FILE- Light illuminates part of the Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Nov. 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
- The trade organization, whose members include Meta, Amazon, Google and others, note that this will be the first case to reach the High Court related to social media age verification.
NetChoice announced late Monday that the trade organization has filed an emergency application to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to reinstate a lower court’s preliminary injunction against Mississippi’s “Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act.”
The law requires social media platforms to make reasonable efforts to prevent or mitigate children’s exposure to potentially harmful content while using the platforms. One way of doing that is by age verification.
The injunction was lifted Friday in a one-line order when a federal judicial panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned the injunction put in place by U.S. District Court Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden in June 2024. With no injunction in place, the law was allowed to take effect, over a year after it was scheduled to do so in July 2024.
READ MORE: Federal judicial panel allows “Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act” to take effect
The trade organization, whose members include Amazon, Google, Snap Inc., Meta, Netflix, X, and other prominent online platforms, noted that this will be the first case to reach the High Court related to social media age verification. The group has similar ongoing legal challenges in other states as well, but none have reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
NetChoice contends that the law’s language is “dangerously vague” which forces websites into an impossible position of either over-censoring a vast array of fully protected content or face massive fines and possible criminal penalties. The group claims it violates the 1st Amendment.
You can read the NetChoice appeal filing to the U.S. Supreme Court here.
Frank Corder
