I'm going to Hi everybody and welcome to Outbird Slate's podcast for you lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans people who spend way too much time on the internet. I am Jules Gil Peterson

who's very hard to find online. But I feel like I'm joined by the presence of greatness.

Who's here with you? joined by the presence of greatness.

Who's here with me today?

I'm Brian Louder and I'm so pleased to be called great.

I feel the same way about you Jules. I'm Christina Kottaroucci, a senior writer at

Slate and I still feel like I'm basking in the glow of being altogether after my little time

away earlier this summer.

It's so good for the gang to be back together.

Well, we've all teamed up today because we've got a real one for you.

You know, there's really no shortage of political news going on right now but I think

that means it can be pretty hard to keep up with everything and with so much

attention trained on the presidential election it's easy to forget, for example, that, you know, Congress, that thing is still in session, still entertaining legislation of all sorts.

And what bill that hasn't consistently got necessarily the same amount of press coverage as other initiatives

is the very dubiously named Kids Online Safety Act or Kosa.

It's positioned by its bipartisan supporters as a way to require tech platforms to protect

children from certain forms of harm online. But you may have heard of it because it's received

a lot of criticism, not just from free speech advocates like you might expect, but also

critics warning that it would specifically and profoundly chill the speech of LGBT and especially

trans youth online causing them pretty concrete harm.

The bill has also been around in different iterations since 2022.

It's undergone quite a lot of changes. I mean, there's some schoolhouse rock vibes going on here.

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