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 — an꧅d will 𒐪surely 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 toꦏ 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 m💮andate 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 targetin♎g of minors.

This is the kind of win that state lawmakers can truly brag about to th𝄹eir constituents — and most importantly, it won’t cost New Yorkers a dime.

And anything New York lawmakers achieve without taking taxpayers tꦅo🦂 the cleaners is a win every time.