The United Kingdom’s Kids Online Safety Act, often abbreviated as KOSA, is a set of laws passed in 2023 that puts an importance on protecting minors online. It focuses on forcing many websites and social media platforms, such as Instagram and X, to more heavily monitor minors on their site, often requiring users to verify their age with either an ID or an AI-estimated selfie.
Despite what would be expected, KOSA is not just affecting the internet in the U.K: it has created a massive ripple effect across the world which has only recently come to its full fruition, and many internet giants such as Roblox and Discord are now enforcing age verification around the globe whether people are in the U.K. or not. While this may seem like something to be happy about (after all, the whole point of the act is to keep children safe), it’s not as good as it’s cracked up to be: this new era of the internet encourages censorship and the violation of people’s privacy without the promise of actually protecting minors online.
Unfortunately, KOSA has already been used for censorship: large internet corporations such as X and Reddit have used KOSA as an opportunity to censor information about war in places like Palestine and Ukraine, and there has also been a push to censor queer communities from minors with an emphasis on guarding children from any kind of “transgender content”. This suppression of free speech indicates that whether KOSA has good intentions or not, it is being used to censor vulnerable places and communities.
Along with KOSA’s censorship, it also gives many opportunities for companies and other third parties to breach people’s privacy: Discord, a popular social media application, reported in late 2025 that over 70,000 government IDs had been breached and leaked to the public by unknown hackers. This happened shortly after Discord complied with KOSA’s age verification regulations, requiring users to use their ID to verify their age. This, along with other age verification data breaches, shows that KOSA’s current age verification requirements are doing the opposite of protecting internet users: they’re instead leaking user’s private information to millions of people online.
Even with the evasions of people’s free speech and privacy, KOSA still fails at its primary goal: protecting children. The supposed “restricting age verification tools” required by the act are easily avoidable by using VPNs, which are private networks that force internet providers to believe users live in a different location than where they really are. Many people living in the U.K. have been using these tools to circumvent region-specific restrictions caused by KOSA, with a huge 1,327% increase in VPN usage occurring on July 25th of last year, when KOSA’s laws went into effect. Even then, some people across the world have been using methods like video games to easily fake their age verification with virtual faces, further solidifying how impractical trying to enforce regulations on the internet really is.
Despite all of the U.K. Online Safety Act’s shortcomings, it’s unmistakable that there does need to be something done about how children use the internet: 46% of teenagers have reported being cyberbullied online, and a shocking 1 in 12 children have experienced online sexual abuse. To prevent minors from cyberbullying and to keep them safe from online predators, something must be done, but KOSA is simply not at all the way to go about it, as instead of helping children, it rather harms the integrity of the U.K. government and limits people’s free speech.
With these attacks on free speech and privacy, the future of the internet is unclear, but that doesn’t mean users should give up and let KOSA take full control: there is already a lot of pushback against the bill that is only increasing as the effects of KOSA grow larger and larger, and giving up now will only fuel more censorship. All that can be hoped for is a policy that both protects minors online and empowers free speech.
