California SB 976, “Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act,” is one of the multitudinous laws that pretextually claim to protect kids online. Like many such laws nowadays, it’s a gish-gallop compendium of online censorship ideas: Age authentication! Parental consent! Overrides of publishers’ editorial decisions! Mandatory transparency!

NetChoice made a variation of my argument, saying that age authentication always acts as a speed bump for readers accessing desired content. The court says that’s not so. The court notes that “many companies now collect extensive data about users’ activity throughout the internet that allow them to develop comprehensive profiles of each user for targeted advertising” and, mining that data, age authentication could “run in the background” without requiring any affirmative steps from readers to complete the authentication.