Eleventh Circuit finds Florida's feature-based social media age limits likely constitutional

A 15-year-old in Florida gets a push notification and scrolls a feed with no bottom. Both behaviors are on the list the Eleventh Circuit used to decide which platforms HB3 reaches ^[2].

Florida's pitch was that HB3 "regulates product design, not children's speech" and so does not implicate the First Amendment ^[6]. The panel did not accept the product-design framing as a way around the Constitution. Judge Kevin Newsom, writing for a panel that included Judges Robert Luck and Gerald Bard Tjoflat, wrote that even accepting the state's characterization, HB3 burdens platforms' protected activity of "compiling and curating others' speech" ^[1][4].

Florida still won the point, and the reason is the feature list. The opinion says: "HB3 is facially content neutral: It regulates social-media platforms based on their functional capabilities and features, not the content they communicate" ^[9]. The court found the purpose content neutral too: protecting children from social-media addiction and associated mental-health harms ^[10]. Changing what users post does not change coverage. The court said neither a platform nor a user can "avoid or mitigate" the effects of HB3 by "altering" the substance of any posted expression ^[12].

Any one of five behaviors meets the second condition ^[7]. The court's first condition is separate: how long minors under 16 actually spend on the platform, on average ^[2].

In our reading, the holding decides which platforms must run an age gate on signups, and the obligation the court weighed was the account rule ^[3]. The Volokh Conspiracy post reproduces short excerpts from a long opinion ^[8]. They stop before the intermediate-scrutiny analysis. They also omit the proportion of minors in the usage condition, any penalty for violating HB3 and the statute's full text, and that text governs.

Our recommendation is to treat the five triggers as an inventory and tie each one to a retention or time-to-value figure from the product's own data. If a trigger has no such figure, it is adding coverage risk without any measured return. The tradeoff is that a trigger which does hold users may be worth the age gate, and only the product's own numbers can say.

For a grid, put whether under-16 users average two hours a day on one axis, and whether any trigger plus algorithmic selection is present on the other. The cell where both are yes matches the court's description of a covered platform ^[2]. A product with triggers and low minor usage is one change in its own usage data away from that cell.