Appeals Court Lifts Injunction, Allowing Florida to Enforce Social Media Age Restriction Law

The law, originally enacted in March 2024, imposed a full prohibition on social media account creation by minors under 14, and verifiable parental consent requirement on accounts by 14- and 15-year-olds. The law targets platforms that use design elements such as infinite scroll, auto-play video, and visible engagement metrics, deemed to be addictive and to cause psychological harm among children. Platforms found to knowingly violate the prohibition can be fined up to $50,000 per violation.

In a 2-1 ruling the appeals court held that the law likely does not violate free speech rights because it targets design, not particular speech, and aims to regulate how a platform operates rather than the content it hosts. In a dissent, Judge Robin Rosenbaum argued that, because the the law requires platforms to verify the age of minors, it effectively requires them to verify the ages of all users, including adults, which she said raised privacy issues and “chilled” the speech of adults.

The court’s ruling was limited to lifting the temporary injunction barring enforcement of the law for now, however, and did not completely dismiss the plaintiffs’ First Amendment concerns.

“We agree with the district court that HB3 likely implicates the First Amendment by singling out protected expressive activities. We also agree that HB3 is likely content neutral because it is not facially content based, nor does it have a content-discriminatory purpose,” the majority opinion said. “We conclude, however, that HB3’s limited restrictions likely satisfy the intermediate scrutiny test for content-neutral regulations, so the Attorney General has made a strong showing he is likely to succeed on the merits.”

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The fact that the law does is not targeted at any particular platform, but any platform using the prescribed design features, the court ruled, weighed against a finding that the law is content-based and therefore prohibited by the First Amendment.

“The government may impose ‘generally applicable economic regulations’ that indirectly burden speech ‘without creating constitutional problems,’” the ruling said, quoting the Supreme Court.  “But when it ‘create[s] a special [regulation] that applies only to certain [entities] protected by the First Amendment,’ then First Amendment scrutiny is warranted.”

The Florida law “restricts social media platforms’ ability to contract with children under a certain age if those platforms include certain addictive features,” the court said. “Neither its definition of ‘social media platform’” nor of ‘addictive features’” makes any reference to the type of content involved… And plaintiffs do not point to any language in the statute or other evidence that the Florida legislature’s justification for passing the law was related to the suppression of speech or disagreement with certain topics or viewpoints.”

By placing a stay on the preliminary injunction, the Eleventh Circuit allows the law to be enforced while the underlying appeal of the injunction proceeds.