Mississippi age assurance law can stand while NetChoice pursues litigation

The U.S. Supreme Court says Mississippi’s age assurance law for social media can stand while Big Tech lobby group NetChoice pursues its legal action against the legislation.

The court refused to intervene in a lower court decision that affirmed HB 1126, which imposes age verification requirements on social media platforms.

A statement from the trade group representing Meta, X, Amazon, Google and others says the court “unfortunately denied NetChoice’s emergency application to temporarily halt Mississippi’s I.D.-for-Speech law, HB 1126, while our case moves through the legal system.”

The concurring decision, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, says “NetChoice has not sufficiently demonstrated that the balance of harms and equities favors it at this time.” It follows the court’s decision on Paxton v. Free Speech Coalition, wherein it ruled that age verification measures imposed by a Texas “only incidentally burden the protected speech of adults,” and were therefore not unconstitutional.

However, while Mississippi’s law is allowed to stand for now, Kavanaugh does not rule out a victory for NetChoice in its continuing litigation.

“To be clear, NetChoice has, in my view, demonstrated that it is likely to succeed on the merits – namely, that enforcement of the Mississippi law would likely violate its members’ First Amendment rights under this Court’s precedents.”

Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, calls the decision “merely an unfortunate procedural delay.”

“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.”

The Mississippi law, also known as the “Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act,” has already been the subject of much kicking about in U.S. courts. According to a report from NPR, it is among the nation’s more stringent online safety laws, requiring all users to verify their ages before using services from Facebook to Nextdoor (also a member of NetChoice).

Louisiana sues Roblox for enabling sexual predators

The state of Louisiana is suing Roblox, alleging the social gaming site has created an environment where sexual predators “thrive, unite, hunt and victimize kids.” A report from the Associated Press says the suit filed by Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill alleges that Roblox has “failed to implement effective safety measures to protect child users from adult predators.”

“Due to Roblox’s lack of safety protocols, it endangers the safety of the children of Louisiana,” Murrill says. “Roblox is overrun with harmful content and child predators because it prioritizes user growth, revenue, and profits over child safety.”

Roblox, which has more than 111 million monthly users and is estimated to be worth around $87 billion, doesn’t allow children under 13 to chat with other users outside of games without explicit parental permission. It recently started piloting a new system, called Trusted Connections, that integrates facial age estimation (FAE) provided by Persona. The feature requires teenagers aged 13 to 17 to submit a video selfie for FAE if they want to chat freely with people they know.

It is also rolling out an AI monitoring system to help detect early signs of possible child endangerment, such as sexually exploitative language.

However, Murrill says there is no “age minimum or substantial age verification process once a user signs up, and that “as a result, young children, teens and adults posing as children can sign up.” She believes Roblox should be shut down.

Roblox insists it is committed to keeping kids safe, but has been the subject of several lurid stories. Young women have reported being “virtually gang raped” in Roblox, and KLFY reports that parents have filed at least eight lawsuits against the platform, alleging it enables grooming and sex crimes. Just this week, a former U.S. Marine sued the platform for allowing a predator to groom, extort and sexually abuse him as a child, calling it a “digital hunting ground” for pedophiles.

Amid ‘woke’ wars, easy to see laws co-opted for political ends

Meanwhile, the rollout of digital age check laws around the world continues to make waves with privacy rights activists, First Amendment warriors and those who worry about political overreach.

A piece in the Tennessean notes that “despite the laws being pushed as a large-scale anti-pornography effort, popular online platforms that are not considered adult content services, like YouTube and Spotify, have begun locking down and filtering content based on age checks following similar age-verifying laws that passed nationally in the U.K. and Australia.”

There is ongoing concern that legal definitions of “harmful content” are subject to politicized interpretations, particularly around the question of LGBTQ resources, which some conservative lawmakers have argued are “harmful to minors” in order to push an ideological agenda.

The article quotes Jess Miers, a visiting assistant professor of law at the University of Akron School of Law and expert in technology law.

“Once the door has been opened for regulating one type of content – one type of legally protected content, as pornography is – that door is cracked open for any other kinds of content that the government wants to touch,” Miers says. “On one hand, you might feel that you don’t want your child to be viewing pornography, but you might feel differently if your child is blocked from accessing other types of important resources, like American history, if it’s deemed too ‘woke.’”

It also quotes a policy analyst from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Christian think tank credited with drafting much of the plan for Donald Trump’s current term, who more or less confirms the fear that at least some of these laws are being driven by a puritan moralism that has little to do with constitutional law, and that they absolutely intend to restrict adults’ legal access to certain kinds of online content.

“We need courageous lawmakers and Christians to expose the evils of pornography and put an end to this odious industry,” says a 2024 statement from the Foundation’s Emma Waters. “Republicans and engaged Christians must prioritize laws that protect minors – and all people – from the harms of pornography.”

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometric age estimation  |  biometrics  |  children  |  lawsuits  |  Louisiana  |  Mississippi  |  Netchoice  |  Roblox  |  social media  |  United States