After years of struggling in federal court to defend its regulation of speech online and in the real world, New York is getting creative in how it seeks to dissuade purportedly harmful words and behaviors, particularly through obligations on tech platforms.The Empire State’s next gambit is treating social media itself as an “addictive” substance, and its core components as addictive features, to coerce platforms into speech that denounces their own products and services when served to users in New York.
Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul set the stage for a litigious 2026 by signing a bill into law (S4505/A5346) that treats social media like tobacco and alcohol, requiring unavoidable warning labels on “predatory features such as algorithmic feeds, endless scroll, autoplay, notifications, and ‘likes'” that must be shown prominently whenever users visit platforms.
As with the recent flood of social media regulation from the U.K. to Australia, Hochul justified the law as “protecting our kids,” pointing to former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s report on social media and youth mental health and its claim that research shows double the risk of anxiety and depression in adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media.
But her office also portrayed the law as simply mandating one form of “consumer warning labels” that are routine on even mundane products and services, such as child-suffocation warnings on plastic packaging and flashing-lights warnings on video games that could trigger “users with photosensitive epilepsy.”
Hochul deemed herself instrumental to the final language of the bill, saying she “negotiated a chapter amendment” that lays out how the system works. It gives sweeping power to the attorney general to decide what counts as an “addictive” platform or feature, and to the commissioner of mental health to prescribe the specific warning text.
“Users will not be able to bypass or click through the warnings,” Hochul’s office emphasized. (While her press release was Friday, the bill tracker shows the governor signed it Dec. 19 and Common Sense Media celebrated her signature of “our bill” Dec. 20.)
Ongoing Musk suit didn’t stop James from making demands
Compelling speech from disfavored services, especially social media and pro-life counseling, has not gone well in court for New York, California and other politically blue jurisdictions in recent years, from the Supreme Court on down.
California abandoned its law forcing pro-life pregnancy centers to tell patients where they can get abortions and disclose that they don’t perform or refer for abortions after SCOTUS found it likely unconstitutional in 2018. Delaware quickly gave up on its similar law this year following a First Amendment suit.
New York Attorney General Letitia James has flopped in her defense of both state law and her own enforcement practices around social media and pro-life counseling.
A judge blocked New York’s law against “hateful conduct” on social media but refused to sanction James for subsequently pressuring platforms to censor constitutionally protected speech related to the Israel-Gaza war, deeming her letters “non-coercive” and “pursuant to at least one independent statutory authority” besides the hateful conduct law.
Her track record is worse on saber-rattling against pro-life pregnancy centers and activists, with courts rebuking James for trying to muzzle promoters of so-called abortion pill reversal and sidewalk counselors who seek to talk women out of entering abortion clinics. One judge even compared her efforts to the “Ministry of Truth” in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The AG’s office is facing a new lawsuit this month by school board members that alleges James threatened them from office for describing transgender students with sex-based pronouns and even for allowing debate on males in girls’ facilities.
The onslaught of litigation hasn’t dissuaded the former mortgage-fraud defendant from pushing the First Amendment envelope in collaboration with Gov. Hochul.
Despite an ongoing lawsuit by Elon Musk’s X, James ordered social media platforms Oct. 2 to start disclosing in biannual reports “whether and how their existing policies deal with hate speech, racism, misinformation, and other types of content,” as required by the Hochul-signed Stop Hiding Hate Act. X filed its opposition to James’s motion to dismiss this month.
