Asm. Josh Lowenthal is taking on big tech as both a dad and a lawmaker

Asm. Josh Lowenthal represents Long Beach, California and serves as Speaker Pro Tempore in the California Assembly. Before politics, he worked as a schoolteacher and a successful tech entrepreneur, and he is the father of three young girls, an experience that pushed him to take on predatory social media practices. He is the author of AB 1709 and AB 2, two bills that together ban addictive features like infinite scrolling and autoplay for kids under 16, create a new oversight agency to monitor platforms, and raise the financial penalties when companies are found negligent in harming children.

I sat down with Josh to talk about what it actually took to get this legislation passed unanimously, through a legislature that big tech spends hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying every cycle. We talked about the parallel to gun safety work, a multi trillion dollar industry operating with almost no oversight while kids pay the price, and why he sees this less as a big tobacco moment and more like alcohol regulation, something that can be done responsibly but is causing real harm at the levels kids are currently using it. He also shared why he built this bill to be a model other states can copy and paste, what he is hearing, or not hearing, from the platforms themselves, and why he believes this needs to become a defining issue in the next presidential election.

Connect with Asm. Josh: Website | Instagram | Substack

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