Social networks can’t be forced to filter content for children, judge says

A federal judge put a last-minute partial block on a Texas law that would require some big web services to identify minors and filter what they see online. Called HB 18, or the Protecting Children Online Through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, it was signed into law last year and was supposed to go into effect over the weekend of Sept. 1. But a The court’s decision came late Friday evening It determined that “monitoring and filtering” requirements pose a significant threat to online speech.

The SCOPE Act A range of web services, particularly large social networks, are required to impose special rules on users whose registered age is under 18. This includes limiting data collection, banning targeted advertising, and not allowing financial transactions without parental consent. More unusually for a U.S.-based law, it says services must implement a plan to “prevent known minors from being exposed to harmful content,” including content that promotes or “glorifies” things like suicide, self-harm, substance abuse, and “grooming,” and any service whose content is more than one-third considered harmful or obscene (as defined by a Current Texas statutes) must implement “commercially appropriate age verification methods”.

The decision did not find that the entirety of HB 18 threatened speech protected by the First Amendment, and some provisions — like data collection rules and age verification for sites with large amounts of adult content — remain in effect. (Texas already Required age verification (On adult sites.) Meta and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment on whether they plan to make changes to comply with the new law.

But Pittman is critical of many of the monitoring and filtering rules. “Terms such as ‘propaganda’, ‘glorification’, ‘substance abuse’, ‘harassment’, and ‘training’ remain undefined, despite their potential broadness and politically charged nature,” he writes, echoing criticism from FIRE, which noted that terms such as “training” have been applied to All kinds of LGBTQ content“At what point, for example, does alcohol use turn into ‘substance abuse’? When does an extreme diet cross the line into an ‘eating disorder’?” An attorney general enforcing the law could do so selectively — say, deciding that posts or videos about marijuana are glorifying substance abuse “even if cigarette and alcohol use are not.”

And the judge said that although the social network must filter controversial content, the same rules will not apply to other media:

A teen might read Peter Singer’s advocacy for physician-assisted suicide practical ethics He can’t watch his lectures on YouTube, let alone on Google Books, or possibly even review the same book on Goodreads. In its effort to prevent children from accessing harmful content, Texas also prevents minors from participating in the democratic exchange of ideas online. Even acknowledging that Texas wants to restrict only the most harmful content, a state cannot choose which categories of protected speech it wants to prevent teens from discussing online.

Though the injunction covers only a portion of the law, it makes HB 18 the latest state-level internet regulation to be at least partially blocked by the courts. California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act and other statutes in Arkansas, Ohio, and Mississippi. (At the federal level, Congress is still working on this Children’s Online Protection Actwho has picked up Self-censorship concerns The legal battle over the SCOPE Act is far from over (despite efforts by legislators to placate them) — but for now, Texas teens can continue watching videos about marijuana.