Florida’s attorney general has handed tech companies an ultimatum: build identity verification systems into your platforms by April 8, or his office starts filing lawsuits.

The deadline comes as a federal appeals court hears arguments this week on whether the state can legally force millions of users to prove who they are before accessing social media.

The law driving this, HB 3, bans anyone under 14 from social media entirely and requires parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds. It also forces adult content sites to verify visitors are 18 or older.

Attorney General James Uthmeier gave tech companies 30 days to implement age restrictions and 60 days to deploy parental consent mechanisms. “It is the law of the land,” he said at an Orlando event on March 9. Non-compliance means litigation.

What Florida is actually mandating is a digital ID checkpoint at the entrance to the internet. The law doesn’t specify which verification methods qualify as “reasonable.” It doesn’t cap how long platforms can retain identity documents. It doesn’t limit what platforms can do with the surveillance infrastructure once it’s built. Florida gets the policy win.

Users hand over their documents. The data sits in corporate systems indefinitely, available for breaches, subpoenas, and purposes nobody has disclosed yet.

Uthmeier even named TikTok and Discord specifically. Discord’s attempt to introduce digital ID age verification has been met with much backlash, especially after a leak over over 70,000 government IDs. Uthmeier appears unconcerned.

NetChoice, co-plaintiff in the legal challenge, named this directly: the law creates a security risk by “mandating the surrender of sensitive information.” That’s the part Florida’s child-protection framing is designed to obscure. Every minor blocked from TikTok requires millions of adults to first prove they aren’t minors. The verification burden falls on everyone.

The legal challenge, Computer & Communications Industry Association v. Moody, has moved through courts since Governor DeSantis signed HB 3 in 2024. A federal district judge in Tallahassee blocked enforcement in June, ruling the law “likely unconstitutional” as a restriction on protected speech. Two Trump-appointed judges on the 11th Circuit reversed that in November, staying the injunction and finding Florida likely to succeed.

CCIA president Matt Schruers said the law “violates the First Amendment by blocking and restricting minors, and likely adults as well, from using certain websites to view lawful content.” The “adults as well” clause isn’t incidental. Age verification systems routinely misidentify adults, forcing them through identity checks to access speech they have every legal right to reach.

Paul Taske of the NetChoice Litigation Center argued that “the government cannot set the rules of the road when it comes to accessing protected speech. That is a job best left to parents who can make individualized decisions to suit the needs of their family.”

Florida sold HB 3 as a response to addictive platform design, specifically push notifications and infinite scrolling that the DeSantis administration accused Big Tech of using to “exploit and harm” minors. Regulating those features directly was an option. Florida chose identity verification instead, a solution that does nothing about algorithmic manipulation but builds a permanent infrastructure linking real names to online accounts across the platforms that shape public discourse.

That infrastructure doesn’t get dismantled when a user turns 18. It doesn’t disappear when the political climate shifts. Governments that build mandatory digital ID systems for one purpose reliably find new purposes for them. Florida is constructing that system now, with a child-safety rationale that makes opposition easy to caricature and the long-term implications easy to ignore.