California Wants Your ID to Scroll Instagram.

TL;DR: California Assembly Bill 1709 would ban anyone under 16 from using social media and require every user, adults included, to verify their identity with government-issued ID or biometric data before accessing platforms with algorithmic feeds. The bill cleared the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee on April 16 and the Judiciary Committee on April 21, both with near-unanimous votes. Governor Newsom has signaled he'll sign it. The EFF calls it "privacy-destroying" and warns it would force 40 million Californians to hand sensitive personal data to private companies. A full Assembly floor vote could happen within days. Penalties hit $50,000 per affected minor for knowing violations.

What A.B. 1709 Actually Does

The pitch sounds simple: protect kids from social media. The implementation is anything but.

A.B. 1709 targets "covered platforms" (defined as sites and apps that use algorithmic feeds designed to maximize engagement) ^[1]. Think Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Snapchat. If a platform serves you algorithmically ranked content, it's covered.

The bill does two things:

Bans anyone under 16 from creating or maintaining an account on covered platforms. Platforms must delete accounts of users confirmed to be under 16, along with all associated personal data ^[2].
Requires age verification for all users, not just kids. To prove you're old enough, you'd need to submit government-issued identification or biometric data to the platform or a third-party verification service ^[1] ^[3].

That second part is the kicker. You can't verify that a 15-year-old isn't on Instagram without verifying that a 35-year-old is old enough. So every user gets checked. Every user hands over ID.

Who's Pushing This

Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal, a Democrat from Long Beach, authored the bill. It has a bipartisan author list that reads like a legislative wish coalition: David Alvarez, Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, Mia Bonta, Josh Hoover, Al Muratsuchi, Joe Patterson (Republican), and Buffy Wicks ^[2].

Common Sense Media co-sponsors the bill alongside the California Commission on the Status of Women & Girls ^[2]. Governor Gavin Newsom has publicly backed it, signaling he'd sign it into law ^[4] ^[5].

The Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee passed it 13-1 on April 16. The Judiciary Committee passed it 10-0 (with two abstentions) on April 21 ^[2]. The lone "no" vote in committee? Assemblymember Alexandra Macedo. Out of 25 committee votes cast, one person thought this might be a problem.

The Privacy Disaster Hidden in a Child Safety Bill

Here's what the bill's supporters aren't saying loudly enough: to keep kids off social media, California would create the largest mandatory identity verification system for online speech in American history.

The EFF put it bluntly in an April 24 alert: the bill would force users to submit "highly sensitive government-issued ID or biometric information to private companies" and create "centralized honeypots of sensitive information" that are prime targets for data breaches ^[1].

Think about what that means in practice. Every Californian who wants to use Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube would need to:

Upload a photo of their driver's license or passport, OR
Submit to biometric verification (face scan, fingerprint, etc.)

That data goes to the platform itself or a third-party verification company. The bill requires that verification data be used only for age assurance and be retained for the minimum time necessary ^[2]. But we've seen how well that works.

Age Verification Companies Already Can't Keep Your Data Safe

The EFF specifically cites "repeated data breaches involving age- and identity-verification services" ^[1]. They're not wrong.

The entire premise of A.B. 1709 depends on trusting private companies with your most sensitive documents. Your driver's license number. Your face scan. Your date of birth. Your real name tied to your social media activity.

And unlike a password, you can't change your face. You can't get a new date of birth. When (not if) a verification database gets breached, the damage is permanent. Biometric data, once stolen, is stolen forever ^[1].

This isn't hypothetical. We've documented how age verification companies like Persona already collect biometric data and share it with government agencies. We've covered how Discord's face-scanning age verification raises the same concerns. California's bill would make this mandatory at a scale that dwarfs anything attempted before.

Who Gets Silenced

Age verification doesn't hit everyone equally. The EFF warns the system would "disproportionately silence marginalized communities: those whose IDs don't match their presentation, those with disabilities, trans and gender non-conforming folks, and people of color" ^[1].

People without government-issued ID. Undocumented immigrants. Domestic violence survivors who've changed their identity. Teenagers who use social media to find community and resources they can't access in person. Trans people whose legal documents don't match their lived identity.

For all of these groups, mandatory ID verification isn't a minor inconvenience. It's a wall between them and the modern public square.

And for anyone who values anonymous speech (a tradition with deep roots in American democracy, from the Federalist Papers onward), the bill "threatens to destroy" online anonymity ^[1]. You can't be anonymous on a platform that has your government ID on file.

The Constitutional Problem

The Reason Foundation's testimony to the Assembly is direct: "A law that would broadly exclude an entire class of minors from [social media platforms] is an unconstitutional burden on protected speech" ^[6].

Social media platforms are forums for expression, association, education, news consumption, and political participation. Banning 16-year-olds from all of them is a content-neutral restriction that still triggers First Amendment scrutiny because it prevents minors from accessing constitutionally protected speech.

Courts have already struck down similar age verification laws. In 2024, a federal judge blocked a Texas age verification law, finding it violated the First Amendment. NetChoice v. Paxton. The legal landscape for these laws isn't exactly friendly.

California's bill also overrides parental choice. A parent who decides their 14-year-old is mature enough for supervised social media use? Too bad. The state decided for them ^[6].

Australia Already Tried This. It's Going Badly.

California's bill follows Australia's Social Media Minimum Age Act, which set a similar under-16 ban that took effect in 2026. The results have been instructive.

Australian teens immediately turned to VPNs to bypass the ban. VPN usage among Australian minors surged as kids found workarounds faster than platforms could implement verification systems. The ban didn't eliminate teen social media use. It pushed it underground, away from parental oversight, and onto platforms with even fewer safety guardrails.

The Australian experience is the control experiment for A.B. 1709. And the experiment failed.

What This Is Really About

There's a pattern here. Governments worldwide are using "protect the children" as the entry point for building universal identity verification infrastructure. Australia did it. The UK's Online Safety Act does it. France just tried it for porn sites. And now California.

Once the ID verification infrastructure exists for social media, expanding it is trivial. News sites next. Forums. Messaging apps. VPNs. Every online space becomes gated by government-approved identity.

The bill even creates a new bureaucracy (the e-Safety Advisory Commission within the Department of Justice) to oversee platform compliance ^[2]. A state surveillance body monitoring how 40 million people access the internet, funded by the penalties it collects from non-compliant platforms.

If the framing reminds you of how age verification is really about building surveillance infrastructure, that's because it is.

What You Can Do

Contact Your Assembly Member

A.B. 1709 is heading to the Assembly Appropriations Committee and then a full floor vote, likely within a week. If you're in California, contact your Assembly member. The EFF has set up a quick action page to make this easy ^[1].

Understand What's at Stake

This isn't about whether kids should be on TikTok. It's about whether every adult in California should have to show their papers to post online. If you're comfortable handing your driver's license to Meta, that's your call. But this bill would make it mandatory.

Prepare for the Fallout

If the bill passes, expect platforms to roll out ID verification for California users within the compliance window. Start thinking now about whether you want your government ID linked to your social media accounts, and what alternatives exist.

The Bottom Line

California's A.B. 1709 is a child safety bill that would build the most extensive identity verification system for online speech in the United States. Every adult user verified. Every minor banned. Every piece of government ID stored by private companies or their contractors.

It sailed through two committees with a combined vote of 23-1. The governor wants to sign it. It could pass the full Assembly in days.

The question isn't whether kids should be protected online. Of course they should. The question is whether the tool California chose to protect them (mandatory government ID verification for all internet users) creates a surveillance infrastructure far more dangerous than the problem it claims to solve.

History says yes. Australia's ban already failed. Age verification databases already get breached. And once you build a system that requires ID to access speech, you never take it down. You expand it.

References

Published: April 26, 2026