KIDS Act Clears the House, Servers Pay First

Jordan: Hey everyone, welcome back to Server Rooms. I'm here with Thomas, and today we're planted firmly in one place: the fight over kids' online safety and what it means for Discord. Thomas Doan: Yeah, this one's been building for a while. The House just passed the KIDS Act, and it's already got people picking sides. Jordan: Right, Axios covered the vote on June twenty ninth, and they're already flagging that key senators think this thing has a rough road ahead. Thomas Doan: And what strikes me is what got stripped out along the way. That's going to shape how platforms actually build for this. Jordan: We'll get into that. But first we're walking through what actually happened on the floor, then Thomas and I are going to disagree, plainly, about whether the replacement standard has any teeth at all. Thomas Doan: I've got thoughts. Strong ones. Jordan: I bet. After that we're pulling this out of Washington and into Discord itself, their age assurance rollout from February, the on device stuff and the new load it puts on moderators. Thomas Doan: Which raises the question, if a platform this size can build its own fix, does that undercut the argument for a federal rule? I don't think it's that simple. Jordan: It's exactly where we're headed. We're also getting into the state law mess sitting underneath this bill, and the two competing tracks moving through the Senate this July. Thomas Doan: And whether a single person server should start building for compliance now or just wait and see what Congress lands on, we split on that one too. Jordan: We do, and we're closing things out with a server tool. A Minecraft modding server called ModCraft run by a single moderator. Thomas Doan: Small, scrappy, actually helpful, and also a good stress test for what these new rules would actually ask of someone running a server alone. Jordan: To put this in perspective, that contrast is kind of the whole episode: big legislation meeting small service. Thomas, where do you want to start us off? Thomas Doan: Let's go back to the floor vote itself, because the story really starts with what got stripped out of the original bill. Jordan: two hundred and sixty-seven to one hundred and seventeen. That's the number that stopped me mid-scroll this week. For the Kids Online Safety Act. For the Kids Online Safety Act. And I keep thinking back to our episode on the Committee Deal, because six months ago, this thing was stuck at twenty-eight to twenty-four, straight party line, going nowhere. Thomas Doan: Right, the March markup. That vote was Republicans only, and it basically told you the bill was dead on arrival. Jordan: So how do you go from a party line committee vote in March March to two hundred and sixty seven votes in June. What actually happened in between? Thomas Doan: Guthrie and Pallone, the energy and commerce chair and the ranking member, sat down and rewrote the text. TechPolicy dated the new agreement to June twenty second, a week before the floor vote. Jordan: A week! That's fast for Congress. Thomas Doan: It has to be because of how they brought it to the floor. This wasn't a normal vote-it went up under suspension of the rules. Jordan: Okay, walk me through that, because I don't think most listeners know what Speaker 3: we are talking about. Jordan: Know what that phrase means. Thomas Doan: Suspension is the House's fast lane. No amendments, limited debate, in and out in under an hour typically. It's built for stuff nobody's fighting over, like naming a post office. Jordan: And the catch? Thomas Doan: The catch is it needs two-thirds to pass, not a simple majority. So Guthrie couldn't just ram it through with Republican votes, he needed Democrats on board, which is exactly why the Pallone deal mattered. Jordan: So the suspension vote was the test of whether the deal act- actually held)-- Thomas Doan: Exactly, and two sixty seven clears two thirds pretty comfortably-real bipartisan buy in, not a photo op. Jordan: What's actually inside this thing though, because I keep hearing it's not one bill. Thomas Doan: It's not. TechPolicy calls it a sprawling collection, and by other counts it's something like fourteen separate child safety bills stitched into one vehicle, HR 7757. Jordan: Fourteen bills under one number! Thomas Doan: The anchor pieces are a revised Kids Online Safety Act and something called COPPA 2.0, an update to the old children's privacy law from the '90s. But there's data broker rules, AI chatbot disclosure requirements, age verification mandates all riding along. Jordan: That's a lot to fold into a single suspension vote with no amendments. Thomas Doan: Which is part of why some digital rights groups are uneasy. NBC News reported the bill drew warnings from tech and privacy Speaker 3: groups. Thomas Doan: and privacy advocates as it passed with broad support. Speaker 4: Two very different reactions to the same vote. Thomas Doan: Right. And 47 members didn't vote at all. Out of 435, that's not nothing. Monday evening timing probably explains some of it, but that's a real chunk of the House sitting this one out. Speaker 4: So it clears the House with real numbers behind it; where does it actually land now? Thomas Doan: Senate Commerce Committee: Axios reported on June 29th that the vote sets up a clash there, and key senators are already saying this version has little chance of moving as written. Jordan: Which is the part I want to dig into next, honestly, because Two-sixty-seven votes sounds like consensus, Thomas Doan: Right. Jordan: but if the Senate chair's committee is already lukewarm on the text, Thomas Doan: Then the number doesn't mean what it looks like it means. Jordan: So what did they actually trade away to get those Democratic votes? Because something had to give. Thomas Doan: Something did. And it's the part of the bill that's making senators use words like dead on arrival. Speaker 4: Sharp. Thomas Doan: Building on that liability fight, let's look at what actually got CUT from the Bill Text. Speaker 4: Cut? I thought this was supposed to be the toughened up version. Thomas Doan: That's the marketing, but TechTimes reported the House deal drops KOSA's duty of care standard entirely. That clause would have forced platforms to take reasonable steps against documented harms, eating disorder content, self harm material, sexual exploitation. Speaker 4: So the actual legal obligation to act on known harm? Speaker 5: Tom's gone? Thomas Doan: Gone-in its place you get annual safety audits and what the bill calls reasonable harm reduction policies. Think of Duty of Care like an SLA-miss it, you're liable; an audit is just a report-nobody's on the hook for what the report finds. Speaker 5: So a platform could audit itself, find a mess, publish that, and just keep going? Thomas Doan: That's the structural shift reporting obligation-not- Not civil liability. If the audit shows a platform's algorithm is pushing self-harm content to a 14-year-old, there's no lawsuit path built into this text for that specific failure. Speaker 5: Okay, but walk me through what that means for somebody actually running a server. Say a mid-sized gaming server, 40,000 members, a mod team of volunteers, does this change anything they're required to do? Thomas Doan: Honestly, not much day-to-day. The audit requirement lands on the It's on the platform, Discord, Meta, whoever owns the infrastructure, not on individual server owners, but it does mean the compliance signal mods rely on (platform level enforcement) has less legal pressure behind it than duty of care would have created. Speaker 5: So the incentive to actually build the tooling mods need just softens. Thomas Doan: That's my read, and Senator Blumenthal isn't being subtle about it either. Axios reported him calling the House tax quote, A blank check to Mark Zuckerberg to exploit children, and saying flatly it's dead on arrival in the Senate. Speaker 4: Dead! Jordan: And on arrival is strong language for a bill that just passed two hundred and sixty seven to one seventeen. Thomas Doan: It is, but Blumenthal's been the KOSA author fighting for duty of care since the original bill. Losing it is personal, not procedural, for him. Jordan: There's a second complaint too, right?--something about wiping out existing lawsuits. Thomas Doan: Senator Cantwell's warning is actually the scarier one for platforms, in my opinion: she's flagging that the preemption language could knock out st But state common law cases-the actual lawsuits families are running right now to hold platforms accountable in state court. Jordan: So it's not just that the federal bill is weak; it might actively clear the field of the state remedies that were working. Thomas Doan: That's the argument: replace a working patchwork with a federal audit requirement that has no teeth. Jordan: I'll push back a little here, though: an audit isn't nothing-if Meta has to publish an annual harm reduction report, journalists and researchers get a document. The document to dig through. That's a lever, even without a lawsuit attached. Thomas Doan: I get the instinct, though. I've shipped compliance features under exactly this kind of setup before: self-reported metrics, no external check. Teams optimize for what they're graded on. If the grade is, did you publish a report, you publish a report. If the grade is, did you get sued, you change the product. Jordan: So you don't think transparency does any work here at all? Thomas Doan: I think it does some work. I don't think it does the work. Work duty of care would have done—those are different claims. Jordan: Fair.—And, honestly, this is exactly why I wanted to hear how a platform is handling this stuff for real, not just on paper. Thomas Doan: Right. Which is a good place to land, because Discord isn't waiting on Congress here; they've already built out an age assurance system that's basically a live version of this exact audit versus enforcement question. Jordan: Oh, I want to hear this, because that's the part where policy stops being theoretical. And starts being a setting some mod has to actually flip. Thomas Doan: Exactly the shift worth making-paper commitments on one side, actual on device scanning and default teen settings on the other. Jordan: So walk me through what Discord's actually built here. Thomas Doan: Discord rolled out its age assurance program back in February, and the core piece is facial age estimation from a vendor called Yoti. Jordan: Wait, a camera scan? That sounds invasive. Thomas Doan: That's the pushback, but Discord's support documentation says the estimation runs entirely on device, the image never leaves your phone or laptop, or you can scan a government ID instead. Jordan: Okay, and what happens once it decides how old you are? Thomas Doan: This is the part that changes server operations. If someone's flagged as under 18, Discord flips on teen by default settings platform-wide, NSFW channels get blocked automatically. Jordan: Platform-wide meaning a server owner can't just say, nah, my community's fine, let them in. Thomas Doan: Right, there's no server-level override. Discord's own support pages are clear that owners can't unlock that gate themselves. Jordan: So all those servers running on the honor system with a birth date field? Thomas Doan: That's gone as a compliance strategy. Self-reported birthdates were never verified anyway, but now there's an actual technical wall behind the estimation instead of a text box. Jordan: What's that mean day to day for someone actually moderating one of these servers? Thomas Doan: I'd point to two specific settings: the Sensitive Content Filter, which now interacts with age signals rather than just server-level toggles, And the message requests default, which restricts DMs from unfamiliar accounts to anyone flagged as a minor. Jordan: So moderators aren't just watching chat, they're watching classification. Thomas Doan: Exactly that shift. A guide from peakbot.pro on age verification walks server owners through re-tagging channels and adjusting logging so there's a record showing which content categories got restricted and when. Jordan: That's a real workload change. You're not just banning trolls, you're documenting compliance. Thomas Doan: And that documentation matters if a regulator ever asks what a platform actually enforced versus what it just posted in its terms of service. Jordan: From the people side, though, I've seen the complaints in server support channels. People genuinely upset a face scan is the price of entry. Thomas Doan: Discord's addressed that directly. Their policy states any facial estimation vendor has to process on-device. And they won't use the age data for ad targeting or sell it. Jordan: Do you believe that holds up? Because we won't sell it is something every platform says right before a headline says otherwise. Thomas Doan: Fair skepticism. I'd say the on-device processing claim is more verifiable than the we-won't-monetize-it promise. One's an architecture decision, the other is a policy decision that can change with the new privacy team. Jordan: Which is a very founding engineer's way of saying you trust the code more than the memo. Thomas Doan: Guilty. Discord also has a separate age assurance flow specifically for UK users tied to their own support documentation, which tells me this isn't one global rollout. It's regional, built around whatever law is loudest in that market. Jordan: So Discord is basically building the compliance infrastructure Congress is still arguing about. Thomas Doan: In a narrow sense, yes; but Discord chose facial estimation and ID scans. Nothing in the House bill mandates that specific method; it just says platforms need some age signal with a paper trail. Jordan: Which means a smaller Discord alternative or a Reddit or a Roblox could build something completely different and still claim compliance. Nonsense! Thomas Doan: That's the fragmentation risk. One company's engineering choice becomes the de facto standard everyone else gets compared against, fair or not. Jordan: Okay, but flip that around: if Congress is watching Discord do this voluntarily, doesn't that undercut the argument that platforms need a legal duty of care standard at all? Thomas Doan: That's the argument Discord's lobbyists are absolutely making right now. Look, we did it without you forcing us! Jordan: And the counter is: Sure. But you're a platform with an engineering budget to build on device facial estimation. What about the server running on free volunteer mods in a Carl-bot config? Thomas Doan: Right, that's the actual gap. Discord solved this because Discord can afford Yoti's licensing and a dedicated trust and safety team. Most platforms this bill would touch can't. Jordan: So this becomes less a story about one server and more about every state already writing its own rulebook while Congress catches up. is up Thomas Doan: Which is exactly where things get messy, because Discord's solution only has to satisfy one company's lawyers; the states aren't all asking for the same thing. Jordan: Shifting to the States for a second, more than eighteen states have already enacted their own kids' social media laws, according to the Age Verification Providers Association. Speaker 4: Mm-hmm. Jordan: That patchwork is exactly what this bill is supposed to clean up. Thomas Doan: Right, and Pillsbury's write-up on the bill actually names the mechanism, a conflicts-based preemption standard. States keep whatever's stricter than the federal floor, lose whatever's weaker. Jordan: Which sounds tidy until you remember California, New York and Maryland all wrote their rules differently. A server owner in three states is still tracking three sets of obligations. Thomas Doan: And Brownstein's client alert says Ted Cruz has already scheduled a Senate Jordan: Separate Senate commerce markup in July, specifically on kids' privacy. Thomas Doan: Running parallel to that, Marsha Blackburn's negotiating her own package with the White House, tying the Senate's KOSA to preemption of state AI laws entirely. Jordan: Two different Senate tracks, same month: whichever one actually moves changes what compliant even means by fall. Thomas Doan: Great time to be running a forty person Discord server with one volunteer moderator. Jordan: On top of that, NBC News reported on June 30th that digital rights and tech groups warned the bill could push age verification onto ordinary platforms, not just the ones hosting explicit content. Thomas Doan: That's the part that worries me. The bill's knowledge standard doesn't It doesn't distinguish between a platform with forty million users and a Discord server with forty. Jordan: So here's where you and I actually split. I think small operators should wait this out. Building against a bill three different rooms are still rewriting wastes engineering time. Thomas Doan: I don't buy that. Wait for Congress to finish arguing, and you're doing a rushed build under a deadline instead of a planned one. Jordan: Sure, but age verification for a modding server looks nothing like age verification for a chat-bot platform. You'd build the wrong thing. Thomas Doan: Fair, but logging who joined and when. Having an actual escalation path for reports that's useful under any version of this or under Discord's terms right now. Build the boring stuff today. Jordan: We're not landing on the same timeline, but we do agree on what the target eventually looks like. Thomas Doan: The July markup is the next real signal. Once Cruz sets his agenda, we'll actually know which version of compliant people are building towards. Jordan: Until then, everyone's guessing. Some of us are just guessing with a to do The to do list already open. Thomas Doan: Shifting gears, let's do the Server tour. This week: ModCraft. Jordan: Dry palette cleanser after two segments on audit language. Thomas Doan: It's listed in Discord's gaming and entertainment directory categories, and it's built around Minecraft modding, troubleshooting channels, mod sharing threads, the works. Jordan: I poked around the setup; from what I can tell it's basically run by one moderator handling the whole thing: Tickets, mod approvals, conflict resolution. Thomas Doan: And the peer-to-peer help is genuinely good, people posting crash logs, other hobbyists walking them through dependency conflicts line by line. Jordan: That's the part that works. Someone can't get a shader pak running with their mod loader, and within twenty minutes, three different builders are diagnosing it for free. Thomas Doan: It's the kind of server that reminds you why this hobby side of Discord still matters, separate from all the legislative noise. Jordan: Right, but here's my dry note for the day: a one moderator operation is exactly the kind of place that would struggle. Struggle hardest under new audit requirements Thomas Doan: Even though nothing in the Kids Act is remotely aimed at the Minecraft modding server. Jordan: Nothing. But if the Senate ever attaches real documentation obligations to platforms and pushes some of that burden downstream, a server with one person answering tickets has no compliance department to lean on. Thomas Doan: That's the gap we kept circling all episode-big platform tools like Discord's age assurance system... versus a Volunteer running one Server in his Spare Time Jordan: Speaking of language, I pulled up ModCraft's own promotional listing before we recorded. Thomas Doan: And? Jordan: It reads exactly like the compliance language we just spent forty minutes dissecting. Thomas Doan: So the legislative text and the service's own marketing copy have more in common than either would probably admit. Jordan: Which is honestly the most useful thing about tonight's tour: it's a reminder that promises on a page-legal or promotional-aren't the same as infrastructure. Thomas Doan: The rough edge, if you're going in: don't expect a moderation team. If you get a bad faith troll, it's one person's judgment call, not an escalation chain. Jordan: And that's fine for a hobby server today. It's the exact scenario that gets exposed the moment rules built for platforms the size of Discord start getting applied further down the chain. Thomas Doan: If you're into modding, and you're patient with response times, it's worth a look-just know what you're walking into. Jordan: Search ModCraft on Discord's server directory. It's small, it's a little rough, and it's doing exactly what it says on the label, which honestly is more than we can say for some of the bills we covered today. Today. Thomas Doan: So today really came down to one question: does an audit without teeth still change platform behavior? Jordan: My answer is still yes, just not as much as duty of care would have. That gap is exactly what Discord's own age assurance system is trying to fill on its own. Thomas Doan: Right. And whether a well-funded platform doing that voluntarily makes the case for Congress weaker, that's the piece I'm still not settled on. Jordan: Fair; ask me again after the Senate's Cruz and Blackburn tussle in July. Thomas Doan: Deal; and if you run a small server, that ModCraft visit should tell you something about the gap between one moderator and a compliance audit. Jordan: One person handling mod queues and potential legal paperwork—that's the mismatch we kept circling back to. Thomas Doan: So here's the one sentence version for listeners: Watch the Senate in July. That's where this actually gets decided. Jordan: Agreed; and if you've got a server we should look at next, send it our way: serverrooms at show dot com, or find us on our own Discord server. Thomas Doan: New episodes drop every Wednesday. Subscribe, leave a review, it genuinely helps more than you'd think. Jordan: Thanks for spending this one with us. Thomas Doan: See you next Wednesday.