New York would restrict the way online platforms like Instagram and YouTube can collect and share children’s personal information and let parents keep their kids from being bombarded by “addictive” feeds from accounts they don’t follow, under legislation proposed Wednesday.
The bills offered by state leaders are aimed at protecting young people from features designed to keep them endlessly scrolling, endangering their mental health and development, Attorney General Letitia James said.
“Young New Yorkers are struggling with record levels of anxiety and depression, and social media companies that use addictive features to keep minors on their platforms longer are largely to blame,” James said. “This legislation will help tackle the risks of social media affecting our children and protect their privacy.”
The regulations sought by James and Gov. Kathy Hochul, both Democrats, are similar to rules already in place in Europe, where violations could incur fines worth a percentage of revenue, which could run into the billions of dollars for wealthy tech companies.
Young New Yorkers are struggling with record levels of anxiety and depression, and social media companies that use addictive features to keep minors on their platforms longer are largely to blame,
I don’t think this is necessarily true, but I do think social media isn’t helping in any way.
There’s so much going on in this world that is crushing us millennials and below. Recently I think the complete greed that companies can get away with has destroyed any of our dreams of financial ladder mobility. The thought of making 6 figures and still struggling with rent and groceries is so fucking depressing. These sorts of depressing and anxiety inducing events are just more profound in huge cities because companies get away with so much more there it seems.
I will say that staying off FB and Instagram, while it didn’t cure me, it did help my mental health a notable amount. I also think going from Reddit to Lemmy has been helping my online addiction and attention span as well. I really do think Reddit and Tik Tok and other infinite short-form content algorithms have been hurting people’s attention span. I’ve been slowly resuming reading books, but for awhile there I stopped, and I used to read a ton of books when I was a kid.
Well, yeah. But they’re not going help out working class citizens. That’s not who pays them.
Letitia James must be incredibly busy.
This seems like a better approach than Utah’s lawsuit against TikTok.
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Oh please with the righteous indignation. Politicians of both parties just don’t like the vital anti-capitalist messaging on the platform that goes against the K-College and Major Media “the boot will set you free” capitalist propaganda doctrine.
They need American children to grow to fight eachother over red vs. blue social wedges that provide the illusion of choice and keep them divided while the capitalists exploit their productivity, rob them blind, and continue to control economic policy through the Republicans and Neoliberal middle managers the oligarchs fully own.
We need to stop these channels manipulating our youth into scrutinizing our inscrutible “free” market, after all.
What our children need to know is that the
oligarchsjob creators acting out ofinsatiable, sociopathic greedrational self-interest will rain prosperity down on all of us as long as we protect our belovedsocietyeconomy, and capitalist practices will save humanity from our many crises of completely unknowable origins… like climate change! But beware the unproductive filthy takers, as they will greedily lower your local property values with their continued selfish existence in cardboard boxes under freeways. They’re the real villains.
