• by Wendy Davis , 11 hours ago

Nebraska will ask a federal appellate court to allow immediate enforcement of a law requiring social platforms to verify users' ages and prohibit anyone under 18 from creating accounts without parental permission, state Attorney General Michael Hilgers disclosed in court papers filed Wednesday.

The attorney general has not yet filed substantive arguments with the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Late last month, key provisions of the state's Parental Rights in Social Media Act (LB 383) were blocked by U.S. District Court Judge John Gerrard on First Amendment grounds.

Gerrard said in a written ruling that the age verification and parental consent provisions have "a direct impact on several protected First Amendment activities."

He also specifically noted that the law appeared driven by an effort "to prevent minors from accessing speech about certain subject matter."

"The Attorney General himself testified, in committee, about the need to restrict the 'inappropriate material' available to minors online; e.g., content related to obscenity, drug use, body dysmorphia, and suicide," Gerrard wrote. "Much of that 'inappropriate material' is presumptively protected by the First Amendment."

The ruling came in response to a May lawsuit by the industry group NetChoice, which counts large platforms including Meta, TikTok, Snap and YouTube as members.

The organization noted in its complaint that the Supreme Court in 2011 struck down a California law that banned the sale of violent video games to minors, without parental consent.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who authored the opinion in that case, wrote that the government doesn't have a “free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.

He added that basic free speech principles “do not vary when a new and different medium for communication appears.”

In addition to the age verification and parental consent provisions, the Nebraska law also requires platforms to give parents tools to monitor minors' messages with other users.

NetChoice also challenged that monitoring provision, but Gerrard declined to block enforcement of that requirement.

"At this early stage, these provisions appear to be narrowly tailored to alleviate the identified harms of unmonitored social media activity by minors, and do not offend the Constitution," he wrote.