A federal appeals court has upheld most provisions of a 2024 law aimed at protecting children from harmful and obscene material online. This reverses a lower court ruling that had blocked these provisions.
Under the SCOPE Act—Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment—digital service providers (DSPs) must register the age of users, prevent harm, create parental control tools, and aim to prevent advertisers from promoting adults-only services to minors.
The law also requires digital service providers that publish content, where over one-third of it is considered harmful, to employ an age verification method for all users.
Background
On June 13, 2023, Gov. Greg Abbottt signed the SCOPE Act into law.
Two separate pre-enforcement lawsuits arose, seeking preliminary injunctions to block the law before it was set to take effect on September 1, 2024.
The first—filed by the nonprofit organizations Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and NetChoice—challenged all of SCOPE as a content-based law. Specifically, the suit highlighted the law’s requirement that certain DSPs monitor and filter content accessible to minors to prevent exposure to several categories of potentially harmful speech.
The second—filed by the nonprofit group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT), two individual Texans, and the advertising firm The Ampersand Group—also challenged SCOPE’s requirement for certain DSPs to conduct age verification, to not display targeted advertisements to known minors, and to prevent advertisers from targeting known minors with unlawful products.
