The Supreme Court on Thursday declined to block Mississippi’s social media law, effectively allowing it to go into effect while an appeal winds its way through the courts.
Mississippi’s House Bill 1126, enacted last year, requires social media platforms to verify a user’s age at sign-up and request consent from their parents if they are found to be a minor. Additionally, it requires platforms to “detect, block or prevent the distribution of unlawful, obscene or other harmful material to a known minor.”
It goes further than other age-verification laws enacted around the country in that it applies to all social media sites, not just porn sites, similar to a law that just went into effect in the UK.
In July 2024, District Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden blocked the law after NetChoice—a trade group that represents Meta, YouTube, and Snapchat—cited a possible violation of the First Amendment. The state of Mississippi then appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which temporarily lifted the block on July 17.
NetChoice then filed an emergency petition requesting the Supreme Court intervene. On Thursday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected the request. Though he says “NetChoice has, in my view, demonstrated that it is likely to succeed on the merits,” it hasn’t demonstrated that the law needs to be blocked during the appeals process.
The ruling now allows Mississippi to enforce its social media law while case continues in the lower court. In the ruling, Kavanaugh also cited several district court rulings opposing similar age-verification laws, concluding that “the Mississippi law is likely unconstitutional.”
NetChoice is leaning on that last line. “Although we’re disappointed with the Court’s decision, Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence makes clear that NetChoice will ultimately succeed in defending the First Amendment—not just in this case but across all NetChoice’s ID-for-Speech lawsuits,” says Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center. “This is merely an unfortunate procedural delay.”
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The Mississippi law is named after Walker Montgomery, a teenager who took his own life following an Instagram sextortion scam that demanded payment in exchange for not posting intimate material of him online. These types of schemes are on the rise, especially among young boys, and the law is intended to prevent kids from encountering bad actors on the hunt for a payday.
In June, the Supreme Court upheld a more narrow Texas law requiring porn sites to verify that visitors are 18 or older. “The power to require age verification is within a State’s authority to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit content,” Justice Clarence Thomas said at the time. “Any burden experienced by adults is therefore only incidental to the statute’s regulation of activity that is not protected by the First Amendment.”
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About Jibin Joseph
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