Mississippi Online Age-Verification Law Blocked for Second Time

Mississippi can’t enforce its 2024 online age-verification law against Meta Platforms Inc., YouTube LLC, X Corp., and five other tech companies while a First Amendment suit challenging the law proceeds, a federal court ruled.

Judge Halil S. Ozerden of the US District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi granted a preliminary injunction Wednesday as part of a lawsuit from tech industry group NetChoice LLC.

The law, HB 1126, requires social media platforms to receive parental permission before allowing minors to access their services, and to make “reasonable efforts” to verify a user’s age.

NetChoice met its burden of showing the law wasn’t narrowly tailored to achieve the state’s goal of protecting children from harmful online content, a requirement to survive strict scrutiny under Supreme Court precedent, Ozerden said.

Also that day, NetChoice was denied a preliminary injunction in its separate challenge to a similar Tennessee law requiring online content providers to verify the ages of minors using their platforms.

Because NetChoice likely to succeed on its “as applied” challenge to the Mississippi law, and because NetChoice’s member companies faced irreparable harm in the form of loss of First Amendment freedoms and monetary damages, an injunction was appropriate pending resolution of the lawsuit, Ozerden said.

The injunction blocks the state from enforcing the law against NetChoice members Meta, YouTube, X, Reddit Inc., Nextdoor Inc, Snap Inc., Pinterest Inc., and Dreamwidth, Ozerden said.

The ruling come two months after the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit vacated Ozerden’s previous injunction against enforcement of the law, and sent the case back for a factual inquiry into the law’s scope and its potentially unconstitutional applications.

That closer look was required under the US Supreme Court’s July 2024 holding in Moody v. NetChoice LLC , issued the same day as Ozerden’s initial injunction, where it clarified the facial-challenge framework for First Amendment claims, the Fifth Circuit said.

Ozerden’s Wednesday ruling, decided on the basis of the NetChoice challenge to the law as applied to its members, didn’t address the group’s facial challenge.

Injunction Denied

Judge Eli Richardson of the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee on Wednesday separately denied NetChoice’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the Tennessee law—HB 1891— because he said the trade group failed to show it would suffer irreparable harm from the law absent an injunction.

The Tennessee law imposes age-verification requirements on social-media platforms for all social-media accounts, and parental-consent and parental-supervision requirements for the social-media accounts of minors, Richardson said.

There was no evidence in the record that NetChoice members had faced enforcement or the threat of enforcement related to HB 1891, and the state hadn’t refused to disavow its enforcement until conclusion of the litigation, he said.

Richardson also rejected NetChoice’s argument that its compliance costs related to the act, which were potentially unrecoverable because of sovereign immunity, constituted irreparable harm sufficient to justify an injunction.

Compliance costs are “quite ordinary and are routinely borne (even if only reluctantly) by business entities as a natural (if unwelcome) cost of doing business,” he said.

Richardson didn’t rule on the merits of NetChoice’s First Amendment challenge to HB 1891.

Lehotsky Keller Cohn LLP and Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP represent NetChoice in each lawsuit.

The office of the state attorney general represents Mississippi.

Consovoy McCarthy PLLC, Lawfare LLC, and the office of the state attorney general represent Tennessee.

The cases are NetChoice LLC v. Fitch, S.D. Miss., No. 1:24-cv-00170, 6/18/25 and NetChoice LLC v. Skrmetti, M.D. Tenn., No. 3:24-cv-01191, 6/18/25.