A federal appeals court has said yes, at least in Ohio. The June 18 ruling turns a private family decision into a constitutional one, with consequences for children’s rights, free speech, and the privacy of everyone online.
Almost every parent of a teenager has had some version of the same conversation. The kid wants an account. Everyone at school already has one, and not having it feels like sitting out a conversation that runs all day. The parent stalls. Is she old enough? Who is she going to be talking to? For most families the answer comes out somewhere in the middle: usually a yes with conditions, and a running argument about when the phone gets put away.
That conversation has always happened at home. As of June 18, in Ohio, the state has a say in it too.
A federal appeals court ruled that Ohio can enforce a law requiring social media companies to get a parent’s verifiable consent before anyone under 16 opens an account. With that, a question families used to settle on their own becomes a legal one, bound up with billion-dollar platforms, the First Amendment, and a privacy problem that reaches everybody online. It is also probably on its way to the Supreme Court.
What the court decided
A three-judge panel of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled 2-1 that Ohio’s Social Media Parental Notification Act can take effect. The decision reversed District Judge Algenon Marbley, who struck the law down in April 2025 and blocked the state from enforcing it. The panel sent the case back with orders to rule for Ohio.
Judge Eric Clay wrote the main opinion. He agreed the law puts some burden on speech but called it a small one, “a marginal burden that precisely targets the multi-faceted problem that Ohio has identified.” The problem, as he saw it, is kids clicking “I agree” on the terms of platforms built to hold their attention and sell it, with no adult anywhere in the process. Senior Judge Alice Batchelder, a George H.W. Bush appointee, sided with him. Judge Kevin Ritz, appointed by Joe Biden, dissented, and would have kept the law blocked on free-speech grounds.
The majority was careful about one thing. It said the ruling does not hand states a green light to use parental consent as a tool for censoring ideas. A state could not, the court wrote, invoke child safety to keep teenagers from reading about American history or looking up medical information. The court’s logic is narrower than that. What worries it is not any particular post a teenager might see. It is the fact of a child being signed up, with no adult involved, to a product designed to be hard to put down. Whether that line holds is the question the next round of lawsuits will turn on.
What the law requires
Ohio’s law passed in 2023, tucked into a state budget bill that Governor Mike DeWine signed. It does not ban anyone from anything. It changes the starting point. Sites and apps that a child under 16 could reasonably be expected to use have to check a user’s age, and for anyone under 16 they have to get a parent’s permission, in writing and in a form a kid can’t easily fake, before the account goes live.
Since almost any popular site could be used by a teenager, the law lays out an eleven-factor test for which companies are actually on the hook, along with some exceptions. The Ohio attorney general enforces it and can seek civil fines of up to $10,000 a day per child, once a company has had a chance to fix the problem. There are no criminal penalties. As of the ruling, Attorney General Andy Wilson’s office said it was still reading the decision and would announce later when it starts enforcing.
So in Ohio a company can no longer let a 14-year-old sign herself up. A parent has to agree first, and the platform has to be able to prove the parent really did.
The case for parental consent
To supporters, the ruling just puts an obvious rule back where it belongs.
A 14-year-old can’t sign a lease or take out a loan. She can’t agree to most contracts on her own. But she can tap “I agree” on pages of terms that hand a company her data and her time, and the company on the other end is running some of the most refined attention-grabbing technology ever built. Ohio’s point, which the court accepted, is that this kind of consent means very little coming from a 12-year-old, and that asking a parent to sign off is a small step, well short of banning speech.
The legal argument sits on top of a deeper worry about teenagers’ mental health. Pew Research Center surveys show that almost all American teens use social media, that a sizable share are on it more or less constantly, and that close to half think they spend too much time there. The U.S. Surgeon General has pointed to research linking heavy use, more than three hours a day, with roughly double the rate of depression and anxiety symptoms in young people. Researchers still argue about how much of that link is cause and how much is correlation, a caveat the loudest voices on both sides tend to skip.
Ohio’s officials took the strong version of all this. Attorney General Wilson called the internet “the most dangerous place for our kids” and said the decision gives parents real tools to stay involved. The state senator who pushed the bill through, back when he was lieutenant governor, had argued for years that the platforms are built to be addictive.
There’s a momentum argument too. Ohio isn’t alone anymore. Australia has cut off social media for everyone under 16, and Britain has lined up a similar ban for 2027. Backers see the start of a real consensus that letting young kids loose on these platforms, with no limits and no oversight, was a mistake the rest of the world is now walking back.
The case against
It’s easy to read the other side as Big Tech protecting its customer base. That misses how much of the opposition comes from civil-liberties groups, and how much of it is about children’s own rights rather than companies’.
The starting point is a rule the Supreme Court has held for decades: with a few narrow exceptions like obscenity, minors have real First Amendment rights of their own. A teenager has a constitutional stake in reading and speaking and finding people like her, and on this view the government can’t put a parent’s signature in front of that any more than it could in front of a library card. The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation made that case in a brief to the court, warning that a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing age checks on porn sites shouldn’t be stretched to cover all of social media.
Then there are the kids the principle can hide. For some of them, the account a parent might block isn’t a perk. It’s close to the only door they have. LGBTQ+ teenagers, a large share of whom live in homes that aren’t fully on their side, often find their first real community and their first reliable information online. Route consent through a parent and that can mean no account at all, or being outed just by asking. Kids in foster care or group homes may not have a legal guardian who can consent in the first place. A teenager living with abuse may be relying on exactly the connections a parent could shut off. The worry from digital-rights groups is that a law meant to shield children ends up isolating the ones with the least to fall back on.
The hardest part of the argument comes from the platforms’ own lawyers. They say the law doesn’t shore up parental authority. It overrides it. NetChoice, the trade group that sued, puts it this way: a family should be the one deciding, against a default where access is allowed and a parent can step in to stop it. By setting the government’s answer to “no” unless a parent says otherwise, the group argues, Ohio elbows its way into a call that ought to start at home. “An unconstitutional law protects no one,” its litigation director said. You can read that as principle or as positioning, but it points at something real. Both sides of this fight are claiming the mantle of parental rights.
Why this reaches past teenagers
The privacy fallout doesn’t stop at kids, and critics say that’s the part that gets lost.
To find the users under 16, a platform has to age-check everybody. That means some kind of verification for adults and minors alike: uploading a government ID, sitting for a face scan, or routing your identity through a third-party service. Privacy groups put the technical problem bluntly. There is no reliable way to confirm the age of every single user without collecting sensitive personal data, and the companies told to hold that data are exactly the ones hackers target. A database full of “here’s my ID” and “here’s what I looked at” is a much worse thing to leak than a list of usernames.
These systems also leak the other way. When Utah started requiring age checks on pornography sites, searches for VPNs, the tools people use to disguise where they are, roughly doubled within days. The determined teenagers route around the wall. The privacy cost falls on everyone who doesn’t. Critics call that the worst of both outcomes: a real surveillance burden on the whole population, in exchange for a barrier the most motivated kids can still climb.
Who speaks for the child?
One of the more interesting parts of the decision had nothing to do with screen time. A big chunk of it turned on a dry-sounding legal question, standing, that is really a question about who gets to argue for a child in court.
NetChoice tried to argue on behalf of teenage users. The court wouldn’t allow it. A group of companies whose money depends on keeping minors glued to their feeds, the majority reasoned, can’t credibly claim to speak for what’s best for those same minors. Judge Batchelder wrote that their interests are opposed, not aligned. Judge Ritz, in dissent, thought the platforms and their young users want the same thing here, at least on free speech, and that NetChoice should have been allowed to make the argument.
Underneath the legal terms is the question hanging over every kitchen table. When a child’s interests are on the line, who decides: the company, the parents, the state, or the child? The court didn’t settle that. It just decided that this time, the platforms don’t get to be the ones who answer.
What it means for families now
If you’re in Ohio, a lot is still up in the air. The attorney general hasn’t said when enforcement starts, and the platforms need time to build age-check and consent systems. Setting up an account for a kid under 16 is going to get more cumbersome, and plenty of the specifics, like what counts as valid consent and which apps are even covered, will get worked out in court over the coming months.
If you’re somewhere else in the country, you’re living in a patchwork. Courts have thrown out laws like Ohio’s in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Georgia, while letting versions stand, at least for now, in Florida, Mississippi, and California. The same thing a platform does can be legal in one state and finable in the next, which is a big reason this won’t stay a state-by-state mess for long.
Whatever the courts do, the tools parents already have aren’t going anywhere. Screen-time limits built into the phone, age settings in the app stores, the family-pairing features inside the big apps, and, least technical and most useful of all, actually talking with your kid about what they’re seeing and who they’re talking to. None of that waits on a statute. A law can decide who has to click the consent button. It can’t do the real work of knowing what your kid’s life online is actually like.
Where it goes next
The Ohio decision doesn’t end the national fight. It raises the stakes. Now that the appeals courts are openly split, some upholding these laws and some striking them down, the Supreme Court is the obvious place for this to land. The justices have already shown they’re interested. In 2025 they upheld age checks for sites that publish sexually explicit material, and states are now testing how far that reasoning can be pushed toward social media in general. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has signaled that the platforms have a strong First Amendment argument against the broader laws.
NetChoice says it will keep fighting and still expects to win in the end. Ohio says it’s ready for the fight. Between the two of them, the Supreme Court will most likely be the one to decide whether a parent’s signature can stand between a teenager and a social media account, and what making everyone prove their age is going to cost the rest of us.
Back at the kitchen table
For all the constitutional weight piled onto it, the real question is the small, ordinary one a family faces the first time a kid asks for an account. A court can decide who is legally required to give the okay. It can’t tell you whether your kid is ready, how much you trust her, or how to talk to her about the part of her life that now happens on a screen.
The law is trying to answer something about childhood that the technology blew past years ago, and the people deciding, judges included, don’t agree on the answer. One thing is settled, at least: the call isn’t only yours anymore, and it isn’t only the platform’s. The question of who gets to say yes belongs to everyone now. The conversation at the kitchen table just got a lot more crowded.
Editor’s Note: This piece reflects the law as of June 2026. The litigation is still going, and the enforcement timeline, the list of covered platforms, and the wider legal picture are all likely to shift as the appeals play out.
