A federal judge has dismissed a claim in a lawsuit filed over Utah's new social media laws.
NetChoice, a coalition of tech and social media companies, sued Utah over its laws that crack down on youth access to social media platforms. The laws require age verification, disabling push notifications and features like autoplay and scrolling. NetChoice argues the laws violate First Amendment rights.
But in a new ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby rejected one of NetChoice's claims surrounding Section 230, a federal law that governs internet publishers.
"The dispositive question is whether the Act’s prohibitions on autoplay, seamless pagination, and notifications treat NetChoice members as the publisher or speaker of the third party content they disseminate. The court concludes they do not," Judge Shelby wrote. "The Act’s prohibitions focus solely on the conduct of the covered website—the website’s use of certain design features on minors’ accounts—and impose liability irrespective of the content those design features may be used to disseminate. In other words, the prohibitions do not impose liability on NetChoice members based on their role as a publisher of third-party content because the potential liability has no connection to that content. Accordingly, the challenged provisions fall outside the scope of Section 230’s protections and are not inconsistent with it."
The rest of NetChoice's lawsuit on First Amendment grounds will proceed.
"This case has always been and will always be based on the First Amendment at its core," Krista Chavez, a spokesperson for NetChoice, said in an email to FOX 13 News.
A hearing on NetChoice's remaining claims is scheduled for mid-August.
Utah has passed laws and filed its own lawsuits against social media companies, accusing them of harming the mental health of youth through addictive algorithms and exposing them to harms. Social media companies, in turn, have sued the state over its laws.
In one lawsuit, Utah's Division of Consumer Protection is suing TikTok, claiming its live-streaming feature has become a "virtual strip club" for minors and that the social media giant is getting a cut of payments sent through it. In a new court filing, TikTok asks a judge in Salt Lake City's 3rd District Court to throw it out.
"Through these claims, the Division seeks to hold [TikTok] liable for 'deceptive acts' and 'unconscionable practices' under the Utah Consumer Sales Practices Act. But its claims would do much more than that—they would effectively install Utah courts as the regulator of nationwide content on the TikTok platform. This is irreconcilable with both Utah’s personal jurisdiction requirements and federal law that bars courts from holding online platform providers liable for the way in which they publish and moderate content," TikTok attorney Alexander Southwell wrote.
"And while the Complaint is chock-full of headline-grabbing allegations about ways in which some users of the TikTok platform have allegedly violated the platform’s terms of use and even allegedly engaged in criminal conduct (evading TTI’s extensive monitoring and prevention efforts), a close read of the Complaint reveals that the Division is primarily focused on conduct by third parties—not TTI itself."
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