Topline
The Supreme Court will allow Mississippi to enforce a law requiring social media sites verify the age of users or receive parental consent as the law awaits a legal challenge—but Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed skeptical that the law is constitutional.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the law would “likely” violate the First Amendment rights of social media users.
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Key Facts
The justices declined to put in place a stay, which would have blocked the law from being enforced while a case over its legality plays out.
The law, passed in 2024, is the subject of a suit brought by NetChoice, a trade organization representing companies including Meta, YouTube, X and Snapchat.
Kavanaugh said the group “demonstrated it would likely succeed on the merits” of the case, noting that the law would likely “violate its members’ First Amendment rights.”
However, Kavanaugh said the organization did not demonstrate its members would be sufficiently harmed to warrant a stay.
NetChoice called Thursday’s decision an “unfortunate procedural delay,” but remained optimistic of success in the long run: “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,” Paul Taske, the organization’s co-director for litigation, said in a statement to Forbes.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
Key Background
Mississippi passed HB 1126 in 2024, requiring digital service provider sites to verify the age of users or receive parental consent. It also requires these sites to implement a strategy to prevent known minor users from “exposure to harmful material,” including topics like drugs, suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, bullying, sexual exploitation, and other “illegal activity.” NetChoice quickly sued to stop its implementation, arguing that these requirements violated the First Amendment rights of free speech. “The Act would replace covered websites’ own voluntary (and extensive) “content moderation” efforts to address objectionable speech with state-mandated censorship,” lawyers for NetChoice wrote, arguing that the broad categories described in the law could be interpreted to apply to “everything from classic literature, such as Romeo and Juliet and The Bell Jar, to modern media like pop songs by Taylor Swift.” U.S. District Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden blocked Mississippi from implementing the law in 2024, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction without comment in July.
Big Number
10. That’s how many lawsuits NetChoice has filed against similar laws in other states, including Arkansas, Ohio, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Tennessee, and Utah. The legal challenges have largely been successful so far, with courts in Arkansas and Ohio striking down similar laws. Both states have since appealed these decisions to Circuit Courts. NetChoice secured preliminary injunctions blocking implementation of these laws in California, Florida, Georgia, and Utah—all of whom have likewise appealed these orders.
Tangent
Although Justice Kavanaugh indicated at least some conservative justices on the high court could rule against the Mississippi law, the Supreme Court recently upheld another age verification law. In June, all six conservative justices upheld a Texas law requiring adult websites like Pornhub to verify the age of users. At least 22 states are enforcing some sort of age verification law for adult websites, according to the Free Speech Coalition, while another three have laws going into effect in the near future.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2025/08/14/supreme-court-will-let-mississippi-require-age-verification-for-social-media-for-now/