By ANTOINETTE GRAJEDA | Arkansas Advocate
A federal judge has temporarily blocked an Arkansas law set to take effect Tuesday that would have restricted minors’ social media access.
Tech industry trade group NetChoice in January filed a lawsuit challenging Act 900 of 2025, which sought to amend a 2023 law found to be unconstitutional.
The earlier law and the reworked version would have required age verification to create new social media accounts. A federal judge declared the 2023 law unconstitutional and permanently blocked it last year.
In Monday’s 24-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks said NetChoice was likely to succeed on its vagueness challenge to a provision of the law prohibiting social media platforms from engaging in “addictive practices.”
Brooks, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, said NetChoice was also likely to succeed on its First Amendment challenges to other parts of the law, including a requirement for social media platforms to maintain certain default settings for minors.
These limits include ceasing notifications to Arkansas minors between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. and requiring their privacy and safety settings to be “the most protective level of control” offered by the platform.
Brooks said that while the burdens imposed by these default provisions might be slight, “they do not appear likely to serve the State’s asserted interest at all.”
“Imposing small burdens on vast quantities of speech for no appreciable benefit is not consistent with the First Amendment,” Brooks wrote. “Arkansas cannot sentence speech on the internet to death by a thousand cuts. The default provisions likely violate the First Amendment.”
In a statement Monday, Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, said he was pleased with the decision from the court, which “hit the nail on the head” regarding Act 900, a “deeply flawed” law that “burdens speech without providing any upside.”
NetChoice’s members include Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Snap Inc., which owns Snapchat.
“Indeed, as the court recognized, there are non-tech, constitutional measures that could be taken to advance Arkansas’s goals,” Taske said. “But Arkansas chose to ignore the constitutional options available and opted to impose many vague restrictions on websites instead, interfering with user speech rights and jeopardizing user privacy by forcing websites to track their visitors and collect sensitive data just to comply with the State’s vague standards.”
Spokesperson Jeff LeMaster said the Arkansas attorney general’s office is considering the state’s options and “will continue to vigorously defend Act 900.”
Monday’s order follows Brooks’ decision in December to grant NetChoice’s request to temporarily block another Arkansas social media law, Act 901 of 2025. That law would have allowed parent parents to sue social media platforms if exposure to content on their sites results in their child developing eating disorders, committing or attempting suicide, or becoming addicted to the platform’s feeds.
Other states have also faced legal challenges for their social media laws, including Florida, Georgia and Louisiana.
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