When New York’s governor and attorney general joined forces to pass a law trying to restrict social media companies’ ability to use algorithms to shape content for children, they expected Big Tech to put up a battle.
That fight has certainly arrived, but with far more opponents than anticipated.
A broad range of online service providers, including Google, TikTok and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has spent over $700,000 on lobbyists to press legislators and state officials, according to recent state disclosures.
The spending represents aggregate amounts that includes other items on the lobbyists’ agendas, and the disclosures do not state whether the companies are for or against the legislation. But interviews and public statements show that most are opposing the bill — and a related bill connected to child data privacy — or raising concerns about the measures going too far, with some saying it could have unintended consequences on e-commerce sites or digital news publishers.
Companies like eBay and Etsy and a news media trade group that includes The New York Times have also raised concerns about the bills, which would bar companies from using algorithms to produce “addictive feeds” for minors unless they have parental consent, and would limit the personal data from children that they can collect and sell.
The bills have powerful champions, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James, whose office largely wrote the legislation last year just before joining a multistate coalition that sued Meta for deploying features that “purposely addict children and teens.”
The legislation has also drawn significant support from Republican lawmakers, mirroring the bipartisan support social media regulation efforts have garnered in Congress and other states, and underscoring the anger politicians on both sides of the aisle have directed toward technology companies.
Several states, including California and Utah, as well as Congress, have attempted to rein in what the social media giants can show to children, but the powerful industry has fought them off legislatively and in the courtroom.
New York is now the latest battleground, and the bills’ opponents have resorted to the same playbook: hire lobbyists; lean into the dangers of regulating free speech; and assemble allies who represent vulnerable communities, including L.G.B.T.Q. groups and immigrant advocates, who argue that requirements like age verification or government IDs could push people away from valuable resources.
The main sponsor in the State Senate, Andrew Gounardes, a Brooklyn Democrat, says the effort to kill or weaken his legislation — which would also create an avenue for parents to sue social media companies that don’t adhere to the restrictions — illustrates the financial threat it poses to companies that use algorithms to direct addictive content to minors and cash in on advertising revenue from those feeds.
“What we are proposing strikes at the heart of their business model, a business model that generates billions of dollars for them at the expense of kids and their mental health,” Mr. Gounardes said last week at a news conference with parents supporting the bill.
Social media companies, as well as First Amendment advocates like the New York Civil Liberties Union, say that the proposal presents significant legal and practical challenges. They point out that there are few reliable ways to verify age online, and that courts have been largely resistant to similar efforts, which they argue restrict the free speech rights of both minors and companies.
And while the tech companies say they support lawmakers’ goal of keeping children safe online, they contend that the bill could have the opposite effect.
The national pro-tech group Chamber of Progress, led by Adam Kovacevich, a former Democratic operative and onetime Google executive, has argued that algorithms benefit young users by providing a community and giving them a more tailored and sophisticated experience.
Mr. Kovacevich, whose group is backed by Amazon, Apple, Google and Snap, which owns the social media app Snapchat, said the legislation “would actually make social media worse for teenagers.”
“Platforms use algorithms to down-rank hate speech, misinformation and clickbait, and to highlight age-appropriate content,” he said.
Another contentious element of the bill concerns the parental approval requirement. Under the proposed legislation, people under 18 would need parental permission to receive a feed that is curated by an algorithm, and certain limitations would be placed on access between midnight and 6 a.m.
Advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. youth have raised concerns that requiring parental consent would restrict the ability of young people to seek identity-affirming communities and resources online.
The high-stakes battle has created a tug of war over the loyalties of L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups and other liberal organizations in New York, which have traditionally found allies in the Democrat-led Legislature.
In recent days, three activist groups left the innocuous-sounding “New York Inclusive Internet Coalition,” created by tech interests that include Google, Meta and Yahoo, which had opposed the bill. A spokesman for one of the groups told The New York Times that the group was never a “willing signatory” to a letter criticizing the bill that the coalition sent to the governor and legislative leaders.
Casey Pick, a director at the Trevor Project, a national nonprofit focusing on L.G.B.T.Q. youth suicide prevention, said she supported the mission of the bills because some problems that social media can exacerbate — like body image issues, depression and anxiety — are known to disproportionately affect queer youth.
But Ms. Pick said social media could also be “a lifeline” for young people looking to expand their worlds, and that algorithms were a crucial part of that.
“Everything seems to be trying to make the world smaller,” she said, citing the rash of book bans and legislative efforts to quash classroom discussions of L.G.B.T.Q. life and culture. “The internet, in some ways, remains the place where the world is still large, and where folks can discover new things about themselves, new things about the world around them,” she said.
Many L.G.B.T.Q. groups, including the Ali Forney Center and Equality NY, raised similar concerns and joined the Inclusive Internet Coalition on these grounds. But in the past month, these groups have faced pressure to choose sides.
Several groups have dropped out of the coalition, while others, like SAGE, a nonprofit advocacy group for aging members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, have said that they were added to the coalition’s communications without approval.
“SAGE was not a willing signatory of the New York Inclusive Internet Coalition’s letter regarding this bill,” the group said. “We have been in contact with the coalition to have SAGE removed from the letter.”
One coalition member group, which requested anonymity to avoid angering Ms. James’s office, cited inappropriate pressure from the attorney general’s staff in its decision to not take sides in the issue.
Another group left the coalition after receiving assurances from the attorney general’s office that officials would soften provisions designed to keep children off social media late at night and would ensure that data used to establish lawful age was destroyed after verification, according to emails reviewed by The Times.
“There has been an intensive pressure campaign to silence nonprofits,” said Steven Choi, a coalition spokesman. “And so it is not a surprise that groups don’t want to deal with that kind of heat.”
A spokesman for Ms. James did not directly address the accusations that her office had pressured groups, but confirmed in a statement that the office had conducted outreach to “parents, kids, impacted organizations and even Big Tech.”
“Good policy involves diverse voices and experiences,” the statement said. “Our kids’ safety and well-being is at stake, and we have a responsibility to protect them — which is what this legislation will do.”
The debate over the social media regulation bills is playing out against a national backdrop of rising mental health disorders and suicides among adolescents. A year ago, the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, warned that social media could present “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”
Kathleen Spence, a middle-school teacher on Long Island who appeared at the State Capitol last week in support of the bills, said she had firsthand knowledge of those risks.
She said her daughter Alexis opened her first Instagram account when she was 11, in violation of the app’s rules that limit its use to those 13 and older, and was soon bombarded by algorithmic feeds that she said caused her daughter to develop eating disorders and cut herself.
Alexis was considering suicide when her parents, whose attempts to police her social media use were easily defeated with fake accounts and app-hiding devices, intervened and got her help, Ms. Spence said. She and her husband blamed Meta for their daughter’s social media addiction in a lawsuit filed in 2022.
“There is something wrong here and something needs to be done about it,” Ms Spence said.