Ohio's Social Media Parental Consent Law Restored by Federal Appeals Court

On June 18, 2026, a divided three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Ohio's Social Media Parental Notification Act must be reinstated, overturning a lower court's block on the law. The statute requires children under 16 to obtain parental consent before using social media platforms and had been challenged by NetChoice, a trade group representing TikTok, Snapchat, Meta and other major technology companies, on constitutional grounds. The panel held in a 2-1 decision that the parental-consent requirement constituted a marginal burden that targeted the problem of unsupervised assent to platform terms by minors who are harmed as a result, and rejected arguments that the law was overly broad or an unconstitutional impediment to free speech.

Consent and blanket gating provisions impose structural limitations: they restrict access for users willing to comply while offering little prevention against the actor initiating harm, since adults can freely message children who clear the gate and offenders readily falsify credentials or migrate to less-regulated channels where the underlying conduct proceeds undetected. Guardii's anti-grooming, anti-sextortion and athlete-abuse detection modules intervene at the point of hostile contact, operating across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms to identify sustained targeting, escalation and coercion patterns in direct messages, flagging or blocking threats before they reach a child and surfacing a minor in crisis to a parent, school or authority without requiring every user to prove their age at the front door.