2026 01 15 A33598 D290774 Amy Bos Net Choice Written Testimony

Summary

Written testimony in opposition submitted by Amy Bos, Vice President of Government Affairs at NetChoice, dated January 15, 2026, headed to the Washington State Senate Business, Trade and Economic Development Committee. The letter argues that state laws on minors' online access, including age verification and parental consent mandates, have been enjoined or struck down under the First Amendment. It discusses NetChoice v. Griffin and Arkansas S.B. 396, Free Speech Coalition v. Foti in Louisiana, and California's Assembly Bill 976. It then objects to expected Washington addictive feeds legislation restricting feeds and push notifications to minors, arguing such limits face strict scrutiny and that age determination creates privacy risks. It closes by urging the committee to focus on digital literacy, transparency and parental tools.

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Amy Bos
Vice President of Government Affairs, NetChoice
Washington, DC 20005
                                                                 Defending Free Speech and Free Enterprise Online




Washington State
Senate Business, Trade and Economic                                 TESTIMONY IN OPPOSITION
Development Committee

                                                                                               January 15, 2026


Dear Chair Kaufmann, Vice-Chair McClintock and Members of the House Committee on Consumer
Protection and Business:

Thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony on behalf of NetChoice. NetChoice is a trade
association of leading internet businesses that promotes the value, convenience, and choice that
internet business models provide to American consumers. Our mission is to make the internet safe for
free enterprise and free expression. We appreciate your attention to children’s online safety—a priority
we share with this committee and concerned parents across Washington State.

Throughout history, books, movies, television, rock music, video games, and the Internet have all been
criticized for posing risks to minors. Today’s social media platforms occupy the same cultural space,
generating comparable debates about their impact on minors. These discussions matter, and all
stakeholders—parents, educators, researchers, and lawmakers—have important roles to play in them.
But one participant is conspicuously absent from the list of who should decide what young people can
read, watch, or say: the government itself. The First Amendment draws a bright line, reserving that
authority for families, not the state.

Despite this constitutional framework, we have witnessed a wave of state legislation in recent years
attempting to interpose the government as the gatekeeper of minors’ online experiences. From Florida
to Utah, from Texas to Ohio, state legislatures have enacted laws mandating age verification systems,
requiring parental consent for account creation, and dictating platform design features—all in service of
limiting what young people can see and say online. The legal results have been swift and unambiguous:
these laws do not stand up to First Amendment scrutiny.

The past two years alone have produced a remarkable string of judicial rejections spanning the Ninth
Circuit and district courts in Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio, Texas, and Utah.
Different circuits, different statutory schemes, different judges—yet the same constitutional defects
appear in each case. These laws violate the First Amendment because they are not sufficiently tailored to
achieve their stated goals. Worse, they accomplish the opposite of empowering parents: they replace
parental judgment with state diktat.
The Supreme Court identified this precise problem in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association
when it distinguished between two very different roles for government. On one hand, the state may
legitimately help parents enforce their own decisions—if a parent tells a concert venue not to admit
their child, the state can back up that parental choice. On the other hand, the state cannot simply decree
that no child may attend any concert without obtaining advance parental permission. The former
respects parental authority; the latter usurps it.

This is not a subtle distinction. Laws requiring blanket age verification and parental consent mandates do
not give parents more control—they give the government control, subject only to a parent’s ability to
override the restriction. The constitutional infirmity is inherent: the state has no authority to prevent
young people from accessing fully protected speech unless their parents affirmatively grant permission.
That inverts the proper relationship between families and government, making the state the default
arbiter of what minors may read, watch, and discuss online.

We come before you today not as adversaries, but to share the experiences of other jurisdictions.
NetChoice has closely monitored kids’ online safety legislation nationwide, and we have seen a troubling
pattern: well-intentioned laws that are struck down by federal courts before they can take effect, wasting
taxpayer resources and delaying real solutions. We want to work collaboratively with this committee to
develop effective approaches that will withstand legal scrutiny and actually protect children.

The State of Play in Other Jurisdictions

Across the nation, states have rushed to enact laws restricting how minors access online content and
services. The pattern is consistent: these laws are challenged immediately, preliminarily enjoined, and
ultimately invalidated. The First Amendment provides robust protection for online speech, and courts
have repeatedly found that state efforts to regulate internet content for minors run afoul of
constitutional protections.

Most recently, federal courts have struck down age verification laws in both Arkansas and Louisiana. In
Free Speech Coalition v. Foti (Louisiana) and NetChoice v. Griffin (Arkansas), courts found that mandatory
age verification requirements for accessing lawful online content violated the First Amendment. The
Arkansas law, S.B. 396, required social media companies to verify users’ ages and obtain parental
consent for minors. In August 2023, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas
preliminarily enjoined the law, finding it likely unconstitutional because it imposed significant burdens on
adults’ access to protected speech and was not narrowly tailored.

California’s Assembly Bill 976, the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, signed into law in
September 2024, represents a different regulatory approach than age verification mandates, but raises
equally serious constitutional concerns. The law requires social media platforms to provide minors with a
default “chronological feed” instead of algorithmically ranked content, restricts notifications to minors
during nighttime hours and school hours, and limits other features deemed addictive. While the court
did not decide on the constitutionality of the personalized feeds provision, the restriction on sending
minors notifications was struck down.




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Terms like “addictive feed” lack clear definitions, giving platforms little guidance on compliance while
simultaneously exposing them to enforcement actions. This vagueness chills protected speech as
platforms must guess at what features might be deemed impermissibly addictive and might err on the
side of suppressing lawful speech in order to aim for compliance with the law. Moreover, by mandating
specific design choices based on content presentation—how and when users see speech—California is
directly regulating editorial functions that lie at the core of First Amendment protections. AB 976, like
other state social media laws, also requires platforms to determine which users are minors—a
requirement that creates significant practical and constitutional difficulties.

Constitutional Concerns with Washington's Proposed Approach

We understand that Washington came close to passing addictive feeds legislation last year and the
legislation is expected to be introduced again this year. The bill’s core provisions prohibit operators from
providing addictive feeds to minors unless the operator has reasonably determined the user is not a
minor. The bill also restricts push notifications during nighttime and school hours unless operators obtain
parental consent.

A prohibition on providing addictive feeds to minors is a content and design-based restriction that
burdens constitutionally protected speech. Such a law still regulates how platforms present lawful
content to users based on editorial algorithms—a core First Amendment activity. Courts have
consistently held that such restrictions on curatorial and editorial functions are subject to strict scrutiny,
which requires the government to use the most narrowly tailored and least restrictive means available.
Mandating chronological feeds or prohibiting algorithmic curation is not narrowly tailored, particularly
when less restrictive alternatives exist, such as parental control tools that platforms already offer.

It is important to address a common misconception: personalized feeds are not inherently unsafe for
children. In fact, when properly designed, personalized algorithms serve as powerful safety tools. These
systems can filter out harmful content, reduce exposure to bullying and harassment, and surface
age-appropriate educational and entertainment content that matches a young person’s interests and
developmental needs.

Personalization allows platforms to learn what content keeps children engaged in positive
ways—whether that’s science experiments, art tutorials, sports highlights, or educational videos. The
same technology that can recommend content can also identify and demote harmful material before
children ever see it. Chronological feeds, by contrast, provide no filtering mechanism and expose users to
whatever content appears in their network, regardless of its appropriateness. Mandating
chronological-only feeds for minors would actually remove an important layer of protection and curation
that helps keep young users safe.

While the new draft bill attempts to address privacy concerns by prohibiting the use of personal
information collected for age determination for other purposes, this provision does not eliminate the
fundamental privacy and security risks created by age determination requirements. Operators must still



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collect, process, and store sensitive personal data to comply with the law, creating the honeypots of
verified identity information that attract hackers and data breaches. The privacy protections in Section 7
do not prevent the initial collection—they merely restrict subsequent use, which offers little comfort
when the database is compromised.



A Path Forward: Empowering Parents Without Constitutional Violations
Washington State should learn from the legal failures in other jurisdictions. Enacting legislation that
mirrors struck-down laws in Arkansas, Louisiana, or California would waste state resources defending an
unwinnable case and delay actual solutions to the legitimate concerns parents have. Rather than rushing
forward with constitutionally suspect mandates, we urge this committee to work collaboratively with
stakeholders, including the technology industry, to develop tools and resources that empower parents
without violating the First Amendment.

Everyone here wants the internet to be a safer place for kids — but we can’t get there by compromising
the privacy, speech rights, and independence of every user. At NetChoice we believe focusing instead on
digital literacy, transparency, and helping parents guide their children online — without building a
surveillance system that treats every American like a child is the best and most constitutionally sound
approach. We stand ready to assist this committee in finding constitutionally sound pathways forward.

Thank you for your consideration.


Sincerely, ​

Amy Bos
Vice President Government Affairs​
NetChoice
NetChoice is a trade association that works to make the internet safe for free enterprise and free expression.




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