North Carolina’s HB 301 is an unconstitutional social media age verification bill that imposes First Amendment defying restrictions on minors’ access to lawful online speech — provisions already enjoined in Utah, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Ohio. The bill would also force platforms to collect sensitive personal data from minors and parents alike, creating new vectors for identity theft and data breaches that undermine the very privacy interests the legislature seeks to protect.
NetChoice Testimony in Opposition to North Carolina HB 301
June 8, 2026
North Carolina General Assembly
Dear Chair Bell, and Members of the House Rules, Calendar, and Operations of the House Committee,
On behalf of NetChoice, a national trade association working to make the internet safe for free enterprise and free expression, we write to express our opposition to House Bill 301, which would prohibit young people from accessing social media without verifiable parental consent.
We share the sponsor’s goal to better protect minors from harmful content online. NetChoice members have taken issues of teen safety seriously and in recent years have rolled out numerous new features, settings, parental tools and protections to better empower parents and assist in monitoring their children’s use of social media. We ask that you oppose HB 301 and instead use this bill as a way to jumpstart a larger conversation about how best to protect minors online and consider alternatives that do not raise constitutional issues.
Key Concerns:
- HB 301 imposes unconstitutional age-verification and parental consent requirements;
- The Supreme Court and lower courts have consistently held parental consent for accessing lawful speech online unconstitutional; and
- Age-verification and parental consent presents heightened threats to privacy and undermines the state’s interest in protecting the privacy of minors.
HB 301’s Core Provisions are Unconstitutional and are Already Being Actively Litigated in Other States:
HB 301’s restrictions on minors’ access to social media platforms raise First Amendment concerns by limiting their ability to access information and engage in protected speech. Courts have consistently recognized that minors have constitutional rights to receive information and ideas through various media. The bill’s requirements would effectively create a barrier to constitutionally protected speech, as platforms would be required to verify age before allowing access to any content. This constitutes a prior restraint on speech, which courts have traditionally viewed with particular skepticism. Similar provisions have been challenged in federal court and laws in Utah, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Ohio are currently enjoined.
Additionally, the Supreme Court has invalidated parental consent requirements when they impermissibly chill access to lawful speech (Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass’n, 564 U.S. 786 (2011)). In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the Court struck down a California law restricting minors’ access to violent video games without parental consent. The Court rejected the notion that a new category of unprotected speech could be created for speech directed at children, emphasizing that minors are entitled to significant First Amendment protection. Justice Scalia’s majority opinion noted that the government cannot “restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed” simply because it disagrees with them.
When other courts have examined age-verification and parental consent laws, Brown governs. For example, when the District Court for the Southern District of Ohio reiterated that parental consent laws do not enforce parental authority but enforce governmental authority subject to a parental veto. “[Ohio’s parental consent law] appears to be exactly that sort of law. And like content-based regulations, laws that require parental consent for children to access constitutionally protected, non-obscene content, are subject to strict scrutiny” (NetChoice v. Yost, 716 F. Supp. 3d 539, 558 (S.D. Ohio 2024)).
Age-Verification and Parental Consent Requirements Undermine Privacy:
While we share the legislature’s goal of protecting young people online, HB 301’s approach would create significant privacy and security concerns while potentially limiting beneficial online interactions for North Carolina’s youth.
HB 301 would require social media companies to collect and verify personal information about minors in order to obtain parental consent. The bill’s requirements would force platforms to collect sensitive personal information from both minors and parents in order to actually establish the relationship, thus, creating new data security vulnerabilities. This runs counter to best practices of data minimization and could make North Carolina residents more susceptible to identity theft and fraud.
Some states that have experimented with age-verification and parental consent have required the collection of a government ID card, credit card number or biometric information to ensure the website is complying with the law. But by requiring the collection (and then, implicitly, the storage) of this sensitive information, age-verification requirements make websites the perfect target for hackers, identity thieves and other bad actors.
As we have seen, no number of safeguards can ensure against data breaches. According to Child Identity Fraud Reports from Javelin Strategy and Research, nearly 2 million children were victims of identity theft in 2022 (Javelin, 1.7 Million U.S. Children Fell Victim to Data Breaches According to Javelin’s 2022 Child Identity Fraud Study, (Oct. 26, 2022) (last visited Mar. 22, 2024)). Meanwhile, the 2019 hack of Pearson (a school technology provider) exposed information of thousands of children, including their names, birthdates and email addresses (Lindsay McKenzie, Pearson Hack Exposes Thousands of Students’ Data, INSIDE HIGHER ED (Aug. 4, 2019)). Even government agencies responsible for storing personal information have been subject to massive data leaks (Sean Lyngaas, Millions of Americans’ personal data exposed in global hack, CNN POLITICS, June 16, 2023). Mandating that websites or services collect sensitive personal data on minors as a precondition for accessing vast swaths of online speech substantially increases these risks. They also make websites juicier targets for hackers. Accordingly, state legislatures should evaluate whether their proposed policies would advance privacy protections or simply subject minors and adults to greater vulnerability in their online lives.
The Private Right of Action will Produce Litigation, Not Protection
HB 301 creates a private right of action allowing suits against social media platforms on behalf of minor account holders, with damages of up to $10,000 per claim. While the intent is to provide a remedy for harmed minors, this provision is likely to generate a wave of litigation that imposes costs without improving child safety.
Several structural problems deserve the Committee’s attention:
- Vague standards invite over-litigation. Terms like “knowingly or recklessly” allowing a minor to create an account, and “commercially reasonable” age verification efforts, are highly subjective. Platforms will face suits even where they made good-faith compliance efforts, because plaintiffs’ counsel will always be able to argue that more could have been done.
- Costs flow to consumers, not bad actors. Litigation defense costs are ultimately borne by users through higher costs and reduced services—including the minors the bill is meant to protect. Smaller platforms and startups face existential risk from even a handful of claims, which may reduce competition and drive users to less accountable alternatives.
- The Attorney General is better positioned to enforce. The AG can focus enforcement on systemic bad actors and bring the technical expertise and public interest judgment that individual plaintiffs’ counsel cannot. Concentrating enforcement in the AG’s office—as the bill does for age verification violations—is a more effective model for the account creation provisions as well.
Given the constitutional problems presented by age-verification and parental consent, NetChoice urges you to oppose HB 301 to avoid identical constitutional pitfalls. As always, we offer ourselves as a resource to discuss any of these issues with you in more detail.
Sincerely,
Amy Bos
Vice President of Government Affairs, NetChoice (The views of NetChoice expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of all NetChoice members.)
NetChoice is a trade association that works to protect free expression and promote free enterprise online.