It's the Brian Lair show on WNYC. Good morning again, everybody. I'm Tiffany Hansen in for Brian today. We're going to turn now to a new push out of Albany aimed at protecting kids on the internet.

Earlier this week, Governor Hockel said she would back legislation that would make it harder for strangers to interact with minors online.

The proposal would also tighten rules around kids' interaction with AI chatbots, following several tragic cases in which young people formed intense emotional attachments

to those bots and ended up taking their own lives. As part of our ongoing effort here on the

Brian Lara Show to help make sense of the increasingly complicated and very much often unsettling

digital landscape, we're going to unpack some of this legislation and others like it and talk folks through

what the science says about how social media and AI affect young people.

With us to help go through all of this is Chris Perry.

She's the executive director of children and screens, a nonprofit focused on child

center tech policy and design. Welcome to WNYC, Chris.

You. So let's just start with some of these proposals from Governor Hokel. There is one that

would block strangers from interacting with minors online. I don't know how that is going to work. Maybe you can explain that for us

because I feel like it's the Wild West out there and how do you even make something like that work?

Well, there are a number of pieces of a policy that would help make that possible and they start

primarily with understanding the child's age,

but also making it more difficult for the platforms to collect data on the child, thereby

making them more anonymous and more difficult to track and more difficult to market to and

personalized feeds to. The policies that New York is putting in place

essentially address each of these features of platforms that they use to target children.

I'm going to ask sort of a basic question here, but when kids are online and they're asked, let's say, to put their age in,

because that's how we're really determining who that user is and what age they are, right?

Is by this kind of self-control?

...