In Friday’s ruling, the justices noted the difference between the age verification requirement in the porn website case and the content filtering rule in the new case. “Unlike the age verification requirement we addressed in that case, the monitoring and filtering requirement (of the SCOPE Act) has to do with content filtering and is therefore superseded,” they found.
The Fifth Circuit and other appeals courts “have interpreted Section 230 as granting DSPs ‘broad immunity’ from ‘all claims arising from their publication of information created by third parties,’” the Fifth Circuit panel said. State law required websites to prevent exposure of known minors to material defined as obscene under Texas law and other content “that promotes, glorifies, or facilitates” suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, substance abuse, stalking, bullying, harassment, grooming, trafficking, and “child pornography or other sexual exploitation or abuse.”
paxton argument that Texas law imposes no liability for damages caused by the content they host. The law does not take precedence because it “imposes compliance duties, not publisher responsibility” and aligns with the child protection goals of Section 230, he argued.
Other parts of the law can be enforced
The Fifth Circuit judges did not accept Paxton’s argument. They said the law provides for enforcement of violations by the attorney general’s office and allows parents of minors to file actions seeking declaratory judgments and injunctive relief.
“Actions to enforce the monitoring and filtering requirement are claims that arise from the DSPs’ actions as publishers, that is, from their monitoring, selection, and removal of content, and are therefore directly preempted by Section 230,” the ruling says.
Friday’s decision was not a complete loss for Paxton because the Fifth Circuit determined that a group of students did not have standing to challenge the Texas law, meaning other parts of the law can be enforced. These require platforms to force users to register their ages before creating accounts, not to display ads targeting known minors, to make commercially reasonable efforts to prevent advertisers from targeting known minors with ads for illegal products or activities, and to verify that users are 18 or older if more than a third of the platform’s content is obscene.
