US judge temporarily blocks Georgia law requiring parental consent for minors online

A federal judge in Atlanta has temporarily blocked parts of a Georgia law that would have required age checks and parental consent before young people could use social media platforms, in a case brought by the tech industry group NetChoice.

The ruling came in June 2025 from a judge on the US District Court in Atlanta hearing NetChoice's challenge to the state law. The judge allowed access for now while the case continues, blocking parts of the requirement, including elements connected to schools and students. The decision is a preliminary one, and the wider case remains before the court.

In its challenge, NetChoice argued that the law would break the budgets of some of its members, citing constant compliance costs, the burden of monitoring members' sites and the costs of litigation. The group also argued that the law largely imposed on its members a duty to obtain parental consent for minor users, while its websites went unchanged, and pointed to the small number of minors it said the measure would actually affect.

The judge's written order noted that age verification technologies are numerous and changing rapidly, and that some of the technologies at issue were unproven. "None" of these technologies could be relied on in the way the law imagined, the order said, according to the ruling as reported.

Georgia is one of many states to have passed legal age requirements for social media use in recent years, with varying verification rules. Similar challenges by NetChoice have been filed across the country, and parts of several state laws have been blocked by courts pending appeal, including cases that have reached the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

The wider litigation

The ruling lands as social media harm claims continue in US courts. The first school-district test case in the coordinated social media addiction lawsuit proceedings, brought by a Kentucky county school district against Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube, settled before a trial that had been set for June 2026, with no settlement figure given. The next district test trials, for Tucson Unified and Charleston County, are due to start in 2027, and further Los Angeles trials are set for 28 October 2026 and for 16 March and 6 August 2027.

Anyone affected by the issues in this article can contact Samaritans free on 116 123 or at samaritans.org.