California Makes Child Safety a Product Requirement

California has made a consequential choice about online safety: it is regulating the design of products, not merely asking families to manage the consequences. Governor Gavin Newsom said Thursday that he had signed a package of laws covering companion chatbots, social-media features, child privacy and digitally altered abuse material.

The package includes what the governor's office calls the nation's strongest companion-chatbot rules. Adam's Law requires crisis protocols for children expressing suicidal ideation, parental controls, notifications if a child disables safety settings, independent child-safety audits and annual risk assessments. A separate measure bars platforms from offering users under 16 addictive features such as autoplay and algorithmic feeds based on a user's history and profile.

The legislation also treats the next layer of risk as a design problem. It expands child-exploitation protections to digitally altered or AI-generated material, restricts targeted advertising to children and adds requirements around the use of K-12 pupil data in AI systems. Reuters independently reported the enactment as a new set of curbs on social media for children, while CNBC likewise reported the signing and its restrictions on addictive features.

That is a better starting point than pretending a terms-of-service page can neutralise an engagement system optimised to keep a vulnerable user scrolling. But rules should be judged by what they make measurable. Independent audits need published methods and meaningful access to evidence; age signals need to minimise the collection and retention of identity data; and families need a clear route to challenge an incorrect restriction.

California should pair the new duties with transparent enforcement and interoperable safety standards. The aim is not to freeze innovation or give officials a veto over every product decision. It is to make companies compete on whether their systems are safe by design, while preserving children's privacy and giving parents and young people a remedy when a platform gets the balance wrong.