Federal Court Lifts the Block on Georgia's Social Media Age Verification Law

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the preliminary injunction that had kept Georgia's social media age verification law in legal limbo since a district court blocked it in 2025. The ruling doesn't declare the law constitutional or uphold it on the merits. What it does is remove the procedural block that was preventing the law from taking effect, and send the case back to district court for a full ruling on the substantive questions.

Georgia's SB 351 was passed in 2024. It requires social media services to make "commercially reasonable efforts" to verify users' ages — a standard that avoids specifying the exact method, unlike the Philippines' government ID requirement or Türkiye's e-Devlet token. Parents of children under 16 must consent to their children joining a service. Platforms are also restricted in how they can target advertising at minors under 16 and how much data they can collect on them.

NetChoice, a technology industry trade group whose members include major platforms, sued in federal court before the law was set to take effect in July 2025. U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg sided with NetChoice, blocking the law and finding it restricted minors' rights, chilled anonymous online speech, and limited people's ability to receive speech from social media. That injunction stood for over a year.

Why the Appeals Court Disagreed

The Eleventh Circuit's reasoning turns on procedure rather than substance. The court found that NetChoice had not adequately demonstrated the law would be unconstitutional across its full range of applications — the standard required for a preliminary injunction to hold. 

The court noted that not all speech on social media platforms is "fully protected" speech: some platforms host pornography, which is constitutionally protected for adults but not for minors. NetChoice hadn't addressed how SB 351 should apply in those contexts, and hadn't even provided a full list of its own members subject to the law.

The court was not saying the law is constitutional. It was saying NetChoice's challenge hadn't established unconstitutionality broadly enough to justify blocking the whole law before a full trial. The underlying First Amendment questions — whether age verification requirements unconstitutionally restrict speech, chill anonymous online communication, and burden the right to receive information — remain genuinely open and will need to be litigated on the merits at the district court level.

Where This Fits in the Broader Picture

This ruling arrives in a week of significant movement on social media age legislation globally. Türkiye's ban for under-15s was formally published Saturday with a November 1st enforcement date. Greece presented its framework. The Philippines Senate passed the strictest version yet — a total ban for under-18s. The Georgia ruling is the US contribution to the same week: a court removing a procedural block that had been the most successful legal challenge to state-level age verification legislation.

The district court's original reasoning — that age verification laws restrict minors' speech rights and chill anonymous online communication — is the same argument that has blocked similar laws in other jurisdictions. The Utah VPN blocking case, which we covered earlier this month, produced a preliminary injunction on similar First Amendment grounds. Georgia's law survived that hurdle at the appeals level; Utah's VPN provisions did not. The difference in outcomes reflects different procedural postures rather than a settled constitutional answer.

Georgia's law will now go back to district court for a full hearing. Whether it survives that process — and whether the Supreme Court eventually addresses the broader question of whether states can constitutionally require age verification for social media access — is still to be determined.