A federal appeals court reversed a lower court injunction and cleared the way for Ohio's social media parental consent law to take effect, more than two years after a district judge blocked it at the request of Big Tech's most powerful trade group.
The three-judge panel at the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that NetChoice, the industry group representing Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, failed to prove the Ohio law violates the Constitution. The panel sent the case back to the district court with instructions to enter judgment in favor of the state, Just the News reported.
The law requires social media platforms, gaming apps, and other internet services that sell products or provide services to children to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent before opening accounts for anyone under 16. Ohio originally set the law to take effect in January 2024. It never did.
NetChoice sued before the law could go into force, arguing it was unconstitutional because it "imposes blanket parental-consent requirements for minors to access and engage in all manner of protected speech across a wide swath of websites." Chief U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley of the Southern District of Ohio agreed and issued an injunction. He said the law's language invited lawsuits by being "capacious and subjective" and pointed to what he described as significant compliance costs for social media companies.
For more than two years, the law sat dormant while Ohio families waited.
The Sixth Circuit panel saw it differently. The majority held plainly that "NetChoice has failed to establish that the act is facially unconstitutional." The court also acknowledged the stakes for the children the law was designed to protect, writing that "for young people, who are at a pivotal stage in cognitive development, social media has been linked to issues with sleep, anxiety, body dysmorphia, depression, and bullying."
Ohio had argued throughout the litigation that the law was a "legitimate exercise of the state's prerogative to regulate contracting with minors" and did not violate the First Amendment right to free speech. The appeals court's decision validated that position.
Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson praised the ruling on Friday. His statement framed the decision in terms that parents across the country will recognize, the question of who gets to decide what children see online.
"The court agreed that parents, not social media companies, should get a say in what kids see online. We have an obligation to keep our children safe, and today, the most dangerous place for our kids is the internet."
That line, "the most dangerous place for our kids is the internet", carries weight precisely because it comes from an attorney general who just won a federal appeals case against some of the largest technology companies on the planet. Wilson did not hedge. He did not qualify. He said what millions of parents already believe.
The ruling arrives at a time when courts across the country are grappling with questions about children, parental rights, and institutional authority. The Ohio case sits squarely in that debate.
The panel was not unanimous. Appeals Court Judge Kevin Ritz dissented, writing that "the First Amendment interests of NetChoice overlap neatly with the First Amendment interests of its members' minor users." In other words, Ritz argued that blocking minors from creating accounts without parental permission also restricts the minors' own speech rights.
It is a familiar argument. Tech companies and their allies have long insisted that any friction between a child and a social media account amounts to censorship. The majority of the panel was unconvinced.
NetChoice did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling. Whether the group seeks further review, either from the full Sixth Circuit or from the Supreme Court, remains an open question. The case now returns to the district court, where Judge Marbley has been instructed to enter judgment for Ohio.
Several important questions remain unanswered. The ruling does not make entirely clear whether the law takes effect immediately or whether additional district court proceedings must occur first. The precise compliance timeline for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok is also uncertain.
The Ohio case is part of a growing national push by state governments to hold tech platforms accountable for their impact on children. For years, Silicon Valley operated under the assumption that the First Amendment gave it a near-absolute shield against regulation, especially regulation aimed at protecting minors. That assumption is eroding.
Ohio's law does not ban children from social media. It simply says that if you are under 16, your parent has to consent before a company opens an account for you. That is not censorship. That is parenting, backed by law.
The tech industry's resistance to even this modest requirement tells you something about its priorities. NetChoice represents platforms that profit enormously from young users' attention, data, and engagement. When a state steps in and says parents should have a say, the industry's first instinct is to lawyer up.
Judge Marbley's original injunction leaned heavily on the compliance costs to companies. The Sixth Circuit, by contrast, weighed the evidence about what social media does to developing minds, sleep disruption, anxiety, body dysmorphia, depression, bullying, and concluded the state had a legitimate interest in acting.
That shift in emphasis matters. It suggests that federal courts are beginning to take seriously what parents have been saying for years: the platforms are not neutral playgrounds, and children are not just small adults.
The decision also comes against a backdrop of significant judicial activity in Ohio, where courts have been active on questions ranging from election law to regulatory authority. The state has become something of a proving ground for whether traditional legal principles, parental authority, state police power, the regulation of commerce involving minors, still hold up against the tech industry's expansive reading of the First Amendment.
NetChoice's core claim, that requiring parental consent for a child's social media account is a blanket restriction on protected speech, asks courts to treat a 13-year-old's TikTok account as constitutionally equivalent to a newspaper editorial. Two of three Sixth Circuit judges declined the invitation.
States have regulated contracting with minors for centuries. A 15-year-old cannot sign a lease, open a credit card, or consent to a medical procedure without parental involvement. Ohio's law applies that same principle to the digital world. The tech industry's objection is not really about free speech. It is about market access.
Meanwhile, other powerful institutions are finding that federal courts are no longer rubber-stamping their preferred outcomes. The legal landscape is shifting, and organizations accustomed to winning on procedural grounds are discovering that judges are willing to look at substance.
The two-year delay itself deserves scrutiny. Ohio's legislature passed a law. The governor signed it. It was set to take effect in January 2024. A single district judge blocked it. For more than two years, the policy preferences of one federal judge, and the litigation strategy of one industry trade group, overrode the democratic process in Ohio.
The Sixth Circuit corrected that. But the delay meant two more years of children signing up for platforms without parental knowledge or consent, two more years of exposure to the harms the court itself acknowledged.
That cost does not show up in a legal brief. It shows up in emergency rooms, school counselors' offices, and family dinner tables across Ohio.
The outcome also carries implications for how federal courts handle challenges to state laws more broadly. When a trade group can freeze a duly enacted state law for years with a single injunction, the balance of power between elected legislatures and unelected judges deserves examination.
Ohio's approach was not radical. The state did not ban social media for minors. It did not impose content mandates. It said: verify the user's age, and if the user is a child, get a parent's permission. That is the kind of common-sense guardrail that most Americans, left, right, and center, support instinctively.
The Sixth Circuit's ruling validates the principle that states can act to protect children online without running afoul of the First Amendment. Other states watching this case now have a federal appellate precedent to lean on.
NetChoice may appeal. The legal fight may not be over. But for now, Ohio parents are closer to having a say in whether their children open social media accounts, and the tech industry is one step further from treating American children as unregulated revenue streams.
When a state has to fight for two years in federal court just to let parents say yes or no to their child's social media account, the problem was never the law. It was the people fighting it.