Google, Meta and TikTok Sue California to Block Law Banning Addictive Feeds and Autoplay for Under-16s

Introduction

On Wednesday, November 4, 2026, three of the largest technology companies in the world went to court against the largest state in the United States, and they did it separately, on the same day, over the same law. Google, Meta Platforms and TikTok each filed a federal lawsuit against California, asking judges to block Assembly Bill 1709 before it takes effect on January 1, 2027. The law would bar online platforms from offering users under the age of 16 the features California calls addictive: personalised feeds that choose what a child sees next, and autoplay that starts the next video without being asked. The companies say the law violates their First Amendment rights, overrides the judgment of parents, and conflicts with the federal liability shield in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed the bill on September 10, 2026, saying children’s safety should be central to any discussion about technology and that the state would not stand by while unregulated technology puts children at risk. The attorney general’s office, which is the sole defendant in all three cases, did not immediately respond to requests for comment when the lawsuits were reported on November 5. The fight is now the most direct court test yet of whether a state can tell the world’s biggest platforms how to present content to children, and the answer will reach far beyond California, because the same companies face similar laws and lawsuits in other states. This report explains why Google, Meta and TikTok sued California over AB 1709 in November 2026, and what the outcome could mean for children, parents and the platforms themselves.

1. What the three lawsuits ask the courts to do

The three lawsuits arrived within hours of each other on November 4, 2026, and they share a single goal: stop Assembly Bill 1709 from ever being enforced. Google, Meta and TikTok did not file together. Each company brought its own case, with its own lawyers and its own complaint, but each one names the same defendant, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, and each one asks a federal judge for the same two things: a declaration that the law is unconstitutional, and an injunction blocking the state from enforcing it. The timing was not accidental. With the law due to take effect on January 1, 2027, the companies moved less than two months before the deadline, giving the courts time to rule on a preliminary injunction but leaving little room for delay. The filings were first reported by the Reuters news agency on November 5, and they immediately became one of the most closely watched technology-law stories of the year, because the three companies together operate the platforms where most American teenagers spend most of their online time: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

1.1 Three separate filings, one target

Google filed its lawsuit in federal court in San Jose, California, and its complaint was brought in the names of Google LLC and YouTube LLC, the two companies behind the world’s largest video platform. Meta Platforms Inc. sued in San Francisco, the federal court closest to its headquarters. TikTok filed in Los Angeles, through TikTok Inc. and TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, the American entity created to handle United States user data. All three cases name Attorney General Rob Bonta in his official capacity as the sole defendant, because his office enforces California’s laws. The separate filings matter for a practical reason as well as a legal one. Three different judges, in three different courthouses, will now consider the same law at the same time, and they could reach different conclusions, which would make an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit more likely and could eventually put the question before the Supreme Court. The companies’ decision to sue separately also reflects their different businesses. YouTube is a video platform built around recommendations. Meta runs Facebook and Instagram, where feeds are the product. TikTok’s entire service is a personalised, autoplaying feed. Each company therefore has its own reason to fear a law that targets exactly those features.

1.2 The relief sought before January 1

The companies are asking the courts to act before the law takes effect, and that request for early relief is the most urgent part of the case. Each complaint seeks both a preliminary injunction, which would freeze enforcement while the case is litigated, and a permanent injunction, which would strike the law down for good. A preliminary injunction would require the judge to find that the companies are likely to win on the merits, that they would suffer irreparable harm without court protection, and that the balance of equities favours blocking the law. The companies argue that the harm is immediate, because re-engineering their platforms for millions of California children under 16 would take months of work and would change the experience for users who may never be covered by the law if it is ultimately struck down. California, for its part, will argue that the harm of waiting is borne by children, and that a law passed by the legislature and signed by the governor should not be frozen on the companies’ say-so. No court had issued any order blocking AB 1709 or deciding its constitutionality as of November 6, 2026, and no judgment had been issued in any of the three actions. The law’s fate now rests with the courts, and the first rulings on the preliminary-injunction requests will be the most important dates in the case.

2. What AB 1709 actually bans

Assembly Bill 1709 is a narrow law with a wide reach, and understanding exactly what it does is essential to understanding the fight over it. The law does not ban children from social media. It does not ban accounts for users under 16. It does not require platforms to delete young users or to stop serving them content altogether. What it does is target a specific set of features that the legislature described as psychologically exploitative, and it says platforms may not offer those features to a user under 16, even if a parent consents. The distinction matters, because the companies’ defence depends on it: they argue that the law reaches into the heart of how they present content, while the state argues that it regulates only a harmful design choice, not speech itself. The bill, sponsored by Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal, adds sections 22682 to 22686 to California’s Business and Professions Code, and it applies to what the law calls covered platforms, roughly websites and apps for which an addictive feed is a significant part of the service.

2.1 Addictive feeds and autoplay, defined

The law defines an addictive feature as one designed to keep a user engaged through psychological mechanisms that can lead to compulsive use, and it names two features in particular. The first is the addictive feed: a feed that selects or prioritises content using information linked to the user or the user’s device, which is how personalised recommendations work on every major platform. When YouTube suggests the next video, when Instagram orders the posts in a feed, when TikTok decides which clip comes next, the platform is using a person’s viewing history, likes, location and device signals to choose what appears. The second is autoplay: the feature that starts the next video automatically, without the user pressing play. California’s argument is that these two features, working together, remove the natural stopping point from a child’s experience, so that a ten-minute break becomes an hour without any conscious decision to continue. The law also requires platforms to take reasonable steps to keep these features away from younger users, including age verification under California’s Digital Age Assurance Act. That verification requirement is itself controversial, because it means platforms must find out how old their users are, which raises questions about privacy and about how accurately age can be established online.

2.2 What the law does not ban

For all its reach, AB 1709 leaves a large part of the online world untouched, and the law’s defenders have made a point of saying so. A platform may keep an under-16 account open, provided that user is not given any addictive feature. A child could, in principle, still use YouTube, Instagram or TikTok in California, but would see content in a chronological order, or in an order chosen by the user, rather than one chosen by an algorithm, and would have to press play for each video. The law also does not ban advertising to children, does not ban direct messaging, and does not require platforms to verify the age of every adult user. Enforcement is deliberately limited: only the attorney general or a local public prosecutor can sue to enforce the law, and there is no private right of action for parents or teenagers. That last point is significant, because it means the law cannot be used by an individual family to sue a platform for damages; the state alone decides when and whether to bring a case. The companies, however, say that these limits do not save the law, because the features it bans are the features that make their services work, and a platform that cannot recommend content or play the next video is a fundamentally different product.

3. The companies’ First Amendment argument

At the centre of all three lawsuits is the First Amendment, and the companies’ argument is that AB 1709 tells them how to present speech, which the Constitution does not allow the government to do. Their case is built on a simple proposition: choosing, organising and displaying third-party content is an editorial act, and editorial acts are protected speech. When a platform decides which video to recommend, which post to show first, or which clip to play next, it is exercising the same kind of judgment a newspaper exercises when it decides what goes on the front page, or a television station exercises when it decides what to broadcast. The state, the companies argue, cannot substitute its own judgment for theirs, and cannot compel them to present content in the state’s preferred way. Meta’s complaint puts the point directly, saying that the state cannot, consistent with the First Amendment, override Meta’s editorial judgment about how it curates and displays third-party content. Google and TikTok make the same argument in their own words, and all three say the law wrongly compels them to honour the state’s preferred means of presenting content to children.

3.1 Editorial judgment and content curation

The editorial-judgment argument has been gaining ground in American courts, and the companies know it. In recent years, judges have treated the way platforms arrange content as a form of protected expression, because the arrangement itself communicates something: this is interesting, this is relevant, this is worth your time. A personalised feed is, in this view, an opinion about what a particular user will want to see, expressed millions of times a day. The companies also point to the practical impossibility of the law’s demand. To comply, they would have to build a separate version of their services for California children under 16, with recommendations switched off and autoplay disabled, while keeping the ordinary service for everyone else. That, they say, is not a minor design change but a state-ordered redesign of the core product. California’s answer, which will be tested in court, is that the law regulates conduct, not speech: the addictive design of a feed is a business practice, like the design of a slot machine, and the state has always been able to regulate products that harm children, even when those products involve words and pictures. Which of these two characterisations a judge accepts will decide the case.

3.2 Parents, not the state, should decide

The second strand of the companies’ argument is about who decides what children see online: parents, or the state. The lawsuits argue that AB 1709 substitutes the state’s judgment for that of parents, by banning features even when a parent has consented to them. This is a deliberate choice by the companies, because the parental-rights argument has political force that a purely corporate First Amendment claim does not. Polls consistently show that American parents are worried about social media, but they are also divided about whether the government or the family should set the rules, and the companies are betting that judges will be sympathetic to the idea that a parent who wants a child to have a personalised feed should be allowed to make that choice. The argument is sharper because AB 1709 bans the features even with parental consent, which is a stricter rule than California’s earlier law, Senate Bill 976, which required verified parental consent before showing minors addictive feeds. The companies say that if the state’s real concern is that children cannot consent for themselves, then parental consent should be enough, and a law that ignores parents altogether reveals that the state is pursuing its own view of good content rather than protecting children who lack protection. California’s supporters respond that parental consent is often meaningless in practice, because parents cannot monitor every feature of every platform, and that the law protects children whose parents are absent, overwhelmed or simply unaware of how the features work.

4. Section 230 and the liability-shield argument

Alongside the First Amendment, the companies raise a second federal defence: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 is the 1996 federal law that protects online platforms from liability for most content posted by their users, and it also bars states from imposing liability that treats a platform as the publisher of that content. The companies argue that AB 1709 conflicts with Section 230, because the law effectively holds them responsible for how they present third-party content, which is the very thing Section 230 says states may not do. The argument is technical, but its consequences are large: if a judge agrees that the law conflicts with Section 230, the state law falls without the court ever having to decide the First Amendment question. The companies have used Section 230 in this way before, and it has been one of their most reliable defences against state regulation. California will argue that the law does not impose liability for user content at all, but instead regulates the platform’s own design choices, which are the platform’s own conduct rather than anyone else’s speech.

4.1 What Section 230 protects

Section 230 was written in the early days of the commercial internet, when Congress wanted to encourage platforms to moderate content without fearing that moderation would make them legally responsible for everything their users posted. Its most famous provision says that no provider of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher of information provided by another person, and courts have read that language broadly for nearly thirty years. The protection has allowed platforms to host billions of posts, videos and comments without being sued for each one, and the companies argue that this protection is the foundation of the modern internet. In the AB 1709 cases, they say the law does indirectly what Section 230 forbids directly: it punishes them for the way they organise and present other people’s content, which is a form of treating them as publishers. The companies also note that Congress, not California, is the body that decides the scope of Section 230, and that a state cannot narrow a federal shield by relabelling a content rule as a design rule. The counter-argument, which has found support in some recent court decisions, is that Section 230 protects platforms from liability for what users say, not from regulation of what platforms themselves do, and that a feed designed to maximise engagement is the platform’s own product.

4.2 Why California says the law fits anyway

California’s defenders say the law was written with Section 230 in mind, and that it fits through the gaps in the federal shield. The law does not, they point out, make a platform liable for a defamatory video, a dangerous challenge, or a misleading post. It makes the platform liable only for offering a particular feature to a particular age group, and the feature is the platform’s own creation. A court that accepts this distinction would find no conflict with Section 230, because the law regulates the platform’s conduct, not the content it hosts. The state can also point to the fact that AB 1709 is not the first California law to test this boundary. Senate Bill 976, the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, which requires verified parental consent before showing minors addictive feeds, is already being challenged in court, and TikTok’s appeal in its challenge to that earlier law is pending before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. How the Ninth Circuit rules on SB 976 will shape the AB 1709 cases, because the same judges and the same legal principles will be involved. The companies, for their part, say that if the earlier law is vulnerable, the newer one is more vulnerable still, because it goes further by banning the features outright rather than conditioning them on parental consent.

5. How California got here

AB 1709 did not appear from nowhere. It is the latest step in a long campaign by California to regulate the technology industry, and it arrives at a moment when the state’s relationship with Silicon Valley has grown openly hostile. For years, California was the industry’s home and its protector, the state where the platforms were founded and where they employed hundreds of thousands of people. That relationship has frayed as evidence has accumulated about the effects of social media on children, as lawsuits by states and school districts have multiplied, and as the companies have spent heavily on lobbying against regulation in Sacramento. Governor Newsom has positioned himself as the leading Democratic voice for restraining the industry, signing a series of bills on child safety, data privacy and artificial intelligence, and the AB 1709 fight is the most direct confrontation yet between his administration and the companies that dominate the state’s economy. The law also reflects a national shift: after years in which Congress debated online safety without acting, states have begun to legislate on their own, and California’s laws have become the template for others.

5.1 From signing on September 10 to the January 1 start date

Governor Newsom signed AB 1709 on September 10, 2026, and the law was scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2027, giving platforms less than four months to prepare. At the signing, Newsom said children’s safety should be central to any discussion about technology, and that California would not stand by while unregulated technology puts children at risk. The short runway was deliberate. Supporters of the law argued that the companies had known for years that regulation was coming, and that a longer delay would simply give them more time to lobby for repeal. Critics, including the companies, said the timetable was unrealistic, because rebuilding the recommendation and autoplay systems for a single state’s children is a major engineering task, not a setting that can be switched off. The January 1 date also explains the urgency of the lawsuits. The companies needed a court to intervene before the law took effect, because once it did, they would face a choice between complying at great cost or risking penalties of up to 50,000 dollars per affected minor. That choice, and the litigation timetable, means the first rulings on preliminary injunctions are likely to come before the end of 2026, and they will be watched by every state legislature considering a similar law.

5.2 SB 976 and the Digital Age Assurance Act

AB 1709 is part of a package of California laws, and it cannot be understood without the two laws that came before it. Senate Bill 976, the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, requires verified parental consent before platforms may show addictive feeds to minors under 18. It was challenged in court as soon as it was passed, and TikTok’s appeal in its challenge to SB 976 is pending before the Ninth Circuit. The Digital Age Assurance Act, meanwhile, sets the rules for how platforms establish the age of their users, and AB 1709 relies on that framework, requiring platforms to take reasonable steps, including age verification under the Act, to keep addictive features away from younger users. The three laws fit together as a system: one law sets the age-verification standard, one law requires parental consent for older teenagers, and AB 1709 bans the features entirely for children under 16. The companies argue that the system, taken together, amounts to a state takeover of how their services work, while the state’s supporters say it is a proportionate response to a public-health problem, and that each law is justified on its own terms. The courts will have to decide whether to treat AB 1709 in isolation or as part of this wider regulatory programme.

6. The money at stake

Behind the constitutional arguments lies a large amount of money, and the financial stakes help explain why both sides are fighting so hard. For the companies, the cost of compliance would be measured in engineering time, lost engagement and lost advertising revenue, because personalised feeds and autoplay are the features that keep users watching, and watching users are the product that advertisers pay to reach. For the state, the penalties in the law are designed to be large enough to matter to companies of this size: up to 50,000 dollars per affected minor for a knowing violation, and up to 25,000 dollars for a negligent one. With millions of California children under 16 using these platforms, the theoretical exposure runs into the billions, which is why the companies moved so quickly to court. The financial context also includes the settlements the companies have already paid, and the lawsuits still pending, over the harm that social media is said to cause children. The numbers in those cases show how expensive the child-safety issue has become for the industry.

6.1 Penalties of up to $50,000 per affected minor

The penalty structure of AB 1709 is one of its most striking features, and it was designed to make non-compliance expensive. A knowing violation, meaning the platform offered an addictive feature to a child under 16 knowing that the child was under 16, can attract a civil penalty of up to 50,000 dollars per affected minor. A negligent violation, where the platform failed to take reasonable steps to prevent the feature reaching young users, can attract up to 25,000 dollars per affected minor. Because only the attorney general or a local public prosecutor can bring an enforcement action, the penalties would be sought by the state, not by individual families, and the state would have to prove the violations in court. Even so, the scale of the exposure is enormous. If a platform were found to have shown addictive feeds to one hundred thousand California children, the penalties could reach five billion dollars for knowing violations alone. The companies argue that penalties of this size, applied to a product used by millions, are disproportionate and coercive, and that they effectively force compliance before any court has decided whether the law is constitutional. The state’s supporters respond that large penalties are necessary precisely because the companies are so large, and that a fine of a few thousand dollars would be treated as a cost of doing business and ignored.

6.2 Meta’s $18 billion settlement and the states’ pressure

The AB 1709 lawsuits arrive in the shadow of the largest child-safety settlement in the industry’s history. In August 2026, Meta agreed to a settlement of up to 18 billion dollars to resolve child-safety claims brought by 29 American states, and under the settlement the company also agreed to limit teenagers’ use of Facebook and Instagram. The settlement, which followed years of litigation over whether the company’s products harmed young users, showed that the states are willing to use their combined power to extract both money and design changes from the platforms. It also showed that the companies, for all their courtroom confidence, are willing to pay very large sums to make cases go away. The settlement is not an admission of liability, and Meta has continued to argue in court that its products are lawful, but the size of the payment has become a reference point in every discussion of the industry’s responsibility for children. The states that brought those claims are watching the California cases closely, because a ruling that AB 1709 is unconstitutional would weaken their leverage in future negotiations, while a ruling upholding the law would encourage more states to legislate. The companies, meanwhile, are fighting in California partly to avoid a precedent that would be used against them in the other 49 states.

7. What happens next in the three courts

The three lawsuits will now move through the federal courts on parallel tracks, and the first decisions will come quickly. Each case begins with the same procedural steps: the state will file its response to the complaint, the companies will ask for a preliminary injunction, the state will oppose it, and a judge will hold a hearing. Because the law takes effect on January 1, 2027, the judges will be under pressure to rule on the preliminary-injunction requests before that date, and the companies have asked for expedited schedules. The three judges will consider the same legal questions, the same evidence about how the features work, and the same arguments about the First Amendment and Section 230, but they will do so independently, and they could reach different answers. If one judge blocks the law and another allows it to take effect, the result would be confusion for the companies and for California families, and the cases would almost certainly be consolidated on appeal before the Ninth Circuit, which hears federal appeals from California.

7.1 San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles

The choice of courthouses is not a detail. Meta sued in San Francisco, in the Northern District of California, the court that has heard many of the most important technology cases of the past two decades. Google filed in San Jose, also in the Northern District, a courthouse that has handled many of the biggest cases involving Silicon Valley companies. TikTok sued in Los Angeles, in the Central District of California, the largest federal district in the country. The cases were docketed, as reported in legal-news summaries, as San Francisco 3:26-cv-13201, San Jose 5:26-cv-13204 and Los Angeles 2:26-cv-12965, though the formal court records will be the authoritative source for those numbers. The three districts are all within the Ninth Circuit, which means that whichever judge rules first, the appeal will go to the same court of appeals, and the Ninth Circuit’s eventual decision will bind all three cases. That court has already been asked to consider a similar question in TikTok’s appeal against Senate Bill 976, and its ruling there will be read closely by the judges in the AB 1709 cases. Legal observers expect the Ninth Circuit to hear the AB 1709 cases on an expedited basis if any of the district judges issues a ruling that the other side appeals, and a decision could come in the first half of 2027.

7.2 The preliminary-injunction question

The preliminary injunction is the most important near-term question, because it will decide whether AB 1709 takes effect on January 1, 2027, or is frozen while the cases are litigated. To win a preliminary injunction, the companies must persuade a judge that they are likely to succeed on the merits, that they will suffer irreparable harm if the law takes effect, that the balance of hardships favours them, and that an injunction serves the public interest. The companies’ strongest argument is that a law that restricts speech cannot be allowed to take effect while its constitutionality is in doubt, because the harm of silenced speech cannot be undone. California’s strongest argument is that the public interest lies in protecting children, and that a democratically enacted law should be given effect unless it is clearly unconstitutional. Judges deciding preliminary injunctions in First Amendment cases often focus on the likelihood of success, and here the recent trend in the courts has favoured the platforms. Several state laws regulating social media have been blocked on First Amendment grounds in recent years, and the companies will cite those decisions heavily. California will argue that AB 1709 is different, because it targets addictive design rather than content, and because it protects children, a group the courts have traditionally allowed the state to protect more vigorously. The first rulings will show which of these arguments the judges find persuasive.

8. What remains unconfirmed and what to watch next

For all that is known about the lawsuits, much remains unconfirmed, and the story will develop quickly in the coming weeks. No court has yet ruled on the merits, no judge has decided whether to block the law before January 1, and the companies have not said publicly how they would redesign their services if they lost. The attorney general’s office has not yet filed its formal response to the complaints, and its legal strategy is not yet public. The numbers in the case are also unconfirmed in important respects: the exact number of California children under 16 who use each platform, the cost of building a separate experience for them, and the revenue that personalised feeds and autoplay generate from young users are all figures the companies hold and have not disclosed. The political context is also uncertain. The lawsuits were filed days after the 2026 midterm elections, in which Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress, and the new Congress may take up federal online-safety legislation of its own, which could either support or pre-empt California’s law. The coming weeks will provide the answers.

8.1 Questions the courts have not answered

Several questions will determine the outcome of the cases, and none of them has been answered yet. The first is whether a personalised feed is speech or conduct, and the courts have not settled that question in a case exactly like this one. The second is whether Section 230 bars a state from regulating the design of a feed, or whether the law’s focus on the platform’s own features takes it outside the federal shield. The third is whether the parental-consent argument will persuade a judge, given that AB 1709 bans the features even when parents agree. The fourth is whether the penalties in the law, up to 50,000 dollars per affected minor, are so large that they effectively coerce compliance and therefore amount to an unconstitutional condition. The fifth is a practical one: if the law is upheld, how will the platforms know a user’s age accurately enough to comply, and what will happen to children whose age cannot be verified. Each of these questions could decide the case on its own, and the judges in San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles may answer them differently. The appeals that follow will be watched by every state legislature in the country, because the answers will determine how far states can go in regulating the platforms that shape children’s lives.

8.2 What to watch next

The first thing to watch is the preliminary-injunction rulings, which are expected before January 1, 2027, and which will decide whether the law takes effect on schedule. The second is the attorney general’s response, which will reveal California’s legal strategy and whether the state will defend the law on First Amendment grounds, on Section 230 grounds, or on both. The third is the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in TikTok’s appeal against Senate Bill 976, which could come at any time and will shape the AB 1709 litigation. The fourth is any statement from the companies about how they would comply if they lost, including whether they would build a separate experience for California children or change their services nationwide. The fifth is the reaction in other states, where legislatures that have been waiting for a test case may now move to pass their own versions of AB 1709, or may wait to see how the California cases are decided. The sixth is Congress, where the new Democratic majorities may take up federal child-safety legislation that could change the legal landscape entirely. The coming weeks will provide the answers.

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