language: en · status: in-force · last checked: 2026-09-19

Mississippi — Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act (Miss. Code §§45-38-1 to 45-38-13)

House Bill 1126 of the 2024 Regular Session, approved 30 April 2024 and in force from 1 July 2024. It is not a student-privacy statute: it binds digital service providers directly, wherever they are, whenever a known minor in Mississippi holds an account — age registration, verified parental consent, data minimisation, a ban on precise geolocation and on sharing, and a duty to run a strategy against a list of named harms.

Mississippi has no dedicated student-data-privacy statute at all; see ../student-data/ for that finding and its evidence.

Applicability to EdTech

The scope test is the whole question, and it is a conjunctive three-part test in §45-38-5(1): the service must connect users so they can socially interact, and let a user create a profile to sign in with, and let a user create or post content other users can view. A service failing any one of the three is outside the act.

Two exclusions matter more than the definitions. §45-38-5(2)(c) takes out a service that primarily provides access to content generated or selected by the provider where chat or comment functionality is incidental — which is the shape of a curated content library with class-level commenting. §45-38-5(2)(b) takes out a service facilitating only e-mail or direct messaging. Neither exclusion is available to a service whose point is user-posted content viewable by other users.

"Known minor" is doing real work: the duties attach only where the provider knows the account holder is under 18 (§45-38-3(d)) — but §45-38-7(1) requires age registration and commercially reasonable verification for every account, so a provider in scope cannot stay ignorant by design.

There is no exemption for a service supplied to a school, and no route by which a district's consent stands in for a parent's: §45-38-7(2) requires express consent from a parent or guardian, with six named acceptable methods. That is the sharpest divergence from the school-service statutes elsewhere in this corpus, which generally let the school act as the parent's agent.

Key obligations at a glance

Accounts (§45-38-7)

• No account without the person registering their age, and commercially reasonable verification "with a level of certainty appropriate to the risks" of the provider's own information practices — (1).
• A known minor may not hold an account without express parental consent; six methods are named, the last being any other commercially reasonable method — (2).

Minors' data (§45-38-9)

• Collect only what is reasonably necessary to provide the service, and use it only for the purpose it was collected for — (1).
• No precise geolocation collection — (2)(a).
• No targeted advertising involving harmful material — (2)(b).
• No sharing, disclosure or sale of a known minor's personal identifying information except for six enumerated compulsions and safety purposes — (2)(c). Note what is not in that list: no exception for service providers, processors, analytics or a corporate transaction.

Harm mitigation (§45-38-11)

• Commercially reasonable efforts to develop and implement a strategy preventing or mitigating a known minor's exposure to harmful material and content promoting self-harm, eating disorders, substance use, suicidal behaviours, stalking, violence, bullying, grooming, trafficking, child sexual abuse material, incitement and any other illegal activity — (1).
• The duty does not require blocking a minor's deliberate, independent search, nor the provision of prevention resources — (2).

Enforcement

• Attorney General, through the unfair-and-deceptive-trade-practices regime: HB 1126 SECTION 8 adds violating the act to Miss. Code §75-24-5(2) as paragraph (q).
• A narrow private action: no general private right of action, but a parent or guardian of an affected known minor may seek a declaratory judgment or an injunction — §45-38-13. Class actions are barred — (3).

Enforceability is contested

The act has been under constitutional challenge since it passed, as NetChoice v. Fitch: preliminary injunction 1 July 2024, stayed by the Fifth Circuit 17 July 2025, Supreme Court declined to reinstate it 14 August 2025, Fifth Circuit heard the appeal 3 February 2026. Check the docket before treating any provision as enforceable or unenforceable on a given date — the text below is the enacted text either way, and the document does not track the litigation.

Contents

Licence

The reproduced text is HB 1126 (2024 Regular Session) as sent to the Governor, served by the Mississippi Legislature on billstatus.ls.state.ms.us. No copyright subsists in this text. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020), the Supreme Court held: "Under what has been dubbed the government edicts doctrine, officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties." It went on: "judges—and, we now confirm, legislators—may not be considered the 'authors' of the works they produce in the course of their official duties as judges and legislators. That rule applies regardless of whether a given material carries the force of law." (slip opinion, pp. 1 and 5–6, read 2026-10-01.)

The enrolled bill page carries no copyright notice (read 2026-10-01). The corpus takes nothing from the codified Mississippi Code, which LexisNexis publishes for the State, or from Justia.

Public-domain text carries no conditions. The corpus attributes it all the same: the {.meta} provenance line on each section names the publisher, the Sources section links the official text, and the Meta section describes what the builder changed (markup and anchors only). Nothing here suggests that the Mississippi Legislature endorses the corpus.

Related

• Puerto Rico Ley 185-2024 — the closest comparator in the corpus: minors' cyber-privacy with its own social-media scope test
• Mississippi student data (no statute) — the research finding that Mississippi has no student-privacy statute
• COPPA — the federal floor this sits above, and the source of the verifiable-parental-consent methods §45-38-7(2) echoes
• Illinois BIPA — the other US instrument here with a private right of action rather than AG-only enforcement
• Texas CUBI · Washington RCW 19.375 — AG-enforced state comparators

Sources

• Mississippi Legislature — HB 1126 (2024 Regular Session), as sent to the Governor
• Mississippi Legislature — HB 1126 bill history