EdLaw nat/us/state/fl/hb3-minors-online/README.md

language: en · status: in-force · last checked: 2026-09-19

Florida HB 3 — social media use for minors and age verification

The 2024 Florida act that bars under-14s from holding social media accounts, requires parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds, and imposes age verification on commercial sites distributing material harmful to minors. It is a consumer statute, not an education one: nothing in it turns on a school relationship, which is exactly why it reaches products a student-privacy analysis would miss.

Applicability to EdTech

Read the definition before assuming it does not apply. "Social media platform" in §501.1736(1)(e) is a four-part cumulative test: the service allows users to upload content or view other users' content and ten percent or more of its under-16 daily active users average two hours or more a day on it and it employs algorithms that analyse user data to select content and it has at least one listed addictive feature. The listed features are the part to check a product against — infinite scrolling (continuous loading, or pages with no visible end), push notifications or alerts, personal interactive metrics (reaction counts, shares, reposts), auto-play video, and live-streaming. A collaborative learning platform with a social feed, reaction counts and push notifications satisfies three of the four limbs on its face; whether it satisfies the second is a measurement question about its own users, not a legal one.

The exclusion is narrow: a service whose exclusive function is email or direct messaging shared only between sender and recipients, without public or group display.

The duties are engineering work, on the clock. For an account holder under 14, §501.1736(2) requires the platform to bar account creation, to terminate existing accounts — including those it merely treats as likely under-14 for content or ad targeting — with a 90-day dispute window, to honour a minor's own termination request within 5 business days and a confirmed parent's within 10 business days, and then to permanently delete all personal information relating to the terminated account unless law requires retention. §501.1736(3) runs the same machinery for 14- and 15-year-olds with parental consent as the gate. Note what triggers termination for the "likely under 14" cohort: the platform's own targeting categorisation is treated as knowledge.

Age verification reaches the verifier too. §501.1737 binds a commercial entity knowingly and intentionally publishing material harmful to minors where such material is a substantial portion of the site, and §501.1738 sets the anonymous age verification standard: the check is performed by a non-affiliated third party, and the entity and the third party must not retain the personal identifying information used — it must be deleted immediately after the check. A third party that performs verification in violation of §501.1738 is itself liable (§501.1737(5)(b)). Any vendor building or reselling an age-assurance component into a Florida product is in scope directly, not through its customer.

Enforcement

Both operative sections route through the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. A knowing or reckless violation of §501.1736(2) or (3) is an unfair and deceptive trade practice actionable solely by the Department of Legal Affairs, with a civil penalty of up to $50,000 per violation plus attorney fees and costs, and punitive damages where the failure is a consistent pattern (§501.1736(5)). Separately there is a private route: a platform that knowingly or recklessly violates those subsections is liable to the minor account holder for up to $10,000 in damages plus costs and fees (§501.1736(6)). §501.1737 mirrors both, with a one-year limitation period on the private claim.

Litigation status: HB 3's social-media provisions have been the subject of a First Amendment challenge by CCIA and NetChoice. The text here is the codified text as the Florida Legislature currently publishes it; nothing in this corpus records the state of that litigation, and the enforceability question should be checked before relying on the sections.

Contents

Document Covers
MINORS-ONLINE.md Fla. Stat. §501.1736 (social media use for minors), §501.1737 (age verification for online access to materials harmful to minors) and §501.1738 (anonymous age verification) in full

Licence

The corpus reproduces Fla. Stat. §§ 501.1736, 501.1737 and 501.1738 verbatim from Online Sunshine, the Florida Legislature's official statutes site, with each section's History line.

Statute text enacted by a state legislature is outside copyright under the government edicts doctrine. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020) (slip opinion, read 2026-10-01), the Supreme Court held: "Under what has been dubbed the government edicts doctrine, officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties." It applied the doctrine to an arm of the legislature as well as to legislators: "Because Georgia’s annotations are authored by an arm of the legislature in the course of its legislative duties, the government edicts doctrine puts them outside the reach of copyright protection."

Online Sunshine pages end with "Copyright © 1995-2026 The Florida Legislature" (for example § 501.1736, read 2026-10-01). That notice can cover the site, but not the statute text, which the Legislature enacts: § 11.2421 (Online Sunshine, read 2026-10-01) provides that the compilation "prepared by the Office of Legislative Services under the provisions of s. 11.242" is "adopted and enacted as the official statute law of the state under the title of “Florida Statutes 2026”". The History lines the corpus keeps are part of that compilation.

The curator should note that the Legislature's copyright line exists; it is not read as reaching the enacted text, and no other terms on the site restrict reproduction.

Conditions: none attach to the statute text. The corpus nonetheless names the official source in its Sources section and in each fact document's {.meta} provenance lines, and its Meta section describes what it changed (anchors added, nothing reworded).

Sources