A federal judge has once again blocked Mississippi from enforcing its 2024 online age-verification law, siding with tech industry group NetChoice in its ongoing First Amendment challenge.

U.S. District Judge Halil S. Ozerden granted a preliminary injunction Wednesday against enforcement of House Bill 1126, which requires social media platforms to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent before allowing minors to access their services. The ruling prohibits enforcement of the law against eight major tech companies, including Meta Platforms, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, Snap, Pinterest, Nextdoor, and Dreamwidth.

Ozerden concluded that NetChoice had demonstrated the law is likely unconstitutional as applied to its members, finding that it is not narrowly tailored to achieve the state’s interest in protecting children and thus fails under the Supreme Court’s strict scrutiny standard for content-based speech regulation.

“NetChoice met its burden of showing the law wasn’t narrowly tailored to achieve the state’s goal,” Ozerden wrote, highlighting the potential irreparable harm to NetChoice members, including the loss of free speech rights and unrecoverable compliance costs.

This is the second time Ozerden has issued an injunction in the case. His first ruling was vacated by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ordered a more detailed factual analysis following the U.S. Supreme Court’s July 2024 decision in Moody v. NetChoice. That precedent refined the standard for evaluating facial First Amendment challenges to content moderation laws. Wednesday’s ruling focused instead on the law’s application to NetChoice’s member companies and did not address the broader facial challenge.

On the same day, a federal judge in Tennessee reached the opposite conclusion. Judge Eli Richardson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee denied NetChoice’s motion to block enforcement of that state’s HB 1891, which imposes similar age-verification and parental-consent rules.

Richardson ruled that NetChoice had not proven its members faced imminent enforcement or irreparable harm. He rejected arguments that anticipated compliance costs were sufficient to warrant an injunction, stating such expenses are a normal burden of doing business.

The Mississippi law remains unenforceable against the named platforms while the lawsuit continues.

The Tennessee law is still in effect, though NetChoice may appeal the denial.

Both cases are being closely watched as test cases for how far states can go in regulating children’s access to online platforms without violating constitutional free speech protections.

The lawsuits are:

• NetChoice LLC v. Fitch, S.D. Miss., No. 1:24-cv-00170 (Mississippi)
• NetChoice LLC v. Skrmetti, M.D. Tenn., No. 3:24-cv-01191 (Tennessee)

Legal teams from Lehotsky Keller Cohn LLP and Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP represent NetChoice. Mississippi’s defense is handled by the Attorney General’s Office, while Tennessee is represented by Consovoy McCarthy PLLC, Lawfare LLC, and the Attorney General’s Office.