LGBT Tech Testifies in Opposition to Proposed California Youth Social Media Ban (AB 1709)
- Shae Gardner
- 12 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Last week, LGBT Tech’s Director of Policy and Research Shae Gardner testified before the California Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to AB 1709, a bill that would restrict users under 16 from creating or maintaining accounts on covered platforms that use certain personalized or “addictive” feed features.
The testimony emphasized that while platforms have failed young people (including LGBTQ+ young people) in failing to adequately address harms, AB 1709 takes the wrong approach in response.
For so many LGBTQ+ youth, online spaces are often where they first find identity language, affirming representation, peer support, crisis resources, and community. LGBT Tech’s national polling shows that many LGBTQ+ people join digital and social platforms as minors, often to find resources and support they may not have access to offline.
Our testimony also raised specific concerns about how AB 1709 treats personalized recommendations. Harmful engagement optimization should be regulated, but not every recommendation is harmful. For LGBTQ+ youth, discovery matters. A young person may not know the right words to search for, the name of an organization, or what resources exist.
LGBT Tech is one of many organizations representing LGBTQ+ people, youth, civil rights, digital rights, and marginalized communities that have raised serious concerns or outright opposition to this legislative approach.
California should regulate the mechanisms of harm directly, including manipulative design, predatory contact, harassment, sextortion, drug trafficking, harmful amplification, and abusive data practices. But youth safety should not come through exclusion from the very spaces where vulnerable young people may be most likely to find help.
Testimony text:
Chair and Members, good afternoon and thank you. My name is Shae Gardner, I use she/her pronouns, and I am the Director of Policy and Research at LGBT Tech.
I ask this Committee to ensure California does not become the state that saw LGBTQ+ youth facing rising hostility across the country, and responded by blocking access to one of the few pathways many still have to support.
Like this body, we are keenly aware of the harms young people face online. We are not asking you to trust platforms more. We are asking you to regulate the mechanisms of harm within them more precisely, because their failures do not in any way make them disposable. For so many of our youth, online spaces are more navigable, more private, and much safer than the offline environments available to them.
I know this personally. My story as an open and confident member of this community started as a scared and confused 15 year old who got on social media platforms. That experience was not, even then, an entirely pleasant or protected one. But to have been without it would have been devastating.
And we have seen this far beyond my own experience. LGBT Tech’s national polling shows the vast majority of LGBTQ+ people joined digital and social platforms as minors; joined these spaces to find community and resources otherwise inaccessible to them; and that the users, the platform recommended content, and the representation they found once there were crucial to the discovery and formation of their own LGBTQ+ identities.
That is why the personalization question matters so much. Harmful engagement optimization should be regulated, but AB 1709’s language is missing a crucial distinction between addictive mechanisms and beneficial discovery. For LGBTQ+ youth, the latter is often how they first encounter words, stories, crisis resources, and people like them.
In conditioning youth access on age-based exclusion, AB 1709 requires vulnerable young people to pick up the tab for platform failures, making online spaces both inaccessible to the young people who may need them most and riskier for those who find a way back in.
So every young person has an affirming home, a safe school, a trusted adult, and local resources they can access without fear, California cannot block access to the supportive online spaces. Not when community is, itself, a safety measure. And not when isolation is a proven and deadly harm.
