The Wikimedia Foundation and cosigners filed an amicus brief in Netchoice v. Brown, urging the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in the US to uphold a block on the Utah Minor Protection in Social Media Act, which establishes age verification online. The Foundation argued that the Act’s vague and broad definition of “social media service” risks encompassing even platforms that host public interest content. It imposes costly age assurance and content restrictions that would hurt open access and community-led content models, violating users’ First Amendment rights in the US.
The Wikimedia Foundation and Organization for Transformative Works, Chamber of Progress, and Engine Advocacy submitted an amicus or “friend-of-the-court” brief in NetChoice v. Brown, before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in support of NetChoice. As the plaintiff, NetChoice urged the appellate court to maintain a block on the Utah Minor Protection in Social Media Act, which requires social media platforms to disable some features on minors’ accounts and puts in place age verification measures for people accessing the internet from the state of Utah. In our brief, we reminded the court that the Act was passed in order to protect minors from the “addictive design features of certain social media services” and to stop social media platforms from “continu[ing] to prioritize their profits over our children’s wellbeing,” and hence includes provisions requiring social platforms to verify users’ ages. Unfortunately, the language of the Act goes much further than protecting youth from the risks posed by for-profit social media websites. The law’s vague, overly broad definition of “social media service” risks sweeping platforms that operate in the public interest, like the Wikimedia projects, into its scope.
To be clear, the requirements of the Act, more than age assurance mandates, establish content restrictions that would be incredibly challenging for public interest platforms to implement. To comply with the Act’s age assurance requirements alone would prove costly for nonprofit hosting providers; furthermore, age assurance checks would create a barrier for both minors and adults attempting to access free and open knowledge projects, impacting their rights to freedom of expression and to access reliable information. Lastly, the Act also affects the users’ First Amendment rights by requiring platforms to adopt a hands-on editorial model to ensure compliance with the law’s strict content restrictions for minors.
With the case now in the appeals court, our amicus brief urges against reversing the district court’s ruling and declaring the Act valid despite its First Amendment violations. This reversal would set a dangerous precedent, since the legislation’s vague language could affect platforms like Wikipedia and that of our cosigners: threatening their editorial models and severely hampering their ability to share free and open knowledge with the world.
The Foundation and other public interest platforms would need to collect more user data in order to comply with age verification mandates and content restrictions. In the case of the Wikimedia projects, it could expose both readers and volunteers to unnecessary risks by forcing them to identify themselves before being allowed to access or edit our projects. Furthermore, the Foundation would then be forced to restrict the content that minors could access, even preventing them from reading and/or interacting with edits made by adult users, who would also be restricted from reading or interacting with the edits made by minors. This would effectively break the collaborative model of knowledge creation and curation of the projects. The Act’s continued validity threatens a free and open internet.
We would like to thank our cosigners to this brief for their work: the Organization for Transformative Works, Chamber of Progress, and Engine Advocacy. As part of the Foundation’s initiative to engage with law school clinics in order to foster legal students’ interest in internet law and regulation, the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic conducted the research and initial drafting of the amicus brief. We would like to give special thanks there to Clinical Instructor Wendy Chu, and her students, Andrew Li and Alexa Levy.
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