Senate's KOSA Advance Puts Cannabis Ads in Crosshairs

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On August 5, 2026, the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee waved through the Kids Online Safety Act, better known as S. 1748, in a voice vote so routine it barely registered outside the committee room. But buried in the bill's language is a detail that should matter a great deal to anyone running a cannabis brand's Instagram account or email list: the legislation names cannabis products explicitly, right alongside narcotics, tobacco, gambling and alcohol, as categories platforms must actively shield minors from encountering online.

The bill comes from Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and it isn't a fringe proposal -- it carries 76 cosponsors, a bipartisan coalition rare enough in this Congress to make the bill's eventual passage feel more like a question of when than if. For a cannabis industry that already juggles a state-by-state maze of ad restrictions, age-gating rules, and platform bans, a federal law aimed squarely at social media and online outreach adds an entirely new layer to navigate. The bill still has to clear a full Senate floor vote and get reconciled with a House companion bill before it becomes law, but the direction of travel is clear enough that marketers shouldn't wait for the ink to dry before paying attention.

What the Senate Committee Actually Approved

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The committee action itself was procedural but not small. Lawmakers advanced S. 1748 as what's called the Blackburn substitute amendment, as modified -- essentially an updated version of the bill text that incorporated changes negotiated ahead of the markup. It didn't move alone. The same session also cleared three related pieces of legislation: the Youth AI Privacy Act (S. 4199), the CHATBOT Act (S. 4407), and the Children's Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act (S. 5171). Taken together, the package signals that the committee is treating youth digital safety as a broad legislative priority this session, not a one-off bill.

KOSA itself is the marquee item of the four, and its bipartisan cosponsor list -- 76 senators as of the markup -- is the kind of number that tends to translate into eventual floor action. Blackburn and Blumenthal have been shepherding versions of this bill for several years now, through multiple committee cycles and stalled floor attempts, and this markup represents the furthest the current iteration has gotten.

What happens next is a full Senate floor vote, though no date has been set. Given the size of the cosponsor coalition, leadership has real incentive to find floor time, but Senate calendars are crowded and priorities shift. Cannabis operators watching this bill should treat committee passage as a green light for closer monitoring, not as confirmation that anything is imminent -- floor scheduling in the Senate can stretch on for months even when a bill has broad support.

The Cannabis-Specific Language, Explained

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The mechanics of how KOSA treats cannabis are worth reading closely, because the bill doesn't just mention marijuana in passing -- it builds cannabis into three separate operative provisions. Section 102 establishes a duty of care requiring covered platforms to exercise reasonable care in the design of features that could contribute to specific harms to minors, and the list of harms it enumerates includes the distribution, sale, or use of narcotic drugs, tobacco products, cannabis products, gambling, and alcohol. That's the core framing: cannabis sits in the same sentence, under the same legal standard, as heroin and cigarettes.

Separately, the bill contains a direct advertising restriction barring platforms from serving ads for narcotic drugs, cannabis products, tobacco products, gambling, or alcohol to any account or profile a platform knows belongs to a minor. And beyond advertising, the duty-of-care language also touches product design more broadly -- features that could enable distribution, sale, or use of these products to minors would need to be built with that risk in mind, which is a much wider net than just paid ad placement.

What makes this notable for the cannabis industry specifically is that the bill draws no distinction based on state legality. A dispensary in Colorado or a cannabis brand in California operating in full compliance with state law would still fall under the same federal ad-restriction bucket as an illegal narcotics dealer, at least as far as platform obligations go. And the bill's reach isn't confined to social media apps in the narrow sense -- it applies to online platforms broadly, which likely sweeps in the websites cannabis brands use for email capture, loyalty programs, and other direct outreach tools that have become central to how legal operators build customer relationships in an environment where paid social advertising is already heavily restricted.

Why the House Already Moved on This

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The Senate isn't moving in isolation here. The House passed its own version of this idea, the KIDS Act (H.R. 7757), sponsored by Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY), by a decisive 267-117 vote last month. That followed a March markup in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where the bill cleared by a 28-24 margin -- a closer, more partisan vote than the lopsided floor tally suggests, and a reminder that committee-level disagreements don't always show up in the final headline vote.

The House bill contains its own cannabis-focused youth safety provisions, conceptually similar to what's in S. 1748 but not identical in structure or wording. It now sits in the Senate, where most Capitol Hill observers think it faces long odds of passing as written -- the chambers have different priorities and different coalitions backing their respective bills, and senators generally prefer to advance their own version rather than simply adopt the House's.

That sets up the next real hurdle: even if the Senate passes S. 1748 on the floor, lawmakers would still need to reconcile it with H.R. 7757 before anything reaches the President's desk. Reconciliation is where the fine print often changes. The exact wording around cannabis-specific ad restrictions, the definition of what counts as knowing a user is a minor, and the scope of the duty-of-care standard could all shift during that process. For an industry trying to plan compliance strategy around this bill, the House-Senate gap is a reminder that the current cannabis language in S. 1748 isn't necessarily the final language -- it's a snapshot of where one chamber landed, not where Congress will end up.

Industry Pushback: Vague Standards, Real Compliance Risk

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The loudest criticism of KOSA isn't coming from people who think kids shouldn't be protected from drug and alcohol advertising -- it's coming from people who think the bill's operative standards are too loose to apply predictably. Shoshana Weismann, a fellow at the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank, has specifically flagged the bill's knowledge standard -- the test for whether a platform knows a user is a minor -- as vague enough that platforms may respond by over-restricting content and ad delivery well beyond what the law actually requires, simply to avoid liability.

That critique gets an unusual amount of company from the other side of the political spectrum. Jenna Leventoff, an attorney with the ACLU, has pointed to a pattern: several state-level youth online safety laws with similar structures have already been struck down in court on First Amendment or vagueness grounds. Courts have repeatedly found that broad duty-of-care mandates aimed at protecting minors online can end up restricting speech more than the Constitution allows, especially when the standard for what counts as reasonable care isn't clearly defined.

It's worth being precise about where the disagreement actually lives. Almost nobody testifying or commenting publicly is arguing that platforms shouldn't have to shield kids from drug or alcohol marketing -- that goal has broad support across the political spectrum. The friction is entirely in the implementation: how broadly terms like reasonable care and knows is a minor get interpreted by regulators and courts, and how much compliance burden that interpretation places on platforms and advertisers.

For marijuana businesses, that uncertainty lands on top of an already dense compliance environment. State rules already require age-gating, restrict certain content and imagery, and in many cases ban cannabis advertising from major platforms outright. A federal standard, especially a vague one, doesn't replace that patchwork -- it stacks on top of it, and there's no guarantee the federal standard will line up cleanly with what states already require.

What Comes Next for Marijuana Brands

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Blackburn has been vocal about her expectations for this bill, publicly predicting that 2026 will be the year KOSA finally becomes law and framing the effort as ending what she describes as Big Tech profiting off of our children. That kind of framing tends to generate momentum, and with 76 cosponsors already signed on, she has a credible case to make.

But the path from here to an actual law still runs through a full Senate floor vote and then reconciliation with the House's KIDS Act -- a process that, as noted, could still meaningfully alter the cannabis-specific language before anything is finalized. Nothing about the current text should be treated as locked in.

In the meantime, cannabis companies that lean on organic social reach, influencer partnerships, or targeted digital ad buys have a more immediate reason to pay attention than the legislative calendar. Platforms have a well-established habit of tightening their own policies preemptively, well before a law actually requires it, simply to get ahead of liability risk and public scrutiny. A cannabis brand that assumes it has time to react once KOSA is signed may find that Meta, TikTok, or Google has already adjusted ad-targeting rules or content policies months earlier.

And regardless of what happens at the federal level, state law isn't going anywhere. Advertising legality and enforcement will keep varying state by state, and nothing in a federal youth-safety bill preempts that patchwork automatically. Cannabis businesses should keep working with counsel to confirm current local advertising rules rather than assuming a future federal standard will simplify -- or override -- what they already have to follow.

Slotting cannabis products into the same statutory sentence as narcotic drugs, gambling and alcohol tells you something about how Congress still sees state-legal marijuana, even now, with two dozen-plus states running fully licensed adult-use markets. It doesn't matter, in this bill's framing, whether the dispensary is operating under strict state licensing and paying state excise taxes -- for federal ad-restriction purposes, cannabis gets grouped with the products lawmakers consider inherently dangerous to minors, full stop. That's not a technical footnote; it's a signal about how far Congress still is from treating legal cannabis as an ordinary regulated consumer good.

At the same time, the fact that both a free-market think tank and the ACLU are raising nearly identical vagueness concerns is a strong hint that this bill, even if it passes both chambers, isn't going to be the last word. State laws built on similar duty-of-care and knowledge-standard language have already lost in court more than once, and there's little reason to think a federal version with comparable ambiguity sails through unchallenged. Passage would likely open a new chapter of litigation rather than close the book on the question.

Given all that, cannabis marketers are probably better served treating this bill as an early warning than as a countdown clock. Platforms tend to move on their own timeline, tightening ad policy and content rules ahead of any legal requirement to do so, and that shift can arrive well before Congress finishes its reconciliation process. The smarter move is watching platform policy pages as closely as the Senate floor schedule -- and checking in with counsel on current state rules -- rather than waiting for a final federal law that may still be a long way off.