Ohio Judge Strikes Social Media Law Restricting Teen Access (1)

A federal judge struck down Ohio’s law limiting teen social media use, marking another court win for the tech industry group NetChoice fighting similar restrictions nationwide.

Judge Algenon L. Marbley granted a permanent injunction against the Social Media Parental Notification Act in a Wednesday decision for the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. The law required platforms to verify whether its users are at least 16 and demanded parental consent for younger users. The decision enjoins Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) from enforcing the law.

NetChoice—whose members include Meta Platforms Inc., X Corp., and Alphabet Inc.'s Google—alleged in its Jan. 2024 complaint that the law violated First and 14th Amendment protections by requiring Ohioans to hand over personal data in order to access content. Marbley granted a preliminary injunction of the law Feb. 12, 2024.

Yost didn’t appeal that decision, but Governor Mike DeWine (R) called the preliminary injunction “disappointing” and asked for Congress to “protect our country’s children.”

Ohio’s law had to satisfy strict scrutiny because it was a content-based restriction, Marbley said. “Generally, First Amendment protections ‘are no less applicable when government seeks to control the flow of information to minors,’” the court said.

The law restricted children’s ability to engage in and access speech, thus implicating the First Amendment. And its definitions for which websites had to follow the law was a content-based restriction because it favored some forms of engagement with certain topics to the exclusion of others.

Ohio’s law therefore was “either underinclusive or overinclusive, or both,” of the interests it purported to serve, such as protecting children from unfair contracts.

Nearly all of the state’s evidence that social media was harmful to children as “based on correlation, not evidence of causation,” Marbley said.

Even if protecting children from those harms was a sufficient interest, and “it very well may be,” the law isn’t sufficiently tailored to address that problem, the court said.

“Protecting children’s well-being is a laudable, perhaps even achievable, goal. But Ohio’s imperative is to achieve this goal through legislation that is constitutional,” Marbley said.

“We’re reviewing the decision and will determine the next steps,” Yost’s office said.

NetChoice has challenged similar laws in California and Utah, and recently won a permanent injunction blocking a similar law in Arkansas.

“With two permanent injunctions stopping age verification laws that block access to free, lawful speech online, we hope to work with policymakers on constitutional solutions to digital challenges,” NetChoice said in a statement praising the ruling.

Sperling & Slater LLC and Lehotsky Keller Cohn LLP represented NetChoice.

The case is NetChoice, LLC v. Yost, S.D. Ohio, No. 2:24-cv-00047, 4/16/25