New Yorkers applying for concealed carry permits will no longer be required to share their social media accounts with police, according to a settlement proposed in federal court last week.
State officials required concealed carry applicants to provide a list of their social media accounts as part of a sweeping gun safety law in 2022. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the Concealed Carry Improvement Act days after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down New York’s prior gun licensing regulations, finding it gave law enforcement too much power to subjectively decide who should get permits to carry guns.
Hochul said at the time that social media reviews would be part of a more comprehensive application process.
“We’re now going to raise the bar and make sure that people are truly responsible gun owners once they receive a permit,” she said at a press conference announcing the new law.
Second Amendment advocates filed a slew of lawsuits challenging various aspects of the law, including the social media requirement. While the state is still defending most of the law, the attorney general’s office agreed that it would not enforce the social media requirement and ensure it did not appear on applications for concealed carry permits.
Luis Valdes, a spokesperson for Gun Owners of America, said checking applicants’ social media violated their rights.
“The fact that the state of New York was demanding social media information from a gun owner is very despotic,” he said.
Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement that the settlement “protects New York’s nation-leading gun safety laws that require licenses to own a firearm.” She did not say why her office decided to stop pursuing its legal defense of the social media requirement.
“We will continue fighting this case and defending our laws that keep New Yorkers safe from gun violence,” she said.
Lawmakers passed the Concealed Carry Improvement Act after Hochul called state lawmakers back to Albany for an emergency session in the days after the Supreme Court upended New York’s long-standing concealed carry rules, which were some of the strictest in the country. The governor said at the time that the legislation would strengthen the state’s gun laws while following the restrictions outlined in the Supreme Court decision.
Hochul also said the new law was needed to curb gun violence and condemned the justices for striking down the previous law only weeks after a mass shooting in Buffalo.
The Concealed Carry Improvement Act created sensitive locations where even most permit holders are barred from carrying guns, including at protests, playgrounds and Times Square. It also required any applicant for a concealed carry permit to demonstrate “good moral character,” provide four character references and complete 18 hours of in-person training. Turning over social media accounts was another new requirement for permit applicants.
In a federal lawsuit filed in the Northern District of New York, several gun owners and a prospective permit applicant argued different pieces of the law were unconstitutional. Plaintiff Lawrence Sloane, an Onondaga County resident who wanted to carry a handgun for self defense, said the social media requirement violated his First and Fifth Amendment rights.
His lawyers said in the lawsuit that his Facebook profile is set to “friends only” and that he would have to add law enforcement officers as a “friend” if they wanted to view his profile — a step he said he was not willing to take.
“[I]f he were ‘forced to produce all [his] speech,’ he would ‘self-censor for fear of retribution, unwilling to express [his] true feelings, especially on contentious issues involving political speech,’” the lawsuit states.
The attorney general’s office said in court that applicants would not have been required under the law to add licensing officers as Facebook friends or disclose private posts. The office also said at a court hearing that checking applicants’ social media would allow licensing officers to look into whether they could be dangerous.
But Peter Tilem, an attorney who represents many gun owners in Second Amendment cases, said it was unclear how the state would decide whose social media posts were too problematic to get concealed carry permits.
“Who was going to determine whether what a licensing officer saw on that social media account disqualified them from exercising their constitutional right or not,” he said. “What was the criteria going to be?”
Tilem said the proposed settlement suggests the state felt it could no longer defend the social media provision in court.
The social media requirement was only briefly in effect before a federal judge ordered the state to pause enforcement of various parts of the law in October 2022. Judge Glenn Suddaby said the state had failed to establish that there was enough of a historical precedent to require people to disclose social media accounts — or other pseudonyms in the pre-Internet age — to licensing officers. A higher court later upheld most of the law, but not the social media rule.
Now, Sloan has agreed to stop pursuing his legal challenge of the social media requirement in exchange for a pledge from the state that it won’t ask applicants for concealed carry permits to share their account information. The two sides signed a proposed settlement last week and are now waiting for a judge to finalize the agreement.
Desmond Patton, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the intersection of social media and gun violence, called the agreement “an important win for New Yorkers.” He said reviewing social media for risks is more complicated than lawmakers realize.
“Language on social media is deeply contextual, culturally specific, and often misunderstood, even by sophisticated analytic tools. That means systems like this can easily misread people and communities, especially those already over-surveilled,” he said in a statement. “I hope this decision encourages the state to move away from surveillance-based approaches.”
Everytown for Gun Safety, which has defended the Concealed Carry Improvement Act in court papers, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
An earlier version of this story carried the wrong byline. It was written by Samantha Max.
