ATLANTA (CN) - Tech lobbyists urged a federal judge on Tuesday to block a Georgia law requiring parental consent before allowing minors to create social media accounts, less than a month before it goes into effect.

U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg seemed open to granting the request, noting that similar laws have been overturned by federal judges in Arkansas and Ohio and temporarily blocked in Utah.

With litigation also pending against such laws in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee, the judge asked the state to explain why its law shouldn't be blocked as well.

State attorney Logan Winkles said nothing in the law involves censoring or restricting online speech as tech lobbyist NetChoice accuses, but instead limits where children can go and with whom they can contract without parental consent. He argued it has nothing to do with content and serves as a minor gate-keeping provision for contracts between the most powerful companies in the world and children.

"Its a place where children are being restricted, not content," Winkles said.

Senate Bill 351, also known as the "Protecting Georgia's Children on Social Media Act of 2024" says social media services would have to use "commercially reasonable efforts" to verify someone's age by July 1, 2025.

Services would have to treat anyone who can't be verified as a minor. Parents of children younger than 16 would have to consent to their children creating an account.

NetChoice attorney Jeremy Maltz argued the language is too vague and would expose websites such as Dreamwidth, an online journal service, to either compliance costs or massive penalties.

NetChoice - which represents members like Meta, Google, Amazon, and X, formerly Twitter - sued Georgia in May, making it the eighth state to see its law requiring parental consent for children to use social media challenged in court. The group is involved in multiple legal battles and lobbying efforts related to online content regulation.

The state also argued that NetChoice shouldn't have standing to bring such claims, because they didn't mention any affected individuals that face irreparable harm in their complaint.

"No 15-year-old is here, no parent, or any individual saying their First Amendment rights have been violated," Winkles said.

The attorney added that many providers already have age verification tools in place, including artificial intelligence that can estimate the age of a person without requiring any personal information or an identification.

There is also a 90-day window given to cure any violations before any action would be enforced by the state's attorney general, Winkles said.

Under the law, social media companies would also be limited in how they could customize advertisements for children younger than 16 and how much data they could collect on those children. The law would prohibit services from using data other than location and age when presenting advertisements to a minor.

It also echoes a Texas law pending before the Supreme Court that would mandate age verification on pornography sites by requiring users to upload a government-issued photo ID before allowing them to view adult content. Any sites that do not enforce these rules would receive a $10,000 fine for each child who accesses content deemed "harmful to minors."

Winkles said the law was created to combat a "mental health crisis" that has a direct connection with social media and is uniquely dangerous to children and teens by keeping them engaged and addicted. He said children are also more vulnerable to adult bad actors who can easily take advantage of them on social media.

To comply with federal regulations, social media companies already ban kids under 13 from signing up for their platforms.

But children have been shown to easily evade the bans. Up to 95% of teens aged 13 to 17 report using a social media platform, with more than a third saying they use them "almost constantly," the Pew Research Center found.

Totenberg said she will consider both parties' arguments further and that she may decide to hold an evidentiary hearing before issuing a ruling.

Source: Courthouse News Service