains ongoing.

The company doesn’t know if the issue is related to an App Store bug, or if Apple is “secretly implementing a censorship order,” as it’s apparently affecting “multiple other VPNs” on iOS in Brazil.

In a new filing, DOJ says it’s “not trying to litigate in secret,” but that the court should be able to review classified information that led Congress to determine the divest-or-ban bill was necessary. In its own filing, TikTok says the government’s arguments for the bill are riddled with errors and omissions.

CNN has a rare inside look at the Supreme Court deliberations that led to the (bad!) Texas and Florida social media regulations being put on hold and sent back to the lower courts to figure out how they would affect other kinds of websites and services. It almost went the other way, until Samuel Alito went too far in his first draft and Amy Coney Barrett flipped, eventually joining the 6-3 majority opinion.

Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) updated their discussion draft that seeks to prevent debacles like that between Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI. It’s gained the support of SAG-AFTRA and the Recording Industry Association, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which counts tech companies among its donors, previously raised concerns that the draft bill was overly broad.

The vice president and likely Democratic presidential nominee applauded the Senate’s vote to pass the Kids Online Safety Act and urged full passage through Congress.

Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul recently signed the state’s own laws to protect kids online, exemplifying how states have been the first to move on this kind of legislation. Hochul said in a statement that when she signed those bills, “we were sending a message to the nation. Now, I’m excited to see the Senate take steps to help safeguard more young people nationwide.”

The bill they’re contained in passed the 60 vote threshold to close debate, but the Senate must still vote to fully pass it. Schumer indicated that could happen early next week. Should it pass, it goes to the House – but that could take a while considering members are leaving early for summer recess.

“Once the Senate clears today’s procedural vote, KOSA and COPPA will be on a glide path to final passage early next week,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said ahead of the cloture vote, which closes debate and sets up the bills for a full vote.

That bill is being used as the vehicle for KOSA and COPPA 2.0. They’re basically tucked in as an amendment to this unrelated bill that deals with duplicative reporting requirements for federal agencies.

The Tennessee Republican, another of the bill’s lead sponsors, began her remarks with what KOSA doesn’t do. It doesn’t cover nonprofits, it doesn’t include rule-making, it doesn’t include news outlets, and it doesn’t give the government new authority, she said.

“There’s no censorship in this bill. None. Zero,” the Connecticut Democrat who’s the bill’s lead sponsor said on the Senate floor. “It is about product design. Much as it would be about a car that is unsafe and is required to have seatbelts and airbags.”

The Kentucky Republican said the bill “promises to be pandora’s box of unintended consequences.” He added that “there’s enough to hate this bill from the right and left,” describing, for example, how discussion of sexuality, climate change, and abortion could cause anxiety, which the duty of care mandates platforms try to mitigate.