SALT LAKE CITY, Sept. 11, 2024 (Gephardt Daily) — Gov. Spencer Cox is posting thoughts on social media after a federal judge blocked the enactment of a youth social media act.
Senate Bill 194, which Cox signed into law, would have required social media platforms to verify the age of the user prior to granting access. The stated goal was to protect the mental health of children who may be adversely affected by social media.
“Although I am disappointed in the court’s decision regarding the Utah Minor Protection in Social Media Act, we always knew that this could be a long battle,” Cox said in his X post. “And it is a battle worth waging, as the harm social media is causing our children continues.
“Let’s be clear: social media companies could voluntarily, at this very moment, do everything that the law put in place to protect our children. But they refuse to do so. Instead, they continue to prioritize their profits over our children’s wellbeing. This must stop, and Utah will continue to lead the fight.”
U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby agreed with NetChoice, a coalition of social media and tech companies, which filed a lawsuit asking for the new law to be blocked due to First Amendment issues, since the law would require mass data collection on social media users, and that information could be misused for marketing or other purposes.
“The court recognizes the State’s earnest desire to protect young people from the novel challenges associated with social media use. But owing to the First Amendment’s paramount place in our democratic system, even well-intentioned legislation that regulates speech based on content must satisfy a tremendously high level of constitutional scrutiny,” Judge Shelby wrote in his decision.
“Defendants generally respond to these underinclusivity concerns by suggesting a social media-specific problem arises when social media companies’ use ‘addictive design features’ in combination with ‘user-generated [content] and user-to-user interface,'” Shelby continued.
“But Defendants simply do not offer any evidence to support this distinction, and they only compare social media services to ‘entertainment services.’ They do not account for the wider universe of platforms that utilize the features they take issue with, such as news sites and search engines.”
