(WNY News Now) Under the leadership of New York Attorney General Letitia James, a coalition of 32 nonpartisan attorneys general is calling on Congress to enact the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) in order to address the risks that social media poses to children’s mental health.
NEW YORK As part of a bipartisan coalition of 32 attorneys general, New York Attorney General Letitia James today called on Congress to enact the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would shield kids from new technologies, including some of the most harmful elements used by social media firms. Given the strength of the nation-leading legislation that Attorney General James advanced to combat addictive social media algorithms in New York, the coalition and Attorney General James wrote to congressional leadership urging them to include a clause in KOSA that ensures it would not preempt any state laws with stronger protections. While allowing states like New York to have robust safeguards in place, such a measure would assist provide a guaranteed baseline of protection for American youngsters, especially as other states move forward with legislation modeled after New York.
Attorney General James stated, “We know that social media is largely to blame for the struggles that young people are facing worldwide.” For this reason, I pushed for laws to shield young people in New York from these addicting platforms, and I’m happy to see that other states are considering and adopting similar measures. We can create a foundation of protections for children throughout the country with KOSA, but we also need to make sure that states have the authority to implement more comprehensive protections for their children as necessary. Combating addicting social media is not a party issue; rather, it is about safeguarding children and making sure that the government can function efficiently at all levels.
The bipartisan coalition and Attorney General James stressed the need for federal action to address the national youth mental health epidemic, which is largely the result of social media businesses targeting children. The coalition pointed out that social media companies make money by making their platforms irresistible to kids and then selling user data to marketers without warning users or their parents about any possible concerns. The attorneys general are urging Congress to take immediate action to improve online safety for children, who spend an average of almost five hours a day on the internet.
If approved, KOSA would allow parents and children to choose not to get algorithmic suggestions and would block some of the most addictive features of social media sites, such as platform awards and video autoplay. Additionally, it would mandate that online platforms assign all accounts belonging to minors to the highest safety settings by default and provide new resources for parents to better safeguard their children online. These actions, together with recent revisions to the proposed legislation that better support state enforcement, were praised by Attorney General James and the bipartisan coalition in their letter today.
The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) is able to draft regulations that will better protect children’s online privacy and take action against the use of addictive algorithmic feeds for underage users’ social media accounts thanks to the legislation that Attorney General James advanced, that Senator Andrew Gounardes and Assemblymember Nily Rozic introduced, and that Governor Hochul signed into law. Social media firms will have to limit nightly notifications and addictive feeds for users under the age of 18 unless parental approval is obtained, according to the SAFE for Kids Act, the first bill of its sort to be enacted into law in the United States. Online sites are not allowed to collect, use, share, or sell the personal information of anybody under the age of eighteen unless they have informed consent or it is absolutely required for the website’s operation, according to the New York Child Data Protection Act. Additionally, it gives OAG the authority to enforce the legislation and pursue up to $5,000 in damages or civil penalties for each infraction. Following the conclusion of OAG’s regulation procedure, both statutes will become operative.
Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming are among the attorneys general who have signed the letter alongside Attorney General James.
In the battle to safeguard Americans online, particularly young adults, and to address issues with social media firms, Attorney General James has taken the lead nationally. A bipartisan coalition of 14 attorneys general, led by Attorney General James, filed complaints against TikTok last month for allegedly harming the mental health of young people. In September 2024, Attorney General James spearheaded a bipartisan group of forty-two attorneys general who urged Congress to enact warning labels on social media platforms, as the US Surgeon General had demanded. Attorney General James spearheaded a bipartisan group of forty-one attorneys general in March 2024, calling on Meta to address the increase in fraudulent and scammers taking over Facebook and Instagram accounts. Attorney General James and a bipartisan group of thirty-two attorneys general sued Meta on a federal level in October 2023 for contributing to the youth mental health crisis and causing harm to the mental health of young people. Attorney General James conducted an investigation into the role of online platforms in the Buffalo mass shooting and published his findings in October 2022. Attorney General James was one of 44 attorneys general that joined a bipartisan alliance in May 2021 to urge Facebook to halt its plans to introduce an Instagram version for kids under the age of 13.