SB-758: Social Media Age Verification

This bill raises concerns about free expression, privacy, and the constitutional rights of both minors and adults. Specifically, p.5 lines 5-7 of the bill create an “age verification” requirement for social media platforms, whereby platforms “shall employ a reliable, industry-accepted method approved by the department of justice” to determine whether a user of the platform is a minor.

While the government has a legitimate interest in protecting minors from harm, the U.S. Supreme Court has said that “does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.” In part for this reason, courts have struck down social media restrictions similar to SB-758 around the country.

And in a recent U.S. Supreme Court emergency docket concurrence involving a state social media age-verification law, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that under the Court’s precedent, the law “is likely unconstitutional.”

With the risk of sensitive identity documents falling into the hands of bad actors due to data breaches, and the very real threats of government surveillance and criminalization of dissent, requiring adults to submit to mandatory age and identity gates in order to express themselves on platforms like X, Bluesky, and Reddit will inevitably chill constitutionally protected speech.