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 it awaits a legal challenge—but Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed skeptical 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 a stay in place on the law, which would have blocked it 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 Reddit.
Kavanaugh said the group “demonstrated it would likely succeed on the merits” of the case, noting that it 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.
