Georgia can now enforce its 2024 law requiring social media platforms to verify users' ages and get parental consent before opening accounts for children under 16. A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction that had blocked the law, Senate Bill 351 — the Protecting Georgia's Children on Social Media Act — since before its planned July 1, 2025 start date. The case now returns to the federal district court in Atlanta for further proceedings, but the state is free to enforce the law in the meantime.
Source: The Current (Georgia)
The ruling landed one day after the same panel decided Florida's companion case. In a 2-1 decision on the Florida law, HB 3, the panel reversed the as-applied injunction and vacated the facial one, clearing Florida to enforce a stricter regime: no social media accounts at all for children under 14, and parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds, aimed at platforms built around features such as infinite scroll and autoplay. A legal roundup published this week by the Taft law firm, carried by Mondaq on October 28, ties the two Eleventh Circuit decisions together with Alabama's HB 161, which is scheduled to take full effect on January 1, 2027 — meaning families and platforms across the Southeast now face enforceable, but different, child-safety rules state by state.
What Georgia's law requires
Senate Bill 351 passed the Georgia General Assembly in 2024 with broad bipartisan support, and Governor Brian Kemp signed it despite a request from the industry group NetChoice that he veto it. The law requires covered social media companies to make 'commercially reasonable efforts' to verify a user's age; anyone who cannot be verified is treated as a minor. Parents must consent before a child under 16 opens an account. Platforms are also barred from targeting advertising at children using their personal information beyond age and location, face limits on collecting minors' data, and can be fined if they fail to make reasonable verification efforts.
How the court ruled — and what it did not decide
In the Georgia case, NetChoice v. Attorney General of Georgia (No. 25-12436), the panel held that NetChoice — the trade association whose members include Meta, Google, Amazon, YouTube, Reddit, X and Pinterest — had failed to demonstrate it was likely to succeed on its First Amendment claim, and Attorney General Chris Carr's office summarised the holding as a finding that the group offered no evidence that enforcing the law would be unconstitutional. The panel also reversed the district court's vagueness and Section 230 preemption holdings. On vagueness, the reason was procedural: the district court had struck the law over the phrase 'commercially reasonable' on a theory NetChoice itself had never pleaded, which the panel called error under the party-presentation principle. The panel did not rule that the phrase is clear — it ruled that the injunction could not rest on an argument nobody made.
In the Florida case, Computer & Communications Industry Association v. Attorney General of Florida (No. 25-11881), the majority — Judge Elizabeth Branch, joined by Judge Barbara Lagoa — found HB 3 content-neutral, held that it serves an important government interest and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary. Judge Robin Rosenbaum dissented, arguing that age verification would in practice screen every user, adults included, and calling the law a categorical ban on minors' speech. United States District Judge Mark Walker had blocked Florida's law in June, and United States District Judge Amy Totenberg had blocked Georgia's; both injunctions are now gone, and both cases go back to those district courts.
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, who defended SB 351, called the decision a major win for families: "This is about keeping our children safe from online predators and mental health harms." His office's brief blamed social media for rising rates of anxiety, body-image problems, depression, self-harm and suicide among minors, and added: "Bullying, intimidation, harassment, and sexual predation thrive on social media platforms." Those are the state's claims in litigation, presented here as its stated case — the courts have not made findings on them.
What this means for families and platforms
For platforms, the practical work starts now: age-verification flows, parental-consent systems and account-deletion and data rules must work in Georgia and Florida, on top of the patchwork Taft counts at more than twenty states with laws regulating social media or online services used by minors. For parents — including diaspora families in metro Atlanta and across Florida whose children move between relatives, languages and devices — the visible change will be new age checks and consent prompts, and, in Florida, under-14 accounts that platforms must refuse or remove.
What happens next
Neither fight is over. In Georgia, the merits of the First Amendment claim, the remaining preliminary-injunction factors, the vagueness theory NetChoice actually pleaded, and any as-applied challenge were all left open on remand. In Florida, the First Amendment issues likewise continue in district court. But the legal position today is the opposite of where it stood in the summer of 2025: the laws are enforceable while they are defended, not frozen while they are challenged. Families in Georgia and Florida should expect platforms to begin applying the new checks, and should watch the district courts for the next rulings.