Parents in Texas who counted on state law to keep self-harm, eating disorder, and bullying content out of their children’s social media feeds no longer have that protection — and neither do parents in any other state that has tried the same approach. On July 24, 2026, a federal appeals court ruled that Texas cannot force social media platforms to screen and remove potentially harmful content from minors’ feeds, because a federal statute enacted in 1996 preempts any state that tries to hold platforms liable as publishers. The ruling exposes a structural gap in child online safety law: every state that has attempted to mandate content-filtering for minors runs into the same federal wall, and only Congress has the authority to breach it.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a 2–1 decision in consolidated cases brought by two industry groups against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The majority, written by Circuit Judge Dana Douglas and joined by Senior Circuit Judge Patrick Higginbotham, held that the content monitoring-and-filtering requirement of Texas House Bill 18 — the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act, or SCOPE Act — is preempted by Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act. At the same time, the court upheld the law’s age-verification mandate and dismissed a separate set of challengers for lack of legal standing.
The ruling simultaneously tells states what they can and cannot do: they may require platforms to confirm users’ ages before granting account access, but they cannot compel those same platforms to screen, rank, or remove content based on its subject matter once users are inside. That bifurcation is now the legal architecture for every state attempting to protect children online.
What HB 18 Required — and What the Court Blocked
Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed HB 18 in June 2023, with its provisions taking effect September 1, 2024. The statute was among the most comprehensive state attempts to regulate social media’s interactions with minors. It required digital service providers to develop and implement a strategy to prevent minors from encountering content that promotes, glorifies, or facilitates suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, substance abuse, stalking, bullying, harassment, grooming, trafficking, and child sexual exploitation. It also required parental consent before collecting data on users under 18, restricted targeted advertising directed at minors, and mandated that platforms whose content is more than one-third “obscene” verify users’ ages before granting access.
The monitoring-and-filtering provision was the law’s most expansive protection — and the one the court has now blocked for the second time. A federal district court first enjoined it in August 2024, finding it was likely preempted by Section 230 and facially unconstitutional. The district court in the companion case widened the injunction further in February 2025, blocking targeted advertising restrictions as well. Attorney General Paxton appealed both decisions to the Fifth Circuit, which consolidated the cases.
Section 230: Why States Cannot Set Content Standards for Platforms
The legal mechanism that blocked HB 18’s filtering mandate is one sentence, 26 words long: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Congress enacted Section 230 in 1996 specifically to prevent the chilling effect that would result from holding platforms liable for every piece of content their users post.
Writing for the majority, Judge Douglas applied the Fifth Circuit’s own precedent from Doe v. MySpace, Inc. (2008) and A.B. v. Salesforce, Inc. (2024) to reach a straightforward conclusion. HB 18’s monitoring-and-filtering requirement would hold platforms liable for their decisions about monitoring, screening, and deletion of content — exactly the category of conduct Section 230 immunizes. Allowing the requirement, the majority wrote, would expose providers to sweeping state-set publication standards, treating them not merely as publishers but as publishers subject to sweeping state controls.
The majority acknowledged the discomfort of the holding. Section 230 “may raise the specter” that it functions as a “get-out-of-jail free card” for social media companies, the opinion noted — directly quoting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s 2024 dissent from a denial of certiorari in a case involving Snap. But the majority concluded that Congress, not state legislatures, must decide whether to narrow that immunity.
What Does the Ruling Mean for Parents Right Now?
The practical consequence is that HB 18’s self-harm and bullying content filter has never gone into effect — and now has no path to doing so unless either Congress acts or the Supreme Court overturns the preemption analysis. The age-registration requirement, which requires platforms to record users’ ages at account creation, does remain active. But age registration without accompanying content-filtering obligations leaves platforms with knowledge of a user’s age and no state-mandated duty to act on it.
How Age Verification Survived — And What It Still Costs Privacy
The age-verification portion of HB 18 — which requires platforms whose content is more than one-third “harmful material” to confirm users are 18 or older before granting access — survived on a different legal track. The Supreme Court cleared that path in its June 2025 ruling in Free Speech Coalition Inc. v. Paxton, which upheld a materially similar Texas age-verification law for pornographic websites in a 6–3 decision. In that case, the Court applied intermediate scrutiny and held that age-verification mandates only “incidentally burden” protected speech because they regulate access to content rather than targeting the content itself.
The Fifth Circuit applied that precedent directly to HB 18’s age-verification requirement, holding that the Supreme Court’s analysis foreclosed any challenge to it.
Age verification, however, is not a cost-free protection. Every mechanism that goes beyond a user typing their own birthdate — and self-declaration is widely considered ineffective because minors simply enter a false date — requires collecting and transmitting personal identity data. Several age-verification companies have experienced significant security incidents since 2024:
The identity verification firm AU10TIX, used by X, TikTok, and Uber, exposed users’ driver’s licenses in 2024 after an employee’s credentials were compromised and left accessible for over a year. A cyberattack on a third-party customer support and age-verification vendor exposed approximately 70,000 Discord users’ government ID photos in October 2025. And in early 2026, a separate privacy controversy over undisclosed data practices led Discord to end its UK pilot partnership with identity verification firm Persona after users and researchers raised concerns about government data-sharing ties. These are not hypothetical risks. They are documented outcomes of centralizing identity data at third-party verification companies.
Privacy-preserving alternatives exist. Zero-knowledge proofs allow a user to demonstrate they meet an age threshold mathematically, without transmitting their identity to either the platform or the verifying entity. HB 18 does not require their use.
What the Dissent Gets Right — and Why It Matters
Circuit Judge James Ho, appointed to the Fifth Circuit by President Donald Trump, concurred in part and dissented in part. His disagreement is not a minor quibble about statutory interpretation. It is the most direct challenge to the majority’s Section 230 analysis — and the same argument that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit adopted in Anderson v. TikTok, Inc. (2024).
Ho’s core argument: Section 230 protects platforms from liability for content “provided by another information content provider.” When a platform curates its algorithm to determine what content a user sees, that curation is the platform’s own expressive speech — not the publication of third-party content. The Supreme Court recognized as much in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC (2024), when it held that platforms engage in protected First Amendment expression when they exercise editorial discretion over their feeds.
Under Ho’s framework, HB 18’s monitoring-and-filtering mandate doesn’t hold platforms liable as publishers of third-party content — it holds them liable for their own curation standards. And curation, being first-party speech, falls outside Section 230’s text.
If Ho’s analysis ultimately prevails — at the Fifth Circuit en banc, at the Supreme Court, or by persuading other circuits — it would mean states can set baseline curation standards for minors without running into Section 230. The Third Circuit has already reached that conclusion in Anderson v. TikTok.
States Cannot Mandate Content Filtering Without Federal Action
The ruling’s deepest implication is structural: the content-filtering mandate is not just blocked in Texas. The same Section 230 preemption barrier that blocked HB 18 applies in every state that enacts comparable legislation. Courts have already blocked similar laws in California, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Every one of those injunctions rests on the same preemption logic the Fifth Circuit majority affirmed Thursday.
This means the entire state-by-state legislative strategy for mandating self-harm, eating disorder, and bullying content filtering for minors is now legally foreclosed — at least until the Supreme Court revisits Section 230’s scope or Congress acts. Congress has repeatedly stalled on federal children’s online safety legislation. The U.S. House passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act in June 2026, but Senate sponsors declared the bill dead on arrival that same week. There is currently no federal law that mandates content filtering for minors on social media.
The result is a genuine protection gap. States can require platforms to register users’ ages. States can require platforms to verify ages before granting access to obscene content. But states cannot require platforms to do anything with that age data — cannot require them to filter self-harm content, cannot require them to restrict eating disorder promotion, cannot require them to screen out bullying — without running into Section 230.
What Paxton and Texas Are Likely to Do Next
Texas’s next procedural steps are well-defined. Attorney General Paxton’s office is widely expected to petition the full Fifth Circuit for en banc review — a hearing before all active circuit judges rather than a three-judge panel. The 2–1 split and Judge Ho’s vigorous dissent provide exactly the kind of internal disagreement that typically supports an en banc petition. If en banc review is denied, Paxton can seek a writ of certiorari from the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court has several reasons to take such a case. The Fifth Circuit’s majority opinion directly conflicts with the Third Circuit’s Anderson v. TikTok holding on whether curation constitutes first-party speech exempt from Section 230. A circuit split on a question this consequential — whether states can mandate any content standards for minors on social media — is precisely the kind of case the Supreme Court exists to resolve.
Where Social Media Platforms Stand
For the platforms most directly affected — Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads), Snap, YouTube, and TikTok — the ruling preserves existing content-moderation autonomy on the filtering question while confirming that age-verification infrastructure must be in place in Texas. The age-registration requirement, which was not the subject of the court’s main holding, remains active and enforceable.
The practical consequence for platforms: they continue to operate under their own content-moderation policies rather than state-mandated filtering standards. What they cannot do is ignore age-registration compliance — and what Texas can still enforce against them under the portions of HB 18 that survived is the collection and protection of age-related data.
TikTok, whose parent company ByteDance is headquartered in China, operates under a distinct set of legal obligations not addressed by HB 18 or this ruling. Chinese law, including the National Intelligence Law (2017) and the Data Security Law (2021), legally compels Chinese companies to cooperate with national intelligence requests regardless of where a company’s servers are located. That structural legal condition applies to any data TikTok collects under HB 18’s age-registration requirements, independently of the content-moderation question the Fifth Circuit addressed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Fifth Circuit ruling mean Texas’s SCOPE Act is no longer in effect?
Not entirely. The ruling blocks the law’s content monitoring-and-filtering mandate — the requirement that platforms screen and remove content promoting self-harm, eating disorders, and bullying for users under 18. That provision has now been held preempted by Section 230 and remains blocked. Other provisions survived: the age-registration requirement (users must disclose their ages at account creation), the parental consent rules for data collection, and the age-verification requirement for platforms whose content is predominantly obscene. The monitoring-and-filtering protection — which most parents likely thought of as the law’s central protection — is the piece that is gone.
Why can’t Texas just pass a new law to work around Section 230?
Section 230 is a federal statute, and under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, federal law preempts any state law that conflicts with it. The Fifth Circuit majority held that any state law that holds platforms liable for their decisions about monitoring, screening, or deleting user content — however that obligation is framed in state legislation — runs into Section 230’s text. The only ways around that are: (1) Congress amends or narrows Section 230 to carve out state child safety mandates; (2) the Supreme Court adopts Judge Ho’s curation-as-first-party-speech analysis and holds that Section 230 doesn’t cover curation decisions; or (3) the Supreme Court overrules its own interpretation of Section 230. None of those is within Texas’s power to accomplish unilaterally.
Does age verification protect children on social media if content filtering does not?
Age verification and content filtering do different things. Age verification establishes who the user is — whether a person is 13, 16, or 22 before they create an account. Content filtering determines what that user sees after they’re inside the platform. HB 18’s age-registration requirement, which survived, gives platforms the data to know a user is a minor. But without the content-filtering mandate, platforms have no state legal obligation to do anything differently for that registered minor. Age verification is also not privacy-neutral: it typically requires submitting identity documents to third-party companies that have experienced documented data breaches, and privacy-preserving alternatives like zero-knowledge proofs are rarely required by law.
What does this ruling mean for parents in states other than Texas?
The ruling has direct national implications. The Section 230 preemption analysis the Fifth Circuit applied is not specific to HB 18 — it is a general legal conclusion about the kind of content-filtering mandate states can and cannot enact. Courts have already used the same reasoning to block similar laws in California, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Any state that passes a law requiring platforms to filter specific categories of content for minor users now faces the same preemption barrier. Parents relying on state child safety legislation to protect their children from harmful content should understand that, until federal legislation passes or the Supreme Court revises Section 230’s scope, no state can legally mandate the filtering protections these laws promised.
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