WASHINGTON — Two federal bills aimed at making the internet safer for children will see a vote on the Senate floor shortly, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, has announced.

In remarks on the Senate floor Tuesday afternoon, Schumer said he will bring the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act 2.0 to a vote in the Senate. Both bill are targets of support from children’s safety advocates, including Mary C. Rodee, the mother of Riley K. Basford, a Potsdam teen who took his own life after being targeted online. Rodee has been an advocate for children’s safety legislation in New York and at the federal level. She couldn’t be reached for comment by press time Tuesday.

The Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, would expand protections for children on the internet, requiring that internet content platforms like TikTok and YouTube allow kids younger than 18 the option to opt out of algorithmic content recommendation feeds, expand parental control over children’s data, cut down on content that promotes harmful behaviors like suicide, sexual exploitation and substance abuse, and establishes an independent auditor to study the relationship between social media and kids’ mental health.

The bill is similar to a recently enacted New York law, the SAFE For Kids Act, which goes further than the proposed federal bill by barring social media companies from providing algorithm-generated content feeds to those younger then 18 without explicit parental consent.

The Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act 2.0, or COPPA 2.0, would update federal rules regarding data collection on minors that were established by the first COPPA Act of 1998.

COPPA 2.0 would block internet companies from collecting data on people younger than 17 without parental consent, raising the COPPA 1 age from 13. It would also require that platforms that could reasonably be used by those younger than 18 to invest in child protections, and establish limitations on how digital marketing companies can use data collected on teenagers specifically.

Similar legislation was also passed at the state level in New York earlier this year by the Child Data Protection Act, which explicitly prohibits internet companies from gathering, using, sharing or processing data collected on people younger than 18 without express and informed consent from the user, and prohibits the disclosure of minors’ data to third parties without written agreements from the minors or their parents.

Schumer, the leading Democrat in the upper chamber and senior senator from New York, said that these bills have been a long time coming — facing opposition from other senators and tech companies.

“Children and teens have been subjected to online harassment, bullying, and other harms for far too long,” he said in a statement. “This legislation will require social media companies to design their products with the safety of kids and teens in mind, bans targeted advertising to kids, provides parents with tools to protect their kids and gives families more options for managing and disconnecting from these platforms.”

KOSA has more than 70 cosponsors in the Senate, but at least one senator, Rand Paul, R-Ky., has threatened to hold the bill up with a lengthy filibuster if it came to a Senate floor vote, a move that could cost the chamber days of voting time.

Some advocates for LGBTQ-plus rights have also raised concerns about KOSA, warning that it gives state attorneys general the ability to pursue tech companies that show content they deem to be inappropriate to children without setting specific guidelines for what that means specifically.

LGBTQ-plus advocates have warned that it could empower unsupportive parents or state government officials to shut down LGBTQ-plus focused content without having to prove that content is actually harmful, which would in turn cut off LGBTQ-plus people younger than 18 from resources, information and their communities online.

That threat appears to have subsided, and the bills are moving through the Senate process. Both will appear before the Senate Commerce Committee at its Saturday meeting.

While KOSA has been introduced in the Senate since December, it didn’t get a House companion bill until April. The House companion is supported by a bipartisan group of representatives including Rep. Elise M. Stefanik, R-Schuylerville, and has been awaiting a full committee vote in the House Commerce Committee since May.

COPPA 2.0 was also introduced in the House in April and was referred to the House Commerce Committee that month. It is co-sponsored by a smaller group of bipartisan House representatives that doesn’t include Stefanik.

These bills are moving forward just a few weeks after the U.S. surgeon general, who is in charge of directing health warnings and advisories for the federal government, released a warning advisory about the potential harms of social media use for children and teens’ mental health and wellbeing.

The surgeon general’s advisory included data that shows people younger than 18 who spend more than three hours daily on social media are twice as likely to experience a mental illness like depression or clinical anxiety.

A study from 2021 shows that 77% of New York City high schoolers spent an average of three or more hours on social media per day.