The Fifth Circuit ruled 2-1 on July 24, 2026 that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act preempts the core content-moderation mandate in Texas's Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, the state's 2023 minors'-safety law. In CCIA & NetChoice v. Paxton, Judges Dana Douglas and Patrick Higginbotham held that the law's requirement that platforms "monitor, screen, and delete" content harmful to minors amounts to treating platforms as publishers of third-party speech — precisely what 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1) forbids states from doing. Judge James Ho dissented, arguing that curation decisions are a platform's own speech and fall outside Section 230 entirely.
What Texas was trying to do
The SCOPE Act, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott on June 13, 2023 and effective September 1, 2024, is a serious legislative effort, not a symbolic one. Its Section 509.053 required covered platforms to build and maintain active defenses — hash-sharing systems, keyword databases tuned to filter-evasion tactics, human review teams, and researcher-accessible algorithm code — against a specific, named list of harms: content promoting suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, substance abuse, stalking, bullying, harassment, grooming, and trafficking. That list reads less like boilerplate and more like a response to real cases lawmakers had heard about. Texas's argument — that a state has a compelling interest in shielding minors from algorithmically amplified self-harm content, and that voluntary platform trust-and-safety programs have proven inconsistent — is not frivolous. A federal district court had already partially enjoined the monitoring provisions in August 2024, but Texas kept litigating because the underlying problem it identified is genuine.
Why Section 230 still controls
The majority's reasoning tracks the statute closely. Section 230(e)(3) bars "any cause of action" or "liability" under state law that is "inconsistent with" the section, and § 230(c)(1) bars treating an interactive computer service as the publisher of information provided by someone else. The panel drew a distinction that has recurred across nearly every state minors'-safety case since 2023: filtering content is publisher conduct, while filtering audiences — verifying who may access a service at all — is not. "Publishers do not filter audiences; they filter content," the majority wrote, and a mandate to make editorial judgments about which posts are too dangerous for a teenager to see is functionally identical to a defamation claim over which posts a platform chose to carry. That is exactly the category of claim Congress preempted in 1996. The court also rejected Texas's argument that the Supreme Court's Moody v. NetChoice (2024) recognition of platforms' First Amendment interest in curation somehow narrowed Section 230's separate statutory shield — the two protections, the majority said, overlap without conflicting.
What survived, and why that matters more than the headline
Critically, the panel did not strike down the SCOPE Act. It revived the age-verification requirement (Section 509.057) and the targeted-advertising restrictions (Sections 509.052 and 509.055), consistent with the Fifth Circuit's own prior ruling in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton upholding Texas's separate age-verification statute. That distinction is the article's real lesson: Section 230 protects editorial judgment about content, not a state's ability to regulate account-level practices like data collection, ad targeting, or age-gating. Legislatures that want durable minors'-safety laws should be writing around that line, not through it.
The pattern this confirms
This is not an isolated result. Minors'-safety statutes in Arkansas, Utah, Ohio, and Louisiana have run into the same wall on First Amendment or Section 230 grounds over the past two years, while narrower age-verification and parental-consent regimes have generally fared better in court. That consistency across circuits and administrations is a signal, not noise: state legislators keep drafting content-moderation mandates dressed up as child-safety bills, and courts keep drawing the same line between regulating access and dictating editorial judgment.
"Actions to enforce the monitoring and filtering requirement are claims stemming from [digital service providers'] actions as publishers ... and are thus squarely preempted by Section 230." — Judge Dana Douglas, majority opinion
Why this outcome is right
We take child online safety seriously, and the SCOPE Act's list of harms — grooming, self-harm content, eating-disorder material — describes genuine dangers. But a state-by-state patchwork of mandatory content-monitoring regimes, each with its own definition of "harmful," would force national platforms to build 50 different moderation systems or default to the most restrictive one, chilling lawful speech for adults and minors alike. Section 230 exists precisely to prevent that fragmentation while leaving room for states to legislate at the account level — who can sign up, what data can be collected, whether ads can target a 14-year-old. Congress, not a patchwork of circuit courts responding to state legislatures, remains the right body to update Section 230 if lawmakers believe platform content practices need a federal floor. Until then, Texas — and the roughly dozen states pursuing similar statutes — has a workable template sitting in the same opinion that just went against it: verify age, restrict data and ad targeting, and leave content moderation to the platforms and to Congress.