A district court has blocked the enforcement of certain parts of a law passed in Texas that would have limited online access to minors.
The law Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment Act (SCOPE) was passed in 2023 and signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott.
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The Act intends to prevent the known minor’s exposure to harmful material and other content that promotes, glorifies, or facilitates:
- (1) suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders;
- (2) substance abuse;
- (3) stalking, bullying, or harassment; or
- (4) grooming, trafficking, child pornography, or other sexual exploitation or abuse.
Last year, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) filed a lawsuit seeking to block the implementation and enforcement of the law.
In the preliminary injunction, FIRE stated, “This case concerns a brazen act of overt content-based censorship and prior restraint. Defying the Supreme Court’s consistent reaffirmation that governments have no ‘free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed,’ the motion reads. It “mandates age registration, prohibits young people in Texas from accessing and exchanging protected speech based on its subject matter, and bars Texans from sending and receiving directed communications based on their contents and intended audience. The Act also threatens the rights of Texans of all ages by compelling online intermediaries to enforce additional age-verification requirements triggered by a vague and arbitrary content-based threshold that will pressure online publishers to limit the expressive content they disseminate.”
On Friday, the district court stopped the enforcement of parts of the law, granting FIRE’s motion for a preliminary injunction.
“The court determined that Texas’s law was likely unconstitutional because its provisions restricted protected speech and were so vague that it made it hard to know what was prohibited,” said FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere. “States can’t block adults from engaging with legal speech in the name of protecting children, nor can they keep minors from ideas that the government deems unsuitable.”
FIRE says the specific provisions of the law which were blocked included content monitoring and filtering, targeted advertising bans, and age-verification requirements, ruling that these measures were unconstitutionally overbroad, vague, and not narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest.