Court Enjoins Mississippi Age-Verification Law While Constitutionality Case is Pending
A district court preliminarily enjoined a Mississippi social media age-verification law for the second time Wednesday, ruling it's too broad to survive a First Amendment challenge. The U.S. District Court for Southern Mississippi previously enjoined the same law, HB-1126, in July 2024 (see 2407010062).
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However, in an email to Privacy Daily, the Mississippi attorney general's office said it will continue to fight for the "commonsense" law.
“NetChoice has demonstrated a substantial likelihood of success on its claim that, as applied to its covered members, H.B. 1126 is either overinclusive or underinclusive, or both, for achieving the State’s asserted interest in protecting minors from predatory behavior online,” said Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden. “As such, the Act is likely not sufficiently narrowly tailored to survive strict scrutiny as applied to at least eight of NetChoice’s members,” including Meta, Snap and Reddit.
The state law requires parental consent for minors younger than 18 to create accounts with covered digital service providers, which NetChoice's complaint argued places an undue burden on access to free speech in case 24-00170 (see 2406070059).
“The First Amendment proudly protects all Americans’ speech, expression and thought from government intrusion -- without compromise,” said Paul Taske, NetChoice’s associate director of litigation, in a press release after Wednesday’s second injunction. “NetChoice is thankful the court yet again blocked Mississippi’s law from censoring speech, limiting access to lawful information and undermining user security online as our case proceeds.”
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the first preliminary injunction against HB-1126, in April 2025, citing the ruling in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC (see 2504180013).
Earlier in June, NetChoice cited the U.S. District Court for Northern Florida’s blocking a Florida social media law requiring age verification (see 2506030057) as a reason to grant the injunction in the Mississippi case (see 2506040049).