Key Points

  • The Eleventh Circuit held that Florida's HB3, which bars children under 14 from creating social-media accounts and requires parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds, is a content-neutral speech regulation subject to intermediate scrutiny.
  • The court held that HB3 likely satisfies intermediate scrutiny as applied to the trade groups' members and reversed the preliminary injunction on that claim.
  • The court vacated the injunction as to the facial challenge, holding that the challengers did not carry their burden under Moody v. NetChoice of showing that the law's unconstitutional applications substantially outweigh its valid ones.
  • The court affirmed that CCIA and NetChoice have associational standing and that Younger abstention did not require dismissal despite Florida's later enforcement action against Snap.
  • Judge Newsom, concurring, questioned whether West Virginia v. B.P.J. bars as-applied First Amendment challenges to laws reviewed under intermediate scrutiny, and declined to apply it absent a clearer signal from the Supreme Court.

A federal appeals court on Oct. 14 reversed an order that had blocked Florida from enforcing a law barring children under 14 from opening social-media accounts, holding that the law likely survives a First Amendment challenge brought by two Internet trade organizations.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that the law, known as HB3, is content neutral, meaning it regulates platforms by their features rather than by the topics or views expressed on them. Judge Newsom wrote the opinion for a panel that also included Judges Luck and Tjoflat. A content-neutral law faces intermediate scrutiny, a less demanding test than the strict scrutiny applied to laws that single out speech by its subject or message.

The decision is a loss for the Computer & Communications Industry Association and NetChoice, Internet trade organizations whose members include Snap, YouTube and Meta, according to the opinion. The groups have challenged similar laws in Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, California, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Utah, and the Georgia case is on appeal before the Eleventh Circuit. The Eleventh Circuit had stayed the injunction while the appeal was pending.

HB3 covers platforms that let users post and view content, select content by algorithm, and use at least one of five "addictive features" the statute lists: infinite scrolling, push notifications, displays of likes and shares, auto-play video and live-streaming. A platform falls within the law only if at least 10% of its daily active users under 16 spend an average of two hours or more a day on it. Covered platforms must bar users under 14 from creating accounts, require parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds, and terminate accounts held by children the law excludes.

Florida told the court that platforms use those features as "psychological hooks" that "overstimulate the reward center in the brain" and "foster compulsive overuse," contributing to what the state called a "youth mental health crisis."

The trade groups sued in October 2024, shortly before the law took effect. A federal judge in the Northern District of Florida granted a preliminary injunction in June 2025, finding the law likely content neutral but too broadly drawn to survive intermediate scrutiny.

On appeal, Florida argued that HB3 "regulates product design, not children's speech" because it governs only the contracts by which platforms open accounts. The panel disagreed, holding that the law burdens the platforms' protected activity of compiling and curating others' speech, which the Supreme Court recognized in Moody v. NetChoice, its 2024 decision. "Yes, it implicates the First Amendment and thus triggers constitutional scrutiny," Newsom wrote. "But it likely does so in a content-neutral manner."

"HB3 is facially content neutral: It regulates social-media platforms based on their functional capabilities and features, not the content they communicate," Newsom wrote. The opinion relied on the Supreme Court's 2025 TikTok decision, which treated as content neutral a federal statute requiring TikTok to sell its U.S. operations or shut down. Under HB3, the opinion said, "Truth Social is just as likely as Instagram to be affected."

The trade groups argued that HB3 targets "social" speech. Judge Rosenbaum had made a similar point in a dissent from the stay order, calling the restrictions a "proxy for a content-based regulation directly prohibiting 'public, interactive, user-to-user social speech.'" Newsom rejected that view. "The 'social'-ness of speech is a function of its form, not its substance," Newsom wrote.

The panel then held that HB3 likely does not burden substantially more speech than necessary, citing the law's age tiers and usage threshold. The court also stressed that the law restricts account creation, not access. "Even a minor—indeed, even a young child—may continue to use the platforms provided he either (1) uses his parents' (or someone else's) account or (2) gains access without an account," Newsom wrote.

The groups argued that Florida could have left account decisions to parents, who they said "already have many tools to protect their minors on the Internet." Citing Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the 2025 decision upholding a Texas age-verification law for pornographic websites, the panel held that intermediate scrutiny does not require the least restrictive option. "Now, none of that is necessarily to say that HB3 embodies the best policy choice. Maybe, maybe not," Newsom wrote.

The panel also ruled against Florida on two threshold questions. It held that the groups have associational standing, which lets an organization sue on behalf of injured members. It also held that the district court properly declined to abstain under Younger v. Harris. Florida sued Snap in state court in April 2025, but by then the federal case had passed the "embryonic stage," the panel held.

The court separately vacated the injunction to the extent it rested on a facial challenge. Under Moody, the panel held, the challengers bear the burden of showing that a law's unconstitutional applications substantially outweigh its valid ones, and the trade groups' briefing "doesn't mention even a single platform that isn't one of its members." Noting that Moody had faulted the Eleventh Circuit's own earlier analysis, Newsom wrote, "We've learned the facial-challenge lesson the hard way."

Newsom also wrote a concurrence about West Virginia v. B.P.J., a 2026 Supreme Court equal-protection decision on women's and girls' sports. A footnote in that decision said "as-applied challenges are not entertained when courts apply intermediate scrutiny or rational basis review." Newsom wrote that if that rule extended to free-speech cases, the trade groups' claim "failed the moment that we concluded that intermediate scrutiny applied." "Before exporting it to the First Amendment context, I think it's wise to await a clearer signal from the Supreme Court," Newsom wrote.

The panel affirmed the standing and abstention rulings and sent the case back to the district court. The opinion said that if the groups continue to assert the rights of their members' users in a facial overbreadth challenge, the district court may address those issues then.