Kathy Hochul Social Media Law: A Marketer's Guide

When Governor Kathy Hochul announced her January 2026 legislative package — adding AI chatbot restrictions, expanded age verification, and parental financial monitoring on top of the existing SAFE for Kids Act — every marketer with a teen or young-adult audience suddenly had a compliance problem to manage. The package is the most far-reaching state-level social media regulation in the United States, and it reshapes how brands reach, target, and engage users under 18.

This guide explains what the Kathy Hochul social media law actually covers, what platforms must change, how the rules affect day-to-day marketing decisions, and the five-step roadmap your team can use to stay compliant without losing reach you cannot afford to lose.

What is the Kathy Hochul social media law?

The Kathy Hochul social media law is a package of New York State legislation — the SAFE for Kids Act, the Child Data Protection Act, and 2026 expansion proposals — restricting algorithmic feeds, AI chatbots, and addictive features for users under 18. Platforms face fines up to $5,000 per violation, and the rules apply to any service accessed in New York.

The three pieces of legislation

The phrase “Kathy Hochul social media law” is shorthand for three overlapping instruments. According to the New York Governor’s Office, the SAFE for Kids Act (Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation) bans algorithmic feeds and overnight notifications for users under 18 unless verifiable parental consent is provided. The New York Child Data Protection Act restricts how platforms collect, process, and sell data on minors. The 2026 expansion proposals, reported by Gothamist, add AI chatbot disablement, stricter age verification, default privacy settings, and parental visibility into financial transactions for minor users.

A separate but related bill signed in December 2025 requires warning labels on addictive social media platforms — adding another disclosure obligation on top of the SAFE for Kids Act compliance load.

Why New York is moving first

New York has the largest state-level enforcement appetite in the United States for digital child safety. According to the New York Attorney General, the proposed SAFE for Kids Act rules were issued on September 15, 2025, with public comment closing on December 1, 2025. Other states — California, Florida, Texas, Utah — have related youth safety statutes, but New York is the first to operationalize a combined algorithm + AI + age verification framework with serious teeth.

“If kids in our schools, and that’s where they are eight or nine hours a day, are not engaging with their peers because they’re on their phones, that’s harming them. Period.” — Governor Kathy Hochul, CBS News (June 2024)

Who is actually covered

The SAFE for Kids Act applies to operators of “addictive social media platforms” — any website, online service, or mobile application that offers users an addictive feed as a significant part of its services, and whose users spend at least 20 percent of their time on those feeds. According to Wikipedia’s summary of the SAFE for Kids Act, the law covers all major social platforms, video apps, and most user-generated-content services. Pure messaging tools, business communication apps, and e-commerce platforms without algorithmic feeds are generally outside scope.

What does the law require platforms to change?

The law requires four platform changes: algorithmic feeds must default to chronological for under-18 users without parental consent, age assurance must be commercially reasonable, AI chatbot features must be disabled for minors under the 2026 proposals, and overnight notifications face restrictions. Each change directly reshapes how marketers reach younger audiences.

Algorithmic feed restrictions

The SAFE for Kids Act prohibits platforms from delivering algorithmically ranked feeds — feeds personalized by user behavior — to users under 18 without verifiable parental consent. Default feeds for minors must be chronological or based only on accounts the user explicitly followed. Marketers should treat this as a structural change to organic reach for teen audiences: a post that would have been amplified to interested teens via ranking signals now reaches only those teens who follow the brand directly.

This effectively flips the discovery model for teen audiences from algorithmic to chronological follow-graph. Brands that built reach through algorithm-amplified discoverability — the dominant model since 2018 — lose that distribution channel for the under-18 segment.

Age assurance requirements

Platforms must use “commercially reasonable and technically feasible methods” to estimate user age. The Knight-Georgetown Institute analysis of the proposed rules notes that platforms can choose from a menu of methods including ID verification, facial age estimation, behavioral signals, and self-attestation with parental confirmation. The standard is reasonableness — not perfection — but platforms that under-invest in age assurance face per-violation liability.

The downstream effect for marketers: more teen accounts will be correctly identified as teen accounts, removing the historical gap between stated age and actual age that some brand teams quietly relied on.

AI chatbot disablement for minors

Under the January 2026 proposals reported by Spectrum News, platforms must disable AI chatbot features for users under 18. This includes platform-native chatbots, generative companions, and brand-deployed chat experiences delivered through the platform’s API. According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing, conversational AI adoption among brands grew over 80% year-over-year — meaning a substantial share of brand customer service and lead capture stacks now intersect with this proposal.

For brands using AI chatbots on Instagram DM, Facebook Messenger, or platform-embedded support, the practical implication is that a portion of inbound conversations must route to human agents or non-AI flows when the user is a minor.

Notification and data limits

Platforms cannot send notifications to minors between midnight and 6 a.m. without parental consent. The New York Child Data Protection Act further restricts collection, processing, and sale of data on users under 18 without informed consent — and prohibits targeted advertising based on that data. Brands that built retargeting flows on teen audience signals must re-architect those flows to exclude minor cohorts.

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How does the law affect marketers and brands?

The law affects marketers in four direct ways: organic reach drops for under-18 segments when algorithmic distribution turns off, paid targeting on teen audiences is constrained, influencer partnerships face stricter compliance, and brand AI experiences must detect age and disable for minors. Brands with teen exposure — apparel, gaming, education, beauty — should treat this as urgent.

Reach loss for under-18 audiences

The biggest measurable impact is organic reach. According to Pew Research, 71% of US teens use Instagram, 63% use TikTok, and 63% use Snapchat — and most discovery on those platforms is algorithmically ranked. When ranking is replaced by chronological order for non-consented minors, brands lose the amplification mechanism that put teen-relevant posts in front of teens who didn’t already follow them.

Brands relying on viral teen reach should expect a 30-60% impression drop for the under-18 NY segment based on internal benchmarks from comparable algorithm-off experiments. The fix is not to push harder on existing tactics — it is to rebuild the follower funnel so teen audiences opt into the brand directly rather than being delivered to them by ranking.

Influencer and creator partnerships

Influencer marketing aimed at teen audiences faces two distinct pressures. First, the algorithm restriction reduces creator reach to non-following teen viewers. Second, the data protection rules limit how brands can measure creator-driven conversions among minor cohorts. According to Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2025 report, 60% of brands plan to increase influencer spend year-over-year — but the teen-targeting segment of that spend is becoming structurally harder to convert.

Smart brands are reframing influencer briefs around “audience opt-in” — building creator content that drives follows rather than relying on borrowed creator reach to deliver impressions.

AI-powered customer service

Brands running AI chatbots for customer service on social platforms must build age-aware routing. When a user under 18 initiates a chat, the experience must fall back to a human agent, a non-AI scripted flow, or be disabled entirely depending on rule finalization. This adds engineering work to every brand AI deployment touching social platforms, and it constrains the unit economics that made conversational AI attractive in the first place.

Common mistake: Brands often assume “we don’t market to teens” without auditing their actual age distribution. Verify with platform-reported audience demographics before concluding you’re out of scope — many DTC brands have 5-15% teen audiences they did not consciously target.

Ad targeting and lookalikes

The New York Child Data Protection Act bars targeted advertising to minors without consent. In practice, platforms have responded by removing under-18 audiences from interest-based targeting and lookalike modeling tools. Brands that build lookalike audiences from converters must verify that the seed audience excludes minors — otherwise the resulting lookalike may carry compliance risk in addition to performance risk. The intersection of AI ethics and brand marketing becomes a daily operational question, not a quarterly board topic.

Compliance roadmap for marketing teams

A practical compliance roadmap has five steps: audit under-18 exposure across organic and paid, adjust paid media targeting to exclude minor cohorts, update influencer briefs for algorithmic and data restrictions, review AI chatbot deployments for age-aware routing, and build a contingency plan for the 2026 expansion. Each step has a deliverable and an owner.

Step 1: Audit your under-18 exposure

Start with the data. Pull audience demographic reports from each platform’s analytics — Meta Audience Insights, TikTok Analytics, YouTube Studio, Snapchat Ad Manager. Quantify the percentage of your reach, engagement, and conversion volume coming from users under 18, and the percentage coming from New York specifically. Brands that find more than 5% teen exposure should move to Step 2 immediately. Brands at less than 5% can plan more deliberately, but should not ignore the audit.

Step 2: Adjust paid media targeting

Once the audit is complete, update paid media setups to explicitly exclude users under 18 from any campaign where it is a legal or strategic requirement. According to the WARC 2025 Marketing Outlook, global ad spend on social platforms is projected to grow 12% in 2026 — but the under-18 share of that spend is contracting as platforms remove targeting options. Marketers should reallocate budget toward retained teen-reach segments (consented users) and toward age-bridge audiences (18-21) where intent is similar.

This is also the moment to revisit attribution. Multi-touch attribution models that include under-18 touchpoints may be under-counting consented older audiences who actually convert.

Step 3: Update influencer briefs

Update influencer briefs to explicitly address the algorithmic restrictions and data limits. Three brief changes matter most:

• Require follower-driven distribution rather than algorithm-driven reach as the success metric for teen-targeted campaigns
• Prohibit data collection on minor commenters or DM senders without explicit consent flows
• Specify that brand-supplied chatbot or AI assist tools cannot be used in creator content shown to teens

These changes do not require new contracts immediately — they can be added to standard briefs and addenda for in-flight campaigns.

Step 4: Review AI chatbot deployments

Any brand-owned chatbot operating inside a social platform must be reviewed for age-aware routing. The minimum viable response is a fallback decision tree: when the platform signals a minor user, the chatbot disables generative responses and routes either to a human agent or to a static FAQ. This applies across Meta’s Messenger and Instagram DM AI features, TikTok customer service chat, and any third-party AI tool deployed inside the social environment.

Brand teams should also evaluate whether their own first-party AI experiences — outside the platforms — should adopt the same age-aware patterns. The reputational risk of a brand AI shipping inappropriate content to a minor is materially higher than the platform’s per-violation fine.

Step 5: Build a contingency for the 2026 proposals

The January 2026 expansion proposals are not yet law, but the legislative pattern is clear. Build a 90-day contingency plan that covers: tighter age verification, defaulted privacy settings, AI chatbot disablement, and parental financial monitoring. According to Bloomberg Government’s coverage, the proposals form the cornerstone of Hochul’s 2026 State of the State agenda and are likely to move through the legislature in 2026. Marketers waiting until enactment will lose 90 days of preparation against teams that pre-positioned.

Summary and action items by team

The action set differs by function: brand and content teams should rebuild teen reach around follower funnels, paid media teams should re-architect targeting and attribution to exclude minor cohorts, influencer leads should revise briefs, and engineering teams must build age-aware routing for AI. Treat the matrix below as a starting checklist; tailor to your audience mix.

Brand and content teams

Brand and content teams must shift from algorithm-driven teen reach to follower-driven teen reach. That means restructuring the social media campaign framework around follower acquisition for teen-relevant content, prioritizing posts that convert viewers into followers, and producing content that performs in chronological feeds (clearer titles, stronger first frames, less reliance on algorithm-friendly engagement tricks). Studying silent scroller traits becomes more important because chronological-feed audiences behave differently from algorithm-fed audiences.

Paid media teams

Paid media teams should treat the under-18 cohort as a separate planning unit. Exclude minors from campaigns where targeting is restricted, reallocate budget into consented teen segments and 18-21 age-bridge audiences, and rebuild lookalike seeds to exclude minor-aged converters. Revisit your best times to post on social media playbook for chronological feeds — timing matters more when ranking does not.

Influencer and creator program leads

Influencer program leads should update creator briefs to specify follower-driven distribution metrics, prohibit data collection on minor commenters without consent, and ban brand chatbot tools from teen-targeted creator content. Use creator partnerships to drive brand-following behavior on social media rather than relying on creator reach to substitute for paid distribution.

Summary action matrix

Compliance, Without Losing Your Marketing Edge

The Kathy Hochul social media law is the start of a national pattern, not a New York-only event. Brands that adapt early will keep their teen reach through opt-in channels while competitors lose distribution to algorithm restrictions. GrowthGear helps marketing leaders rebuild their reach, targeting, and AI strategy for the post-algorithm-default era — without trading growth for compliance.

Book a Free Strategy Session →

Sources & References

1. New York Governor’s Office — “Nation-leading legislation to restrict addictive social media feeds and protect kids online” (2024)
2. New York Attorney General — “Proposed rules for the SAFE for Kids Act issued September 15, 2025; public comment closed December 1, 2025” (2025)
3. Gothamist — “Hochul proposes sweeping laws to protect kids from online dangers and AI bots — 2026 State of the State package” (2026)
4. Spectrum Local News — “Hochul eyes bills to protect kids from online predators, scammers, AI chatbots” (2026)
5. Knight-Georgetown Institute — “First steps toward operationalizing age assurance mandates: New York SAFE for Kids Act proposed rules” (2025)
6. CBS News — Governor Hochul on signing the SAFE for Kids Act: “Our kids are in distress” (2024)
7. Pew Research Center — “71% of US teens use Instagram, 63% use TikTok, 63% use Snapchat” (2024)