Calif.’s Social Media Law Can’t Be ‘Squared’ With First Amendment, Says CCIA

Though “cloaked in the garb" of protecting children’s privacy, California’s age-appropriate social media design law (AB-2273) “is in reality a broad and unconstitutional attempt to restrict speech and control the information that can be provided to minors.” So said CCIA’s amicus brief Friday (docket 5:22-cv-08861) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Jose in support of NetChoice’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block the law from taking effect in July 2024 (see 2212140063).

AB-2273 is “a familiar story,” harkening back to when California tried banning the sale or rental of violent video games to minors, said CCIA. Now California “has turned its attention” from video games to the internet, it said. In AB-2273, California “enacted a vague and sweeping law that prohibits online services from presenting a broad range of lawful speech to minors,” it said. The First Amendment “invalidates this blunderbuss law, just as it barred similar past efforts to censor online speech,” it said.

AB-2273 “impermissibly restricts online service providers’ speech,” said CCIA. The statute “forbids disseminating amorphous and expansive categories of content,” including those that may be materially detrimental to the physical health, mental health or well-being of anyone under 18, it said. “To the extent these provisions are even discernable [sic], they unlawfully restrict core publication and editorial choices of online services.”

The provisions of AB-2273 “unduly limit” how online services, including search engines, social media websites, news publishers and libraries, “help users quickly find the information most relevant, interesting, or enjoyable to them,” said CCIA. They do so “using key terms that are all but impossible to understand, much less apply in any consistent or predictable way, which will inevitably lead to self-censorship,” it said: “The First Amendment prohibits California’s overbroad effort to limit the dissemination of lawful speech to minors.”

AB-2273 also “impermissibly compels speech,” said CCIA. The statute requires online services to prepare “onerous” data protection impact assessments about controversial topics “and to disclose those assessments to state law enforcement officials,” it said. Nearly every provider of online services will now be obligated to speak about how its algorithms and design features could expose kids to harmful, or potentially harmful, content, contacts or conduct, it said.

Online providers under AB-2273 “must do so separately for every existing feature of their services -- and every future feature,” said CCIA. “This wildly burdensome compelled-speech mandate, which effectively requires publishers to condemn their own services and incant the State’s preferred dogma about contentious social and scientific questions, cannot be squared with the First Amendment,” it said.