Governor Kathy Hochul, New York Attorney General Letitia James, State Senator Andrew Gounardes, and Assemblymember Nily Rozic announced new legislation to regulate unhealthy social media usage by prohibiting minors from accessing addictive feeds without parental consent.
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Recent research has shown devastating mental health effects associated with children and young adults’ excessive social media use, including increased rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and self harm.
Children also face unique risks when their data is collected online.
The two bills, both sponsored by State Senator Gounardes and Assemblymember Rozic, will protect children by prohibiting online platforms from collecting and sharing their personal data without consent and limiting addictive features of social media platforms that are known to harm their mental health and development.
Multiple studies have shown that social media can cause a wide range of negative mental health effects for children and young adults.
Addictive feeds, which are designed to harness personal data to serve users content to keep them on the platform for as long as possible, have increased the addictive nature of social media platforms and heightened the risk to young users’ wellbeing.
97 percent of teenagers report being online daily, and research has found that frequent social media use among adolescents can be associated with long term developmental harms. Multiple studies have found a link between excessive social media use, poor sleep quality, and poor mental health among young people.
Other research has shown that adolescents who spend more than three hours per day on social media face double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes, including symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Additionally, research has found that for young girls, the association between poor mental health and social media use is stronger than the associations between poor mental health and binge drinking, sexual assault, obesity, or hard drug use.
Children also face various risks to their privacy online. While other states and countries have enacted laws to limit the personal data that online platforms can collect from minors, no such restrictions currently exist in New York. This current deficiency leaves children vulnerable to having their location and other personal data tracked, shared, and sold online.
The two pieces of legislation introduced today will add critical protections for children and young adults online by restricting the collection of minors’ personal data and changing how young users are served content online to reduce the harms of addictive features that keep children on social media longer. ■