Tom DiNapoli can make the web safer for kids

Afew weeks ago, I wrote a column in this space outlining the reasons why so many people are just so unhappy. Not surprisingly, social media is one of the main culprits. Albany now has the chance to do something about it and our state comptroller, Tom DiNapoli, could then drive even more change nationally.

The first step for the Legislature is passing a pair of bills authored by state Sen. Andrew Gournardes and Assemblymember Nily Rozic that would create an opt-in for minors using social media and protect children’s data. The legislation restricts social media platforms from pushing an algorithmic feed in front of minors without parental consent.

Kids would only see the people and topics they choose to follow. Disturbing images, awful advice and toxic content would no longer be forced on them day and night. The bill protects kids without violating the First Amendment.

Gov. Hochul and Attorney General Tish James have lent their powerful support to the bill with the governor including the language in her budget. Of course the social media platforms oppose the bill. Of course they’ll try to buy off groups on the left to tout their lies and scare the Democratic supermajority into submission. And of course the Legislature hates it when the governor includes non-budget items in the budget.

If the Assembly and Senate have any spine at all, they’ll pass it. If they won’t, at the very least, they must take a few common sense steps to protect kids. Teenage suicides are spiking. Do any legislators really want that blood on their hands? But that’s not all Albany can do. Collectively, public pension funds control $5.64 trillion, most of which are invested in the stock market. New York State, at the end of the last fiscal year, controlled $248.5 billion. Throw in New York City and that’s $253 billion more.

Let’s use Meta, the owner of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, as our example here. Meta’s investor base is 64% institutional, which means that both directly and indirectly, public pensioners own a significant share of the company.

While Meta’s clever bylaws effectively give Mark Zuckerberg full control over all decisions regardless of what shareholders want, if comptrollers and treasurers from across the country, led by DiNapoli, were to join together, form a list of demands to make the platform less harmful to children, and threaten to divest if the demands aren’t met, that could move the needle.

If Zuckerberg is a rational economic actor, he will choose to do as much harm as possible to society for as long as it still makes him more money than any other option. But if, say, 20% of Meta shares were dumped at the same time, it would send the stock price tumbling, Zuckerberg’s personal net worth would plummet, and all of the other shareholders, including Meta employees, would be extremely angry. Meta has an incentive to stop this.

While their fund managers may rightfully worry that divesting would hurt overall fund performance, sometimes you make a moral choice not to invest in an industry, whether tobacco or guns, and you find other ways to make up the difference. DiNapoli himself has used his divestment powers on other hot-button issues, including on climate, Russian companies and BDS, so why not this?

If enough collective shareholder ownership joined forces, odds are that Meta would cave to the demands and the divestment would never actually have to happen.

So what would those demands be? Eliminate design features that make the app addictive like infinite doom scrolling. Eliminate surveillance advertising on youth. Eliminate deceptive data collection practices. And for certain topics like eating disorders or Instagram feeds that teach girls how to cut themselves, just ban them. Yes, you probably will ban some well-intentioned content along the way too. So be it.

Now, Meta’s stock has been a top performer, so you could see unions, whose support DiNapoli relies upon, not wanting to have their pension funds divested from it. But union members’ kids suffer online too and I think DiNapoli could use his considerable powers of persuasion to convince them that making an entire generation dramatically safer is worth the tradeoff. There are always other stocks.

State and city comptrollers like DiNapoli rarely have the opportunity to take the lead on major societal issues. He manages money managers. It’s pretty boring most of the time. But DiNapoli isn’t just a financial professional — he’s a politician too. He wants to impact society broadly. He wants to do something more meaningful than just generate 6.3% returns instead of 5.9%. This is his chance.