Google, Meta and TikTok Sue to Block California Law Curbing Addictive Social Media for Kids
Three social media giants turned to the courts this week to contest a single California law set to go into effect in January.
In separate lawsuits filed Wednesday, Google, Meta and TikTok said Assembly Bill 1709 wrongly compels them to honor California’s preferred means of presenting content to children, and substitutes the state’s judgment for that of parents. The law prohibits social media platforms from offering children things like personalized feeds and autoplay for videos. It also requires the deletion of children’s accounts with those features.
The companies said the law violates the First Amendment free speech protections, as well as Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which broadly shields online platforms from liability over user content.
The California Attorney General’s office, which enforces the state’s laws and is the only defendant, wrote KQED that it is reviewing the lawsuits, adding, “Our office is committed to defending California’s commonsense laws to protect kids online.”
During his final State of the State address, Gov. Gavin Newsom called on lawmakers to explore stricter online safety guardrails for kids, even as critics warned free-speech concerns and age-verification challenges have complicated the state’s broader effort to regulate social media.
Google, which owns YouTube and is a unit of Alphabet, filed its lawsuit in federal court in San Jose. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, sued in San Francisco. TikTok, a unit of China’s ByteDance, sued in Los Angeles.
Newsom signed AB 1709 into law in September, saying at the time that children’s safety should be central to any discussion about technology. “We’re establishing a framework,” he said in a press conference announcing the package, “so that we can really enact a more aggressive posture as it relates to enforcement.”
“AB 1709 is a blatantly unconstitutional restriction on free expression that erodes the long-standing and protected practice of curating content based on user preferences, which bookstores, TV networks and streaming services all use,” a TikTok spokesperson wrote in an email to KQED. He added TikTok teen accounts have more than 50 preset safety, privacy and security settings.
“We are challenging this law because it violates the First Amendment by letting the government dictate how ideas are organized, displayed, or shared with Californians. Under the law, we would be forced to either remove features that keep teens’ experiences age-appropriate, or cut thousands of California teens off from family, friends, and their communities,” a Meta spokesperson wrote in a separate email to KQED.
“We offer a range of protections and tools that put parents in control,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda told KQED in an email. He warned banning discovery features on streaming platforms like YouTube would suppress users’ ability to engage and learn from a vast library of educational content. “Overly broad laws like this actually break the systems we’ve built to help kids find high-quality, age-appropriate videos,” he wrote. He added that Google tried to offer amendments to improve the bill during the legislative process.
“Nobody in their right mind believes the platforms are using free speech as a form of consumer protection,” wrote the bill’s author, Assemblyman Josh Lowenthal of Long Beach. “In regard to Section 230, no one is buying that social media algorithms are ‘content-neutral tools facilitating communication’ or that Section 230 grants corporations blanket immunity from consumer safety laws. Quite the opposite, these tired arguments are window dressing to obfuscate social media companies’ actual goal: to mine and monetize our children’s focus and attention.”
“Social media has been used not just for entertainment but also for, like, civic engagement, education, self-expression, community, especially for young people that don’t have support of their families in real life or their community in real life,” said Rindala Alajaji, associate director of state affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a major player in Sacramento. The digital rights group opposed the bill, but for different reasons than the social media companies.
“We all deserve a better internet and not a smaller one,” Alajaji said, adding that social media bans “don’t really fix what’s wrong with social media companies.” She urged lawmakers to think “more creatively and expansively about how we address those harms.”
Eric Goldman, an associate dean for research and professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, told KQED that he’s worried AB 1709 veers into censorship territory. Among his concerns: the restrictions on how publishers present content to their audiences; mandatory age authentication of all users, adults and minors alike; and a requirement that the publishers terminate users’ accounts. That last concern, Goldman wrote to KQED in an email, “not only restricts those users’ ability to consume content but also takes away their ability to publish their own content.”
The three companies, along with Snapchat parent company Snap Inc., are facing thousands of lawsuits by individuals, school districts, municipalities and other government entities claiming they sought intentionally to addict children to their platforms and caused a mental health crisis among young people.
In August, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion and limit teenagers’ use of Facebook and Instagram under agreements with nearly all U.S. states. They accused it of violating privacy and consumer protection laws.
“The public and the attorneys general are outraged at the behavior of the big social media and AI platforms,” said Jim Steyer, the CEO of Common Sense Media, which is also a big mover and shaker in Sacramento.
Now, Steyer said, consumer advocates and states are winning. “They’re winning big. And so the companies are trying to delay the inevitable. Defer the settlements, minimize the settlements. And somehow trying to explain after the fact that they aren’t really liable for all the damages and all the harm they’ve caused to young people,” he told KQED.
Many states regulate children’s access to social media given the inability of Congress, over several presidential administrations, to take action. In the meantime, countries elsewhere are experimenting with a range of restrictions; Australia, for example, has a ban on social media for children under 16.