Landmark California bill to ban social media for teens under 16 passes crucial hurdle

Social media companies would be barred from allowing children under 16 to create accounts on their platforms under a bill passed by California lawmakers Thursday in a dramatic rebuke from the home state of the country's tech industry.

The bill's passage in the state Assembly represents a significant step state lawmakers are taking to enact a ban similar to one implemented last year in Australia amid growing concern about social media's effect on children's mental health. It also comes as social media companies, including Meta, TikTok and YouTube, face a slew of lawsuits alleging their platforms have harmed young users.

Assembly Bill 1709 would ban social media companies from allowing children under 16 to create accounts on platforms with features defined as addictive, including notifications, endless scrolling, algorithm-generated feeds and autoplay. It would also create an advisory commission within the California Department of Justice to help implement the bill.

The measure is championed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers who all have school-age children and say they feel increasingly powerless as they try to protect their kids from harm online. During debates on the bill, the co-authors have repeatedly referenced their own experiences as parents - trying and failing to prohibit their teens from spending time on YouTube, their kids arguing they should have cellphones because their friends do, and watching them struggle with peer pressure that follows them home through their social media accounts.

"These products, the entire business model is built on creating addiction. That's how they make money," said Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat who is part of the coalition pushing for the measure. "Let's pass this bill unanimously with bipartisan support and send a message, not just to the world, but to the tech industry, that they have to keep our children safe."

Assembly Member Josh Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, the lead author, noted that kids spend more time on screens than they do in school. One 2021 study, by advocacy group Common Sense Media, found that teens spend an average of eight hours per day on screens. Common Sense Media is one of the sponsors of the bill.

Lowenthal pointed to a laundry list of problems facing the current generation of teens. Rates of eating disorders, depression and anxiety are on the rise.

"I haven't come across a single parent anywhere in the state of California that is not deeply concerned about this and doesn't know what to do," Lowenthal told the Chronicle in an interview earlier this year.

Lowenthal, who has daughters in sixth, eighth and 10th grades, said he sees firsthand the harm that social media does to children. He said girls especially are barraged with unrealistic and sometimes AI-generated images of women's bodies at a time when they're feeling especially self-conscious about their own bodies.

"I can't tell you what an awful feeling it is to go into one of your kid's rooms at 8 in the evening and they're by themselves completely stressed out," Lowenthal said. "The challenge of social media and its addictive properties is that it follows you everywhere. When I was growing up, when I was home, I had complete relief. I was in a safe place. The pressures and challenges of growing up abated when I was home with my family. It's not the case anymore."

The bill has drawn opposition from a range of groups funded by the tech industry, including Chamber of Progress and Technet. It has also generated opposition from civil liberties and free speech advocates.

Molly Buckley, a legislative analyst for the digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the ban wouldn't address the harms lawmakers are identifying, which are often broader mental health issues that are not caused by social media alone.

She also argued that the legislation could put both children and adults at risk by forcing tech companies to collect and store sensitive identification information about their users to comply with the law. Such data would be very attractive to identity thieves, especially the data from children, whose data could be exploited to fraudulently open lines of credit that could be used for years before they come of age and realize their information has been stolen.

"Parents groups are usually convinced that age verification or social media bans are the silver bullet to kids' online safety," Buckley said. "They actually just create more risk for kids and adults while taking that decision power over what's best for each individual young person out of the family's hands where it should belong."

Some lawmakers who agree social media can be harmful for children have expressed skepticism that a ban could be enforced. Regulators in Australia are already encountering some of those challenges. An early review of that country's ban last month found two-thirds of teens were circumventing the policy to continue using social media.

"If we could wave a magic wand and pass a ban and just keep kids off this stuff, I actually would be pretty happy about that," Assembly Member Cottie Petrie-Norris, an Irvine Democrat who has two teenage sons, said during a committee hearing last month. "I'm concerned that kids are smarter than we are, they're gonna get around this, and they're gonna be on these platforms anyway."

Assembly Member Alexandra Macedo, one of the Legislature's youngest members at 32, noted that she easily circumvented an age restriction when she was 12 to make her own MySpace account. During a committee hearing on the measure in April, the Tulare Republican raised privacy and free speech concerns about the proposal and cautioned that she thought the measure wasn't fully baked.

"I'm in my 30s and can tell you it's tough to be on social media," she said. "I can't imagine being a teenage girl and going through it, let alone a parent feeling helpless in how you can help your child. I just think we have a little ways to go."

In the end, both Macedo and Petrie-Norris ultimately voted for the bill on Thursday. It passed the state Assembly 72-0. It still must be passed by the state Senate by the end of August. But after that, Gov. Gavin Newsom has indicated he supports the measure.

At a news conference in February, he said he has discussed the issue with leaders from Spain and Australia as countries across the globe confront the issue of children's safety online. He underscored his concern by telling a story about a birthday party where one of his daughters and her friends were all sitting silently on their phones instead of speaking with one another, and how worried that made him.

"As a father, as a parent, we need help. We have a generation that's never been more anxious, less free, more stressed, and we have to address this issue," he said. "I'm very grateful the Legislature is taking this very seriously."

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This story was originally published May 28, 2026 at 7:13 PM.