• by Wendy Davis , 4 hours ago

Meta Platforms, Google and TikTok are petitioning a federal judge to immediately prevent enforcement of a California law prohibiting social platforms from algorithmically recommending posts to minors under 18 without their parents' consent.

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila in the Northern District of California rejected the platforms' argument that the 2024 Protecting Our Kids From Social Media Addiction Act (SB976) violates the First Amendment.

The tech companies on Tuesday filed an appeal of that ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and also asked Davila to block enforcement of the law until the 9th Circuit weighs in on its constitutionality.

Meta Vice President of Engineering Lars Backstrom said in a declaration filed with Davila Tuesday that complying with the law would require the company to "radically alter the nature of the products Meta offers to many California-based users."

"Personalized feeds are woven deeply into Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and Threads services," he said, adding that the changes required by the law "will severely restrict Meta’s ability to present affected users with content that they might find valuable, and noticeably diminish the user experience for affected users, in some cases potentially rendering Meta’s services unrecognizable to those users."

Davila ruled last week that the platforms failed to show their personalized recommendations were the kind of "expressive" speech that is protected by the First Amendment.

He specifically held that relying on algorithms' "number-crunching capabilities" to make recommendations is not an "expressive" decision.

The tech companies dispute that conclusion.

"It is, in short, an extraordinary holding to conclude that a publisher makes no protected expressive choice when it elects to curate speech content based on likely user interests identified through algorithmic modelling," TikTok writes in its bid for an injunction pending appeal.

The company adds that Davila's reasoning would allow the government to "prohibit the New York Times from recommending news stories to viewers based on their expressed news interests."

Meta and Google make similar arguments.

"This Court erred by holding that the personalized-feed provisions do not implicate the First Amendment at all," Google says, adding that the ruling "is unprecedented and has potentially enormous ramifications for all manner of online platforms and their users."