On August 31, 2026, the California legislature passed Assembly Bill 1709 without a single dissenting vote — 39-0 in the Senate, with the Assembly accepting the Senate's amendments the same day after its own 76-0 approval in May. The bill would prohibit websites, online services and apps from offering users under 16 "addictive features" such as personalized recommendation feeds and autoplay. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is urging Governor Gavin Newsom to veto it, calling it "a well-intentioned, but deeply flawed piece of legislation."

Why It Matters

Every age-verification mandate that lands on a general-purpose platform eventually reaches the adult industry, because the infrastructure is shared. If California drives Meta, Google, TikTok and their peers to standardize on ID upload or face scanning to satisfy AB 1709, that is the rail every other age-gated service in the state gets to use — and the compliance cost curve for adult platforms bends accordingly. It also determines what "reasonable" looks like in the next round of litigation over adult-specific statutes. The device-level fork is the one worth tracking. AB 1856 keeps OS-level age signals alive, and that is precisely the model Pornhub has been lobbying Google, Apple, Microsoft and US lawmakers to adopt — a phone that broadcasts an age bracket rather than a website that demands your driver's licence. As Free Speech Coalition policy director Mike Stabile put it in Mashable's late-August reporting on the age-verification era, "No one wants to scan their face to masturbate." California is currently running both approaches in parallel, and whichever one Newsom signs and courts sustain becomes the national default by sheer market weight. The unanimity is its own signal. A 39-0 and 76-0 vote in a legislature that is otherwise sharply divided says child-safety framing now carries no political cost, which means the constraint on these laws will be judicial rather than legislative. France's Constitutional Council struck down that country's under-15 social media ban in August on proportionality and privacy grounds; EFF is effectively asking Newsom to reach the same conclusion before a court has to.

The mechanism is what drags this into sextech's orbit. Under-16 users would keep their accounts but lose recommendation algorithms and basic inputs like who they follow and what they like. To know who is under 16, platforms must run age assurance — via California's Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043), which takes effect in 2027, or failing that, the method defined in Health and Safety Code Section 27001. EFF's objection is that this pushes companies toward government ID or biometric checks, creating "massive honeypots of sensitive personal data," severely damaging online anonymity and exposing users of all ages to breach risk. Penalties run to $50,000 per affected minor for knowing violations and $25,000 for negligent ones. The bill also establishes a seven-member e-Safety Advisory Commission to advise the Attorney General, Legislature and Governor on age-assurance technology and privacy.

EFF further argues AB 1709 "introduces legal confusion by creating provisions that conflict with already enacted legislation like A.B. 1043 and S.B. 976," and that California "will only end up spending valuable resources to defend a law bound to be tied up in court." Newsom has not publicly endorsed AB 1709 but has previously supported restricting teen social media and signed AB 1043.

The bill is one of several age-related measures moving through Sacramento in the same window. The legislature separately passed AB 1856, an amendment preserving operating-system-level age signals — the device-level approach that adult-industry advocates have argued for as the least intrusive alternative to site-by-site ID checks.

Sources

Update — 2026-09-08

{Initial entry — story first created.}