(Reclaim The Net)—Just weeks after Americans criticized the United Kingdom for imposing intrusive and heavy-handed social media rules, Congress is now advancing legislation that raises strikingly similar concerns about government overreach, privacy erosion, and the expansion of online surveillance.
A bipartisan agreement on children’s online safety legislation unveiled by House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders would impose new obligations on social media platforms, while creating powerful incentives for companies to end online anonymity.
The proposal is part of the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act), an omnibus package that bundles together multiple bills, including the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTs Act, COPPA 2.0, the SPY Kids Act, and more, as well as data broker provisions and research and education initiatives.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone announced Monday that they had reached agreement on the legislation, which would require social media companies to provide additional safeguards and parental tools for minors. The lawmakers said it would “hold Big Tech accountable.”
“We worked across the aisle for many months and have now found common ground on policies to significantly improve the digital environment for kids,” Guthrie and Pallone said in a joint statement.
As always, under that framing lies a familiar and deeply controversial approach: imposing broad obligations on platforms that hinge on whether companies know a user is a minor, without clearly defining how that knowledge is supposed to be obtained.
Congress has tried for years to set national rules for social media and youth safety. Those efforts have repeatedly stalled, in part because of unresolved tensions between child protection goals and fundamental privacy rights. In the absence of federal action, states have moved ahead with their own laws, often pushing even more aggressive requirements.
One of the main disputes appears to have been resolved in favor of House Republicans. According to a committee spokesperson, the agreement does not include a “duty of care” provision, a requirement backed by many child-safety advocates and several Senate lawmakers.
The bill text states that nothing in it may be construed to “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.”
That language has drawn criticism from some Senate supporters who had pushed for stronger requirements. Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote that “KOSA without a duty of care isn’t KOSA.”
Even without that provision, however, the bill still creates a framework that pressures platforms to determine who their users are and how old they are.
The legislation defines “know” or “knows” to mean “to know or should have known.” Similar language appears across multiple sections of the KIDS Act, including provisions covering online platforms, AI chatbots, and gaming services. That standard creates legal risk for companies that fail to identify minors, effectively encouraging them to gather more information about users to avoid liability.
The bill attempts to soften that implication by stating that “Nothing in this subtitle may be construed to require the provider of a covered platform to implement an age gating or age verification functionality on the covered platform.”
But that reassurance rings hollow. Platforms are told they do not have to verify age, while simultaneously being held responsible if they “should have known” a user was a minor. The most obvious way to resolve that contradiction is to collect more data, deploy age-estimation technologies, or introduce identity checks across the board.
Privacy advocates have long warned that this kind of legal structure incentivizes surveillance.
The bill would require platforms that know a user is a minor to provide privacy and safety controls, including tools to limit communications, restrict geolocation sharing, reduce compulsive-use features, and offer options to opt out of personalized recommendation systems.
Default settings for minors must provide what the legislation describes as “the most protective level of control with respect to privacy and safety.”
But those protections depend entirely on platforms being able to identify minors in the first place, raising the question of how much personal data will be collected from all users, not just children, in order to make that determination.
Parents would also receive expanded oversight tools. Platforms would be required to provide account-management controls, time-limit features, notifications about new messaging requests, and other supervisory functions for accounts belonging to minors.
Another provision allows states to enact stronger protections than those set at the federal level.
The bill says nothing prevents a state from enforcing laws that provide “greater protection to minors” than federal requirements. That opens the door to an increasingly fragmented regulatory outlook, where companies must comply with a patchwork of state laws, many of which may impose stricter identity verification or access restrictions.
For users, that could mean more aggressive data collection and fewer opportunities for anonymous or pseudonymous participation online, depending on where they live.
The measure also includes language on encryption. It states that platform requirements may not override encrypted communications and that companies must comply in ways that “do not compromise the integrity of strong encryption.”
While that language appears protective on its face, privacy advocates have repeatedly warned that indirect regulatory pressure can still lead companies to weaken encryption in practice, particularly if compliance requires monitoring user behavior or identifying specific categories of users.
Congress has struggled to pass comprehensive social media legislation and states have filled the gap. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, at least 20 states enacted laws in 2025 addressing children’s use of social media.
A December 2025 Pew Research Center report found that Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok remain the most widely used online platforms among Americans ages 13 to 17.
Meta and Google declined to comment on the bipartisan agreement. Snap and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The legislation also comes as major technology companies face thousands of lawsuits alleging that social media products harmed young users.
The agreement still faces hurdles before becoming law, including Senate approval and President Donald Trump’s signature.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
