California's AB 1709 Would Strip Under-16 Feeds of Algorithms

AB 1709 made it through the California legislature this week, and the state's most prominent digital-rights group wants Governor Gavin Newsom to kill it anyway. If he signs it, no account held by someone under 16 in California gets a recommendation algorithm, a personalized feed, or ranking based on who they follow and what they like. Instead, a verified-under-16 account falls back to a plain chronological view, starting in 2027.

The bill is AB 1709, authored by Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal, and its path to Newsom's desk was not close. It passed the Assembly floor 76-0 in May, cleared the Senate Privacy and Judiciary committees unanimously in June, survived the budget-focused "Suspense Day" cut in Appropriations on August 20, and got its required Senate floor vote in just before the August 31 cutoff. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has opposed it since April, and its latest post, published August 31, is a direct plea: veto this before it becomes law.

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What would AB 1709 actually change?

It is narrower than "ban minors from social media," which is how some coverage has shorthanded it. The bill targets what it calls addictive features: recommendation algorithms, infinite scroll tuned by engagement signals, and any ranking of content based on who a user follows or what they've liked. A covered platform, defined broadly enough to include most social apps but carved out for commerce and cloud-storage sites, has to identify users under 16 and switch those accounts to a non-personalized, chronological experience with addictive features turned off. It does not require kicking minors off the app entirely or blocking them from reading public content.

The mechanism for knowing who's under 16 is the part that worries privacy advocates most. Platforms are supposed to lean on the device-level age signal created by a separate law, AB 1043, the Digital Age Assurance Act, which itself doesn't take effect until January 1, 2027. Where that signal isn't available, the bill falls back to an age-determination method under California Health and Safety Code Section 27001. Either path means a phone or an operating system is making an age call that a platform then has to trust and act on.

Why does EFF want a veto?

Three arguments, laid out across EFF's April, July, and August posts on the bill. First, privacy: enforcing an age gate at this scale means platforms need a reliable way to tell a 15-year-old from a 17-year-old, and EFF argues that pushes toward government ID checks or biometric age estimation, creating what it calls a honeypot of sensitive data that didn't need to exist. Second, speech: EFF says cutting young people off from algorithmically surfaced communities lands hardest on marginalized teens, specifically citing LGBTQ+ youth who often find support online that isn't available offline. Third, redundancy: EFF argues AB 1709 overlaps and conflicts with two laws California already has on the books, which raises a fair question about whether this is solving a gap or just adding a second, messier layer on top of existing rules.

Doesn't California already regulate this?

Yes, which is EFF's whole point. SB 976, the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, passed in 2024 and already restricts personalized, addictive feeds for minors without parental consent, defaulting to chronological. AB 1043, the Digital Age Assurance Act, passed more recently and builds the device-level age-signal plumbing that AB 1709 leans on, but doesn't itself take effect until January 1, 2027. AB 1709 sits on top of both, tightening the age threshold and removing the parental-consent escape hatch SB 976 offers. Whether that's a needed fix or duplicative overreach is exactly the fight playing out on Newsom's desk right now.

What happens if Newsom just doesn't act?

This isn't a case where inaction quietly kills a bill. Under the California Constitution, a bill passed by the legislature before September 1 of the session's second year and sitting with the governor on or after that date becomes law automatically if he hasn't signed or vetoed it by September 30. There's no pocket veto in California the way there is federally. Newsom has three real options here: sign it, veto it, or say nothing and let AB 1709 take effect anyway. Governors have let bills lapse into law this way before, usually when they're not opposed enough to spend political capital on a veto but don't want their name directly on something controversial either.

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1. May 2026Assembly passes AB 1709, 76-0
2. June 2026Senate Privacy and Judiciary committees advance it unanimously
3. Aug. 20, 2026Survives Appropriations "Suspense Day"
4. Aug. 28, 2026Amended in Senate
5. Aug. 31, 2026Clears Senate floor deadline; EFF publishes its veto plea
6. Sept. 30, 2026Newsom's deadline to sign, veto, or let it become law
7. Jan. 1, 2027AB 1043's age-signal infrastructure takes effect, feeding AB 1709's enforcement

Who's actually affected?

Any California resident under 16 with an account on a covered platform, which the bill defines broadly around apps and services where addictive features are a significant part of the product, carving out commerce sites and cloud storage. Under-13 users are already covered separately by federal COPPA, so the practical new group here is 13-to-15-year-olds who currently get the same algorithmic feed as adults. Platforms bear the compliance cost: building and maintaining a second, chronological-only experience, wiring up the age-signal check, and doing it before the Digital Age Assurance Act's infrastructure is even fully live. Common Sense Media has publicly backed the bill as child-safety policy; EFF and allied civil-liberties groups are the loudest opposition. Expect a legal challenge if it does take effect. Courts have already narrowed or blocked similar age-verification and algorithm-restriction laws in other states on First Amendment grounds, and nothing about California's version is obviously immune to the same argument.

Our take

The 76-0 Assembly vote is the number that matters most here, more than anything EFF has published. A bill this lopsided rarely gets vetoed outright; governors usually save vetoes for fights they can actually win or bills nobody will notice. Newsom has leaned into kids-online-safety messaging before, and killing a nearly unanimous child-safety bill days before a re-election-adjacent news cycle is a harder sell than quietly letting it become law without his signature, which is very plausibly where this ends up. EFF's privacy argument is the strongest part of its case, not the speech one. An algorithm ban is a genuinely different, more defensible ask than a blanket access ban, but it still needs an age-verification system to work, and that system is where the actual civil-liberties risk lives. If AB 1709 becomes law, watch the age-verification mechanism, not the algorithm restriction, for where the real fight moves next.

Original analysis by GenZTech, drawing on EFF's public statements and the bill's own legislative record. Track AB 1709 directly as it nears Newsom's desk.