Meta, TikTok and Google each asked a federal judge to pause the parts of California's SB 976 that stop them from serving personalized feeds to minors without a parent's verified consent, six days after that same judge had refused to block those provisions.
The law would force platforms into digital ID checks.
The appeals themselves are already lodged with the Ninth Circuit.
We obtained a copy of the filings for you here (Google), here (TikTok), and here (Meta).
Tuesday's filings are a separate move, asking Judge Edward Davila, who heard the case in San Jose, to hold the law off their platforms while the appellate court decides whether he read the First Amendment wrong.
These are requests, and so far that is all they are. The companies want an answer by the close of business on August 18, and say that if none comes, they will take the same request up to the Ninth Circuit.
The move has worked once already. When NetChoice challenged the same law, Davila granted a 30-day injunction pending appeal, and the Ninth Circuit then enjoined the state from enforcing SB 976 for the length of that appeal.
On August 5, Davila denied the platforms' bid for a preliminary injunction, finding them unlikely to show that their ranking systems carry any expressive message of their own. He wrote that the ruling was preliminary and that the companies could still win their argument that the law is unconstitutional.
The provisions he left standing reach only minors a platform already has "actual knowledge" about. What turns that into a test run against every user is the same law's next deadline. By January 1, 2027, SB 976 requires operators to start assessing which of their users are minors, under rules Bonta's office is drafting. The pause the companies want from Davila would hold that requirement off with the rest of the law.
The office published its proposed version of those rules on May 14.
Those rules list the ways a platform may decide a user is not a child. Among them are "biological or behavioral signals," which the draft spells out as facial analysis, hand-gesture or gait patterns, and vocal analysis, set beside verified personal data, a cryptographic proof of age, and a government ID. An ID, the state says, cannot be the only option a platform offers.
The draft points a camera at a face or a gait, a microphone at a voice, to estimate whether the person opening a feed is over eighteen. The check exists to keep children out of ranked feeds, and the only way to do that is to run it against everyone. Adults in California would end up proving their age to open a personalized feed.
That the three companies pressing this case are Meta, Google, and TikTok changes nothing about the objection. Their feeds run on the same behavioral profiling the law is aimed at, and their motions defend that business. Meta's engineering vice president, Lars Backstrom, said in a declaration that compliance would force the company to "radically alter the nature" of its products.
Bonta's office was asked to agree to a pause and, failing that, to give thirty days' notice before any enforcement. On August 10, it declined both, and the companies filed the next day.
