Georgia Social Media Child Protection Law Blocked by Court (2)

NetChoice showed that a Georgia law designed to protect children from harms created by social media likely violates the First Amendment, a federal court said.

Despite its noble intent, the Protecting Georgia’s Children on Social Media Act erects “barriers to speech that cannot withstand the rigorous scrutiny that the Constitution requires, and the inapt tailoring of the law—which is rife with exemptions that undermine its purpose—dooms its constitutionality and calls into question its efficacy,” Judge Amy Totenberg said Thursday. She granted NetChoice’s motion for preliminary injunction, according to the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia order.

It’s an outcome familiar to many states that have passed laws restricting children from social media, only to have a local federal court enjoin the statute—often after a NetChoice lawsuit. Tennessee’s law escaped this fate, but only because the tech group failed to prove imminent injury.

In the Georgia case, NetChoice challenged Section 3-1 of SB 351, which required covered social media platforms to take commercially reasonable efforts to verify the age of its users. It allowed those companies to instead apply restrictions placed on children’s accounts on everyone. The law also required parental consent for children to create an account on covered sites.

Totenberg’s ruling described Georgia’s law as a content based restriction after noting that its definition of social media company “would exempt everything from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to Barstool Sports to Discord.” Because the law was content based, it had to, and likely would fail to, survive strict scrutiny, the court said.

The law would “dramatically” curb the right of young people to access speech online, and would likely burden adults who declined to provide personal information to access social media sites. It would “potentially all but kill anonymous speech online,” and push smaller companies out of business, the court said.

The obstacles that Georgia’s law would put before constitutionally protected activities “would highly likely be unconstitutional,” Totenberg said.

The court offered alternative methods it said would be more tailored than the Georgia statute. Parents can control when and if children are on internet-connected devices, the court said.

“Free expression doesn’t end where government anxiety begins,” NetChoice Litigation Director Chris Marchese said in a statement that spoke highly of the preliminary injunction.

“We will continue to defend commonsense measures that empower parents and protect our children online,” Kara Murray said Friday on behalf of Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (R). The attorney general is planning to appeal the ruling, she said.

The case is NetChoice v. Carr, 2025 BL 221646, N.D. Ga., No. 1:25-cv-2422-AT, 6/26/25.