California’s “Addictive Feeds” Law Violates Teens’ First Amendment Rights

A California law that prohibits teens from receiving recommended social media content from other social media users violates their First Amendment rights, EFF argued this week. The case, Meta v. Bonta, challenges SB 976, which requires that teen social media users get their parents’ permission before seeing other users’ recommended speech on their social media feeds. The legal challenge to SB 976 has largely centered on how the law violates social media services’ First Amendment rights to curate user-generated content and present it as they see fit. But the friend-of-the-court brief EFF filed along with the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Wikimedia Foundation shows that the law violates teen users’ First Amendment rights, too. “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,” the brief argues. Recommendation systems have a dual purpose on social media: they help all users discover speech and content by other users, and to get their own speech in front of a wider audience. “SB 976 creates significant, cons...