NetChoice v. Ellison

Issue: In *NetChoice v. Ellison*, plaintiff NetChoice argues that a Minnesota law requiring social media platforms to display a state-authored mental-health warning to every user at the start of every session — with no option for users to permanently dismiss it — unconstitutionally compels private speech in violation of the First Amendment. The case turns on whether the more demanding strict-scrutiny standard applies, or whether the government can defend the mandate under the more permissive *Zauderer* framework, which permits rational-basis review for purely factual disclosures in commercial advertising contexts. The question is made legally significant because no Supreme Court ruling has definitively settled whether *Zauderer* can reach beyond its original advertising context to cover a warning displayed across a general-purpose speech platform.

NetChoice — a trade association whose members include Meta, TikTok, YouTube, X, Reddit, and Snap — filed this complaint on April 29, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, initiating a challenge to Minnesota House File 2 (2025), Article 19, Section 13, which is scheduled to take effect July 1, 2026. The complaint seeks declaratory and injunctive relief and advances four main arguments: that the mandatory warning is compelled speech subject to strict scrutiny under *Riley* and *NIFLA*; that *Zauderer*'s more permissive standard cannot apply because the warnings are not appended to commercial advertisements and are not "purely factual and uncontroversial"; that the interstitial warning burdens users' right to access protected speech under *Lamont* and *Packingham*; and that undefined statutory terms like "substantial purpose" and "primarily" render the law void for vagueness. Plaintiff also marshals a string of preliminary injunctions granted against materially similar statutes in eight other states as evidence of emerging judicial consensus against such mandates. No preliminary injunction motion has yet been docketed, and defendants have not yet answered.

Minnesota's law is among the first state social-media warning-label statutes positioned to take effect following the wave of legislation enacted between 2023 and 2025, meaning a ruling here — even at the preliminary injunction stage — will carry significant persuasive weight in the dozen or more similar cases still pending in federal courts. A preliminary injunction granted by the District of Minnesota would further solidify the pattern of judicial resistance to state-mandated mental-health warnings, while a decision allowing enforcement could fracture that emerging consensus and accelerate the path to Supreme Court review. The case also gives a federal court an early opportunity to address the question *NIFLA* deliberately left open — whether *Zauderer* survives outside the commercial-advertising context at all — in a setting where the regulated entity is simultaneously a commercial service and a major forum for protected speech.

Issue: Whether Minnesota's proposed statutory restrictions on social media platform design features — including algorithmic amplification, engagement-based optimization, and "deceptive patterns" targeting minors — violate the First Amendment's prohibitions on compelled speech and forced hosting of third-party content.

NetChoice filed suit in the District of Minnesota challenging the constitutionality of Minnesota legislation whose policy foundations are set out in this Attorney General's report, which was filed as Exhibit 4 to the complaint. The document itself is the Minnesota Attorney General's second annual report on emerging technology and youth well-being, prepared by AG Keith Ellison's office in February 2025 with the assistance of expert Dr. Ravi Iyer and a law clerk; it was submitted to the Legislature pursuant to 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 57, Art. 1, § 4, subd. 3. The report documents alleged harms from platform design choices and AI systems, surveys the existing legislative and legal landscape across jurisdictions, critiques prior regulatory approaches, and proposes specific legislative recommendations — including banning "deceptive patterns," mandating algorithmic amplification limits, and restricting AI chatbot design — accompanied by model bills in the appendices. No court ruling or briefing on the merits is contained in this document.

The report is significant as an exhibit because it reveals the state's own regulatory theory — that platform liability should attach to *design functions* rather than *content* — a distinction the AG explicitly frames as the constitutionally safer path in light of prior court decisions striking down content-based online speech laws, and which NetChoice is apparently contesting as insufficient to avoid First Amendment scrutiny.