You log into [insert social media platform of choice], in the mood for the latest news, your friends’ baby pics, a few outlandish opinions. But have you considered what the state commissioner of mental hygiene has to say about that?

If lawmakers in New York and Minnesota get their way, social media users will be greeted with persistent warnings about the potential toll their scrolling habits could be taking on their mental health.

Legislatures in both states recently passed legislation requiring warning labels on social media, despite an utter lack of evidence that this will do good and one federal court ruling declaring a similar law for porn websites to be unconstitutional.

The Minnesota rule says a “conspicuous mental health warning label” must appear each time a user accesses a social media platform and only disappear when the user exits the platform or “acknowledges the potential for harm and chooses to proceed to the social media platform despite the risk.” It came as part of a larger bill signed by Gov. Tim Walz in June.

The New York bill—which passed both houses of the state Legislature but is still awaiting Gov. Kathy Hochul’s signature—mandates that any social media platform that provides the basic features we’ve come to expect (like autoplay, infinite scroll, push notifications, or like counts) must display a warning label “prescribed by the commissioner of mental hygiene.”

This is peak performative lawmaking. It lets state lawmakers pretend to be doing something to save us from the boogeyman du jour, Big Tech. They can put out their press releases and pat themselves on their backs.

Check out the gag-inducingly grandiose tone in which New York state Sen. Andrew Gounardes has been talking about the measure he sponsored. “This is about enabling New Yorkers to reclaim control of their own lives from big corporations,” Gounardes said … as if people can’t currently just stop or reduce social media use but will somehow miraculously gain this power when they see some government-mandated legalese about tech addiction above their feeds.

In the real world, government goons telling you to put down Instagram and go touch grass would be unlikely to help even if it could pass constitutional muster—which it almost certainly won’t.

“You’d think lawmakers would learn,” writes Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

When Texas passed a ridiculous law requiring adult websites to add “health warning labels” based on no science at all, even the notoriously ridiculous Fifth Circuit—a court that never met a garbage internet law it didn’t like—said “whoa, the mandated health warning part’s obviously unconstitutional.” The court explained that compelling websites to display the state’s preferred message about content when there’s no scientific consensus is completely out of line. […] But apparently, NY and Minnesota lawmakers saw that ruling and thought: “Let’s do the exact same thing, but for social media!”

Both the New York law and the Minnesota law represent the government trying to compel speech in an impermissible way.

“The Supreme Court has established through cases like Zauderer that the government can only compel commercial speech (like warning labels) when the compelled disclosure is ‘purely factual and uncontroversial’ and relates to preventing consumer deception,” notes Masnick. “Neither condition applies here.”

Pittsburgh Lowers Sex Work Penalty

The Pittsburgh City Council voted last night to reduce penalties for prostitution. Under the newly passed ordinance, police can choose to essentially issue a citation rather than arrest someone for a misdemeanor crime.

As it stands, the minimum penalty for engaging in prostitution “can involve up to a year in jail, and it also can involve a sliding scale of fines that can go all the way up to $10,000,” Theresa Nightingale, executive director of For Safer Sex Work Pittsburgh, told the Pittsburgh City Paper. Under the new ordinance, someone engaging in prostitution in Pittsburgh could receive “just a small fine similar to a traffic ticket,” she said.

Pittsburgh Councilwoman Barb Warwick, who introduced the legislation, said at a council meeting last week that she would “love if we could legalize consensual sex work but we cannot in the city. That would be a state issue. This is just about the penalty, very similar to the change in penalty for cannabis possession.”

Pennsylvania’s state law on prostitution remains unchanged. And Pittsburgh authorities can still charge sex workers with violating that law—a misdemeanor offense.

But under the new ordinance, they can also choose to merely charge them with the summary offense of engaging in prostitution, which means no court appointment

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Article from Reason.com

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