In 2022, Mississippi teenager Walker Montgomery took his own life after enduring months of sexual harassment, stalking, and threats from an online predator via social media. In an effort to shield minors from online predators, Mississippi’s state legislature passed the Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act, also known as H.B. 1126, requiring social media websites and applications to verify the age of users and to seek parental consent before creating profiles for minors. The bill was signed into law by Governor Tate Reeves (R) in April of 2024 and was slated to go into effect that summer.

The law stipulated that it only applies to “digital service providers” that connects “users in a manner that allows users to socially interact with other users on the digital service;” allow users “to create a public, semi-public or private profile for purposes of signing into and using the digital service;” and allows users to create and post content to message boards, chat rooms, landing pages, video feeds, or timelines. It is not applicable to news, sports, commerce, shopping, or video game websites or other sites not generally classified as social media.

Nonetheless, the trade organization NetChoice — which represents a host of social media companies including Discord, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Reddit, Snapchat, and X, in addition to online retailers like Amazon and Etsy, streaming services like Netflix, and internet titans like AOL, Google, and Yahoo — filed a lawsuit, alleging the law to be unconstitutional and in violation of First Amendment rights. Chief Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi sided with NetChoice and blocked Mississippi from enforcing its law, agreeing that the law was likely unconstitutional.

“In sum, because the Court finds that Plaintiff NetChoice, LLC has carried its burden of showing a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of its claim that the Act is unconstitutional under a First Amendment facial challenge and, alternatively, a Fourteenth Amendment vagueness challenge, it will grant the Motion for a Preliminary Injunction,” Ozerden wrote. He did, however, acknowledge the state’s compelling interest in protecting minors from online harm and added, “nor does the Court doubt the good intentions behind the enactment of H.B. 1126.”

In April of this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit vacated Ozerden’s injunction, finding that the district court had failed to apply the correct standard of review for the case based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, a pair of First Amendment cases centered on social media censorship of political conservatives. Judge Patrick Higginbotham wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision “makes clear that the district court here should have undertaken more detailed factual analysis before making the requisite finding for preliminary injunctive relief that NetChoice, LLC is substantially likely to succeed on the merits of its facial challenge.” He added, “We in turn VACATE the preliminary injunction and REMAND this case to the district court for the required factual analysis.” In other words, Mississippi is free to enforce its law while litigation is ongoing.

NetChoice then appealed the appellate court’s decision to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to stay the circuit court’s order to vacate the district court’s injunction. In an unsigned order issued Thursday, the Supreme Court denied the request, allowing Mississippi to continue enforcing H.B. 1126. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a brief opinion concurring with the decision not to stay the circuit court’s order, but explained that he believed Mississippi’s law would eventually be found unconstitutional.

“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,” he wrote. He continued, “In short, under this Court’s case law as it currently stands, the Mississippi law is likely unconstitutional.” Kavanaugh added, “Nonetheless, because NetChoice has not sufficiently demonstrated that the balance of harms and equities favors it at this time, I concur in the Court’s denial of the application for interim relief.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, said, “The effects of social media use are readily apparent to anyone paying attention — jealousy, low self-esteem, addiction, an inability to communicate normally in person, selfishness, suicide ideation, sleep deprivation, and paranoia, to name a few. When minors are using social media, they are doing so without fully developed brains,” she pointed out. “Studies show that teens ages 12-15 who use social media for over three hours a day face twice the risk of negative mental health outcomes as other teens. That’s just three hours a day, and across the country, we know that teens are addicted to their phones and spend much more than three hours a day on them — and the impact on families across our country has been devastating, with some families experiencing the tragic death of their child due to social media.”

As a country, Szoch emphasized, “We should be doing all we can to protect our teens from social media use—and the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing Mississippi to protect young people from the dangers of social media is a step in the right direction.”

Currently, laws restricting or regulating social media use for minors are in place and enforceable in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, New York, Tennessee, and Virginia, while Arkansas, California, Ohio, and Utah have passed social media age regulation laws that have been blocked by federal courts. Texas also passed a law requiring parental consent for children to create social media accounts and mandated that social media platforms must filter content “harmful to minors” from children’s feeds; a federal court allowed the parental consent facet to stand but struck down the content filtering provision.

Similar laws have been passed in at least one chamber of the state legislature in Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Washington and have been introduced in Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.