Meta, Google, TikTok sue California over teen social media law

Meta, Google and TikTok have each sued California Attorney General Rob Bonta, seeking to block AB 1709, the state law signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September that is due to take effect at the start of the new year. The statute bars social platforms from offering autoplay video and personalized recommendation feeds to users under 16, and it requires companies to delete those users’ accounts if the features aren’t switched off. Companies that don’t comply could face fines of up to $50,000 per affected minor.

All three companies argue the law runs afoul of the First Amendment by dictating how they curate content, and that Section 230 preempts the state’s ability to regulate it. Meta’s filing says the statute would effectively bar it from serving any content to minors unless it abandons autoplay and personalized recommendations altogether. TikTok and Google raised comparable arguments, with Google noting that autoplay is already disabled by default for minors on YouTube and that parents can switch off teen access to Shorts. The companies also contend the law oversteps parents’ own authority to manage their teens’ internet use through existing parental-control tools.

The challenge arrives amid a wider push, both in the U.S. and abroad, to limit how teenagers use social media on mental-health grounds — a push privacy advocates say can backfire. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Rindala Alajaji argues that mandates like AB 1709 force platforms to collect more identifying data for age checks, eroding the anonymity of every user, not just minors, and that a blanket cutoff for under-16s would silence the kind of youth-led organizing seen in the Parkland shooting survivors’ gun-safety campaign and Greta Thunberg’s climate activism.

The stakes are already visible elsewhere: Australia banned social media outright for users under 16 in December 2025, while France’s top court struck down a comparable law over free-speech concerns. Meta, separately, has agreed to pay as much as $18 billion to settle children’s-safety claims brought by 29 U.S. states. A spokesperson for Bonta’s office said it is reviewing the lawsuits and remains committed to “defending California’s commonsense laws to protect kids online.”

Why it matters

How California’s law fares will help settle whether U.S. courts treat algorithmic-feed restrictions as content regulation subject to First Amendment and Section 230 limits — a question already splitting outcomes abroad, from Australia’s outright ban to France’s court-blocked version.