Bereaved parents saw their hopes for change dashed after a bill meant to protect children from sexual predators and drug dealers online died in the Colorado state legislature last month.

Several of those parents had helped shape the bill, including Lori Schott, whose 18-year-old daughter Annalee died by suicide in 2020 after consuming content on TikTok and Instagram about depression, anxiety and suicide.

“When the legislators failed to vote and pushed it off onto some fake calendar date where they’re not even in session, to not even have accountability for where they stand – as a parent, it’s a slap in the face,” said Schott, who identifies as a pro-second amendment Republican. “It’s a slap in the face of my daughter, and to other kids that we’ve lost.”

Had the legislation passed, it would have required social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to investigate and take down accounts engaged in gun or drug sales or in the sexual exploitation or trafficking of minors. It also mandated the creation of direct hotlines to tech company personnel for law enforcement and a 72-hour response window for police requests, a higher burden than under current law.

Additionally, platforms would have had to report on how many minors used their services, how often they did so, for how long and how much those young users engaged with content that violated company policies. Several big tech firms registered official positions on the bill. According to Colorado lobbying disclosures, Meta’s longtime in-state lobby firm, Headwater Strategies, is registered as a proponent for changing the bill. Google and TikTok also hired lobbyists to oppose it.

“We’re just extremely disappointed,” said Kim Osterman, whose 18-year-old son Max died in 2021 after purchasing drugs spiked with fentanyl from a dealer he met on Snapchat. “[Legislators] chose big tech over protecting children and families.”

Protections for users of social media (SB 25-086) passed both chambers before being vetoed on 24 April by governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, who cited the bill’s potential to “erode privacy, freedom and innovation” as reasons for his veto. Colorado’s senate voted to override the veto on 25 April, yet those efforts fell apart on 28 April when the state house opted to delay the vote until after the legislative session ended, effectively blocking an override and keeping the bill alive.

The bill originally passed the senate by a 29-6 vote and the house by a 46-18 margin. On 25 April, the senate voted 29-6 to override Polis’s veto. Lawmakers anticipated that the house would take up the override later that day. At the time, according to those interviewed, there appeared to be enough bipartisan support to successfully overturn his veto.

“It was an easy vote for folks because of what we were voting on: protecting kids from social media companies,” said the senator Lindsey Daugherty, a Democrat and a co-sponsor of the bill. She said she urged house leadership to hold the vote Friday, but they declined: “The speaker knew the governor didn’t want us to do it on Friday, because they knew we would win.”

The parents who advocated for the bill attribute its failure to an unexpected, 11th-hour lobbying campaign by a far-right gun owners’ association in Colorado. Two state legislators as well as seven people involved in the legislative process echoed the parents’ claims.

An abnormal, last-minute campaign disrupts bipartisan consensus

Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO) cast the bill as an instrument of government censorship in texts and emails over the legislation’s provisions against “ghost guns”, untraceable weapons assembled from kits purchased online, which would have been prohibited.

RMGO launched massive social media and email campaigns urging its 200,000 members to contact their legislators to demand they vote against the bill. A source with knowledge of the workings of the Colorado state house described the gun group’s social media and text campaigns, encouraging Republicans voters to contact their legislators to demand opposition to the bill, as incessant.

“[Legislators] were getting countless calls and emails and being yelled at by activists. It was a full-fledged attack. There was a whole campaign saying: ‘This is a government censorship bill,’” they said.

The group’s actions were instrumental in a campaign to deter house Republicans from voting against the veto, resulting in the quashing of the bill, and unexpected from an organization that had been facing funding shortfalls, according to 10 people interviewed who were involved in the design of the bill and legislative process. Sources in the Colorado state house spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal from RMGO.

The house had delayed the vote until 28 April, which allowed RMGO time to launch a campaign against the bill over the weekend. When lawmakers reconvened Monday, the house voted 51-13 to postpone the override until after the legislative session ended – effectively killing the effort.

The gun activists’ mass text message campaign to registered Republican voters asserted the social media bill would constitute an attempt to “compel social media companies to conduct mass surveillance of content posted on their platforms” to search for violations of Colorado’s gun laws, describing the bill as an attack on first and second amendment rights, according to texts seen by the Guardian.

A familiar, aggressive foe

Founded in 1996, RMGO claims to have a membership of more than 200,000 activists. It is recognized as a far-right group that takes a “no-compromise” stance on gun rights. Dudley Brown, its founder and leader, also serves as the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, which positions itself further to the right than the National Rifle Association (NRA). RMGO has mounted criticism against the NRA for being too moderate and politically compromising. Critics have described RMGO as “bullies” and “extremists” because of its combative tactics, which include targeting and smearing Democrats and moderate Republicans. The group did not respond to requests for comment on its legislative efforts.

RMGO is a well-known presence at the Colorado capitol, typically opposing gun-control legislation. Daugherty described its typical campaign tactics as “scary”. She got rid of her X account after being singled out by the group over her work on a bill to ban assault weapons earlier this year.

“When we were running any of the gun bills at the capitol, they put my and some other legislators’ faces on their websites,” she said. A screenshot of a tweet from RMGO showed Daugherty with a red “traitor” stamp on her forehead.

The group’s campaign resulted in the spread of misinformation about the bill’s impact on gun ownership rights, sources involved in the legislative process said.

“The reason I was in support of the bill, and in support of the override, was it has to do with child trafficking and protecting the kids,” said the senator Rod Pelton, a Republican, who voted in favor of the veto override in the senate. “I just didn’t really buy into the whole second amendment argument.”

The bill had enjoyed the backing of all 23 of Colorado’s district attorneys as well as bipartisan state house support.

RMGO’s late-stage opposition to the social media bill marked a break from its usual playbook. The group generally weighs in on legislation earlier in the process, according to eight sources, including two of the bill’s co-sponsors, Daugherty and the representative Andy Boesenecker.

“They really ramped up their efforts,” Boesenecker said. “It was curious to me that their opposition came in very late and appeared to be very well funded at the end.”

In recent years, RMGO group had been less active due to well-documented money problems that limited its ability to campaign on legislative issues. In a 2024 interview, the group’s leaders stated plainly that it struggled with funding. Daugherty believes RMGO would not have been able to embark on such an apparently costly outreach campaign without a major infusion of cash. A major text campaign like the one launched for SB-86 was beyond their financial capacity, she said. Others in Colorado politics agreed.

“Rocky Mountain Gun Owners have not been important or effective in probably at least four years in the legislature. They’ve had no money, and then all of a sudden they had tons of money, funding their rise back into power,” said Dawn Reinfeld, executive director of Blue Rising Together, a Colorado-based non-profit focused on youth rights.

The campaign made legislators feel threatened, with primary elections in their districts over the weekend, Daugherty said, particularly after accounts on X, formerly Twitter, bombarded the bill’s supporters.

“Folks were worried about being primaried, mostly the Republicans, and that’s kind of what it came down to,” Daugherty said.

Aaron Ping’s 16-year-old son Avery died of an overdose in December after buying what he thought was ecstasy over Snapchat and receiving instead a substance laced with fentanyl. Ping saw the campaign against the bill as an intentional misconstrual of its intent.

“It was looking like the bill was going to pass, until all this misinformation about it taking away people’s gun rights because it addresses people buying illegal shadow guns off the internet,” he said.

Ping gave testimony in support of the bill in February before the first senate vote, alongside other bereaved parents, teens in recovery and a district attorney.

“The bill gave me hope that Avery’s legacy would be to help. So when it didn’t pass, it was pretty soul-crushing,” said Ping.

States take up online child-safety bills as federal lawmakers falter

Several states, including California, Maryland, Vermont, Minnesota, Hawaii, Illinois, New Mexico, South Carolina and Nevada, have introduced legislation aimed at improving online safety for children in the past two years. These efforts have faced strong resistance from the tech industry, including heavy lobbying and lawsuits.

Maryland became the first state to successfully pass a Kids Code bill, signing it into law in May 2024. But the victory may be short-lived: NetChoice, a tech industry coalition representing companies including Meta, Google and Amazon, quickly launched a legal challenge against the measure, which is ongoing.

Meanwhile, in the US federal government, the kids online safety act (Kosa), which had wound its way through the legislature for years, died in February when it failed to pass in the House after years of markups and votes. A revamped version of the bill was reintroduced to Congress on 14 May.

In California, a similar bill known as the age-appropriate design code act, modeled after UK legislation, was blocked in late 2023. A federal judge granted NetChoice a preliminary injunction, citing potential violations of the first amendment, which stopped the law from going into effect.