Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill into law that could hold social media companies like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram liable for facilitating child sex trafficking, his office announced.   

Assembly Bill 1394, which was authored by state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, and will go into effect Jan. 1, 2025, requires a court to award statutory damages between $1 million and $4 million for each act of commercial sexual exploitation that social media platforms “knowingly facilitated, aided or abetted.” 

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.