The news: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed 13 laws restricting addictive social media features and harmful AI chatbot interactions for minors. The measures are among the most stringent protections for young US users to date.

What’s changing under the new rules:

• Autoplay & Personalized Feeds: Banned for users under 16 on all social platforms.
• AI Chatbot Companions: Mandatory age verification (or universal child protections), parental controls, self-harm crisis protocols, explicit AI disclosures, risk assessments, and independent safety audits.
• Platform Liability: Large platforms failing to exercise reasonable care face statutory damages up to $1M per injured child.
• Targeted Advertising & Profiling: Restricts services popular with children from profiling young users or repurposing their personal data for ads.

The laws come weeks after Meta agreed to a $17.1 billion settlement of a multistate lawsuit in California federal court, which would impose 2-hour daily time limits, overnight restrictions, non-algorithmic feeds, banned cosmetic filters, and stronger parental controls and age verification for teens.

Why it matters: Rather than putting responsibility mainly on teens and parents to manage social media usage, the laws target how products are built and hold companies more accountable for preventing harm.

The social media restrictions respond to evidence linking heavy screen use with poorer mental health. Teens with four or more hours of nonschool screen time are more than twice as likely to report depression symptoms (25.9% vs. 9.6%) and anxiety symptoms (27.1% vs. 12.3%), per a CDC study published in 2025.

The chatbot rules bring similar protections to conversational AI which is already used by most teens. Seventy-two percent of teens have used an AI companion, per Common Sense Media. And among those who have used them 34% report feeling uncomfortable with something an AI companion has said or done. Tech companies have begun adding their own guardrails amid lawsuits over teen self-harm and mental health negligence, but California adds formal documentation and independent review to those efforts.

For marketers, tighter guardrails matter because they are likely to fundamentally change media planning by making child safety a more important priority. Strategies for reaching younger audiences are likely to shift, especially if California’s stricter rules spread to other states.

Implications for social media and AI companies: California turns youth safety measures from voluntary product choices into legal requirements and could give other states a model for regulating social media and companion chatbots. Public support could add momentum beyond the state: A majority of US adults support federal rules around children’s social media use, including 74% for a ban on child data collection and 71% supporting mandatory parental consent rules, per a December CivicScience survey.

Social media and AI companies may apply the changes more broadly rather than maintain California-specific experiences, making the state’s rules a de facto baseline for youth safety. Although the laws center on children’s mental health, the resulting changes to crisis response, default safeguards, and compulsive design could extend beyond the users covered by the age limits.