Sixth Circuit revives Ohio’s parental consent law for kids’ social media | #childpredator | #kidsaftey | #childsaftey

CINCINNATI (CN) — A divided appeals panel vacated a lower court injunction and determined Ohio’s parental consent requirement does not violate minor users’ First Amendment rights.

NetChoice, a trade association representing Google, YouTube, Meta and others, sued Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost after the Buckeye State passed the Parental Notification by Social Media Operators Act in July 2023.

The law is designed to protect minors from the dangers of social media and requires individuals under the age of 16 to get parental consent before they can create accounts.

NetChoice argued the act violated the First Amendment and succeeded in obtaining a permanent injunction from a federal judge.

U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley struck down the law in April 2025 and found it was not narrowly tailored to achieve the state’s laudable interest in protecting minors from mental health issues associated with social media.

Yost, who has since been replaced by Attorney General Andy Wilson, appealed the Bill Clinton appointee’s decision to the Sixth Circuit.

The case was argued in February, and the panel released its opinion Thursday.

U.S. Circuit Judge Eric Clay, a Clinton appointee, wrote the divided panel’s lead opinion and focused his analysis on the issue of standing.

NetChoice argued it could establish third-party standing on behalf of minor users in the state who were unable to create social media accounts because of the law, but Clay disagreed.

He sided with the state of Ohio and determined the trade association does not have the best interests of the children in mind.

“NetChoice has certainly argued for unfettered access to social media for minors. But the act intends to mitigate harm to minors associated with increased used of social media and the lopsided contracts that NetChoice has minors execute before they may enjoy that access.

“Without children users present in the litigation, we cannot be sure that a well-informed, rational child would reject the act’s protections or advocate for precisely the same contours of First Amendment doctrine as NetChoice does,” Clay said.

The harms associated with social media use by children outweigh the association’s interest in protecting users’ First Amendment rights, according to Clay.

“The claims and defenses in this case inextricably intertwine NetChoice’s financial and legal incentives with the significant potential harm to the children rightsholders, all centered around the core third-party First Amendment right.

“Yost has offered evidence that the transactions at issue involve lopsided and exploitative contracts that initiate enduring relationships in which members seek to capture and hold children users’ attention for as long as possible, even if that engagement is harmful,” he said.

In his analysis of the association’s facial challenge to the law — brought on behalf of its members — Clay applied strict scrutiny and determined it is a content-based restriction that favors one kind of speech over another.

He based his assertion on an exclusion in the law that exempts news and current events outlets from the parental consent requirements.

However, the state’s interests in protecting minors are enough to survive strict scrutiny, according to Clay.

“Children have at their disposal many ways of accessing the internet and can often do so anonymously, evading their parents’ supervision,” he said. “Parents may not be able to keep up with what new social media platforms their children are using, in which case post hoc knowledge of available tools on a given platform are unhelpful. Prospectively requiring parental consent before a child accesses a social media platform mitigates that problem.”

In the end, Clay labeled the parental consent requirement “a marginal burden” to the companies that operate social media platforms and emphasized it does not constitute a “parental veto” that could effectively censor certain content.

Wilson lauded the court’s decision in a statement.

“This ruling is a win for Ohio families,” the Republican attorney general said. “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. This decision gives parents the tools to be involved and provide oversight,” he said.

Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Alice Batchelder, an appointee of George H.W. Bush, wrote a concurring opinion and agreed with Clay that the association could not sue on behalf of minors in the state.

“NetChoice’s interests vis-a-vis those of minors are not ‘completely consistent,’ ‘closely aligned,’ or even neutral. They are opposed to one another,” she said.

U.S. Circuit Judge Kevin Ritz, a Joe Biden appointee, wrote a dissenting opinion in which he disagreed with his colleagues on the issues of standing and strict scrutiny.

Ritz said the “First Amendment interests of NetChoice overlap neatly with the First Amendment interests of its members’ minor users” and allow the association to sue on behalf of the minors.

In his analysis of the state’s constitutionality argument, Ritz admitted the social media sites could pose “serious risks to children,” but ultimately found the interests of constitutionally protected speech outweigh those risks.

The parental consent requirement could effectively act as an “insurmountable barrier to entry for online speech,” according to Ritz, who also questioned whether it would even be a deterrent to the harms cited by Yost.

“Under the act, parents need only give one-time consent for their children to create an account on covered websites, after which children can continue using the websites without any additional oversight,” Ritz said. “Neither the state nor Judge Clay’s opinion explains how this regime will prevent the websites from causing ‘issues with sleep, anxiety, body dysmorphia, depression, and bullying’ or ‘physiological effects like those from substance and gambling addictions.’”

The trade association vowed to continue its fight against the law.

“An unconstitutional law protects no one, and we remain focused on ensuring the First Amendment rights of Ohioans are protected,” Paul Taske, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center said in a statement.