Court signals NetChoice faces tougher road on age check laws

The legal campaign against state social media age check laws is entering a more precarious phase for NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), even as the trade groups continue to notch wins elsewhere.

During oral arguments on March 10, at least some members of a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit pressed the industry groups on standing, on the difficulty of mounting a facial challenge, and on whether the lower courts moved too quickly to conclude that Florida and Georgia’s youth social media laws were unconstitutional across the board.

The panel grappled with whether the states could limit children’s access to social media and that several of the states’ arguments appeared to gain traction, even if it was not yet clear how the judges would rule.

The two laws at issue reflect different models of state regulation, but both are part of a broader push to force age checks or parental involvement before minors can use major social platforms.

Florida’s HB 3 bars covered platforms with addictive features from allowing children younger than 14 to hold accounts and requires parental consent for 14 and 15 year olds. The law also requires termination of certain accounts and deletion of personal information associated with terminated accounts.

Georgia’s SB 351, by contrast, requires age verification and parental consent for minors seeking social media accounts.

Both laws had been blocked by lower courts before reaching the Eleventh Circuit.

In Florida, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction on June 3, 2025, holding that HB 3 likely violated the First Amendment. But in November 2025, the Eleventh Circuit stayed that injunction pending appeal, allowing the state to move forward while the case continued.

In Georgia, a federal judge blocked SB 351 in June 2025 just before it was to take effect, and that injunction is now under appellate review.

That procedural posture matters because the arguments this week suggested that at least some members of the Eleventh Circuit may be less persuaded by sweeping First Amendment objections than by narrower questions about who can sue and how broadly courts may intervene before a law is fully tested.

Judge Robert Luck questioned whether the lower court had properly assessed the full range of constitutional and unconstitutional applications of the Florida law, invoking the Supreme Court’s 2024 guidance on facial challenges. Luck asked how a court could make that determination on a facial challenge without knowing the full universe of constitutional and unconstitutional applications.

The hearing also featured pointed questions about whether the tech associations were trying to defend the rights of users rather than their own members’ rights.

That line of questioning cut to one of the central tensions in these cases.

NetChoice and CCIA have consistently framed these laws as unconstitutional burdens on access to lawful speech, arguing that age verification and parental consent requirements chill anonymous speech, burden users, and force people to surrender sensitive personal information to access ordinary online services.

The states, by contrast, have tried to characterize the measures not as direct speech restrictions, but rather as regulations aimed at platform design, access, and child safety.

The appeals court explored the states’ argument that the laws regulate site design and operation rather than speech itself, while also testing whether exceptions in Georgia’s law could make it more content sensitive than the state claims.

The parental rights issue also surfaced directly. During argument in the Georgia case, Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat raised the constitutional interest parents have in raising their children, underscoring a major tension in these disputes.

The challenge from the tech groups is not only that the state is burdening speech, but also that the state is stepping into a sphere traditionally occupied by parents. That framing may complicate industry’s effort to present these cases as straightforward First Amendment disputes.

Florida’s posture is especially consequential because the state has already shown a willingness to enforce HB 3 aggressively. On April 22, 2025, Attorney General James Uthmeier announced legal action against Snapchat, alleging the platform was violating HB 3 and Florida consumer protection law.

That enforcement history helps explain why the trade associations are fighting not just over abstract doctrine, but over whether large platforms may soon face concrete compliance demands in one of the country’s largest states.

Even so, the broader national picture remains mixed rather than uniformly favorable to the states.

NetChoice secured a permanent injunction in Louisiana in December 2025, when a federal district court granted summary judgment and permanently enjoined enforcement of Act 456 against the covered NetChoice members.

The law would have required social media companies to implement strict age verification for users, obtain parental consent for minors, and restrict certain features for minor accounts.

In Mississippi, the litigation has been far more volatile. A district court injunction was paused, the law allowed to take effect, and the Supreme Court declined to block it at that stage, although Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the law was likely unconstitutional.

In Arizona, NetChoice has publicly objected to SB 1747 – which has passed the Senate – warning that it would likely trigger the same constitutional fight seen elsewhere. The bill would regulate online platforms by requiring age verification for all users and mandating parental consent for minors. 

Taken together, these cases show why the Eleventh Circuit arguments matter beyond Florida and Georgia. NetChoice has built a litigation strategy around the idea that social media age assurance laws are unconstitutional identity-based burdens on access to lawful speech.

That strategy has produced important victories, but the March 10 hearing suggested that at least some judges are no longer content to treat every such law as obviously doomed on its face.

Instead, they appear increasingly interested in threshold issues like associational standing, the rights of parents versus minors, and whether lower courts must first sort through which applications of a law are constitutional before halting enforcement wholesale.

That does not mean Florida and Georgia will ultimately prevail. It does mean the momentum in this area now looks less like a clean string of industry wins and more like a judicial sorting process that could narrow, rather than eliminate, the states’ room to regulate children’s access to social media.

If the Eleventh Circuit embraces that narrower approach, the next phase of these fights may turn less on broad claims about digital ID mandates and more on whether specific provisions can survive as applied to specific platforms, age groups, and product features.

Article Topics

age verification  |  Computer & Communications Industry Association  |  Florida  |  Georgia  |  lawsuits  |  Netchoice