Social media platforms operating in California will have to strip infinite-scroll feeds and autoplay away from every user they know is under 16, or stop letting those users hold an account at all. Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1709 on September 10, 2026, the same day he signed a dozen other bills aimed at children’s online safety. The bill passed the Legislature without a single no vote on August 31, a rare outcome for a measure that directly restricts how the largest social platforms operate.
Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal of Long Beach wrote the bill, which adds a new chapter to California’s Business and Professions Code rather than amending an existing statute. That chapter does not ban social media for teenagers outright. It targets a narrower category the bill calls “addictive features,” and gives platforms a choice: remove those features for anyone under 16, or remove the users instead.
What counts as an addictive feature under the new law
The statute, which adds a new Chapter 22.9 to the state’s Business and Professions Code, names two features explicitly: an addictive feed and autoplay, with room for the state Attorney General to designate others later by regulation. An addictive feed is defined broadly, covering any service where user-generated content is recommended, selected or prioritized for a viewer based on information tied to that person or their device — the mechanism behind virtually every modern social app’s home screen.
The law carves out several exceptions so it does not sweep in ordinary functionality. Content a user explicitly searched for, a chronological next item in a sequence the user already started, private messages between users, and search results that are not persistently personalized all fall outside the definition. Two categories of service are exempt entirely: platforms limited to commercial transactions or product reviews, and services whose feed exists mainly for cloud storage. Everything else that relies on an addictive feature as a significant part of its product is covered, including social media platforms as the state already defines that term elsewhere in the code.
The Legislature backed the distinction with its own findings rather than leaving the definition to speak for itself. Lawmakers declared that platforms are “intentionally designed to maximize user engagement through features such as algorithmic content recommendation, infinite scroll, autoplay, and notifications, which mirror known behavioral reinforcement systems associated with addiction,” citing internal company statements and peer-reviewed research on adolescent reward systems to support that conclusion.
Penalties: $50,000 for a knowing violation, $25,000 for negligence
Enforcement runs through civil penalties tied to intent rather than a single flat fine. A platform that knowingly provides an addictive feature to a user under 16 faces penalties of up to $50,000 per affected minor; a negligent violation caps at $25,000 per minor. Courts weighing a penalty must consider the platform’s size, how severe and prolonged the violation was, and whether the operator made good-faith efforts to comply.
Only the state Attorney General or a local public prosecutor can bring a case — the law creates no private right of action, meaning an individual family cannot sue a platform directly under this statute. That per-minor structure is what makes the exposure scale with a platform’s actual under-16 user base rather than capping total liability at a fixed number, regardless of how many children were affected.
An age-check system that does not switch on until 2027
AB 1709 does not build its own method for determining who is under 16. It leans on a separate law, the Digital Age Assurance Act, which requires device operating systems to collect age information at account setup and pass an age-bracket signal to individual apps. That law does not take effect until January 1, 2027, which means the verification system AB 1709 names as its primary mechanism will not be running for more than a year after the addictive-feature ban itself becomes enforceable.
Where a platform cannot verify age through that system, it must fall back on an alternate age-determination method under state health and safety law. In the meantime, the bill also creates a seven-member e-Safety Advisory Commission inside the Department of Justice — an advisory-only body drawing on pediatrics, adolescent psychology and platform-design expertise — to guide the state on how age-assurance technology and enforcement should evolve.
EFF’s warning: a de facto ban dressed as a feature ban
Not every child-safety group backed the bill. CalMatters reported that the Electronic Frontier Foundation urged Newsom to veto it, calling AB 1709 “well-intentioned, but deeply flawed.” The digital rights group argued the law defines addictive features so broadly that platforms would find it simpler to lock out every user under 16 entirely rather than build and maintain a stripped-down, feature-free version of their product — effectively cutting younger teenagers off from what EFF called “essential information and experiences” rather than merely changing how they experience a feed.
Newsom framed the same tradeoff as intentional pressure rather than a flaw. “Parents can’t compete. Can’t compete with the engineering, can’t compete with the algorithms,” he said at the signing, describing the design gap as one that leaves any parent feeling outmatched and inadequate by comparison. Jim Steyer, whose organization Common Sense Media backed the bill alongside two others in the same package, called the effort “the first step in the United States towards comprehensive regulation and commonsense guardrails around these platforms.” Whether platforms respond by rebuilding their products for under-16 users or by simply excluding them is the practical question the next year of compliance work will answer, and it is one the bill’s text leaves entirely up to each company.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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