• by Wendy Davis , Yesterday

Siding against Google, Meta and TikTok, a federal judge on Wednesday rejected their request to block a California law that prohibits social platforms from algorithmically recommending posts to minors under 18 without their parents' consent.

The companies had argued that their recommendations were speech, and that attempts to restrict them violated the First Amendment.

U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila in the Northern District of California disagreed, writing that the platforms failed to demonstrate that their personalized recommendations were the kind of "expressive" speech that's protected by the First Amendment.

"Plaintiffs rely on predictive algorithms that incorporate users’ past watch history and other data and then suggest content that the algorithms anticipate will be engaging, or 'interesting' to users," Davila wrote. "Plaintiffs’ decision to rely on these algorithms’ number-crunching capabilities is not an expressive judgment."

He added that the tech companies themselves "are not making any determination of what is 'interesting' when they rely on this predictive modeling, nor do they otherwise seek to convey an expressive message through their personalized feeds."

Davila noted that the ruling is only preliminary, adding that the platforms could still ultimately prevail with their argument that the law is unconstitutional.

The new decision is the latest development in a battle over California's 2024 Protecting Our Kids From Social Media Addiction Act (SB976).

The tech industry group NetChoice previously sued to block the law, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in September that NetChoice wasn't the right entity to bring suit.

The appellate judges said in the ruling that only individual social-media companies could sue over the constraints.

Google, Meta and TikTok then challenged the measure in lawsuits filed separately, but raising similar First Amendment issues.

"If a teen demonstrates an interest in science experiments or content about local scholarships, the Act would preclude Meta from recommending additional content about science experiments or local scholarships to that user unless they specifically search for 'science experiment' or 'local scholarships' every single time they log in," Meta argued in its bid to block the law.

TikTok added in its papers that companies other than social-media platforms make personalized recommendations to users.

"Nearly all online publishers and streaming platforms -- from the New York Times to Netflix -- now consider individualized preferences in determining what content to publish and how to present it to their users," TikTok wrote.