New York Post. June 4, 2024.
Editorial: Hooray for Hochul: New York leads nation in protecting kids on social media
Hand it to Gov. Hochul for wrangling the Legislature into passing first-in-the-nation legislation to regulate social-media feeds for younger kids.
Major social-media firms, such as Meta and Google, have spent big lobbying against Hochul’s commonsense measures — and will surely spend more on challenging the laws in court.
And these are just first steps (Hochul’s push to ban cellphones in school, for example, is still ahead): There’s still a long way to go in protecting children from this century’s equivalent to cigarettes, but at least the gov has New York and the country moving in the right direction.
Caught up in the race to own eyeballs, social-media firms have refused to self-regulate, to make protecting young users a priority — to put child safety ahead of profits.
So it falls to government to mandate the necessary guardrails — and, it seems, to New York to get the ball rolling.
Assembly and state Senate leaders have acceded to Hochul’s late-session push to pass the New York Child Data Protection and the Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Acts.
The bills don’t impinge on the tech companies’ free-speech rights, but focus on the “recommendation algorithms” that lure and hook kids into their content, requiring default chronological feeds for users 18 or younger (unless they receive parental consent) and empowering parents to impose time limits on social-media use and in-app notifications.
The courts have long permitted the regulation of commercial speech — and free-speech rights don’t protect the targeting of minors.
This is the kind of win that state lawmakers can truly brag about to their constituents — and most importantly, it won’t cost New Yorkers a dime.
And anything New York lawmakers achieve without taking taxpayers to the cleaners is a win every time.
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Albany Times Union. June 4, 2024.
Editorial: Editorial: Unfinished business
The NY HEAT Act and medical aid in dying are among the measures the Legislature should pass before lawmakers gavel out this year’s session.
With the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, New York pledged to wean itself off the fossil fuels that are imperiling life on Earth, going all in on green energy while protecting the most vulnerable among us from bearing the costs of the ambitious shift. The 2019 law was a powerful statement of New York values: responsibility, leadership, innovation, equity. But although values point us to where we want to go, policy is the vehicle that gets us there. And we’re not covering the distance nearly fast enough.
That’s why we need to pass laws like the Home Energy Affordable Transition Act.
The NY HEAT Act would reduce greenhouse gas emissions while shielding low- to moderate-income New Yorkers from spikes in energy costs. Among other measures, it would get rid of the 100-foot rule, which mandates that utilities must provide free gas hookups to new customers within 100 feet of the existing network — connections that are subsidized by current ratepayers. That rule is one of the ways our laws are tilted in favor of fossil fuels. And if we truly want to wean ourselves off gas and oil, laws like that have to change.
The NY HEAT Act is one of the measures the state Legislature is still considering as the session enters its final days. Here are some of the other bills that are worthy of lawmakers’ attention:
The Medical Aid in Dying Act would give terminally ill people the option to end their lives with the help of lethal drugs prescribed by a physician, rather than spend their last days in agony. New Yorkers deserve the right to make that choice for themselves, with all responsible safeguards in place to prevent abuse.
A public redevelopment authority for The College of Saint Rose campus would make sure the needs and concerns of the community are given priority as plans move forward for the property’s reuse.
New York’s 42-year-old Bottle Bill has been a powerhouse in fighting pollution, but it’s overdue for an update: A new bill would raise the bottle deposit fee from a nickel to a dime, cover more beverages and increase the handling fee for redemption centers.
Another pollution-fighting tool is the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act, which would reduce the use of plastic packaging and shift the costs of dealing with package waste away from taxpayers and onto the companies that produce it.
The state’s four-year-old ban on the retail sale of flavored vapes has done basically zilch to keep the products off shelves. So we need to pass laws that boost enforcement and stop letting retailers keep the flavored nicotine products on hand.
Establishing a short-term rental registry would help communities get a handle on the number of Airbnbs and other temporary accommodations in their municipality, an important step toward deciding how to manage the industry.
The Renewable Capitol Act would not only let the state lead by example on green energy, it would bring a measure of environmental justice to Albany’s long-abused Sheridan Hollow neighborhood.
Other actions the Legislature should take include extending the work of the limousine task force, allowing distilleries to ship liquor directly to consumers, boosting government transparency by strengthening Freedom of Information Laws, easing judicial backlogs by removing the cap on the number of trial court judges, and passing crucial internet safety protections for children.
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