Imagine a customer walking into a bookstore. She loves mysteries and just finished a great book. She wants something along the same lines but she doesn’t know what, so she asks the bookseller. The bookseller considers their inventory, directs her to the non-fiction section and to a specific title that she might like based on the last book she read. She may not have considered this book because it’s outside of the genre she has typically preferred, but the bookseller knew to recommend it based on what she had said, what the bookseller knew of the book, and other customers who had enjoyed it.
A law that prohibited this interaction would have significant First Amendment implications. Yet that’s exactly what a law in California does, except for teenagers on social media.
On September 15, 2026, the Center for Democracy & Technology and Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief along with the Wikimedia Foundation in Meta Platforms v. Bonta, challenging California’s SB 976. CDT and EFF filed the brief to bring to the court’s attention the law’s broader impacts on young people’s freedom of expression and access to information online.
The brief explains that personalized recommendation systems help users find information and audiences for their own speech, and that restricting teenagers’ access to those systems burdens their First Amendment rights. It further argues that platforms’ decisions about what content to recommend, to whom, and in what order are protected editorial judgments, even when those decisions are implemented through automated systems.
Finally, the brief explains that recognizing these First Amendment protections does not prevent states from addressing legitimate concerns about the addictive nature of these recommendation systems and the private surveillance that drives them. States can pursue more narrowly tailored approaches, including stronger privacy protections and tools that give young people greater control over the content they see, without broadly restricting their ability to use personalized recommendations.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
