Utah Social Media Law Tossed by Judge

For much of the last two years, state and federal regulators have been trying to pass social media laws to protect children online (from privacy issues and mental health problems).  Utah was one of the first to get such a law enacted.  Now, enactment of the law has been stayed thanks to a ruling that it will not likely comply with the First Amendment.  The federal judge's ruling says that the state has not identified an “actual problem in need of solving.”   In so finding, the judge states that there is no clear nexus between mental health and online use by children, and thus that the government may not impinge on the speech rights of social media companies.

WHY IT MATTERS

The First Amendment generally receives a lot of deference: judges tend to be very skeptical of legislative efforts to regulate speech.  In this case, the speech being protected is that of Google and other large tech companies, which would be required to verify user age and default to certain settings for children.  The clear signal from the judge here is that the state will have to find a different way to address the issue, or find more evidence that online media harms children, before the platform operators will be forced to implement any special rules about users who are children.