Eleventh Circuit Vacates Georgia SB 351 Social Media Injunction

On October 15, 2026, the Eleventh Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction that had blocked Georgia's under-16 social media age-verification and parental-consent law since June 2025. The panel held that NetChoice has standing to sue but has not carried its burden for a facial First Amendment challenge.

Information last verified on October 18, 2026. The opinion resolves nothing about the law's ultimate constitutionality.

Status: Judgment entered October 15, 2026. The panel ordered the preliminary injunction VACATED and the case REMANDED. Under FRAP 41(b) the court's mandate issues after the rehearing period runs, and FRAP 41(c) provides that the mandate is effective when issued; the public appellate docket in No. 25-12436 showed no mandate entry as of October 18, 2026.

Jurisdiction scope: This article addresses a federal appellate ruling on Georgia's SB 351 social media provisions, O.C.G.A. 39-6-1 through 39-6-5, and the Eleventh Circuit's companion Florida decision. It does not address Georgia's separate adult-content age-verification statute beyond explaining why the two are different, and it does not cover other states' laws. For the full state-by-state picture, see our table of state age-verification statutes and their court status.

What Happened

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued a published 25-page opinion on October 15, 2026 in NetChoice v. Attorney General, State of Georgia, No. 25-12436, on appeal from the Northern District of Georgia, D.C. Docket No. 1:25-cv-02422-AT. Judge Newsom wrote for a panel that also included Judges Luck and Tjoflat. No judge filed a separate concurrence or dissent.

The disposition appears in the opinion's final paragraph: "Accordingly, we AFFIRM the district court's determination that NetChoice has associational standing, VACATE the preliminary injunction, and REMAND to the district court for proceedings consistent with this opinion."

The panel framed its holdings at the outset. "NetChoice has associational standing to challenge SB 351's validity on behalf of its members," the opinion states. "However, NetChoice has failed to carry the burden it bears in connection with its facial First Amendment challenge under Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. 707 (2024). Nor has it shown a likelihood of success on the merits with respect to its vagueness or section 230 challenges."

The procedural history the opinion recounts

NetChoice, an internet trade association, filed suit on May 1, 2025, two months before SB 351 was slated to take effect, bringing facial and as-applied First Amendment claims, a vagueness claim, and a claim that 47 U.S.C. 230 preempts the law. It moved for a preliminary injunction the same day.

Judge Amy Totenberg granted that motion in a 50-page Opinion and Order entered June 26, 2025, five days before the law's July 1, 2025 effective date. She concluded that SB 351 was likely a content-based speech restriction that failed strict scrutiny, likely unconstitutionally vague, and likely preempted by section 230. On the content-based question, she wrote that even where the statute's exemptions "draw a dividing line based on who is generating a platform's content," that "distinction is merely a different flavor of content-based regulation because it distinguishes speech based on the speaker," which she identified as the platform versus the user.

The district court also held that it lacked the factual record to adjudicate an as-applied challenge in a pre-enforcement posture, so it reached only the facial claim. That choice narrowed the appeal: because the injunction rested solely on the facial challenge, the panel considered only the facial challenge.

Georgia Attorney General Christopher M. Carr appealed, and the appeal was docketed as No. 25-12436 on July 16, 2025. The Eleventh Circuit heard oral argument on March 10, 2026, the same day it heard argument in the Florida companion appeal.

Holding one: standing survives

The panel affirmed on standing. Only the third prong of the Hunt associational-standing test was contested, the requirement that neither the claim nor the relief require individual members' participation, which the opinion describes as a "judicially self-imposed" prudential limit rather than a constitutional one.

Georgia argued that NetChoice's membership is too varied, spanning Meta and Snap on one end and small platforms like Dreamwidth on the other, and that because some members such as X and Reddit host pornography, different levels of First Amendment scrutiny would apply member by member. The panel rejected that at the threshold stage, reasoning that NetChoice's covered members "are more homogeneous" than the mixed group of directors, camera operators and sellers in the Third Circuit's Free Speech Coalition v. Attorney General United States, 974 F.3d 408 (3d Cir. 2020), and that SB 351 "imposes the same burden on all covered platforms."

The panel also noted that a standing analysis assumes the plaintiff would succeed on the merits, so it was "willing to assume for present purposes that the content hosted by social-media platforms comprises mostly protected speech." A footnote flags that this assumption is deliberately more generous than the merits analysis that follows.

Because NetChoice has associational standing, the panel declined to decide whether NetChoice also has third-party standing to assert the rights of its members' users.

Holding two: the facial challenge fails on Moody burden grounds

This is where the opinion spends most of its length, and the panel says so: "Spoiler alert: This is where most of the action is."

Under Moody, a court must first assess a law's scope, asking what activities by what actors it regulates, then decide which applications violate the First Amendment and measure them against the rest. A facial challenger must show that the law's unconstitutional applications substantially outweigh its constitutional ones.

NetChoice argued it had satisfied step one by identifying the regulated category, social media platforms, and relying on Packingham v. North Carolina, 582 U.S. 98 (2017), for the proposition that such platforms are fully protected. The panel held that NetChoice was "overreading Packingham," which it read as a merits decision about tailoring rather than a holding about how to establish a law's scope for facial-challenge purposes.

The panel then divided SB 351's possible applications into three groups: "conventional" platforms hosting fully protected speech, "hybrid" platforms that mostly host protected speech but allow some potentially unprotected pornography (it named X and Reddit), and hypothetical "rogue" platforms hosting only unprotected speech. Because pornography is unprotected as to minors under Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, 606 U.S. 461 (2025), the panel reasoned that the same statutory requirement could draw strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, or rational-basis review depending on the platform.

On who bears the burden of sorting that out, the panel put it on the challenger: as the "price" of its "decision to challenge the law[] as a whole," a plaintiff must "carry its burden" of showing that invalid applications substantially outweigh valid ones. The panel acknowledged "the distinct possibility that SB 351 overwhelmingly applies to platforms that overwhelmingly host protected speech," and that if so the unconstitutional applications "would probably substantially outweigh the constitutional ones." But it held that "however intuitive, that sort of impressionistic judgment won't satisfy Moody's stringent demands."

The specific evidentiary gap the panel identified is concrete. "Indeed, NetChoice hasn't provided even a full list of its own members to which SB 351 applies," the opinion states, noting that the brief named only Dreamwidth, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Nextdoor, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, X, YouTube and Tumblr. The panel also invoked its own history: "We've learned the facial-challenge lesson the hard way," citing the Supreme Court's vacatur of its earlier Florida decision in Moody.

Holding three: the vagueness ruling was procedurally improper

NetChoice had argued below that the statutory phrase "social media platform," defined largely by a long list of excluded functions whose "predominant or exclusive function" test is itself undefined, was unconstitutionally vague. The district court bypassed that theory and instead held, on its own initiative, that the phrase "commercially reasonable" in the age-verification requirement was vague.

The panel held that was error: "In granting injunctive relief on a theory that NetChoice never pleaded, the district court erred," citing Clark v. Sweeney, 607 U.S. 7, 9 (2025), on the party-presentation principle. A footnote rejects NetChoice's preservation argument as "too far afield" from a void-for-vagueness challenge.

Note what this does not say. The panel did not hold that "commercially reasonable" is clear enough to survive a vagueness challenge. It held that this particular vagueness theory was not properly before the district court.

Holding four: section 230 does not preempt the advertising provision

The district court had held that section 230 likely preempts SB 351's ad restriction, relying on the Fifth Circuit's A.B. v. Salesforce, Inc., 123 F.4th 788 (5th Cir. 2024), for the view that the provision imposes liability for publisher-like conduct.

The panel disagreed. "SB 351's advertising provision doesn't treat social-media platforms as publishers or speakers of information provided by others," it wrote. "Rather, it regulates how social-media platforms themselves act by forbidding them from targeting minors with ads based on personal information." Citing Almeida v. Amazon.com, Inc., 456 F.3d 1316 (11th Cir. 2006), the panel described section 230 as preempting laws that hold platforms liable for information originating with a third-party user, which is not what this provision does. A platform can comply "by choosing not to use minors' personal information when targeting their accounts with ads," and so "needn't withdraw, postpone or alter content."

What the Law Actually Says

SB 351 passed in 2024, was signed by the Governor on April 23, 2024 as Act 463, carries the short title "Protecting Georgia's Children on Social Media Act of 2024," and became effective on July 1, 2025 under Section 4-1 of the Act. It amended two different titles of the Georgia Code and created two distinct legal regimes plus a set of public-school requirements. Keeping them apart is the single most common point of confusion on this topic.

Chapter 6 of Title 39: the social media provisions at issue

O.C.G.A. 39-6-1 defines the terms. A "minor" for this chapter is an individual who resides in Georgia and is actually known or reasonably believed by a platform to be under 16. A "social media platform" is an online forum that lets an account holder create a profile, upload posts, view and listen to posts, form mutual connections, and interact publicly and privately with others. That definition then carves out services whose "predominant or exclusive function" is any of more than twenty listed categories, including email, streaming of licensed non-user-generated media, provider-preselected news or sports or entertainment content, online shopping, interactive gaming, photograph editing, teleconferencing, cloud storage, shared document collaboration, technical support, academic or genealogical research, internet access service, peer-to-peer payments, and career development. A separate carve-out covers services that bar minors outright under their terms of use and deploy commercially reasonable age-assurance mechanisms.

O.C.G.A. 39-6-2 sets the core duties. Subsection (a) requires a platform provider either to make commercially reasonable efforts to verify account holders' ages "with a level of certainty appropriate to the risks" arising from its information-management practices, or else to apply the chapter's minor-specific conditions to every account holder. Subsection (c) bars a provider from permitting a minor to hold an account without the express consent of a parent or guardian, and lists acceptable consent methods: a signed form returned by carrier, fax, email or scan; a toll-free consent line; a videoconference call; collection of government-issued ID or payment-card information that is then deleted after identity confirmation; email consent with additional identity verification; or any other commercially reasonable method using available technology. Subsection (e) requires a provider, on a parent's request, to supply a list and description of its content-moderation features, including which can be disabled or modified.

O.C.G.A. 39-6-3 governs minor accounts. Paragraph (1) prohibits "the display of any advertising in the minor account holder's account based on such minor account holder's personal information, except age and location." Paragraph (2) prohibits collecting or using personal information from a minor account holder's posts, messages or usage activity beyond what is "adequate, relevant, and reasonably necessary" for the disclosed purposes.

O.C.G.A. 39-6-4 is the enforcement provision, and it is narrow. The Attorney General has exclusive authority to enforce the chapter, using the Fair Business Practices Act of 1975. Nothing in the chapter may serve as the basis for a private right of action. The Attorney General may seek damages of up to $2,500 per violation, but only after providing at least 90 days' written notice identifying each alleged violation, and the Attorney General may not sue if the entity cures within 90 days and says so in writing. O.C.G.A. 39-6-5 voids any contract term, including a choice-of-law clause or waiver, used to escape the chapter or to block cooperation with the Attorney General.

O.C.G.A. 39-5-5: the separate adult-content statute, which this case never touched

Section 3-2 of the same Act added a new Code section to Chapter 5 of Title 39, on online internet safety, and it operates on completely different terms. There, a "minor" is anyone under 18, not under 16. The duty falls on a "commercial entity" publishing a public website where a "substantial portion," defined as more than 33.33 percent of total material, is harmful to minors. Before allowing access, the entity must use a reasonable age-verification method, which may include a digitized identification card, government-issued identification, or any commercially reasonable method meeting or exceeding the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Identity Assurance Level 2 standard.

The remedies differ too. An individual may recover damages, costs and attorney's fees, so there is a private right of action here. A violating entity faces a fine of up to $10,000 per violation, set by the superior court in the county where an affected minor resides, in proceedings the Attorney General, solicitor general or district attorney must bring within one year. Verification information may not be retained after access is granted, and retaining it creates its own damages claim. The section exempts news and public-interest broadcasts, preserves the rights of news-gathering organizations, excludes cloud service providers, and shields internet service providers and search engines for merely providing access to content outside their control.

This statute was not enjoined, was not before the panel, and has been in effect since July 1, 2025. Our page on how Georgia's single bill produced two unrelated statutes walks through the distinction in more detail.

Part II of the Act, which requires school social media policies, acceptable-use policy review by the State Board of Education, technology protection measures and online-safety instruction, was also untouched by this litigation.

The Companion Florida Decision

The day before the Georgia ruling, on October 14, 2026, the same three judges issued a published opinion in Computer and Communications Industry Association v. Attorney General, State of Florida, No. 25-11881, on appeal from the Northern District of Florida, D.C. Docket No. 4:24-cv-00438-MW-MAF. Judge Newsom again wrote for the court and also filed a separate concurrence.

The Florida disposition is broader than Georgia's. The panel affirmed CCIA's associational standing and the district court's refusal to abstain under Younger, reversed the injunction as to the as-applied First Amendment claim, vacated it as to the facial challenge, and remanded. On the merits of the as-applied claim, the Florida opinion holds that HB3 "likely passes First Amendment muster because it is a content-neutral speech regulation that satisfies intermediate scrutiny."

The difference in reach is procedural. As the Georgia opinion's first footnote explains, the Florida district court had enjoined HB3 both facially and as applied, which let the panel reach both; the Georgia district court enjoined SB 351 only facially, so the Georgia panel reached only the facial question. The Florida opinion also recounts that the panel had stayed Florida's injunction pending appeal; the Georgia opinion records no comparable stay.

A footnote in the Florida opinion lists parallel challenges in other states and identifies them by state: NetChoice v. Carr, 789 F. Supp. 3d 1200 (N.D. Ga. 2025) (Georgia); NetChoice, LLC v. Skrmetti, No. 25-5660, 2026 WL 2546423 (6th Cir. Aug. 28, 2026) (Tennessee); Computer and Communications Industry Association v. Paxton, 184 F.4th 420 (5th Cir. 2026) (Texas); NetChoice, LLC v. Yost, 180 F.4th 268 (6th Cir. 2026) (Ohio); NetChoice, LLC v. Bonta, 152 F.4th 1002 (9th Cir. 2025) (California); NetChoice, L.L.C. v. Fitch, 134 F.4th 799 (5th Cir. 2025) (Mississippi); NetChoice v. Murrill, 812 F. Supp. 3d 594 (M.D. La. 2025) (Louisiana); NetChoice, LLC v. Griffin, No. 5:23-cv-5105, 2025 WL 978607 (W.D. Ark. Mar. 31, 2025) (Arkansas); and NetChoice, LLC v. Reyes, 748 F. Supp. 3d 1105 (D. Utah 2024) (Utah). We report those as the Eleventh Circuit listed them and take no position on what any of them held.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

The narrowest accurate description of this ruling is that NetChoice lost on the record it built, not on the question it asked. The panel went out of its way to say that SB 351 may well apply overwhelmingly to platforms hosting overwhelmingly protected speech, and that if so the law's unconstitutional applications would probably outweigh its constitutional ones. It still vacated the injunction, because under Moody that intuition is not evidence.

That shifts the practical center of gravity in these cases from the constitutional question to the evidentiary one. A challenger that wants a statewide, pre-enforcement block of a social media law in the Eleventh Circuit now has to document the law's full application surface, including platforms it does not represent and content it would rather not discuss. The panel's three-category framework, with different scrutiny for conventional, hybrid and rogue platforms, is the tool it used to make that burden concrete.

The two rulings on vagueness and section 230 land differently from each other. The vagueness holding is procedural and leaves the underlying question untouched, so the vagueness of "commercially reasonable" remains open if NetChoice pleads it. The section 230 holding is substantive: this panel has now held that a state rule about how a platform targets its own advertising is a regulation of the platform's own conduct and falls outside section 230. That reasoning is not limited to minors or to Georgia, and it is the part of the opinion most likely to be cited outside this case.

There is also a reason to be careful about describing the Georgia and Florida rulings as one event. Florida's statute got a merits ruling on intermediate scrutiny because its district court decided an as-applied claim. Georgia's did not. Reading the Florida reasoning onto the Georgia statute would attribute to the Georgia panel a merits conclusion it explicitly declined to reach.

How This Affects You

For Georgia residents and parents, the panel has ordered the June 2025 injunction against the Chapter 6 social media provisions vacated, and it remanded the case rather than ending it. That vacatur takes effect through the court's mandate, which had not issued as of October 18, 2026. Whether and when platforms visibly change their Georgia signup flows is a business and compliance decision, not something the opinion directs. Nothing in Chapter 6 gives an individual a cause of action; O.C.G.A. 39-6-4(b) says so expressly.

For platform operators, the compliance picture under Chapter 6 was always enforced by one party, the Georgia Attorney General, with a 90-day notice and a 90-day cure period built into the statute. Companies in this position generally work with counsel on whether the "predominant or exclusive function" exclusions in O.C.G.A. 39-6-1(6) reach them at all, because that threshold question was briefed below and was not resolved by this opinion.

For anyone trying to understand what is enforceable today across the country, a circuit ruling binds only its own circuit, and the decisions the Eleventh Circuit listed come from several circuits applying different statutes. The lineup changes often; how Florida's two provisions and enforcement actions fit together and the state-level app store verification mandates now on the books are separate tracks from this case.

Nothing above is advice about your own situation or your company's obligations.

What Happens Next

The panel remanded to Judge Totenberg's court for proceedings consistent with the opinion. The district court regains the case when the Eleventh Circuit's mandate issues, which FRAP 41(c) makes effective on issuance. The panel resolved the facial challenge on burden grounds and expressly declined to address the merits of the First Amendment claim or the remaining preliminary-injunction factors, so those remain undecided. The district court's earlier conclusion that it lacked a record for an as-applied challenge is also now situated differently, since the Florida opinion shows the same panel is willing to reach an as-applied claim when a district court decides one.

On timing, the opinion itself says nothing about the mandate or about any stay. FRAP 40(d)(1) sets a 14-day rehearing period unless a local rule provides otherwise, and 11th Cir. R. 40-2 does: a petition for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc must be filed within 21 days of entry of judgment, with 45 days reserved for a civil appeal in which the United States or a federal officer or agency is a party. No federal party appeared here, so the 21-day period governs, and from the judgment entered October 15, 2026 it runs to November 5, 2026 absent an order shortening or extending it. Under FRAP 41(b), the mandate must issue 7 days after the time to file a rehearing petition expires, or 7 days after an order denying a timely petition or a motion to stay the mandate, whichever is later, and the court may shorten or extend that by order. FRAP 41(c) adds that the mandate is effective when issued, and 11th Cir. R. 41-2 restricts shortening the time for issuance of the mandate in a published-opinion appeal. The public appellate docket for No. 25-12436 records the opinion and the judgment on October 15, 2026, and no motion to stay the injunction at any point during the appeal; as retrieved on October 18, 2026 that docket, last updated October 15, 2026, showed no rehearing petition and no mandate.

A further Supreme Court petition is possible in cases of this kind, and FRAP 41(d) provides a mechanism to stay the mandate pending certiorari. We make no prediction about whether that happens here or about how any of it would come out. The events that would convert this into a new story are a rehearing petition or its denial, issuance of the mandate, a stay application, a certiorari petition, or a renewed motion in the district court.

This is general legal information, not legal advice. This article covers a federal appellate ruling in the Eleventh Circuit on Georgia law, with reference to the court's companion Florida decision. Sources were verified on October 18, 2026. Laws change; consult a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction about your specific situation.

Related articles

• Georgia Age Verification Law: One Bill, Two Very Different Statutes
• Our state-by-state table of age-verification statutes and litigation status
• How Florida's age-verification provisions and enforcement actions fit together
• State app store age-verification mandates
• Where the federal KOSA and COPPA 2.0 bills stand

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Last updated: 2026-10-18. Developing: the panel ordered the injunction vacated and the case remanded, and the opinion addresses neither the mandate nor any stay.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Georgia's social media age-verification law in effect now?

The Eleventh Circuit ordered the June 26, 2025 preliminary injunction vacated on October 15, 2026, which removes the order that had blocked O.C.G.A. 39-6-1 through 39-6-5. That disposition takes effect through the court's mandate, and under FRAP 41(b) the mandate issues 7 days after the time to file a rehearing petition expires, so with the 21-day period set by 11th Cir. R. 40-2 ending November 5, 2026, the earliest issuance date is November 12, 2026 absent an order shortening or extending it. As retrieved on October 18, 2026 the public appellate docket, last updated October 15, 2026, showed no mandate and no rehearing petition, and the case was remanded to the Northern District of Georgia, so the litigation is not over.

Did the Eleventh Circuit rule that SB 351 is constitutional?

No. The panel held only that NetChoice had not carried its burden for a facial First Amendment challenge under Moody v. NetChoice, 603 U.S. 707 (2024), and stated that because the facial challenge fails on Moody grounds it needn't address the merits of the First Amendment claim or the remaining preliminary-injunction factors. The merits question remains open on remand.

What does SB 351 actually require of social media platforms?

Under O.C.G.A. 39-6-2, a covered platform must either make commercially reasonable efforts to verify account holders' ages or apply the chapter's minor-specific rules to everyone, and it may not let a user under 16 hold an account without express parental or guardian consent. Under O.C.G.A. 39-6-3 it may not display ads in a minor's account based on the minor's personal information other than age and location, and it may not collect or use more personal information from that account than is adequate, relevant and reasonably necessary for the disclosed purpose.

Who can sue a platform for violating the Georgia social media chapter?

Only the Georgia Attorney General. O.C.G.A. 39-6-4(a) gives the Attorney General exclusive enforcement authority under the Fair Business Practices Act of 1975, and subsection (b) states that nothing in the chapter may serve as the basis for a private right of action. Damages are capped at $2,500 per violation, and the Attorney General must give at least 90 days' written notice and may not sue if the violation is cured within 90 days.

Is Georgia's adult-content age-verification law affected by this ruling?

No. O.C.G.A. 39-5-5 was created by a different section of the same 2024 bill, was never challenged in this case, and has been in effect since July 1, 2025. It applies to commercial entities publishing public websites where more than 33.33 percent of material is harmful to minors, treats anyone under 18 as a minor, allows a private damages action, and carries a fine of up to $10,000 per violation.

What did the court decide about Section 230 preemption?

The panel held that section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does not preempt SB 351's advertising provision. It wrote that the provision doesn't treat social-media platforms as publishers or speakers of information provided by others, and instead regulates how platforms themselves act by forbidding them from targeting minors with ads based on personal information. A platform can comply by not using minors' personal information for ad targeting.

Why did the vagueness ruling not survive?

For a procedural reason. NetChoice had argued that the defined term 'social media platform' was vague, but the district court instead held on its own initiative that the phrase 'commercially reasonable' was vague. The panel held that granting injunctive relief on a theory NetChoice never pleaded was error under the party-presentation principle, citing Clark v. Sweeney, 607 U.S. 7 (2025). The panel did not hold that 'commercially reasonable' is sufficiently clear.

Does this ruling apply outside Georgia?

An Eleventh Circuit decision binds federal courts in Georgia, Florida and Alabama. The same panel issued a separate published opinion on Florida's HB3 the day before, No. 25-11881, decided October 14, 2026, which reversed the as-applied injunction and vacated the facial one. Other states' laws are governed by their own statutes and their own circuits' rulings.

What happens to the case now?

It returns to the Northern District of Georgia, where Judge Amy Totenberg issued the original injunction, for proceedings consistent with the opinion. The merits of the First Amendment claim, the remaining preliminary-injunction factors, the vagueness theory NetChoice actually pleaded, and any as-applied challenge were all left unresolved by the panel.