{"id":205320,"date":"2026-04-21T22:20:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T22:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/205320\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T22:20:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T22:20:08","slug":"attorneys-raise-questions-over-nyc-council-bills-that-would-limit-childrens-social-media-usage-to-1-hour-daily","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/205320\/","title":{"rendered":"Attorneys raise questions over NYC Council bills that would limit children\u2019s social media usage to 1 hour daily"},"content":{"rendered":"

A set of bills that City Council members<\/a> are touting as a way to hold social media companies accountable for harming children\u2019s mental health is facing criticism from some attorneys, who say the legislation would open the city up to lawsuits for civil rights violations.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

The bills, introduced by Council Members Althea Stevens (D-Bronx) and Nantasha Williams (D-Queens), would limit social media usage to one hour a day for those under 17 years old and would require reports on the online activity of people under 24 years old who attend Department of Youth and Community Development programming and get into in-person altercations.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are here today to finally hold the billionaire social media CEOs accountable for \u2026 pushing content that forces children to give them their attention,\u201d said Council Member Shekar Krishnan (D-Queens) at a rally outside City Hall ahead of a Tuesday hearing on the bills. \u201cIncreasingly, that content is violent news, dangerous trends and fueling feelings of isolation and anxiety.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was joined by City Council Speaker Julie Menin, and Council Members Tiffany Caban (D-Queens) and Stevens, who cited studies showing social media has harmed children\u2019s mental health and told reporters students have told them they want protections from those harms.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, Justin Harrison, senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said he believed the bill would expose the city to lawsuits from social media companies because it would violate both their and children\u2019s First Amendment rights.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bill has significant constitutional problems,\u201d Harrison said. \u201cTeenagers have First Amendment rights, and that includes a right to browse the internet, a right to consume information, a right to find friends, find community and find networks online. This sort of blanket, one-size-fits-all approach that the city appears to be taking, limiting access to all the same content for all minors, is really too broad a measure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harrison added that having to prove to a company how old you are online is a significant privacy and surveillance issue that courts are still debating.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

He also raised concerns that the level of monitoring of people\u2019s social media activity necessary to report on what those under 24 who get into altercations are doing on social media would be unconstitutional. Council Member Caban said she shared those concerns during Tuesday\u2019s hearing, and some advocates who testified before the council said they were concerned it could result in increased policing of youth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Harrison and New York Law School professor Michael Goodyear also raised questions over the practicality of enforcing the laws. Both said that, because children could theoretically trick social media companies into thinking they were in a different geographic location by using a different VPN or uploading a photo of fake identification to suggest they were adults, it would make it difficult for social media companies to be in compliance and avoid penalties in ways that wouldn\u2019t be completely their fault.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Goodyear also said that social media companies facing different restrictions in different states and cities could make it hard for them to operate effectively in what he referred to as a \u201cpatchwork system\u201d of enforcement.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe also have to think about how this interplays with the state laws \u2026 as well as the patchwork of laws that are emerging across the country,\u201d Goodyear said. \u201cThat does make it increasingly difficult for social media companies to fulfill their job and provide social media products that are effective for consumers, if they have to comply with 50 different state laws and know how many different city laws.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fight to control social media<\/p>\n

The council is certainly not the first to argue that social media companies\u2019 negligence has caused depression and anxiety in users, particularly youth, and to take action against them on those grounds. Just last month, social media companies Meta and Google were found liable<\/a> for causing depression and anxiety in users in a landmark California case, and Meta was found liable for failing to protect kids from exploitation in New Mexico.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are currently about 4,000 pending cases alleging social media companies are liable for mental or physical harm to users, NPR reports<\/a>. Many are making arguments similar to those made about the tobacco industry in the 1990s: that social media companies knew about the risks to children and users generally, but negligently did not warn or provide sufficient protection measures for users.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Notably, the New York Court of Appeals is currently considering a wrongful death case<\/a> where a mother is arguing Meta and ByteDance, which owns TikTok, are liable for her son\u2019s death because videos he saw on social media platforms pushed him to take part in subway surfing, which ended his life.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

New York City and State have taken a litany of enforcement and regulatory actions against social media companies in recent years. The state passed two 2024<\/a> laws, the SAFE for Kids and Child Data Protection Acts, which prevent social media companies from providing algorithm-based content feeds to kids and collecting their data, and the city filed a suit against Meta and in California federal court last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, Justin said laws limiting kids\u2019 social media usage wouldn\u2019t necessarily prevent people from suing over harms caused by social media platforms \u2014 or tech giants from litigation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Stevens said Tuesday she was open to feedback on the bills and would look to continue amending them to accomplish her goal of protecting children\u2019s mental health from social media companies.\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A set of bills that City Council members are touting as a way to hold social media companies…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205321,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[4207,2710,9,1057,56,63,65,64,4015],"class_list":{"0":"post-205320","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-children","9":"tag-law","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-city-council","12":"tag-ny","13":"tag-nyc","14":"tag-nyc-headlines","15":"tag-nyc-news","16":"tag-social-media"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}