MN social media warning law scheduled to go into effect July 1 but enforcement currently facing legal challenge

Minnesota’s new social media warning law passed during the 2025 special legislative session requires social media companies to display a mental health warning label to users on their sites.

The provision is set to go into effect July 1, 2026.

But a tech industry group named NetChoice, representing social media and tech companies including Meta, Google, TikTok, and Reddit, sued the state — Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minnesota Department of Health Commissioner Brooke Cunningham — in federal court over the law.

The complaint argues that part of the law violates the First Amendment by requiring social media platforms to express “the government’s preferred message,” and asks a federal judge to block enforcement before the July 1 deadline. As of this writing, no ruling has come down yet.

No age limit

NetChoice argues that the statute requires a mental health warning to appear each time a “user” — with no age qualifier — accesses a social media platform. This is what NetChoice’s complaint is calling a one-size-fits-all mandate on every user who opens a covered social media platform, including adults because the law is not limited to minors.

The warning label can only disappear when the user either exits the platform or acknowledges the potential for harm and chooses to proceed.

What does the warning label say?

The warning label’s text must warn the user of potential mental health impacts from using social media and provide resources to address potential mental health impacts, including the national suicide hotline number and website.

The law exempted the commissioner of health from Minnesota’s ordinary rulemaking process — the notice and comment procedure that normally gives the public a chance to weigh in before a regulation takes effect — when writing the actual warning text. Using that exemption, the health department released four pages of proposed warning language in February 2026. But after NetChoice sued, the department withdrew the guidance and replaced it with a single, shorter warning instead.

NetChoice’s amended complaint argues this makes the problem worse, not better, as now the state has compelled two different messages within the same legislative cycle and didn’t have a public process governing either one.

Here is the current text of the warning label:

THE STATE OF MINNESOTA REQUIRES THIS MESSAGE: Some studies have shown that too much social media use is linked to increased mental health symptoms, including anxiety and depression, as well as harm to diet, sleep, and body image. If you need help, call or text 988 or visit 988Lifeline.org.

NetChoice’s complaint also argues that the word choice for the warning label is not the type of purely factual and uncontroversial disclosure that courts have permitted governments to require.

Minnesota’s law also bars platforms from allowing a user to disable the warning label, from providing the warning label in only the platform’s terms and conditions, and from including extraneous information in the warning label that obscures its visibility or prominence.

Not new territory

Minnesota isn’t the first state to try this. Colorado passed a similar warning label law (state-authored) but just focused on minors in 2024. NetChoice also challenged this law, and a federal judge ruled in their favor on First Amendment grounds in November 2025, stating that the compelled warning amounted to more than just “factual, uncontroversial” speech. Given that Minnesota’s warning is also state-authored, it’s the closest direct precedent.

Arkansas, Louisiana, and Virginia have also lost or are still fighting First Amendment challenges over their own social media laws, but those statutes work differently due to age-verification and parental consent requirements, restrictions on “addictive” algorithmic features, and, in Virginia’s case, a one-hour daily usage cap for minors, not warning labels.

The broad nature of Minnesota’s mandate (no carve-out for minors) and the Legislature’s decision to exempt the warning text from Minnesota’s ordinary notice and comment rulemaking process may result in an outcome similar to related cases.

But is the concern really over free speech, or over Big Tech accountability?

As I wrote here, Big Tech companies including Meta, Google/YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat, are facing thousands of lawsuits from plaintiffs accusing them of designing their platforms to be compulsive, particularly for kids. While this is a separate legal fight from the warning label case, it’s a useful reminder that companies’ First Amendment arguments and broader debates over platform design aren’t mutually exclusive.

July 1 is upon us this week. Whether the judge rules before then is anyone’s guess. If not, the state will have a statute scheduled to take effect while its enforceability remains unresolved in federal court.