A Procedural Win, Not a Constitutional One
On August 28, 2026, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit vacated a Nashville federal district court's denial of a preliminary injunction against Tennessee's Protecting Children from Social Media Act, sending the case back for a full evaluation of NetChoice's First Amendment claims. The 2-1 decision, authored by Senior Judge Alice Batchelder and joined by Judge Kevin Ritz, does not strike down Tennessee's law. It does not even predict whether NetChoice will ultimately win. What it does is remove a procedural obstacle that had let the law operate, unreviewed on the merits, for a year and a half (Justia, NetChoice, LLC v. Skrmetti, No. 25-5660; MediaPost).
Tennessee's Protecting Children from Social Media Act, signed in May 2024 and effective January 1, 2025, requires social media platforms to verify the age of every account holder and obtain express parental consent before anyone under 18 can hold an account, alongside mandatory parental-supervision tools. The state's district court denied NetChoice's request to block the law in June 2025, reasoning — among other things — that NetChoice hadn't shown the kind of harm that justifies emergency relief before a full trial on the merits.
Steelmanning Tennessee's Case
Tennessee's defense is not frivolous, and the Sixth Circuit's ruling doesn't touch it. At February's oral argument, Tennessee Solicitor General Matt Rice told the panel that the law imposes minimal friction and pointed to youth mental-health data as the state's justification: adolescent suicide rates up 64% and self-harm among girls aged 10-14 up 281% over the period the legislature reviewed before passing the bill (Tennessee Attorney General's Office). Those figures track a body of research — echoed by legislators in both parties, which is why the bill passed the Tennessee House with only two dissenting votes — linking unrestricted adolescent social media use to depression, anxiety, and self-harm. A state legislature responding to that evidence with a parental-consent gate, rather than a content ban, is not reaching for the most restrictive tool available. Reasonable people can conclude the state has a real interest here, even if the chosen mechanism is flawed.
What the Panel Actually Held
The majority's holding is narrow and doctrinal: harms don't have to already be occurring for a plaintiff to seek a preliminary injunction. Unrecoverable compliance costs — money spent building age-verification infrastructure that can't be refunded even if the law is later struck down — can constitute irreparable harm on their own. So can the chilling of protected speech before enforcement actually happens, so long as enforcement is likely and imminent. The panel found both plausible here, noting that Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti's own public statements about the Act's enforcement mechanism made NetChoice's alleged injury "likely, not remediable at final judgment, and immediate" (Justia). Judge Eric Clay dissented, arguing NetChoice hadn't shown Tennessee had actually sent enforcement letters to any member company and that the majority was inferring imminence from thin evidence.
The remand doesn't touch the First Amendment question that actually decides this case: does compelled identity verification, as a precondition to lawful speech, survive constitutional scrutiny? That question now returns to the district court, which must weigh NetChoice's likelihood of success alongside the harm findings the Sixth Circuit has now established.
Why the Compulsory-Verification Model Is the Wrong Tool
The First Amendment problem isn't that Tennessee wants platforms to know a user's age — it's the mechanism the state chose to get there. Requiring every user, adult or minor, to submit government ID or biometric data to a platform (or a third-party verifier) before accessing lawful speech creates exactly the "honeypot" NetChoice describes: a centralized store of identity documents tied to browsing behavior, which is a materially worse privacy outcome than the status quo, not a better one (NetChoice case tracker). That tradeoff matters even for defenders of some age-verification regime, because centralized ID collection is a foreseeable target for breach, and the law's own no-retention clause doesn't eliminate the exposure window during verification itself.
The Supreme Court's June 2025 ruling in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton — upholding Texas's age-verification mandate for sexually explicit websites 6-3 under intermediate scrutiny — looms over this case but doesn't resolve it (Supreme Court opinion, No. 23-1122). Paxton concerned a narrow category of harmful-to-minors content where courts have long tolerated stricter access controls. Tennessee's Act instead gates access to all social media speech — lawful political discussion, news, entertainment — behind the same verification wall, for every user regardless of the content they seek. That's a materially broader burden on protected speech than Paxton blessed, and it's the distinction the district court will now have to confront directly.
What Comes Next
The practical effect for platforms is limited in the short term: Tennessee's law remains in force while the district court works through the remand, and NetChoice must still win a merits argument it has not yet had the chance to fully make. But the ruling matters as a template. Sixth Circuit precedent on irreparable harm in age-verification cases will shape how other circuits — several of which have similar NetChoice challenges pending against Ohio, Utah, and Arkansas laws — treat pre-enforcement First Amendment claims against platform-facing verification mandates. States drafting the next generation of these laws would do better to look at less invasive, less centralized age-signal mechanisms — device- or app-store-level attestation, for instance — that address the same legislative concern without building the data honeypot NetChoice is suing over.