What the court actually decided
On 14 October 2026, a three-judge Eleventh Circuit panel of Judges Newsom, Luck and Tjoflat issued a published opinion in CCIA & NetChoice v. Uthmeier (No. 25-11881). It let Florida enforce HB 3, which requires covered platforms to bar anyone under 14 from creating an account and to bar 14- and 15-year-olds from doing so without parental consent. The district court had preliminarily enjoined the law, and the Eleventh Circuit had stayed that injunction pending appeal. The panel held that HB 3 likely passes First Amendment review because it is "a content-neutral speech regulation that satisfies intermediate scrutiny," and it rejected the facial challenge under Moody v. NetChoice (2024).
The same panel issued NetChoice v. Carr (No. 25-12436) the next day, 15 October, in an opinion filed that date and widely reported on 16 October. It vacated the injunction against Georgia's SB 351, which requires covered platforms to make "commercially reasonable efforts" to verify account holders' ages, bars under-16s from holding accounts without parental consent, and limits ad targeting to those users. The court held that NetChoice has associational standing, but that it failed to carry its burden on a facial First Amendment challenge under Moody. It also found NetChoice had not shown it was likely to succeed on its vagueness or Section 230 claims. Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr called the result a "major win."
Two features of the Georgia opinion deserve attention. The court said it did not reach the merits of the First Amendment claim itself. And the district court had never ruled on an as-applied challenge, because it found the pre-enforcement record insufficient. The Georgia case is therefore a ruling about what NetChoice proved, not a finding that SB 351 is constitutional.
The strongest case for these laws
The argument for the laws deserves to be stated fairly. Florida told the court that features such as push notifications, autoplay and infinite scroll are "psychological hooks" that foster compulsive use, and that children's developing brains make them especially susceptible. Legislators backed that view overwhelmingly: the Florida Senate's bill record shows HB 3 passed the House 119-0 and the Senate 30-5 in 2024. Parents face real collective-action problems, since a child who leaves a platform alone may lose touch with their classmates. A parental-consent rule can be read as handing that decision back to families. The court found that interest important and held that the Florida law does not burden substantially more speech than necessary to advance it.
Why the reasoning is thinner than the headline
The Florida opinion defines a covered platform in part by usage. At least 10% of daily active users under 16 must spend an average of at least two hours a day on it, and the platform must also use algorithms and one listed addictive feature. That is a targeted design, and it is the reason the panel could call the law content-neutral. But the core operation is still a licence requirement for speech. A 15-year-old who wants to join a private group, message a friend or build an audience needs a parent's sign-off, and a 13-year-old cannot have an account at all, even with parental permission. The panel treated that burden as tolerable because the law is aimed at features rather than viewpoints. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in its 23 October analysis, argued that the court accepted time spent online as a proxy for harm without testing it. That is a fair criticism of an evidentiary record that rests heavily on the state's own account.
The Georgia opinion shows a second problem. Moody makes facial challenges to platform laws very hard, because plaintiffs must map a law's full range of applications and show the unconstitutional ones substantially outweigh the lawful ones. SB 351 sweeps broadly, covering any service that lets users create profiles and interact publicly and privately, then carves out a long list of exceptions that includes email, streaming, shopping and gaming. Challengers will now need member-by-member evidence and as-applied suits. That favours states, and it slows the courts that should be testing whether the law works.
The costs fall on adults too
Georgia's law applies age checks to all account holders. Any enforcement regime built this way pushes platforms toward collecting identity documents or biometric estimates from everyone, adults included, in order to find the minors. That creates a honeypot of sensitive data and favours large incumbents that can afford compliance. It also chills anonymous speech. In Florida, enforcement runs through the Department of Legal Affairs under the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act for knowing or reckless violations, so platforms face real enforcement risk if they guess wrong about who is under 16.
A pro-innovation, pro-speech approach would not dismiss the harm legislators describe. It would favour measures that target the mechanism rather than the age. Examples include limits on autoplay and notification defaults for minors, strong default privacy settings, and device-level or app-store parental controls that keep ID checks out of every individual service. Those options impose a smaller burden on lawful speech, and they are the kind of less restrictive alternative that intermediate scrutiny is supposed to take seriously.
What happens next
Both cases return to the district courts. Florida's lawsuit goes back to federal court in Tallahassee, and Georgia's to the Northern District of Georgia. NetChoice said it is "evaluating all of our options," which could include en banc review or a Supreme Court petition. The Eleventh Circuit's Florida holding also sits against the broader landscape of challenges to similar laws that the opinion itself catalogues, including Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and California. The courts of appeals are not uniform in how they treat these laws, which is the kind of divergence that tends to attract Supreme Court attention.
For now, platforms operating in the two states must decide how to comply, and users must decide what to hand over to prove their age. The evidence that age-gating improves teen wellbeing remains thin, and the evidence that it burdens adults is concrete. As enforcement begins, researchers and regulators should measure both, so that the next round of litigation is decided on facts rather than on who bore the burden of proof.