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A federal judge issued a last-minute partial block on a Texas law that would require some large web services to identify minors and filter what they see online. Called HB 18 or the Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, it was signed into law last year and was set to take effect over the weekend on September 1st. But a late Friday court ruling<\/a> determined that the \u201cmonitoring and filtering\u201d requirements posed a significant threat to online speech.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The SCOPE Act<\/a> requires a range of web services, particularly large social networks, to apply special rules to users whose registered age is under 18. That includes limiting data collection, banning targeted advertising, and not allowing financial transactions without parental consent. More unusually for a US-based law, it says services must implement a plan to \u201cprevent the known minor\u2019s exposure to harmful material,\u201d including content that promotes or \u201cglorifies\u201d things like suicide, self-harm, substance abuse, and \u201cgrooming.\u201d And any service whose content is deemed more than one-third harmful or obscene (as defined by an existing Texas statute<\/a>) must implement a \u201ccommercially reasonable age verification method.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The ruling didn\u2019t find that the entirety of HB 18 posed a threat to First Amendment-protected speech, and some provisions \u2014 like the data collection rules and the age verification for sites with large amounts of adult content \u2014 remain in force. (Texas already required age verification<\/a> on adult sites.) Meta and TikTok didn\u2019t reply to a request for comment on whether they were planning changes to comply with the new law.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But Pitman was highly critical of the monitoring and filtering rules. \u201cTerms like \u2018promoting,\u2019 \u2018glorifying,\u2019 \u2018substance abuse,\u2019 \u2018harassment,\u2019 and \u2018grooming\u2019 are undefined, despite their potential wide breadth and politically charged nature,\u201d he writes, echoing criticism from FIRE, which noted that terms like \u201cgrooming\u201d have been applied to all forms of LGBTQ content<\/a>. \u201cAt what point, for example, does alcohol use become \u2018substance abuse?\u2019 When does an extreme diet cross the line into an \u2018eating disorder?\u2019\u201d An attorney general enforcing the law could end up doing so selectively \u2014 by, say, deciding that posts or videos about marijuana were glorifying substance abuse \u201ceven if cigarette and alcohol use is not.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And the judge points out that while social networks would have to filter out controversial material, the same rules wouldn\u2019t apply to other media:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A teenager can read Peter Singer advocate for physician-assisted suicide in Practical Ethics<\/em> on Google Books but cannot watch his lectures on YouTube or potentially even review the same book on Goodreads. In its attempt to block children from accessing harmful content, Texas also prohibits minors from participating in the democratic exchange of views online. Even accepting that Texas only wishes to prohibit the most harmful pieces of content, a state cannot pick and choose which categories of protected speech it wishes to block teenagers from discussing online.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n While the injunction only covers a portion of the law, it makes HB 18 the latest state-level internet regulation to be at least partially blocked by courts, alongside California\u2019s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act<\/a> and other statutes in Arkansas, Ohio and Mississippi. (At the federal level, Congress is still working on the the Kids Online Safety Act<\/a>, which has raised its own censorship concerns<\/a> despite lawmakers\u2019 efforts to allay them.) The legal battle over the SCOPE Act isn\u2019t finished \u2014 but for now, Texas teens can keep watching videos about weed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n