WASHINGTON — NetChoice strongly supports the lawsuits filed yesterday by Meta, Google/YouTube, and TikTok challenging California AB 1709, a law that would let the state dictate how online services organize and present legal speech to Californians under 16. The suits ask the courts to declare the law unconstitutional and to stop Attorney General Rob Bonta from enforcing it before it takes effect on January 1, 2027.
“California’s AB 1709 is just another unconstitutional attack on free speech from Sacramento,” said Paul Taske, Director of NetChoice’s Litigation Center.
“We applaud Meta, Google, and TikTok for standing up in defense of their own speech rights and for defending the rights of Californians, including teens, to access lawful speech online.”
AB 1709 regulates speech, not just product design. Deciding which content to show, in what order, is an editorial judgment, protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court held in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association that the state cannot restrict minors’ access to protected expression simply because it thinks the expression is bad for them, and that a law riddled with exemptions while overriding parents’ wishes fails constitutional scrutiny. Section 230 further protects services’ decisions about how to publish and arrange third-party content. AB 1709 tries to impose liability for exactly those publishing decisions.
Parental controls, screen-time limits, restricted modes, and non-personalized feed options already give families the power to make the right choices for their own kids, without a government mandate.
This is not California’s first attempt to regulate online speech in the name of child safety. NetChoice has challenged several of the state’s previous efforts, including the California Age-Appropriate Design Code, SB 976, and state-mandated warning labels, and warned Governor Newsom that AB 1709 would not survive constitutional review. Rather than heed those warnings, Sacramento passed another law that invites years of litigation at taxpayers’ expense while doing nothing to give parents better tools.
NetChoice will continue to defend free expression online. We are optimistic that courts will block AB 1709 before it takes effect.
Read the companies’ full complaints here: Meta, Google/YouTube, and TikTok.
Please contact press@netchoice.org with inquiries.