Georgia social media age law

The short title is the Protecting Georgia's Children on Social Media Act of 2024. The bill is SB 351. The General Assembly lists it as Act 463, signed April 23, 2024, with a statutory effective date of July 1, 2025. It amends education law and the law on minors. One track tells social-media platforms to make reasonable efforts to verify age, to get a parent's consent before a minor has an account, and to limit certain advertising in a minor account. The court described those platform rules as applying special conditions to minors under 16 unless the platform applied them to everyone.

On June 26, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia granted NetChoice a preliminary injunction against the platform provisions the group challenged. Georgia appealed to the Eleventh Circuit. Oral argument was reported in March 2026. As of this page's review date, this entry does not treat that appeal as decided. A preliminary injunction is not a final ruling that the law is gone. It means those platform rules should not be described as simply in effect while the order stands.

The same bill also tells local school boards to adopt, implement, and enforce a social-media policy, including technology to block and monitor access, and to publish the policy. The enrolled text sets an April 1, 2026 date for boards to send that policy to the Department of Education. The June 2025 order was aimed at the platform section NetChoice sued over. This page does not treat the school-policy section as part of that injunction. If a later order widened the block, this sentence needs an update.

Parents hear Georgia passed a kids' social-media law and assume every rule is live. The honest sentence is narrower: the act was signed, a statutory date arrived, and a federal court then paused the platform age and consent rules during an appeal. School policy duties sit on another track in the same bill.

Georgia also enacted an AI companion chatbot law, SB 540, with its own 2027 date. Use this page for social media. Use the Georgia AI chatbot law page for conversational AI. They answer different questions.

These state laws are not copies of each other. A duty in Georgia may be missing in Tennessee, and a date in one state is not a date in the next. Whether Congress will override some of them is a live debate, described on the federal AI preemption page. Until a federal statute actually does that, read the state text that applies to you.

Georgia's SB 351 is the social-media age law, separate from the chatbot law in SB 540. Key platform age and consent rules are enjoined. HeyOtto is not a social network and does not claim to satisfy SB 351. A parent creates the account for ages 8–18 and can read the chats. The child does not self-enroll.

• Parents can read chats in the parent dashboard.
• Distress produces an alert and crisis resources, not an automatic call to emergency services.
• HeyOtto does not claim this statute is already satisfied.