EFF argues California's teen feed law violates young users' First Amendment rights

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has challenged California's approach to regulating social media feeds for minors on constitutional grounds. In the case Meta v. Bonta, the organization argues that SB 976 restricts teenagers' First Amendment rights by requiring parental permission before young users can access algorithmically recommended posts from other social media users.

While previous legal arguments against SB 976 have focused on whether the law infringes on platforms' editorial discretion, EFF's friend-of-the-court brief—filed alongside the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Wikimedia Foundation—takes a different angle. The submission contends that the statute also undermines the constitutional protections of the teen users themselves.

SB 976 frustrates young people's ability to use the internet to its full potential, prohibiting them from relying on tools that disseminate their speech and help them view and interact with other users' speech.

EFF brief

Recommendation systems serve a dual function within social media platforms: they enable users to discover content created by others, and they amplify individual users' own contributions to wider audiences. The brief argues that SB 976 creates substantial constitutional problems by limiting teenagers' access to these discovery mechanisms.

SB 976 creates significant, constitutionally violative, burdens on young users' ability to read and comment on the news, discuss politics, find and share art, share their religious beliefs, or even practice their religion with fellow members of their faith. There is simply too much content on services for users to sift through manually, and young users may not know what to search for or even how to find content.

EFF brief

Given the breadth of restrictions SB 976 imposes on teenagers' capacity to both distribute and receive information, the brief argues the law should be invalidated on First Amendment grounds. However, EFF's submission also acknowledges that constitutional protections do not prevent California and other states from adopting alternative regulatory approaches.

One could imagine a law that required services to minimize the amount of data they collect, or limit using more invasive data analysis practices, such as tracking users across multiple services, analyzing keystrokes, and other surveillance-intensive practices. Such restrictions likely would serve the state's aim of protecting all internet users—including minors—and would be more narrowly tailored to addressing the harms those practices cause than SB 976.

EFF brief