A federal judge has granted an injunction blocking a California law that would force online businesses and social media platforms to estimate the ages of people visiting their sites and protect children from seeing content that might cause harm, stating that the law likely violates the First Amendment and would likely lead to online government-fueled censorship.
The law in question, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), is one of the recent crop of bills seeking to “childproof” the internet by either demanding age verification checks of users or by locking away content. CAADCA, passed in 2022 unanimously by the state legislature and supported by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, requires every business in the state with an online component to create a report showing how any new good or service they provided would be accessed by children and investigate and account for any sort of “harms” children might face. Businesses that are not in compliance with the law face fines of up to $2,500 per violation.
NetChoice, a trade organization representing tech firms, sued earlier this year to try to block the law. In NetChoice v. Bonta, the trade organization argued that this overly broad law violates the Constitution by “enact[ing] a system of prior restraint over protected speech using undefined, vague terms, and creat[ing] a regime of proxy censorship, forcing online services to restrict speech in ways the State could never do directly.” In short, the end result of the law would lead to businesses and online platforms having to censor content in order to keep children from seeing it, even though a lot of this content is likely to be protected First Amendment speech.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, agreed and blocked the state from enacting the law, which was scheduled to take effect on July 1, 2024.
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