Speech vs. Safety: The Constitutional Battle Over Protecting Kids Online

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In March 2025, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman blocked California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), ruling that the law likely violated tech firms' First Amendment rights. The decision is the newest chapter in a decades-long constitutional battle between protecting children online and preserving free speech—a persistent challenge for policymakers nationwide. The California legislation would have required online platforms, to strictly evaluate possible harms to children, enable age verification, set privacy settings, and take preventative steps before introducing new features. Violations of the bill would come with hefty fines: up to $2,500 per child for negligent violations and $7,500 per child for intentional ones. While the California Attorney General, Rob Bonta, advocated for what he believed was a “common-sense bill,” he was opposed by NetChoice, a group of online businesses that includes leading tech companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, Netflix, and X. In challenging the Act, Net Choice successfully made the case that the bill would turn these companies into "state-censors" forced to "censor the internet under the guise of privacy,” blocking the ratification of the act.

Judge Freeman's ruling emphasized that regulations focused on "the emotive impact of speech on its audience" are content-based, and therefore, must be narrowly tailored - a standard California's law failed to meet. The ruling furthers a widespread trend in the US Judiciary since the internet’s dawn. Legislative efforts to protect minors from objectionable internet content have encountered repeated conflicts with First Amendment protection, since the 1990s. In 1997, the Supreme Court invalidated major provisions of the Communications Decency Act in Reno v. ACLU, effectively reaffirming that online speech is entitled to broad First Amendment protection. In this case, Justice John Paul Stevens concluded that the interest in safeguarding children does not justify an unnecessarily broad suppression of adult speech. This pattern persisted with the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which in 2007 was permanently enjoined in ACLU v Gonzales, where the Supreme Court once more determined that less restrictive options could achieve the government’s objective of child safety without requiring broad speech restrictions. The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) was the sole piece of legislation to pass constitutional muster in 2003, largely due to its specific and narrow mandate for filtering content on federally funded school and library computers, rather than attempting to impose general content bans across the internet.

To avoid First Amendment violations, content-based restrictions must be precisely tailored—which explains this ongoing judicial battle. Although the ruling courts understand the interest to protect children from the internet’s harms, they routinely state that such broad restrictions would affect all users, including adults, and therefore fail the “narrowly tailored” requirement. Firstly, lawmakers consistently rule that age verification mandates would continually place heavy burdens on adults and inhibit their free speech. In striking down the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) as unconstitutional, the Supreme Court observed that age-verification mechanisms “may lead to potentially severe burdens on speech itself,” Secondly, restrictions based on content generally invoke strict scrutiny, necessitating that the government clearly demonstrate how prospective law would be narrowly drawn to serve a compelling state interest. As Judge Freeman observed in her recent ruling, California's Act would constitute  “a breathtaking act of unconstitutionally vague and overbroad, content-based censorship.” Ultimately, concerns regarding vagueness and overbreadth emerge when laws fail to explicitly delineate the motivation behind prohibiting content, or apply prohibition too broadly.

The ongoing legal discourse surrounding the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act is merely one example out of many that underscore the tensions between safeguarding children online and upholding First Amendment rights. Historical precedents like Reno v. ACLU and ACLU v. Gonzales demonstrate how legislative efforts to regulate internet content and protect minors often face significant constitutional hurdles. The recent injunction against the CAADCA reflects the judiciary's continued emphasis on ensuring that content-based regulations are tuned to avoid undue suppression of free speech. This enduring challenge highlights the necessity for policymakers to craft legislation that effectively protects children online while respecting the constitutional rights of all users.

Navyaa Jain is a Sophomore studying Computer Science - Economics at Brown University. She is a Writer for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review and can be reached at navyaa_jain@brown.edu.

Cat Gao is a sophomore at Brown University studying Philosophy and Literary Arts. She is an Editor for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review and can be reached at cat_gao@brown.edu