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New York State has moved to protect kids from addictive social media platforms, announcing on Tuesday that the SAFE for Kids Act has been finalized and will go into effect early next year.
The law promises to stop social media companies from feeding kids personalized content via algorithms and sending them notifications deep into the night. But any parents hoping this will be a fix-all should think again.
Similar legislation implemented around the country has been blocked by courts, and social media laws in other countries like Australia and the United Kingdom have proven that kids find ways around restrictions faster than the law can keep up.
Maybe the SAFE for Kids Act will keep some tweens from being woken up by Instagram at 2 a.m., but parents beware: lawmakers can’t be kids’ online chaperones. It’s up to family, educators, and community to hold the line.
This week, Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James announced the finalized version of the SAFE for Kids Act — short for “Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation” — and confirmed it will go into effect on January 25, 2027.
The new law would prevent qualifying social media companies from presenting minors with an algorithmically personalized feed and would also bar them from delivering them notifications between midnight and 6 a.m.
New York kids can only overrule the default setting if a parent consents, according to the law, which will be enforceable by civil penalties and age-verification processes, like government ID verification, facial age estimation, and checks against official records.
Critics have warned that age verification means that everyone is less free online, and that requiring users to prove their identities can jeopardize adults’ right to go online and speak anonymously without government oversight.
New York’s law, to its credit, has attempted to placate concerns by giving platforms the option to choose “zero-knowledge” age verification systems, which are cryptographic and don’t share information with third parties except for a user’s adult/minor status.
Even still, the law is vulnerable, and any parent who thinks it’s a permanent fix should think again. Other states, like California and Arkansas, have tried to implement similar notification curfews, only to be blocked by courts, who deemed the regulations unconstitutional.
Other laws attempting to ban minors from social media across the world have shown that wherever legislators have stood between kids and their apps, the kids find a way to circumvent them.
When Australia banned minors from social media in late 2025, many kids simply made new accounts, asked for help with bypassing restrictions, downloaded VPNs to change their geolocation data, and even used an older person’s ID or put on makeup to trick age verification barriers — according to the government’s own report.
A YouGov survey of Australian parents also found that 27% reported their kids were switching over to alternative, less regulated platforms, meaning the law may have sent them to sketchier parts of the internet’s Wild West — and those are just the parents who know what their kids are really doing online.
When Britain enforced age checks for pornography and dangerous online material that same year, VPN downloads from Proton rose 1,200%. The UK government’s own investigation found that 40% of 11 to 17-year-olds had circumvented age checks, as of this month.
Of course, social media restrictions on kids do keep some of them offline. But here in New York there will surely be kids downloading VPNs, using parents’ accounts to get on platforms, and flocking to unregulated websites to access the content they’re after.
That’s not because New York lawmakers don’t have kids’ interests at heart, but because Albany will never be able to stand in for family and community in the battle to keep kids safe from online harm.
Parents, families, schools, and community members need to step up.
To give them their due, they have been trying: Schools around the country have been implementing bell-to-bell cell phone bans. More and more parents are keeping their kids off social media until they’re old enough to scroll responsibly. Flip phones and dumb phones are having a moment. Even kids themselves are expressing a desire to unplug.
But corrosive online material such as gambling, pornography, religious radicalization or school shooter manifestos spread insidiously online and the government can never be a stand-in for grassroots interventions — and parents shouldn’t count on them to be their saviors.
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