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Tech giants Meta, Google, and TikTok are suing to block a landmark California law meant to protect kids’ mental health on social media platforms. The law, one of a slate of bills signed by Gov. Newsom this year to protect kids online, would block social media companies from offering “addictive” features to teens under 16.
Why now: Set to go into effect in January, the law defines addictive features as design choices like infinite scroll, autoplay, and recommendations. Those features are blamed in part for a teen mental health crisis, which the law seeks to curb.
What the tech companies argue: The three suits, filed in multiple federal courts in California this week, argue that the law would infringe on the companies’ First Amendment rights. The Meta suit, for example, says that the law undermines the “fundamental principle” of free speech by making the state “the editor, curator, and controller of online speech.” Google, which owns YouTube, similarly argues in its lawsuit that the law would “frustrate YouTube’s efforts to provide under-16 users with safe, responsible, and enriching experiences on the platform.” The companies want the courts to block the law before it takes effect.
Tech giants Meta, Google, and TikTok are suing to block a landmark California law meant to protect kids’ mental health on social media platforms.
The law, one of a slate of bills signed by Gov. Newsom this year to protect kids online, would block social media companies from offering “addictive” features to teens under 16.
Set to go into effect in January, the law defines addictive features as design choices like infinite scroll, autoplay, and recommendations. Those features are blamed in part for a teen mental health crisis, which the law seeks to curb.
The three suits, filed in multiple federal courts in California this week, argue that the law would infringe on the companies’ First Amendment rights. The Meta suit, for example, says that the law undermines the “fundamental principle” of free speech by making the state “the editor, curator, and controller of online speech.”
Google, which owns YouTube, similarly argues in its lawsuit that the law would “frustrate YouTube’s efforts to provide under-16 users with safe, responsible, and enriching experiences on the platform.”
The companies want the courts to block the law before it takes effect.
When the measure was before the California Legislature, some groups, like digital rights organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued the law would amount to a full ban on social media for teenagers because it was so broad and the features it regulated so fundamental to the platforms. Teens would then miss out on precious online resources, the groups said.
NetChoice, a tech industry-aligned group, also criticized the law. It released a statement supporting the lawsuits, saying “the state cannot restrict minors' access to protected expression simply because it thinks the expression is bad for them.”
A supporter of the law, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in response to the lawsuits that courts have already been “rejecting the industry’s claims that the First Amendment shields them from accountability.”
The bill’s passage was just one in a recent series of damaging moments for the tech industry, which has faced intense scrutiny over its impact on teens’ mental health. Meta agreed in August to pay as much as $17 billion as part of a settlement with 47 states that argued the company had engineered its products to be addictive to children.
A TikTok spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the suits. A Meta spokesperson declined to attach their name to a statement and CalMatters declined to publish it.
“We believe parents are best positioned to make the right decisions for their families, which is why we offer a range of protections and tools that put parents in control,” José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson, said in an email. “Overly broad laws like this actually break the systems we’ve built to help kids find high-quality, age-appropriate videos.”
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
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The 31st Conference of Parties, or COP31, starts Monday with speeches from world leaders and will later dig into how to follow through on past climate pledges.
Why it matters: A key issue this year is the implementation of promises to transition away from fossil fuels. Co-host Turkey is also pushing a separate plan that would help do that by shifting more global energy use — including transportation — to electricity generated from solar and wind power. Negotiators also will hash out how to provide promised funds to poor countries to switch to renewables, adapt to a warmer world and recover from climate-induced damage.
The backstory: Eleven years ago, the world was on track to hit 4 C (7.2 F) of warming above preindustrial levels by the end of the century. In 2015, nations set the goal of keeping warming to below 2 C (3.6 F), but with a preferred limit of 1.5 C (2.7 F), as measured over a multi-year period. Now, the world is at 1.4 C (2.5 F) of warming and is hurtling toward 2.6 C (4.7 F), the U.N. found.
Three stories about climate change are playing out like popular movie genres as United Nations climate negotiations begin in Antalya, Turkey.
There’s the horror story. Many scientists believe global warming is accelerating. Two months ago, the U.N. readjusted its decade-old goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) because the world is blowing past that threshold. The fallout from rising temperatures is felt globally, with Europe’s deadly summer heat waves and Nepal’s devastating flooding as stark examples.
There’s the love triangle. For more than a century, the world has been powered by coal, oil and gas. This love affair spurred economic development, as well as the emissions warming the planet. But renewable energy is capturing some of the world’s attention because it’s cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuels. Instead of switching from one to the other, the world is using both to meet demand from power-hungry artificial intelligence and ever-growing economic development. This isn’t helping curb climate change.
Then there’s the war movie. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine triggered a European energy shock. This year the United States and Israel bombed Iran. The conflict closed the Strait of Hormuz and sent fossil fuel prices skyrocketing, forcing nations to rethink their energy systems.
These stories are colliding as the 31st Conference of Parties, or COP31, starts Monday with speeches from world leaders and will later dig into how to follow through on past climate pledges.
A key issue this year is the implementation of promises to transition away from fossil fuels. Co-host Turkey is also pushing a separate plan that would help do that by shifting more global energy use — including transportation — to electricity generated from solar and wind power. Negotiators also will hash out how to provide promised funds to poor countries to switch to renewables, adapt to a warmer world and recover from climate-induced damage.
“It’s really the moment that we place a magnifying lens on what’s happening in the world on climate change, both good and bad,” David Waskow, international climate chief at the World Resources Institute, said.
While the U.S. is the world’s largest historic carbon polluter, it skipped last year’s COP and isn’t expected to participate this year.
“There’s always two topics in the climate negotiations that are relevant and difficult,” said Niklas Höhne, co-founder of Germany’s NewClimate Institute. “The first one is who produces emissions (and) how much. That is difficult enough. But what is even more complicated is the other issue, and that is who pays. And on this one, we are particularly in a difficult situation because the U.S., as the largest contributor, has dropped out. And there’s no other player who can jump in.”
Global climate efforts are off track
Eleven years ago, the world was on track to hit 4 C (7.2 F) of warming above preindustrial levels by the end of the century. In 2015, nations set the goal of keeping warming to below 2 C (3.6 F), but with a preferred limit of 1.5 C (2.7 F), as measured over a multi-year period.
Now, the world is at 1.4 C (2.5 F) of warming and is hurtling toward 2.6 C (4.7 F), the U.N. found.
October 2026 was the hottest October on record, and 2026 is virtually certain to end up as the second year to exceed the 1.5 degree Celsius level, behind 2024, the European climate agency Copernicus announced Friday.
“We have failed so far,” said Johan Rockström, director of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Rockström said Earth will likely experience more extreme weather, such as floods, droughts and storms, and may soon reach “tipping points,” such as ocean currents changing and the Amazon rainforest collapsing.
It comes down to fossil fuels
Even though burning fossil fuels is the main cause of warming, it has rarely been targeted in final documents agreed upon at the conference, mostly because those decisions require consensus.
“The reason we are seeing the breach of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is because we avoided the absolutely fundamental question of how climate change happened and what’s responsible, the source of the problem and that’s fossil fuels,” said Harjeet Singh, founding director of Satat Sampada Climate Foundation. “Unless and until we resolve the issue of fossil fuel phase out, we will not be able to deal with the problem.”
Brazil, which hosted COP30 last year, this month released a detailed voluntary roadmap for how countries could transition away from fossil fuels.
The roadmap is meant to turn the “big problem” of reducing fossil fuels into “smaller actionable solutions,” Ana Toni, who served as CEO of last year’s climate talks, said. One key thing nations must do is stop subsidizing fossil fuels, she said. The U.N. estimates fossil fuel subsidies globally hit $1.1 trillion this year.
“What’s standing in the way is not so much technology as governments and incumbent industries,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics. “One cannot underestimate the power and influence of the fossil fuel industry in slowing down action.”
Climate talks bring hope and frustration
Barbados youth activist Ashley Lashley’s first COP was five years ago. She was frustrated by the lack of progress then, but hopeful because there was urgency to keep the 1.5-degree goal alive.
Lashley still attends negotiations with some hope, but she is more frustrated than ever. She said “the science has become more alarming, but yet politically we seem to be negotiating how much failure we are prepared to tolerate.”
Qiyun Woo, a Singaporean youth environmentalist, said her generation is tired of “seeing their present and futures blanketed in wildfire smoke, in devastating floods (and) landslides.”
What gives most experts hope is how cheap solar and wind energy are, along with electric car growth, strengthening the economic argument for transitioning away from fossil fuels.
“It has never been as easy to reduce emissions as it is today because, again, this year, renewable energy has been developing faster than before,” Höhne said.
Hope for progress on the sidelines
Much of the work at climate negotiations happens on the sidelines, where not everyone has to agree and some nations do more than others.
One important sideline initiative this year is Turkey’s goal of increasing electricity’s share of global energy use from 21% to 35% by 2035, preferably by using renewable power.
Mohamed Adow, a veteran COP observer and director of Power Shift Africa, said the conference is taking place at a time when the world is deeply fragmented.
“The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has intensified economic and energy security pressures,” he said. “We don’t expect this particular conference to be able to sufficiently respond to the present day challenge ... that is affecting livelihoods and economies.”
The climate talks are hindered by the continued absence of the U.S., Adow said, adding that it wasn’t fair to nations like Nepal, which have to face catastrophic destruction alone while the world’s wealthiest country and biggest polluter sits on the fence.
“A time will come when we will have to hold the U.S. accountable for the climate harms that it’s caused,” he said.
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Borenstein reported from Washington, Delgado from Bangkok and Arasu from Bengaluru, India.
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
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Make It Make Sense is LAist's elections newsletter breaking down the results of the Nov. 3 general election. You can sign up here to receive issues in your inbox through the end of November.
In today's issue:
Read on ... to see all the election results updates for today.
This is the Nov. 6 issue of Make It Make Sense, LAist's elections newsletter breaking down the results of the 2026 general election. You can sign up here to receive issues in your inbox through the end of November.
Good morning! We’re beginning to feel the drag of Election Month. Cue the 🎶 Jeopardy music 🎶. We’re still waiting for an outcome on a lot of our statewide propositions, but we’ve got some juicy tax updates (if you can call them that) and another key race call.
First, now that Nithya Raman will be L.A.’s next mayor, what happens to her current council seat that stretches from the San Fernando Valley to the Santa Monica Mountains?
LAist asked L.A. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson’s office: “We look forward to working with Mayor-elect Raman and will discuss with her an appointment who best serves the residents of the Fourth District,” Martin Schlageter, a senior adviser to Harris-Dawson, said in a statement.
That indicates the district could avoid a special election, but who could be appointed is still very much up in the air.
Meanwhile, Raman will have to work closely with a City Council that didn’t back her bid for mayor. LAist asked the 12 members who will be working alongside her about how they plan to work with her — read what they said here.
🌴 L.A. City Council District 3
🌴 L.A. City Council District 9
🍊 O.C. Supervisors District 4
In the race for the Fourth District, Democrat and Buena Park mayor Connor Traut is leading with 50.80% of the vote over Republican Tim Shaw, a member of the O.C. Board of Education.
🍊 O.C. Supervisors District 5
Democratic incumbent Katrina Foley is still on track to keep her Fifth District seat against Republican Assemblymember Diane Dixon, with a gap that’s widened to 7,600 votes. If either Republican wins, it will change the balance of power on the Board of Supervisors.
These results are based on about 8.9 million votes counted so far statewide — more than 2.5 million in L.A. County and nearly 892,000 in Orange County.
We still have a ways to go! The California secretary of state estimates there are 4.8 million ballots left to count overall, which includes 642,000 in L.A. County and 298,270 in O.C.
This election is turning out to be a banner year for voter turnout — we’re on track to far exceed the 2022 midterms. But we won’t know the full picture until after Nov. 10, the deadline for mail-in ballots to arrive. You can check on the status of your ballot via the state’s BallotTrax system.
The next local ballot counts drop this afternoon starting around 4 p.m., but hey, we’re going into the weekend! From here on out, we’ll only be back in your inboxes when there’s major news to share — like a call on the billionaire’s tax — and we’ll focus on understanding what these results mean for your life in Southern California.
If this is your first day reading Make It Make Sense, you can get caught up on our past issues here:
Otherwise, you can keep up with the results here:
Long before the Trump administration started deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many with school-age children, public schools nationwide faced a massive and accelerating drop in student enrollment caused mostly by shrinking families.
Why now: A report published in June by two education think tanks, Bellwether and WestEd, warned that public schools have entered an era of "sustained" enrollment declines which are already reshaping districts in 40 states. The analysis found the "primary overall driver of declining enrollment is a sustained drop in birth rates," followed by a "national slowdown in immigration." Other factors have spurred public school enrollment losses, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift of more students to private and homeschool learning.
Catch up on what you missed with our Education newsletter, sent weekly.
Long before the Trump administration started deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many with school-age children, public schools nationwide faced a massive and accelerating drop in student enrollment caused mostly by shrinking families.
"Birth rates here in Los Angeles County have been declining for decades, which means fewer children enrolled in our schools," said Kelly Gonez, a board member in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest in the country, which lost more than 300,000 students over the last two decades.
L.A. isn't alone. The population of children under age 18 began to fall nationwide after 2010, according to U.S. Census data, dropping by roughly 2.1 million kids through 2025.
With public schools in much of the country facing a demographic cliff, the Trump administration last year began detaining and expelling large numbers of foreign residents. A study by the Migration Policy Institute found as many as 1.9 million people left the U.S. during the first 18 months of Trump's second term.
As part of the crackdown effort, federal officials weakened restrictions that prevented ICE agents from operating near public schools. "Many of our families immediately went into hiding," Gonez said. "We were predicting a 2% drop in enrollment. It was double that."
Researchers who study education and population trends aren't surprised. This is the first time in nearly a century, since the era of the Great Depression, that birth rates and immigration levels are low at the same time. Large-scale deportations mean even bigger and more rapid changes in areas with large immigrant communities.
"The U.S. isn't alone in facing the challenges of demographic decline," said Thomas Dee, an economist who specializes in education policy at Stanford University. "To stop or slow immigration really exacerbates those problems. Communities are now confronting very painful decisions about closing schools."
The scale of decline is daunting. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the number of kids in public schools nationwide peaked in 2019 and fell by roughly 1.5 million students as of the 2024 school year.
Based on data gathered before Trump's immigration crackdown began, federal researchers project enrollment will decline by at least another 2 million students by 2030. That would mean a 7% national decline in roughly a decade.
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It's unclear how large or sustained the impact of Trump-era immigration policies will be on enrollment trends. Dee and other researchers say that depends on how long ICE crackdowns and other restrictions remain in place.
In the short term, the blow to many districts could be severe. When Dee studied public schools in communities hit by ICE raids in California's Central Valley in 2025, he found student daily absences spiked more than 20%.
Texas, meanwhile, saw the number of kids in classrooms plunge statewide last year by more than 76,000 students. The vast majority of that drop came among Hispanic kids and the children of immigrant families, according to a study by the Texas Education Agency.
Florida, home to a large community of Haitian refugees who were stripped of temporary protected status by the Trump administration in July, saw a big drop in enrollment this year. The state's two largest public school districts, Miami-Dade and Broward County, lost roughly 30,000 children combined in a single year.
"It's really the effect of both the exodus of the existing families and stopping the inflow [of foreign migrants and children] that normally would have occurred," Dee said.
A report published in June by two education think tanks, Bellwether and WestEd, warned that public schools have entered an era of "sustained" enrollment declines which are already reshaping districts in 40 states.
The analysis found the "primary overall driver of declining enrollment is a sustained drop in birth rates" followed by a "national slowdown in immigration."
"At the local level, enrollment decline may permanently reduce available resources and will significantly reshape public education systems for years to come," the study concluded, while predicting a loss of $11 billion a year in public school funding linked to falling enrollment.
Other factors have spurred public school enrollment losses, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift of more students to private and homeschool learning. But the U.S. Department of Education projects private schools, too, will lose more than a million students by the end of this decade.
While debates over immigration policy play out in Washington, D.C., teachers, parents and students say ICE crackdowns already mean more empty classrooms and less vibrant neighborhoods around schools.
"This street right here is actually where the ICE standoff happened. It was right before school," said teacher Guadalupe Cardona, who stood recently outside Santee Education Complex, a high school in South Los Angeles as school buses rumbled past.
In October 2025, an ICE agent opened fire here. No children or school employees were injured, but a man from Mexico without legal status and an ICE agent were struck by bullets. Cardona believes fear following that clash and other raids caused enrollment to plummet.
"In my school alone, we had over 200 students that didn't show up on the first day of school," she said.
"We found that a lot of them were just [gone], no longer living where they had put their address down. We lost two teachers at the beginning of the school year because of it. It is something that hurts beyond just, like, putting your job at risk."
Guadalupe Pineda, a parent, works in a shop just down the street from Santee High. She says dread of ICE, combined with fewer students coming and going, have hurt her community. "There's definitely less sales, less traffic, less everything."
After growing up in LA and attending public school here without legal status, Pineda told NPR she was able to secure U.S. citizenship a few years ago. She said she understands why people are pulling their kids out of school and, in many cases, leaving the U.S. altogether.
"People are still scared, very much scared to go out to do everyday things. I feel like if I didn't have everything set [with my immigration status], I would probably leave. I would be afraid of being separated from my family."
NPR asked White House officials about the impact on public schools of ICE crackdowns and other federal immigration policies, including the revocation of temporary refugee status for hundreds of thousands of people living in the U.S. legally.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis sent a brief email response saying deportations "make American classrooms less crowded." Bis also pointed to a September post on the social media platform X, where administration officials celebrated the overall drop in the number of legal and undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.
"The total foreign-born population declined 2.9 million from January 2025 to July 2026," the statement said. "The huge recent decline in the foreign-born population indicates that net migration to the United States was negative in the last year and a half for the first time since the 1930s."
Advocacy groups that support sharply reduced immigration view these trends as a necessary correction after years of what they describe as lax border security. Ira Mehlman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform said he's not troubled by the prospect that many public school districts will have to downsize.
"We don't guarantee the school system X number of kids," Mehlman said. "That is not the job of our immigration system, that you're going to have X number of kids every single year and if you don't, we're going to go find some for you."
But research suggests it's not only foreign-born children disappearing from classrooms. According to Brookings Institution estimates, as many as 4.6 million school-age kids, including many U.S. citizens, live in homes with family members vulnerable to deportation.
Vanessa Salazar was one of them. She was 18 years old, a U.S.-born senior in LAUSD last year, when her mother was detained and deported to Mexico. "It really threw me off balance," she said. "Coming home without my mother there to be my anchor, really affected my performance in school."
Salazar dropped out to cope with what she describes as her family's trauma and now lives in Mexico with her mother. "It's like, why am I going to be in this country that doesn't really want my people, my community or my culture?" she said.
With birth rates hitting another record low last year and ICE now arresting as many as 50,000 people each month, future school district losses could soar.
A study released in August by state officials predicted public schools in California alone could lose another 710,000 students over the next decade "if current trends in fertility and migration hold."
With LAUSD now facing a second school year in a row with 4% enrollment declines, the district announced a citywide effort in September aimed at identifying buildings and campuses that will close.
Kelly Gonez, the school board member, told NPR she expects cuts to be deep and painful. "When your district is roughly half the size of student population it was 20 years ago, it's hard to find a sustainable path to keep campuses open," she said.
Copyright 2026 NPR
