NetChoice wins in Arkansas, but faces forever war against age assurance

The battle over age assurance legislation in the United States has reached its next level. As the global tide turns toward regulating social media with age restrictions and biometric age assurance technology, legal lobbies and free speech campaigners in the U.S. continue to swing the axe at state-level legislation, flying the tattered banner of Constitutional rights.

The latest release from Silicon Valley’s litigation brigade, NetChoice, proclaims, “First Amendment to Arkansas: you cannot sentence speech on the Internet to death by a thousand cuts!”

The organization is celebrating a victory in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, which issued a preliminary injunction in NetChoice’s lawsuit against Arkansas Act 900, the so-called Social Media Safety Act.

The act represents a modification of a law that previously existed as Act 689, requiring social media platforms to implement “reasonable age verification” measures to confirm that users are at least 16 years old. A U.S. District Court struck down Act 689 in April 2025, handing a victory to NetChoice.

Now, its successor has met the same fate.

Act 900, we hardly knew ye

“Act 900 is deeply flawed,” says Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center. “It burdens speech without providing any upside. Indeed, as the court recognized, there are non-tech, constitutional measures that could be taken to advance Arkansas’s goals. But Arkansas chose to ignore the constitutional options available and opted to impose many vague restrictions on websites instead, interfering with user speech rights and jeopardizing user privacy by forcing websites to track their visitors and collect sensitive data just to comply with the State’s vague standards.”

An interesting feature of Act 900, which may portend appearances in legislation elsewhere, is the inclusion of language that cuts off the argument around virtual private networks (VPNs). The act defines a user as a resident of Arkansas who “accesses or attempts to access a social media platform while present in this state by accessing the social media platform using an Arkansas internet protocol address or otherwise known or believed to be in this state while using the social media platform, including without limitation through the use of a virtual privacy network that gives the appearance that the individual is not located in this state when he or she is in this state.”

Regardless, Arkansas’ latest age assurance law, which also included prohibitions on platforms using “addictive” practices, is dead. NetChoice’s baseline argument is that age verification laws are censorious, and therefore unconstitutional. Its Preliminary Injunction says Act 900 violated the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Per the decision, “NetChoice has shown that it is likely to succeed on its vagueness challenge to the addictive practices provision and that it is likely to succeed on its First Amendment challenges to the other provisions even under intermediate scrutiny.”

Missouri bill ties age checks to AI crackdown 

For NetChoice, the key question in the long term will be how much fight (and money) it has in it. Myth and literature have taught us that a slaying will surely awaken the spirit of vengeance. So it goes in U.S. age assurance and online safety legislation: one law falls, another rises.

Missouri has passed an AI-focused bill that prohibits kids under 16 from creating social media accounts, bans the distribution of deepfakes and sets new rules for platforms and developers. Among these are a requirement for age assurance measures, and a moratorium on addictive design and advertising features targeting minors, according to the Missouri Independent.

The law is explicit in linking social media age checks and the risk of deepfake exploitation. It makes it a felony to “share or threaten to share an AI-generated or other digital depiction of someone to harass, threaten or harm them,” with a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison if  the image depicts a minor.

At least 26 states have laws in place regulating AI-generated intimate depictions.

AI adds new urgency to age check movement

NetChoice may be hoping that online age checks become the next NFTs: much hyped, briefly adopted, now best forgotten. But the legal efforts to realize that hope ignore both the groundswell of support for online safety legislation among parents, and the reality that societal and legal consensus are aligning across the globe – just as AI presents fresh motivation for keeping kids safe online.

To quote from the Arkansas decision, “defendants say social media platforms exploit children for monetary gain. And while NetChoice’s members do not agree with that assessment, it would

be hard to deny the potential for problems associated with children’s usage of social

media in general.” The adverse effects of social media on youth are not going away. The addition of large language models and AI chatbots to the mix is making the problem worse.

NetChoice will litigate as long as it is tenable. But eventually, it will come to look like the lawyers for the Big Tobacco companies of the 20th century, arguing against the scientific link between cigarettes and cancer.

Article Topics

age verification  |  Arkansas  |  deepfakes  |  lawsuits  |  Missouri  |  Netchoice  |  social media