• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 16, 2025

An Ohio law that would have restricted teens' ability to use tech platforms violates the First Amendment, a federal judge said Wednesday.

“The Act as drafted fails to pass constitutional muster and is constitutionally infirm,” U.S. District Court Judge Algenon Marbley in the Southern District of Ohio wrote in a 49-page decision striking down the Parental Notification By Social Media Operators Act.

“This Court, although sympathetic to what the Ohio legislature sought to do, finds that the evidence does not establish the required nexus between the legislative concerns about the well-being of minors and the restrictions on speech,” Marbley wrote.

The Ohio law, passed in 2023, would have prohibited some -- but not all -- web services with social functionality from allowing minors under 16 to create accounts or access content, without parental permission. The statute generally covers operators of sites with social features (such as allowing users to create profiles and interact) and that are aimed at minors under 16 or “reasonably anticipated” to be accessed by teens under 16.

The law exempts ecommerce sites that allow people to post reviews, and “established and widely recognized” media outlets that report news.

Marbley previously issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily blocked Ohio officials from enforcing the law, but Wednesday's decision permanently blocks the law, unless an appellate court intervenes.

The tech industry group NetChoice sued over the law, arguing it was unconstitutional for several reasons -- including that it would have restriced minors' First Amendment right to express themselves and access speech. The organization also said the law wrongly restricted speech based on subject matter, arguing that the exceptions for e-commerce and news sites violate the First Amendment because they're content-based.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost defended the statute, arguing that it furthers the government's interest in protecting minors from harms allegedly associated with social media use -- including “addiction caused by user-engagement features” such as design features like automatically playing videos, and mental health issues like depression and anxiety.

Marbley rejected Yost's contentions, ruling that the state failed to prove that social platforms caused harms to teens. Instead, Marbley wrote, research presented by Yost examined correlations between social media and harm to teens, not causation.

The judge added: “The record also does not show that the full range of “thousands” of websites covered by the Act cause harms to minors sufficient to suppress those minors' access to protected speech.”

He noted in the ruling that in 2011 the Supreme Court struck down a California law that would have banned the sale of violent video games to minors, without parental consent.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion that while the government has the power to protect children, states don't have a “free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed."

The ruling comes several weeks after a different judge struck down a similar law in Arkansas.

Other states including New York, Maryland, Mississippi, Utah, Tennessee, Texas and California have passed statutes that either restrict teens' use of social media, or regulate companies' ability to serve content to teens. Many of those laws are currently facing court challenges, and so far judges have temporarily blocked all or parts of those laws in Mississippi, Utah, Texas and California.