The US District Court for the Western District of Texas has issued an order in the case brought against the Texas SCOPE Act (House Bill 18), approving in part a preliminary injunction.
The request has been granted against the provision requiring social media companies to block teens from accessing certain types of “harmful” content.
However, the court decided to allow online age registration through digital ID requirements from the same act to remain in place. The law, which was to come into force on September 15, is designed to make major web services filter what minors can access on the internet, but also identify them.
Other rules from the SCOPE Act prohibit large social media companies from targeted advertising of those under 18 and limit what data can be collected from them.
Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton was the defendant in the case, with corporate groups Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and NetChoice as the plaintiffs.
These organizations, which represent the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, X, PayPal, Uber, and more, are now declaring victory “for free speech” and referring to the access restrictions envisaged by the law as a “key censorship requirement.”
According to a NetChoice press release, the access-limiting measures that the court found exclusively targeted speech, and for that reason, “likely” represented First Amendment violation.
In addition, the order found the SCOPE Act to be, regarding these provisions, “overbroad, overly restrictive, and underinclusive.”
NetChoice is framing the ruling as yet another instance in a growing number of cases of a federal court “blocking government censorship” when it comes to lawful content and speech on the internet.
The group representing massive corporations said that it has been successful in injunction requests against four more states whose laws create what NetChoice calls “an age-gate.”
However, that’s not the same as age verification, which NetChoice chose not to mention in its statement regarding the ruling. Namely, the court’s decision left data collection and age verification out of the preliminary injunction.
The latter rule applies to sites that are deemed to contain “large amounts of adult content” – even though they are not adult sites.
