A federal appeals court on October 15, 2026, lifted an injunction that had blocked Georgia’s SB 351, allowing the state to enforce a law that requires social media platforms to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent before children under 16 hold accounts. The ruling does not decide whether the law is constitutional; the case now returns to a lower court.

A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Kevin Newsom joined by Judges Robert Luck and Gerald Bard Tjoflat, vacated a preliminary injunction that a federal district court in Atlanta granted in June 2025 at the request of NetChoice, an internet trade organization.

What the law requires

According to the opinion, SB 351 requires covered platforms to “make commercially reasonable efforts to verify the age[s] of account holders,” to prohibit minors under 16 from holding accounts without their parents’ consent, and to bar the display of ads to account holders under 16 based on any personal information other than their age and location.

The law defines a social media platform broadly, as an online forum where account holders can create profiles, post, form mutual connections and interact. It then excludes a long list of services whose main function is something else, including email, streaming, news, online shopping, gaming, cloud storage, videoconferencing and educational tools, the court noted.

NetChoice sued on May 1, 2025, two months before the law was due to take effect, arguing that it violated the First Amendment, was unconstitutionally vague and was preempted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The district court found NetChoice likely to succeed on all three claims and blocked enforcement.

Why the panel ruled for the state

The panel held that NetChoice has standing to sue on behalf of its members, but that it had not shown it was likely to win. Because NetChoice brought a facial challenge, seeking to strike the law in all its applications, the court applied the test the Supreme Court set out in Moody v. NetChoice in 2024, which requires weighing a law’s unconstitutional applications against its lawful ones.

NetChoice did not supply the information needed for that analysis, the court said. It listed only an “exemplary few” members it said the law covers, among them Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Nextdoor, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, X and YouTube, and while it said the law also reaches other sites, it did not name any that host unprotected speech. The panel concluded that NetChoice “hasn’t adequately addressed the ‘full range’ of SB 351’s applications, and the record before us does not permit the weighing Moody requires.”

On vagueness, the panel found that the district court had raised the “commercially reasonable” age-verification issue on its own. “In granting injunctive relief on a theory that NetChoice never pleaded, the district court erred,” the opinion says.

On Section 230, the panel said the advertising provision does not treat platforms as publishers of other people’s content. Instead, it “regulates how social-media platforms themselves act by forbidding them from targeting minors with ads based on personal information,” which falls outside the federal shield.

The court said it did not need to address the merits of NetChoice’s First Amendment claim. It affirmed that NetChoice has standing, vacated the injunction and sent the case back to the district court.

What the parties said

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr called the ruling “a major win for Georgia families and a huge blow to those who would stand in the way of commonsense solutions,” according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This is about keeping our children safe from online predators and mental health harms. Nothing is more important,” Carr said, as reported by Atlanta News First.

Paul Taske, director of NetChoice’s litigation center, told the Journal-Constitution: “As we evaluate our next legal steps, we remain committed to fighting for Georgians’ right to free expression online.”

Why it matters

SB 351 is a privacy law as well as a child-safety law. To comply, covered platforms must verify the ages of all their users, not only minors, and may not use personal information other than age and location to target ads at users under 16. With the injunction lifted, those obligations can be enforced while the litigation continues.

The ruling also turns on procedure rather than the constitutional merits. The panel faulted NetChoice for how it built its facial challenge, the same issue the Supreme Court raised in Moody. The opinion notes that a plaintiff can have an otherwise meritorious claim and still fail to carry the burden of a facial challenge, and the district court had declined to consider NetChoice’s as-applied claims for lack of a factual record.

What to watch

The case returns to US District Judge Amy Totenberg in Atlanta, the Journal-Constitution reported. The opinion also notes a separate challenge to a Florida law restricting minors’ social media accounts, CCIA v. Uthmeier, which the Eleventh Circuit heard on the same day; there, the lower court had blocked the law both on its face and as applied to the plaintiffs’ members.

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