By Jonathan Stempel
Nov 5 (Reuters) – Google, Meta Platforms and TikTok sued California to block enforcement of a new state law intended to limit the risk of addicting children under age 16 to online platforms.
The law, known as Assembly Bill 1709, prohibits those platforms from offering underage children “psychologically exploitative features” that could lead to compulsive use, such as providing personal recommendations and sending videos through autoplay features. It also requires the deletion of children’s accounts with those features.
In separate lawsuits on Wednesday, Google, Meta and TikTok said the law wrongly compels them to honor the state’s preferred means of presenting content to children, and substitutes the state’s judgment for that of parents. They said the law violates the US Constitution’s First Amendment’s 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 state cannot, consistent with the First Amendment, override Meta’s editorial judgments about how to curate and display … billions of posts of third-party speech,” the Facebook and Instagram parent said in its complaint. Google, which owns YouTube and is a unit of Alphabet, and TikTok, a unit of China’s ByteDance, made similar arguments.
The office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who enforces the state’s laws and is the only defendant, did not immediately respond on Thursday to requests for comment.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed the law on September 10. He said children’s safety should be central to any discussion about technology, and California “will not stand by while unregulated technology puts our children at risk.”
THOUSANDS OF LAWSUITS ALLEGE ADDICTION
Some critics accused California of overreaching by restricting children’s online access. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights advocacy group, called the law “a massive privacy and free speech nightmare.”
Many US states regulate children’s access to social media. Countries around the world have similar restrictions, including a ban in Australia on social media for children under 16.
In August, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion and limit teenagers’ use of Facebook and Instagram under agreements with nearly all US states, which accused it of violating privacy and consumer protection laws.
Google filed its lawsuit in federal court in San Jose, California. Meta sued in San Francisco, and TikTok sued in Los Angeles.
The companies and Snapchat parent Snap still face thousands of lawsuits by individuals, school districts, municipalities and other government entities claiming they sought to addict children and caused a mental health crisis that resulted in such harms as anxiety, depression and suicide.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Franklin Paul)
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