Mississippi Court Temporarily Halts Age-Verification Law

A Mississippi court has temporarily stopped a social media age-verification law from being enforced as a case challenging it makes its way through the legal system.

HB 1126, which was set to go into effect on July 1, requires age verification for anyone accessing a social media site in Mississippi and parental consent for teens to create accounts.

NetChoice, an industry group representing Meta and Google, challenged the law as unconstitutional. Chris Marchese, Director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, said in a statement that "if HB 1126 ultimately takes effect, mandating age and identity verification for digital services will undermine privacy and stifle the free exchange of ideas.

"Mississippi also commandeers websites to censor broad categories of protected speech, blocking access to important educational resources," he adds. "Mississippians have a First Amendment right to access lawful information online free from government censorship."

The 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 bills like the one in Mississippi aim to prevent kids from encountering bad actors on the hunt for a payday.

That's easier said than done. The bill text calls on social media sites to make "commercially reasonable efforts to develop and implement a strategy to prevent or mitigate [a] minor's exposure to harmful material and other content that promotes or facilitates" everything from harassment to exploitation.

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According to NetChoice, HB1126 is "well-intentioned" but ultimately "an unconstitutional overreach into citizens’ rights that courts will likely block" since it will likely force "online businesses to censor speech broadly with vague, unclear compliance standards."

A similar law in Arkansas, also challenged by NetChoice, was blocked last fall. But these types of bills are cropping up across the country. A number of age-verification bills focus on adult sites and require them to check ages by having visitors upload official documents like driver's licenses. They are also being challenged and the Supreme Court just agreed to hear arguments related to Texas' version.