Big tech in Ohio suffers setback with appeals court decision on social media restrictions

Ohio’s law requiring children under 16 to get parental consent to use social media apps must be restored, a divided panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday.The decision comes as a blow to Net Choice, which has won court victories against identical digital identification laws in other states, including Arkansas, Louisiana and Georgia. The trade group representing Tik Tok, Snapchat, Meta and other major tech companies said the Ohio decision went against “clear national consensus” and that it intended to keep fighting.“An unconstitutional law protects no one, and we remain focused on ensuring the First Amendment rights of Ohioans are protected,” said Paul Taske, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center.Netchoice brought suit against Ohio’s law in 2024, arguing that it was overly broad, vague and represented an unconstitutional impediment to free speech.The Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit’s panel disagreed. In a 2-1 decision, it found that the law was not unconstitutional and sent it back to a lower court to have a block on the law’s enforcement vacated.“At bottom, the Act imposes a parental consent requirement,” Judge Eric Clay wrote in the lead opinion. “That requirement constitutes a marginal burden that precisely targets the multi-faceted problem that Ohio has identified: Children’s unsupervised assent to terms and conditions for use of platforms that take advantage of and harm them.”Judge Alice Batchelder concurred, writing that “a statute is not vague just because it has a wide berth.”Known as the Social Media Parental Notification Act, the Ohio law was part of an $86.1 billion state budget bill that Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law in July 2023.The administration pushed the measure as a way to protect children’s mental health, with then-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, now a U.S. senator, saying at the time that social media was “intentiona