Written by: Haim Ravia, Dotan Hammer
As additional states in the U.S. advance legislation aimed at restricting minors’ use of social media, federal courts in the U.S. are increasingly confronted with the tension between these laws and the First Amendment of the Constitution.
Recently, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio struck down the state’s social media Parental Notification Act, which was set to take effect in January 2024, but restrained by the Court pending the Court’s final decision. The law would have required social media platforms to obtain and verify parental consent before allowing minors to create accounts. The Court ultimately found that provisions applying only to specific platforms were unconstitutional content-based regulation.
In contrast, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently overturned a lower court’s preliminary injunction against a similar law in Mississippi. The Mississippi Act, like Ohio’s, required parental consent for minors’ social media use but also included provisions limiting the collection of minors’ personal data and mandating protections against harmful content. The Fifth Circuit’s decision found that the district court did not perform the detailed analysis required by the Supreme Court before issuing the preliminary injunction. As per the Court of Appeals, the district court “must determine to whom the Act applies, the activities it regulates, and then weigh violative applications of the Act against non-violative applications”. The Court of Appeals thus sent the case back to the district court for further proceedings.
Click here to read the United States District Court for the Southern District Of Ohio’s decision in the matter of Ohio’s Parental Notification by Social Media Operators Act.
Click here to read the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision in the matter of Mississippi House Bill 1126 to protect minor children from online harmful material.
