Netchoice v. Murrill
Issue
In *NetChoice v. Murrill*, a coalition of civil liberties and digital rights organizations argues that Louisiana's social media age-verification and content-restriction law violates the First Amendment because it burdens fully protected speech for both minors and adults, not merely content that minors have no right to receive. The question is non-obvious because the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in *Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton* upheld a comparable age-verification regime for sexually explicit platforms, leaving open whether that framework extends to general-purpose social media where the restricted speech remains constitutionally protected. The brief also presses whether the Act's more than twenty categorical exemptions — carving out gaming, shopping, and news platforms — independently render the law content-based on its face and subject to strict scrutiny regardless of how the *Paxton* question is resolved.
What Happened
Eight organizations — including the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and the Wikimedia Foundation — filed this amicus curiae brief at the Fifth Circuit on June 2, 2026, in support of Plaintiff-Appellee NetChoice and in favor of affirming the district court's permanent injunction against the Louisiana law. The brief advances three analytically independent grounds for affirmance. First, amici argue that *Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton* is strictly limited to platforms whose predominant content is sexually explicit material unprotected as to minors, and cannot be extended to general social media hosting fully protected speech. Second, they contend that the Act's extensive categorical exemptions constitute facial subject-matter discrimination that triggers strict scrutiny under *City of Austin v. Reagan National Advertising*, foreclosing the law regardless of the state's interest in minor protection. Third, the brief argues that the Act's age-verification mechanism independently chills protected speech by excluding adults lacking qualifying identification, destroying anonymous speech rights, and concentrating biometric data in breach-vulnerable repositories.
Why It Matters
The brief's most consequential contribution is its aggressive effort to cabin *Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton* before it can be read as a generalized permission slip for state age-verification regimes covering any platform where harmful content might appear; the Fifth Circuit's resolution of that interpretive question is expected to deepen an emerging circuit conflict and may invite further Supreme Court review. By developing the content-based exemption theory as an independent ground for invalidation, the brief also signals to legislators nationwide that the common drafting strategy of exempting incumbent industries — news, retail, gaming — while regulating social media may itself be constitutionally fatal. The structural access-equity argument, linking age-verification mandates to the systematic exclusion of approximately fifteen million adults lacking qualifying identification, injects a distinct harm into the record that is analytically prior to any minor-protection justification and could influence how courts evaluate the fit between the law's means and its stated ends.
Related Filings
Other proceedings in the same litigation tracked by this monitor.
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