(LifeSiteNews) — U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles has temporarily blocked the state of Virginia from enforcing a law that would require social media platforms to implement age verification tools and limit users younger than age 16 to one hour of screen time per day, deeming it an infringement on free speech.
The law, which took effect in January after being signed last year by former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, requires the operators of social media platforms to “use commercially reasonable methods, such as a neutral age screen mechanism, to determine whether a user is a minor”; and to “limit a minor’s use of such social media platform to one hour per day, per service or application, and allow a parent to give verifiable parental consent to increase or decrease the daily time limit.” Information such processes gathered would be forbidden from use for any other purpose.
The law was swiftly challenged by technology trade group NetChoice, which claimed that it infringed on the constitutional rights of social media users as well as the proprietors of platforms such as Facebook, X, Reddit, Google, and more. The state argued that the law was narrowly focused on a legitimate interest in combating social media addiction and its associated mental toll.
US News & World Report reports that Giles issued her preliminary injunction on the conclusion that NetChoice was likely to succeed on the merits.
“The court recognizes the Commonwealth’s compelling interest in protecting its youth from the harms associated with the addictive aspects of social media,” she wrote. “However, it cannot infringe on First Amendment rights, including those of the same youth it aims to protect.”
“This ruling reaffirms that the government cannot ration access to lawful speech – even if it has noble intentions,” declared NetChoice Litigation Center co-director Paul Taske, celebrating the ruling. “Fundamentally, parents must stay in the driver’s seat when it comes to decisions about their families.”
The divide over such policies does not fall neatly along partisan lines, with both liberals and conservatives sometimes making the same arguments for or against depending on their emphasis. Opponents call it an illegitimate expansion of government power into the private sector and government taking over parental responsibilities, while supporters argue social media is so pervasive that parents have an uphill battle fighting it along with every other potential harm to their children.
While that debate will continue, action on other social media crises have more unified support, such as inadequate protection of children’s privacy and vulnerability to online sexual predators.
Last year, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported on evidence that Meta was aware that its subscription tools were being used to facilitate child sexual exploitation but neglected to solve the issue, specifically 2023 warnings from safety staffers to superiors about paid subscription tools being used by hundreds of “parent-managed minor accounts” to sell adult male users’ images of their own young daughters.
Many customers made perfectly clear to the mothers running the accounts about their perverted intentions. “Sometimes parents engaged in sexual banter about their own children or had their daughters interact with subscribers’ sexual messages,” the Journal reported. “Meta’s recommendation systems were actively promoting such underage modeling accounts to users suspected of behaving inappropriately online toward children.”
The Times added that Instagram users who reported sexually explicit images and suspected predators were “typically met with silence or indifference” and even if they used the block function on “many” of them, they were actually penalized with limits on their own access to certain features.
