Some late Friday news.
A federal district court on Friday has issued more temporary blocks on provisions of a Texas law designed to restrict what kinds of materials and advertisements minors can see on social media and age verification requirements.
Judge Robert Pitman enjoined several provisions of the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act, also known as the SCOPE Act, calling the blocked sections “unconstitutionally vague.” While not blocking the law in its entirety, the injunction is not the first against the SCOPE Act and goes further than previous rulings to block what the law can restrict minors from seeing on social media.
The lawsuit was filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a first amendment activist group representing four plaintiffs, and Davis Wright Tremaine, a private media law firm. The groups have called the act overly broad and tailored to serve state interest, while state officials feel more oversight is needed to curtail the sometimes harmful effects of social media use on children.
The background: Passed in the 2023 Legislature as House Bill 18, supporters of the SCOPE Act hoped the law would give parents more control over what their children are exposed to online and how minors’ sensitive information is handled by social media companies. But a day before the law was set to go into effect, Pitman granted a temporary block of two sections of the law that regulated certain harmful content platforms could show to minors in a separate suit.
The new injunction goes further, blocking the same two sections as well as three additional provisions: two that would restrict certain ads from being displayed or directed specifically toward minors, and one requiring age verification. Both injunctions are temporary and only apply until final judgments are issued for each case.
“The Court enjoined every substantive provision of the SCOPE Act we challenged, granting even broader relief than its first preliminary injunction,” Davis Wright Tremaine partner Adam Sieff said in a statement.
Since the law’s passing, Texas also has attempted to curtail content it deems as inappropriate and in violation of the act, and in October, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued social media companies over alleged violations of the law. A section of the law cited in Paxton’s suit is one of the five temporarily blocked by the injunction Friday.
See here for some background. As noted, there was another lawsuit filed against the SCOPE Act before this one. It’s pretty common for multiple suits like these to get consolidated, but I can’t tell if that’s the case here. There’s other legal action out there involving Texas, the Internet, and various forms of censorship, including a different social media bill aimed at preventing those companies from moderating content that is currently blocked but increasingly meaningless, and of course the Pornhub situation, which could basically rewrite the First Amendment as we know it. Here’s FIRE’s press release if you want to know more about this one.