Utah urges court to reinstate social media law for minors
Quinn Welsch
(CN) — The Utah Attorney General’s Office asked a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals panel to overturn a lower court’s block of a law the state says protects children from social media companies.
A three-judge panel heard arguments from the attorney general’s office and NetChoice, a trade organization that represents various social media companies, on Thursday morning. Much of those arguments focused on whether the state’s law targets the content of free speech.
An attorney representing Utah argued that its Minor Protection in Social Media Act is content-neutral and is meant to protect children from potential harm on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat.
The state says that the lower court erred when it determined the law was a content-based restriction that infringed the First Amendment rights of the social media companies.
“The definition does not differentiate between any topic, message or purpose,” Deputy Solicitor General Erin Middleton told the panel. “It applies no matter what appears on a platform’s site. Rather than regulating content, the definition is instead designed to determine whether a platform contains certain structural features.”
Middleton argued the law targets platforms with functions that allow users to interact socially. It does not target them based on the type of content they share, she said.
“Social speech can be on any conceivable topic and the act applies the same way,” she told the judges.
One issue brought up by the judges was whether the law could distinguish between content and function of social media platforms.
“Those two things aren’t binary,” U.S. Circuit Judge Jerome Holmes, a George W. Bush appointee, told Middleton. “There’s a situation where you could have functional structures in place that actually capture content.”
The fight over Utah’s social media regulations began in 2023 when the state first enacted the Social Media Act. After an initial lawsuit by NetChoice and other plaintiffs, the law was repealed and replaced in 2024 by a new law, the Minor Protection in Social Media Act
U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby, a Barack Obama appointee, granted NetChoice’s request for a preliminary injunction in 2024, blocking enforcement of the new law. According to Shelby, the law violated the First Amendment by restricting both minors’ and adults’ access to protected speech.
Utah’s Minor Protection in Social Media Act provides a list of hoops for social media companies to jump through. The law requires that companies use an age-assurance system to verify the ages of its users, mandates default privacy protections for minors, and prohibits what it describes as addictive engagement features such as infinite scroll and autoplay features.
But Shelby found the requirements violated the First Amendment because they did not narrowly meet the government’s goals and required sweeping changes to the social media platforms.
“The court recognizes the state’s earnest desire to protect young people from the novel challenges associated with social media use,” Shelby wrote. “But owing to the First Amendment’s paramount place in our democratic system, even well-intentioned legislation that regulates speech based on content must satisfy a tremendously high level of constitutional scrutiny. And on the record before the court, defendants have yet to show the act does.”
In its opening brief, the state ripped into social media companies as predatory and indifferent to the mental health of children. It described a collapse in teen mental health and cited an increase in youth depression, suicide rates, self-harm, and eating disorders, as the internet has become a pervasive part of American life since the 1990s.
“Despite this, social media companies have laced their products with highly addictive elements that act like nicotine in tobacco or the design features of casinos, meant to keep gamblers at the slots and tables as long as possible,” the state said in its brief. “These addictive elements have nothing to do with the underlying content and everything to do with trapping youth in an endless loop, where their eyeballs are constantly drawn to social media, so the social media companies can profit from the data.”
NetChoice argues its members already provide protections for minors on their social media platforms. Furthermore, NetChoice says Utah’s new law is unconstitutional because it targets the content of social media platforms based on its definition of online social interactions.
“This burdens all adults, not just minors,” said Scott Keller, a partner with D.C. law firm Lehotsky Keller Cohn, representing NetChoice. “The district court rightfully said this burdens substantially more than would be necessary. Regulating speech is supposed to be the last resort not the first resort.”
Additionally, Keller argued all of the other requirements for social media companies listed in the law make it unconstitutional.
Snapchat, which is a member of NetChoice, sued the state in a separate lawsuit.
NetChoice has sued multiple other states, including California, Georgia and Texas, over similar laws and has largely been successful.