A judge allows California’s ban on addictive feeds for minors to go into effect

Late Tuesday evening, a federal judge Forbidden Tech lobby group NetChoice is challenging a recently enacted law in California, SB 976which prohibits companies from providing “addictive extracts” to minors.

The effect of this decision is that starting Wednesday, companies will start… will You are prohibited from providing an addictive feed to a California resident user known to be a minor, except with express parental consent. SB 976 defines addictive feeding as an algorithm that selects and recommends content to users based on their behavior, not their explicit preferences.

From January 2027 onwards, companies will be required to use “lifetime assurance technologies”, e.g Age estimation modelsto determine if a user is a minor and adjust their feed accordingly.

In November, NetChoice, whose members include Meta, Google, and X, filed a lawsuit to block SB 976 entirely, arguing that the law violates the First Amendment. The judge denied the request for an injunction, but blocked other elements of the law, including restricting overnight notifications to minors.

New York passed Similar legislation In June.