What the court allowed
In October 2026 the Eleventh Circuit, in CCIA & NetChoice v. Uthmeier, lifted the injunction that had blocked Florida's HB 3 (Fla. Stat. § 501.1736). Under the statute, covered platforms must bar anyone under 14 from holding an account and must terminate existing accounts. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds may hold accounts only with a parent's or guardian's consent. The statute text gives the department of legal affairs power to seek civil penalties of up to $50,000 per violation. It also lets a minor account holder sue for up to $10,000 in damages.
As EFF's analysis reports, the panel recognized that the law burdens protected expression. It still accepted time spent on a platform as a proxy for harm. A companion ruling in NetChoice v. Carr now lets Georgia enforce S.B. 351, which requires parental consent for under-16s. Both are preliminary rulings rather than final judgments, and further review remains possible.
The strongest case for the law
The case for HB 3 deserves a fair hearing. Legislators across the political spectrum worry that features such as infinite scroll, autoplay and push notifications are built to maximize engagement among users whose self-regulation is still developing. Parents say they cannot realistically police dozens of apps. A state that sets a floor, rather than leaving every family to fight each platform alone, is responding to a real collective-action problem. The Supreme Court has also signaled flexibility: in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (June 27, 2025), it applied intermediate scrutiny to a Texas age-verification law for sexually explicit material. The Florida panel can point to that decision as evidence that courts will tolerate some age-gating.
Where the reasoning fails
The trouble is that Paxton concerned content that is unprotected as to minors. Social media is different. It carries news, religion, political debate, art and ordinary conversation, nearly all of it fully protected. A law that bars a 13-year-old from a platform that hosts civic discussion restricts speech the state has no independent power to ban, and it does so even when the child's parents approve.
That last feature is the most striking. HB 3 does not help parents supervise their children. For under-14s it overrides the parents' decision entirely. A proportionate regime would back parental choice with tools. HB 3 replaces that choice with a state default.
The coverage definition rests on the same weak footing. A platform falls under HB 3 only if, per the statute, 10% or more of its daily active users under 16 average two hours or more per day on it, and it has features like infinite scroll or autoplay. Time spent is a measure of popularity, not of injury. A teenager who spends two hours a day on a platform following a school robotics community, a language-learning group or a local news feed is counted the same as one caught in a harmful spiral. The panel's acceptance of that proxy gives lawmakers a template: define harm by usage, and the speech burden becomes a technicality.
There is also a design problem. Enforcing an under-14 ban means platforms must tell who is under 14, and that means checking everyone. NetChoice has argued that HB 3 forces Floridians to hand over personal data to access protected speech, and that this creates cybersecurity risks by making data, including children's data, more vulnerable to hackers. Adults who never intended to be affected will bear the verification burden. Those who find it intrusive can migrate to unregulated services, which is the opposite of a safety gain.
What a proportionate approach looks like
None of this means doing nothing. Evidence-based alternatives exist and have narrower speech costs:
- Design-focused duties. Regulate specific features, such as default privacy settings, limits on late-night notifications and restrictions on targeted advertising to minors, rather than access itself.
- Parent-controlled tools. Operating-system and device-level controls let families set limits without every website collecting identity documents.
- Targeted enforcement. Existing consumer-protection and child-safety laws already reach deceptive design and exploitative practices.
- Better evidence. Time spent is a poor stand-in for harm. Lawmakers should require platforms and researchers to measure outcomes such as exposure to specific risks.
What to watch
The practical stakes are immediate. Platforms operating in Florida must decide how to identify under-14 users, how to run consent flows for 14- and 15-year-olds, and how to handle the 90-day dispute window for terminated accounts. The statute's private right of action raises litigation risk for every miscalibrated decision. Expect more states to copy the Eleventh Circuit's reasoning, particularly its tolerance for usage-based definitions.
The legal question is not settled. This is a preliminary ruling, other circuits have approached similar laws differently, and the Supreme Court may ultimately have to decide how far Paxton extends beyond sexually explicit material. Until then, Florida and Georgia families will experience a regime that substitutes a state-set age floor for parental judgment, justified by a metric that measures engagement, not harm.