Judge to Texas: You Can't Age-Gate the Internet Without Evidence

Summary

Judge To Texas: You Can’t Age-Gate The Entire Internet Without Evidence from the first-amendment-wins-for-now dept Over the summer, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority upended decades of traditional First Amendment standards to say that Texas could put in place an age verification law if that law was intended to keep kids away from porn. As we argued at the time, the ruling had all sorts of problems, but even leaving those aside, it was still pretty clearly limited solely to situations involving age gating adult content. Not news sites. Not fitness apps. Not therapy platforms. Porn. Texas, predictably, heard “you can age gate porn” and decided that meant “you can age gate everything.” Because why respect constitutional distinctions when you can just pretend they don’t exist? And Texas isn’t alone in this—states across the country have been rushing to pass sweeping age verification laws for social media and other content, because ignoring the First Amendment rights of children remains a proud bipartisan tradition. In Texas’s case, the legislature passed Senate Bill 2420, entitled the “App Store Accountability Act,” which would require age verification, parental controls, and warning labels on various app stores and apps. A couple of lawsuits were filed to challenge the law—one from CCIA, the trade group representing a bunch of internet companies, and another from a bunch of students who pointed out that the law violated their rights. Last week, judge Robert Pitman ruled in both cases, putting the law on hold and noting that the law pretty clearly violated the First Amendment, because the law is extremely overbroad and not at all narrowly targeted: Because strict scrutiny applies, Paxton must prove that SB 2420 is “the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state interest.” Free Speech Coalition, 606 U.S. at 484. Paxton has not proven this. First, it is far from clear that Texas has a compelling interest in preventing minors’ access to every single ca...