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California isn’t the first — and certainly won’t be the last — state to put a limit youth social media use, if Assembly Bill 1709 passes the Legislature this month.
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But its author Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, sees the measure as providing a guide for others to follow as parents, doctors and teens across the political spectrum clamor for lawmakers to do more to stem rising rates of poor mental health among young people. The current reality is a complicated and controversial patchwork of laws across the country.
His bill would force social media companies to offer platforms to children under 16 that don’t include certain features meant to keep them using the site, such as a personalized feed and autoplaying videos. It would also create an e-safety advisory commission to help the attorney general implement and enforce the law.
The measure faces a key vote in the Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday. It has bipartisan support.
“I see this as being just the right amount of regulation, where consumers and kids are not shut off and the platforms have a very clear path to being compliant,” Lowenthal said. “I find this the equivalent of saying to kids, ‘we’re not banning you from riding bicycles or skateboards, we’re insisting that you wear a helmet when you do so.’ And that is the situation. That should be replicated not only throughout the United States, but throughout the world, in my estimation.”
Lowenthal didn’t get there right away. Previously, the bill would have prevented Californians under 16 from opening accounts on certain platforms, following several other states that pursued bans for children. He pivoted away from that approach in the face of concerns from state senators and advocates that shutting off vulnerable youth from social media could cut them off from supportive online networks.
But is this new path more effective?
The research is not yet clear, but California’s bill is part of a worldwide fight to find the best way to protect young people online. Legislators are pursuing what they see as the right path in the face of well-financed social media companies looking to knock out those ideas in court.
State laws have been challenged in court, were only recently put into place or haven’t yet gone into effect, meaning researchers will need more time to figure out how state laws are affecting young people. Australia’s ban on children under 16 having access to social media platforms, the first national policy around the world, just went into effect last year.
“Age restrictions, limits on potentially addictive features, and other safeguards are different strategies, and their real-world effects should be carefully evaluated,” said Dr. Jason Nagata, a pediatrics professor at the University of California, San Francisco, in an email.
He and other researchers have found that heavy social media and phone use is associated with health and developmental concerns.
“As policies are implemented, we have an opportunity to study whether they actually reduce problematic social media use and improve outcomes such as sleep, mental health, and school functioning, as well as whether they have unintended consequences,” Nagata said.
States use different approaches
In the absence of conclusive evidence and federal laws passed by Congress, Republican and Democratic state legislators across the country have introduced and passed an array of bills that include the changes Lowenthal considered — banning teenagers of different ages from having accounts and forcing companies to provide feeds that are stripped of addicting features.
Lowenthal said the inspiration for his initial ban, and the advisory commission, came from Australia, not another state.
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The new approach has support. The California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls was a key backer of AB 1709 when it would have kept children under 16 off platforms. After the bill was amended, the commission now opposes it.
Darcy Totten, the commission’s executive director, said the ban would help buy time for a young person’s brain to develop and better educate them on how to navigate platforms safely. She views it as a starting point.
“With these amendments, the concern for the commission is that the bill would open the door for these platforms to advertise their product as safe for kids or free of addictive features,” Totten said. “Which could, one, potentially make the problem worse, but two, would really stall progress and real accountability.”
A majority of Americans support banning anyone under 16 from using social media sites, according to a Pew Research Center survey published last month.
Design It For Us, an organization led by young people that wants to “disrupt Big Tech’s harmful business models” went the opposite way. It opposed the earlier version of the bill, but advocated for the new policy that would require platforms to provide a way for young people to use them without certain features.
Nikki Iyer, a youth leader at the organization and a UC Berkeley student, said the original ban sounded good in theory, but young people could still find ways around it. The new version of the bill, she said, “takes a much more nuanced approach and requires companies to actually change their behavior, and to change their design, rather than to keep doing what they’re doing.”
The current version of the measure is in line with recommendations from the United Nations, which endorses policies that attempt to make platforms safer for children, instead of banning them from the sites completely.
‘Cut and pasted’
Some of the bill’s opponents don’t like either path taken by AB 1709.
One of them is NetChoice, a trade group whose members include Google, TikTok and Meta. It has sued California several times, including over a 2022 bill that attempted to force companies that have platforms likely used by children to offer stricter privacy settings. It has also filed lawsuits against several other states to block their own efforts to regulate youth social media use.
Amy Bos, who handles government affairs for the trade group, said California’s bill repeats what NetChoice sees as a bad pattern of taking decisions out of the hands of parents and potentially running afoul of the First Amendment.
“The government stepping in and limiting choices and mandating design features and telling private companies how to display, that just runs into a whole host of constitutional and policy issues,” Bos said.
California is also initiating legal fights. It is one of more than 30 states accusing Meta in federal court of intentionally designing its platforms Instagram and Facebook to maximize the time young people spend on the sites. Jury selection on the case began Wednesday. AB 1709 could lead to another courtroom battle if the measure passes and is signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, but Lowenthal believes his bill will hold up to scrutiny.
“In California,” he said, “we are acclimated to having the responsibility of crafting legislation that can be cut and pasted into other states.”
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This story was originally published August 13, 2026 at 8:00 AM.