ALBANY – Gov. Kathy Hochul on Monday called for increasing child protections on social media and artificial intelligence and investing in peer-to-peer mental health training for teens.
The proposed legislation would require social media platforms to automatically use the highest privacy settings for anyone under 18, disable open chat features to prevent strangers from messaging minors and disable location sharing, Hochul said. It would also limit young people’s interactions with artificial intelligence companions known as companion bots, which simulate a human relationship with a user.
“I will not rest until I know our students are safe, healthy and happy because we still have these predators and criminals lurking in the shadows of the internet,” Hochul said as she announced her proposals at her alma mater, Hamburg High School in western New York.
Hochul called for expanding a pilot program that provides mental health training to high school sophomores, helping them help their friends, identify signs of distress and encourage them to reach out to adults.
“Today, we continue to break new ground to give our children the tools and safeguards they need to meet the unprecedented mental health challenges and real-world dangers that can sometimes be a byproduct of navigating today’s digital world,” she said in a statement.
The proposals are part of the Democrat’s 2026 legislative agenda and come as she and the 213 members of the state Legislature face election in November.
Hochul will give her full agenda in her State of the State address on January 13, with details of how she plans to pay for it released in her budget proposal a week later.
Hochul and lawmakers passed several laws last year that restrict social media platforms and artificial intelligence and increase safeguards for youth users. They include banning social media platforms from providing addictive, algorithm-based social media feeds to promote content to people under 18 without parental consent; restricting sites from collecting, using and sharing personal information of minors; and requiring social media platforms to display labels warning of the potential negative mental health impacts on youth users.
The latest proposals would require age verifications, including for online games, and allow parents to set limits on children’s financial transactions.
The legislation requires platforms to have the highest privacy settings for children by default, so that strangers cannot see their profiles, tag or message. Children under the age of 13 require parental permission for new connections.
The proposal also requires certain artificial intelligence chatbot features to be disabled for children on social media platforms.
“These common-sense proposals from Governor Hochul will better protect New York’s youth from the harms of addictive and manipulative technology, and help end the ongoing national mental health emergency for children and adolescents,” Julie Scelfo, executive director of Mothers Against Media Addiction, said in a released statement.
