Wednesday, August 26, 2026
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Meta Asks Ninth Circuit to Block SB 976 Pending Appeal
Implications of District Court’s Denial of Injunctive Relief Said to Be ‘Staggering’
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Meta Platforms, Inc. has implored the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to grant an emergency injunction blocking implementation of California’s “Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act”—which bars platforms from providing personalized feeds to minors without parental consent—asserting that a District Court judge, in denying relief, acted in contravention of a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Providing “addictive feeds” to minors entailing issuing a stream of content based on perceived interests.
In a motion filed Monday, Meta recites that Judge Edward J. Davila of the Northern District of California on Friday, “after the close of business,” denied a motion for an injunction pending appeal, asserting that in doing so, he “defied recent Supreme Court precedent holding that Meta’s Facebook Feed is protected by the First Amendment.”
Davila, instead, “decreed that the State of California may restrict how Meta disseminates and curates the feeds of fully protected user speech on its services without any First Amendment review,” the brief protests, declaring that “ implications of that decision are staggering.”
2024 Decision
It cites the high court’s July 1, 2024 decision in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, authored by Justice Elana Kagan. She declared that circuit courts erred in considering restrictions on content moderation imposed on social media by Florida and Texas because there was lacking a proper analysis of the facial First Amendment challenges. Those challenges were brought by NetChoice and another trade association, members of which include Meta’s Facebook and Google’s YouTube. Kagan declared:
“[T]here is much work to do below on both these cases, given the facial nature of NetChoice’s challenges. But that work must be done consistent with the First Amendment, which does not go on leave when social media are involved.”
On Aug. 5, Davila denied motions by Meta, TikTok, and YouTube to preliminarily enjoin implementation of the act, created by SB 976, and on Friday, denied injunctive relief pending appeals, saying:
“The Court is not…persuaded that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their appeal. Plaintiffs reiterate the same arguments that the Court previously considered before concluding that a decision to show users content that a predictive algorithm suggests will be ‘interesting’ to them is non-expressive, and therefore not protected by the First Amendment.”
He added:
“Plaintiffs have not shown that they will suffer irreparable harm by complying with the personalized feed provisions of SB 976 while the Ninth Circuit considers their appeals….As this Court previously noted, great harm is suffered when a law restricts speech….But here, where the Court has found that the personalized feed provisions do not restrict First Amendment freedoms, the Court is unpersuaded by this asserted risk of irreparable injury.”
Meta’s Contention
Meta argued in Monday’s brief: “SB 976 is now in effect, and the State recently refused Meta’s request for a 30-day notice period prior to any enforcement action. Absent prompt relief from this Court, Meta will have to fundamentally transform its services—including ‘pervasive changes to the design and operation of Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and Threads services,’ which display billions of user posts, in ways that will ‘severely restrict Meta’s ability to present affected users with content that they might find valuable.’…The district court erroneously discounted Meta’s argument as speculative…, but Meta’s argument is based on clear, undisputed facts in the record.”
It declares that “according to the State—and now, too, the district court—the State may dictate how… posts of protected speech are organized and published without even triggering, much less satisfying, any First Amendment scrutiny.”
The brief contends that “SB 976’s restrictions on Meta’s feeds implicate the First Amendment for at least two independent reasons: they interfere with Meta’s First Amendment right to determine how to curate and display the protected speech on its services,” in violation of Moody, “and they burden Meta’s separate First Amendment right to disseminate protected third-party expression.”
The case is Meta Platforms, Inc. v. Bonta, 26-5120.
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