Ohio can require social media companies to get a parent’s permission before letting children under 16 onto their platforms, a US appeals court ruled on Thursday, reviving a law the tech industry had managed to freeze.
The decision from the Cincinnati-based 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals overturns a lower court that had blocked the measure, and it hands the state a win in a fight that is playing out across the country.
The panel split two to one. Its majority found that the law did not violate the free-speech protections of the First Amendment, the constitutional argument that the industry has leaned on to challenge child-access rules in state after state.
By rejecting that argument, the court cleared the way for Ohio to enforce a statute that had been on hold since the trade group NetChoice secured an injunction against it.
What the law actually requires is parental consent and disclosure. Companies must obtain a parent’s permission before a child under 16 uses social media or gaming apps, and must provide their content guidelines so families can see what would be moderated or censored on a child’s profile.
The platforms covered include Meta’s Instagram, the kind of service at the centre of the broader debate over how minors use social media.
NetChoice, which represents platforms including Meta, made clear the fight is not over. The group said the ruling threatens the online privacy and constitutional rights of Ohio residents, and added that it “remains fully confident that this unconstitutional law will ultimately be struck down permanently.”
The language signals an intent to keep litigating, whether through a request for the full appeals court to rehear the case or an eventual approach to the Supreme Court.
The ruling lands in a national patchwork of similar laws and similar challenges. States including California, Georgia, and Florida have passed comparable measures, and NetChoice has fought most of them on the same First Amendment grounds.
The Florida dispute with TikTok is one front; the Mississippi age-verification law, which reached the Supreme Court, is another, and the courts have not spoken with one voice.
That inconsistency is the practical problem for the platforms. Age verification at scale has proved contentious wherever it has been tried, raising the prospect of either intrusive identity checks or systems a determined teenager can evade.
Complying with a different rule in every state, some demanding parental consent, others age verification, multiplies that difficulty and is part of why the industry has fought to keep the laws from taking effect.
The regulatory pressure is not confined to the US. Australia has moved to bar under-16s from major platforms and has accused Meta, TikTok, and YouTube of failing to comply, while the UK is extending its own under-16 rules into gaming and AI chatbots. Ohio’s revived law is one piece of a global tightening around how children access social media.
The legal core of the dispute is whether access to social media is itself protected expression. NetChoice argues that conditioning a minor’s entry on parental consent burdens speech the First Amendment shields, both the platforms’ and the users’; the states argue they are regulating commercial conduct and protecting children, not censoring ideas.
Courts have divided on which framing controls, which is why a two-to-one panel in Cincinnati can reach one conclusion while judges elsewhere reach another.
That division is what makes the issue likely to keep climbing the judicial ladder. With appeals courts and the Supreme Court weighing in on overlapping but distinct state laws, the rules governing how minors access social media are being written in fragments, court by court, rather than settled in one place. Ohio’s revived statute is now one data point in a body of law that is still taking shape.
For now, the immediate effect is that Ohio’s parental-consent requirement can take effect, pending any further appeal. The deeper question, whether laws like it survive constitutional review, remains unresolved, and Thursday’s two-to-one decision is unlikely to be the last word.
