NY’s ‘SAFE For Kids Act’: A Lesson in How Not to Regulate The Internet

We’ve written a few times about New York’s preposterously bonkers “SAFE for Kids Act” (SAFE standing for “Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation”). It’s an obviously unconstitutional bill that insists, without any real evidence, that basically all social media algorithmic feeds are somehow addictive and problematic.

Last week we posted a letter by a NY-based parent to his own legislators explaining why the bill would inherently do more harm than good.

But, no matter, the NY legislature passed a slightly modified version of the bill last week, which you can read here. The bill no longer has random, unsubstantiated bans on kids using social media in the middle of the night, but still bans algorithmic feeds for kids.

This means age verification will effectively become mandatory, despite claims to the contrary from bill supporters. If you will get in trouble for serving some type of content to those under 18, you need to have a system to determine how old they are. Thus, privacy-damaging age verification is effectively mandated.

But, even more important, the effective banning of algorithmic feeds is ridiculous. There is no evidence that the algorithmic nature of feeds has anything to do with any harm. It is all a fever dream by ignorant politicians. I know for a fact that when the sponsor of this bill, Andrew Gounardes, was asked by a constituent for evidence of the harms, he was dismissed as simply repeating “big tech talking points.” Gounardes seems absolutely convinced that any criticism of the bill must be from “big tech” lobbyists and refuses to consider the very real problems of this bill.

And the same is true for NY Governor Kathy Hochul, who cheered on the passage of the bill:

Governor Kathy Hochul today celebrated the legislative passage of two nation-leading bills to protect kids online. The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act will restrict a child’s access to addictive feeds on social media, and the New York Child Data Protection Act will keep children’s personal data safe.

“New York is leading the nation to protect our kids from addictive social media feeds and shield their personal data from predatory companies,” Governor Hochul said. “Together, we’ve taken a historic step forward in our efforts to address the youth mental health crisis and create a safer digital environment for young people. I am grateful to Attorney General James, Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins and Speaker Heastie, and bill sponsors Senator Gounardes and Assemblymember Rozic for their vital partnership in advancing this transformative legislation.”

Remember, Hochul has been trying to blame social media for repeated failings of her own administration, so it’s little surprise she would celebrate this law.

But, again, to date, the research simply does not support the idea that algorithmic feeds are harmful or addictive. Studies have been done on both Meta properties and Twitter that find the only real difference between algorithmic and chronological feeds is that when forced to use chronological feeds, users see a lot more disinformation and junk they don’t want.

What Gounardes, Hochul, and lots of very silly people refuse to understand is that algorithmic recommendations not only give users more of what they want to see, but they also help remove the stuff they don’t want to see. And that’s kind of important.

But, really, just for the sake of comparison, if NY politicians are allowed to determine what content you see when you open a social media app, it also means they think they can control what content you see when you open a news story. What’s to stop them from similarly (falsely) claiming that editorial recommendations in the NY Times or the WSJ are “addictive” and all media sites need to only post articles in chronological order?

These requirements clearly violate the First Amendment, and it’s not a “big tech talking point” to say so.

It’s getting ridiculously exhausting to have to point out the problems with all of these clueless state laws from very foolish politicians, and for them to falsely insist that any critiques must come from “big tech.”

It would be nice if there were serious lawmakers out there willing to have serious discussions on the policies they’re thinking about. Tragically, New York has a bunch of clowns instead, just like tons of other states these days. It’s not partisan in any way. New York and California, both fairly blue states, have been pushing dozens of these kinds of laws. But so have Florida, Texas, Utah, Ohio, Arkansas and more.

Unfortunately these days, constitutionally infirm anti-internet legislation has become a bipartisan pastime. And the most likely result is that more taxpayer funds are going to be wasted while these nonsense bills are inevitably rejected as unconstitutional.

It seems that if you sponsor a bill that is eventually thrown out as unconstitutional, it should be grounds for impeachment.