Privacy & Cybersecurity Law Blog

On March 3, 2026, the Virginia Attorney General appealed a U.S. District Court’s grant of a preliminary injunction barring the enforcement of a new Virginia law requiring age verification and a time limit on social media use by minors under the age of 16 pending a final determination on the merits.  

The Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act was amended by Virginia Senate Bill 854 (“the Act”) to restrict the use of social media platforms by minors under 16. In particular, the Act requires social media platforms to use “commercially reasonable methods” to determine whether a user is under 16 and to limit such minors’ use of the platform to one hour a day, absent verifiable parental consent to an increased limit.  

The preliminary injunction was obtained by NetChoice, a technology industry trade association, in NetChoice v. Jones, Case No. 1:25‑cv‑2067 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. NetChoice is challenging the constitutionality of the Act. As in litigation that NetChoice has filed in other states, NetChoice asserts, among other things, that the Act violates the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech.

The District Court found that the Act’s requirements likely constitute a content-based restriction on speech, noting that the Act distinguishes between content types, exempting news, sports, entertainment and ecommerce content while restricting user-created social media content. Content-based restrictions trigger the highest level of scrutiny under the Constitution, requiring the Attorney General to show that the Act serves a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored.

While the Court agreed that Virginia has a compelling interest in addressing the youth mental‑health crisis, it did not agree that the Act is narrowly tailored. The Court noted that the Act required all users, including adults, to verify their age before accessing protected speech, and that minors could be barred from more than one hour of otherwise lawful content, such as watching an educational or religious livestream for longer than an hour.