California Kids’ Social Media Addiction Law Blocked by Court (1)

A federal judge fully blocked a California law designed to protect the state’s children from social media addiction until Feb. 1 while the case is pending in the Ninth Circuit, finding that First Amendment issues raised by the law are novel and difficult.

The court granted NetChoice’s motion for an injunction pending appeal of a Dec. 31 ruling that partially blocked the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, which regulates how minors access addictive, algorithm-operated “personalized feeds” on social media platforms.

Given that the law, officially known as SB 976, “can fundamentally reorient social media companies’ relationship with their users, there is great value in testing the law through appellate review,” said Judge Edward J. Davila of the US District Court for the Northern District of California in a Thursday order.

Davila enjoined California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) from enforcing the entirety of SB 976 until Feb 1. If the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit hasn’t extended the injunction pending appeal or issued its own by then, “this injunction shall dissolve” and the more limited injunction he issued in his Dec. 31 preliminary injunction order will take effect, he said.

Davila’s Dec. 31 ruling would have allowed the core component of the law to take effect, namely restricting minors from accessing social media platform that use personalized feeds without parental consent.

The circumstances must be of “unusual magnitude” to justify a district court granting an injunction pending appeal after denying a preliminary injunction, Davila said. Only when the legal question raised is “particularly important” should a district court consider such a course of action, he said.

“That is the case here,” Davila said. The First Amendment issues raised by SB 976 “are novel, difficult, and important, especially the law’s personalized feed provisions,” he said.

Davila said he doesn’t believe NetChoice, a tech industry trade group, has shown that SB 976 in its “entirety violates” the First Amendment. But if they’re in fact correct, “its members and the community will suffer great harm from the law’s restriction of speech,” he said.

“Likewise, if NetChoice is correct in its argument, the public interest would tip sharply in its favor because there is a strong interest in maintaining a free flow of speech,” Davila said.

NetChoice Associate Director of Litigation Paul Taske said the group is glad the court agreed to temporarily stay the ruling. “We look forward to seeing California in the Ninth Circuit to yet again stop the state from creating an online censorship regime,” he said.

The California AG’s office didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

Lehotsky Keller Cohn LLP, Benbrook Law Group PC, Baker Botts LLP, and Latham & Watkins LLP represent NetChoice.

The case is NetChoice v. Bonta, 2025 BL 879, N.D. Cal., No. 5:24-cv-07885, order 1/2/25