Assemblyman Josh Lowenthal has introduced AB 1709, a California bill that would require social media companies to strip addictive features from their platforms SFGATE. The Democratic lawmaker's proposal arrives alongside AB 56, introduced by Assemblymember Bauer-Kahan in the current 2025-2026 Regular Session, which would mandate warning labels on social media platforms LegiScan.

Neither bill specifies a product feature list yet, but the legislative timing tracks closely with a jury verdict that landed on March 25, 2026. A U.S. jury found Meta and Google negligent for designing platforms harmful to young people, awarding $6 million in damages Reuters. Infinite scroll — the auto-loading feed mechanic that removes natural stopping points from a browsing session — was cited during that trial as an example of harmful design Reuters.

California is not starting from zero on this front. Reuters reported in February 2023 that the state had already passed legislation mandating "age appropriate design" decisions for platforms serving minors Reuters. AB 1709 and AB 56 extend that regulatory thread from design-process obligations toward more prescriptive product mandates and consumer-facing disclosure requirements.

Two Distinct Regulatory Approaches

The two bills take different routes to the same underlying concern. AB 1709 targets the engineering layer directly: it would compel companies to remove features deemed addictive from live products, which for engineering and product teams means auditing engagement mechanics such as autoplay, infinite scroll, algorithmic feed ranking optimized for session length, and notification systems tuned for re-engagement.

AB 56 instead pursues a disclosure model, closer in spirit to surgeon-general warnings on tobacco packaging than to a feature ban. A warning-label regime would not require platforms to change their underlying architecture, only to surface risk information to users or, more likely, to minors and their guardians. Compliance costs and enforcement mechanisms for both bills remain to be defined through the legislative process, and neither has been reported as scheduled for a floor vote.

For platform engineering teams, the practical difference matters. A feature-removal mandate under AB 1709 would require rearchitecting core recommendation and feed systems, a nontrivial undertaking for platforms whose entire monetization model depends on time-on-app metrics. A labeling requirement under AB 56 is comparatively lightweight from an implementation standpoint, though it carries its own legal and reputational exposure if labels are later found inadequate or misleading in litigation.

Context From the Courtroom

The March verdict against Meta and Google gives California legislators a courtroom record to point to as they push these bills forward. Juries assessing "negligent design" claims have effectively been asked to evaluate product decisions — infinite scroll, autoplay, push notification cadence — as engineering choices with quantifiable harm, rather than as protected editorial or expressive conduct. That framing, if it holds up on appeal and in subsequent cases, changes the liability calculus for any company shipping engagement-optimized consumer software, not just the two named defendants.

Worth flagging: the $6 million verdict is modest relative to the platforms' scale, and a single jury outcome does not establish binding precedent the way an appellate ruling would. But plaintiffs' attorneys in ongoing and future litigation are likely to cite the infinite-scroll finding as persuasive authority regardless of its formal precedential weight.

In this author's view, the more consequential document here is AB 1709, precisely because it would force a redesign rather than a warning. Disclosure regimes have a long history in consumer protection — think nutrition labels, energy-efficiency ratings — and they tend to shift consumer behavior only at the margins while leaving the underlying product intact. A mandate to remove specific engagement mechanics is a different order of intervention, closer to how automotive safety regulation forced physical redesigns rather than dashboard warnings alone.

Neither bill has been reported as enacted. Both remain part of California's ongoing legislative session, and their final language, scope, and enforcement provisions could shift substantially before any vote. Social media companies operating in California will be watching committee markups closely, given that a state-level feature mandate from a market as large as California often becomes a de facto national standard for platform design, simply because maintaining separate product versions by state is rarely commercially practical.

What happens next in Sacramento will determine whether the courtroom finding on infinite scroll becomes an isolated verdict or the first data point in a broader shift toward treating engagement-engineering decisions as a matter of statutory design obligation rather than product discretion.