On 5 August, Senior US District Judge Edward Davila refused to block key parts of California’s Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act. The three companies had asked for a preliminary injunction against the law, known as SB 976. Davila denied it, ruling they were unlikely to win their First Amendment challenge.
The contested provisions bar platforms from sending minors “addictive feeds”, meaning personalised streams built from a user’s past behaviour, without verifiable parental consent. They cap a minor’s default feed at one hour a day and switch off personalisation by default. By 2027, operators must also assess whether a user is a minor, part of a wider age-check push.
Why the free-speech argument failed
The platforms leaned on Moody v. NetChoice, the 2024 Supreme Court ruling that a platform’s content-moderation choices are protected expression. Davila drew a sharp line. Moderation can be expressive, he agreed. Personalisation is a different thing.
A personalised feed, he wrote, is “not an ‘expressive’ message; it is merely a mirror that reflects back to users their own perceived interests”. The companies were “merely relying on predictive modelling” to guess what would keep a user scrolling. That, the judge held, is number-crunching, not editorial judgment.
