Florida’s law banning minors under 14 from getting their own social media accounts is likely constitutional, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday, throwing out a lower court’s preliminary injunction against the law.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals had previously stayed the lower court’s ruling blocking the law, pending the appeal by the state of Florida. In its ruling, the appellate court held the law to be within constitutional bounds.
“Yes, (the law) implicates the First Amendment and thus triggers constitutional scrutiny,” the opinion of the unanimous three-judge panel states. “But it likely does so in a content-neutral manner, and it likely survives intermediate scrutiny because it doesn’t burden substantially more speech than necessary to advance the important interest in protecting minors from social-media addiction.”
In response, Paul Taske, director of the litigation center for NetChoice, a trade group of technology and social media companies that challenged the law, said the group is considering their next steps. The group also warned social media sites could be forced to verify the ages and the parental status of all users as a result of the ruling.
"We are disappointed in the Eleventh Circuit’s ruling, which allows Florida to enforce its law imposing digital ID requirements as a condition for accessing lawful speech,” Taske said in a released statement. "We are currently evaluating all of our options as we continue the fight to ensure Floridians’ rights to free expression online are protected, and parents remain in the driver’s seat when it comes to making decisions for their families."
The law (HB 3) was passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2024. Then-House Speaker Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast, championed the measure, which garnered large bipartisan support in the final votes – 30-5 in the Senate and 109-4 in the House.
In addition to banning minors under 14 from creating their own personal social media accounts, it requires 15- and 16-year-olds to get parental permission to get their own accounts.
Moreover, the law targets social media platforms with “addictive features.” That means only platforms with “unlimited scrolling” and the use of algorithms to keep content likely to attract users’ attention on their screens.
Those parameters were important, the court noted, in helping the law stay within the bounds of the Constitution without broadly violating First Amendment rights.
The law “doesn’t ‘burden substantially more speech than necessary’ because it calibrates its restrictions by age, regulates minors’ creation of social-media accounts, not necessarily their access to the platforms themselves, covers only those platforms that have been determined to induce heavy use by children, and applies only to platforms that use both algorithms and one of several addictive features,” the ruling states.
