• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, September 10, 2024

A federal judge has blocked Utah from enforcing a new law that would have restricted social media platforms' ability to serve content to minors under 18.

In an opinion issued Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby ruled that the Utah Minor Protection in Social Media Act, which had been slated to take effect October 1, likely violates the First Amendment.

“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,” he continued, adding that Utah officials hadn't shown that the law's restrictions were constitutional.

Utah's law, passed earlier this year, would have required platforms to limit the ability of minors under 18 to communicate with users who aren't “connected” to the minor -- which essentially means within that minor's network. That restriction could only have been lifted by parents.

The statute also would have required platforms to disable push notifications and refrain from automatically playing content on minors' accounts. The measure replaced a 2023 law that would have prohibited social media companies from allowing minors under 18 to have accounts without parental permission, and banned the companies from serving ads to minors.

The tech industry organization NetChoice sued to block Utah's law, arguing that it violates the First Amendment rights of minors as well as social platforms. The group said in its request for an injunction that the law will leave minors “unable to interact with elected officials on X, share their artistic expression on Instagram, post their athletic highlights on YouTube, or ask for help with their homework on Nextdoor."

NetChoice added that the ban on push notifications was “the digital equivalent of the state banning a newspaper from proclaiming 'Extra! Extra! Read All About It!'”

Shelby said in his ruling that he is “sensitive to the mental health challenges many young people face,” but that Utah officials failed to show “a clear, causal relationship between minors’ social media use and negative mental health impacts.”

“It may very well be the case ... that social media use is associated with serious mental health concerns including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, poor sleep, online harassment, low self-esteem, feelings of exclusion, and attention issues,” Shelby wrote.

“But the record before the court contains only one report to that effect, and that report -- a 2023 United States Surgeon General Advisory titled Social Media and Youth Mental Health -- offers a much more nuanced view of the link between social media use and negative mental health impacts than that advanced by defendants,” Shelby added.

That report said social media “may have benefits for some children and adolescents,” but could also pose a risk of harm, and concluded that more research is needed.