On 15 October 2026 the Eleventh Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction against Georgia's SB 351, which requires parental consent for under-16s to open social media accounts and obliges platforms to make reasonable efforts to verify ages. The same week, a separate 3-0 panel let Florida enforce its law, which bans accounts for under-14s and requires parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds. The Florida panel said the law implicates the First Amendment but "likely does so in a content-neutral manner." Together the rulings mark the largest shift yet in how US courts treat access limits on social media.
The strongest case for the laws
Supporters have a serious argument. Parents face products engineered to maximise engagement, and the platforms' own age gates have long been honour-system checkboxes. Florida's law applies only to platforms found to induce heavy use by children through algorithms and addictive features, so it is aimed at a product design problem rather than at a viewpoint. Georgia's attorney general, Chris Carr, argued that platforms already have the technology to verify ages, and called the ruling a "major win" for families. If states may require proof of age for alcohol, firearms and driver's licences, why not for an account on a feed built to hold a teenager's attention?
That analogy has Supreme Court backing. In Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (decided 27 June 2025), the Court held that Texas's H.B. 1181 triggers and survives intermediate scrutiny because it only incidentally burdens adults' protected speech. Its reasoning was that adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification for content that is obscene to minors, and that requiring proof of age is an "ordinary and appropriate means" of enforcing an age-based limit.
Where the analogy breaks
The trouble is that Paxton rested on a category of speech that is unprotected for minors: sexually explicit material. Social media is different. The speech on these platforms (news, religion, politics, art, friendships) is fully protected for adults and, in large part, for teenagers too. NetChoice's lawyer Paul Taske put it plainly after the Georgia ruling: "The speech at issue is fully protected speech for everyone, regardless of age."
The Eleventh Circuit nonetheless reached for the same toolkit. In Florida, the panel found the law content-neutral and held that it likely survives because it does not "burden substantially more speech than necessary to advance the important interest in protecting minors from social media addiction." In Georgia, the panel held that NetChoice had not carried the burden of a facial First Amendment challenge and had not shown the law unconstitutionally vague. Georgia's own briefing argued that the age-verification and parental-consent provisions do not regulate speech at all, that they are content neutral, and that they would pass intermediate scrutiny in any event. Whether or not the panel adopted every step of that framing, the result is the same: the burden of proving the law invalid now falls on challengers.
That procedural point deserves attention. A facial challenge is the hardest kind to win, because the challenger must show the law is unconstitutional in all or most of its applications. Georgia's reply brief devoted a full section to arguing NetChoice could not meet that bar. By vacating the injunction on this footing, the court has left open the more granular question of how the law applies to specific platforms, features and users. Those are the questions that matter most to real users, and they will now be litigated while the law is in force.
The costs the opinions do not price
An account ban or consent mandate cannot be enforced against children alone. SB 351 requires platforms to verify the ages of their users, which means every adult in Georgia who opens an account may need to prove they are not a child. The incentives for platforms are asymmetric: fines attach to failing to make reasonable efforts, while nothing penalises over-collecting identity data or turning away lawful users. The predictable outcome is more government ID and face scans held by private intermediaries, more breach exposure, and less anonymous speech for dissidents, abuse survivors and ordinary adults.
It also matters what the laws leave untouched. Neither law gives teenagers better tools within the platforms they already use, such as default privacy settings, friction against late-night use, or controls over recommendation systems. A proportionate approach would regulate the design features that cause harm, which Florida's law gestures towards, rather than gating the entire medium by age.
What to watch
The cases return to the district courts, with Georgia's before Judge Amy Totenberg in Atlanta. NetChoice said it is "evaluating all of our options," and a rehearing petition or a request for Supreme Court review is plausible. Notably, as NetChoice itself observed, the Georgia panel did not hold that SB 351 is constitutional, only that the group had not shown it likely to be unconstitutional. That distinction matters because a full record on how verification works in practice, including error rates, data retention and the number of adults turned away, could look very different from the preliminary-injunction record.
For policymakers elsewhere, the lesson is to keep two questions apart. Protecting children from compulsive-use design is a legitimate aim. Making identity verification the price of entry to the main public square of the 21st century is a separate choice with separate costs. Courts have now said the second may be permissible. Legislators should still ask whether it is wise, and require privacy-preserving verification, data-minimisation limits and sunset reviews if they proceed.