• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 7, 2025

Attorneys general in four states are backing Utah's request to lift a block on a law that requires social media platforms to disable “addictive” features on minors' accounts -- including push notifications, content that plays automatically, and the ability to send messages to users who aren't in the minors' networks.

“Limiting children’s exposure to addictive features like autoplay, infinite scroll, and push notifications serves the state’s interest in preventing behavioral addiction,” law enforcement officials in Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas argue in a friend-of-the-court brief filed Thursday with the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Those states -- which recently passed their own laws restricting social media platforms -- are urging the appellate court to allow enforcement of the Utah Minor Protection in Social Media Act, which was blocked last year after the tech industry organization NetChoice challenged the law as unconstitutional.

NetChoice argued 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."

The group 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!'”

U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby said in a ruling issued last September that the statute likely violates the First Amendment and issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting enforcement.

“Even well-intentioned legislation that regulates speech based on content must satisfy a tremendously high level of constitutional scrutiny,” he wrote.

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

Shelby characterized the law as content-based because it only applies to social platforms -- defined as services that allow users to “interact socially” with each other. He said that definition implicitly distinguishes between social media services and all other types of internet services, such as news and ecommerce sites.

But the state attorneys general supporting the law contend that it doesn't discriminate based on content, arguing that whether a service allows social interaction “has nothing to do with communicative content.”

“If a website that brands itself as a news, sports, commerce, or video-game website allows users to 'interact socially,' the Act applies to it,” they wrote.

NetChoice is expected to respond to the arguments by May 7.