Judge blocks Mississippi law that required age verification on social media

A federal judge blocked a Mississippi law from taking effect that would have required age verification for all and parental consent for teens in order to make accounts on many social media sites.

The preliminary injunction fell on the same day the Supreme Court issued a ruling in a pair of cases challenging social media laws in Florida and Texas that sought to regulate social media companies’ content moderation. SCOTUS sent the cases back to the lower courts but made clear that platforms’ content moderation and curation was protected speech.

NetChoice, the industry group that represents Meta and Google and was also lead party in the SCOTUS cases, brought the challenge to Mississippi House Bill 1126. The law was set to take effect on Monday and was designed to protect kids from sexually explicit content. It required online services with content feeds or chat rooms — likely including platforms such as Facebook or YouTube — to verify users’ ages through “commercially reasonable efforts” and obtain parental consent in order for minors to create accounts. Platforms that did not comply would open themselves up to legal action from parents.

NetChoice argued the law would interfere with the rights of both adults and minors to access protected speech online. Mississippi’s attorney general argued the law only regulates “non-expressive conduct,” but US District Court Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden noted in the order that he was not convinced that was the case.

The court accepted the AG’s assertion that “safeguarding the physical and psychological wellbeing of minors online is a compelling interest” but agreed with NetChoice that the legislation was not “narrowly tailored” to serve those goals. The court said that the AG failed to show that NetChoice’s suggested alternatives to the law to protect kids’ well-being — like giving parents more information about how to supervise their kids online — would be insufficient. Asking kids and adults to verify their ages to access protected speech, the judge wrote, “burdens adults’ First Amendment rights, and that alone makes it overinclusive.”

“We appreciate the court’s thoughtful and speedy review of this matter, but respectfully disagree that the Constitution blocks the State’s effort to protect children online,” Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said in a statement. “We will continue to fight for this commonsense law because our children’s mental health, physical security, and innocence should not take a back seat to Big Tech profits.”

NetChoice Litigation Center director Chris Marchese said in a statement the group was “pleased” by the decision and that “we look forward to seeing the law struck down permanently.” 

NetChoice has successfully gotten judges around the country to block laws with the stated goal of protecting kids online but that the group says would actually violate the First Amendment by impeding speech. See: California, Arkansas, and Ohio.

The latest win for NetChoice — combined with the Supreme Court’s statement in its majority opinion in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton that content moderation and curation are First Amendment-protected expression — is a warning signal for legislatures across the country crafting tech regulations. The Supreme Court left open the possibility that tech laws could be crafted in ways that don’t violate the First Amendment, but the guidelines it sets out for what is likely to violate the Constitution could make that a tricky path to follow.

“It is not lost on the Court the seriousness of the issue the legislature was attempting to address, nor does the Court doubt the good intentions behind the enactment of H.B. 1126,” Ozerden wrote in his order. “But as the Supreme Court has held, ‘[a] law that is content based on its face is subject to strict scrutiny regardless of the government’s benign motive.’”