The Texas online age verification law (the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act) has been temporarily blocked by a district judge who granted a preliminary injunction motion.
SCOPE is one of the laws cropping up in the US meant to better protect children on the internet, but critics are consistently pointing out that this type of legislation threatens minors’ protected speech and promotes online digital ID that curbs online anonymity for all.
We obtained a copy of the order for you here.
At the same time, adults’ biometric data or ID information (driver’s licenses, fingerprints) is collected by websites or apps, since the age verification mechanism here is that of exposing everyone’s age/identity, in order to determine if a user happens to be a minor.
Those unwilling to surrender this personal data are in effect banned from content that they constitutionally have the right to access.
The lawsuit was brought by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) non-profit on behalf of several plaintiffs and argues that SCOPE’s requirements regarding age verification, monitoring, filtering content, and targeted advertising bans are broad and vague to the point of being unconstitutional.
Northern District of Texas Judge Robert Pitman agreed that the argument was good enough to grant an injunction.
The court found that SCOPE was “likely” unconstitutional. Its vague nature around stifling protected speech is so pronounced that “it made it hard to know what was prohibited” – FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere explained.
One of the provisions that additionally complicate clear interpretation of the new rules is for websites to monitor how much of their content is of an adult nature or otherwise harmful to children, and then require age verification based on that percentage.
In his injunction decision, Judge Pitman expanded on what he called “indefinite meanings” of some of the definitions of harms that the law seeks to restrict access to, and noted that, “it is easy to see how an attorney-general could arbitrarily discriminate in his enforcement of the law.”
One of the points FIRE representatives have made is that they hope this development would help stem the tide of similar efforts now being championed by legislators in various US states – a trend the organization refers to as “an unconstitutional bandwagon.”
