Report from MediaPost
In Brief – Google, Meta, and TikTok have filed federal lawsuits and urged a federal judge to temporarily block enforcement of California’s “Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act” that restricts personalized or “addictive” content feeds for users under 18 unless a parent consents. The companies argue the law is overly broad and clearly violates the First Amendment by interfering with their editorial discretion to curate content, comparing the restrictions to the state dictating how newspapers select to place articles on a page or how libraries order books. They also claim that California’s definition of “addictive” improperly targets what are essentially personalized, interest-based recommendation systems that are themselves forms of protected expression. The suits follow a September ruling by a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that largely upheld SB 976 and rejected the ability of NetChoice, a tech company trade group, to challenge the law, determining that only companies harmed by the law could bring a challenge. Beginning in January, social media platforms in California will be required to verify the age of users and stop personalized feeds for minors.
Context – Most of the recent flood of state laws regulating social media sites have been blocked by federal judges ruling that they violate the First Amendment, but that trend is increasingly mixed due to a compilation of indecisive Supreme Court decisions in internet-related cases. For example, five Supreme Court Justices in Moody v NetChoice agreed that social media platforms engage in expressive activity strongly protected by First Amendment, but the court’s core decision was to demand a more specific, platform-by-platform analysis, and Justice Barrett, one of the five, questioned whether some algorithms involve protected speech at all. The Ninth Circuit decision builds on Barrett’s question. In 2023, the court chose not to rule on whether Sec. 230 protected YouTube’s algorithmic decisions. And the recent Supreme Court ruling on age verification for online porn is quickly being stretched to cover other online teen activity like social media usage, which Justice Kavanaugh says probably violates the First Amendment, but nobody can be sure until much more litigation plays out.