Texas House Bill 18 requires social media companies to censor protected speech that “promotes, glorifies, or facilitates” ideas deemed harmful to minors. To implement its overbroad content prohibition, the statute requires companies to use imprecise, over-inclusive filtration measures guaranteed to sweep up innocent speech. The First Amendment prohibits Texas’s disproportionate infringements on the rights of minors to access protected speech.

The Cato Institute has joined the Student Press Law Center, Techfreedom, Wikimedia, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and ACLU of Texas to file an amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit challenging HB 18. Our brief argues that the millions of Americans—including 90 percent of American youth—who use social media are entitled to robust First Amendment protections.

Our brief explains that by singling out specific kinds of speech for suppression, Texas’s law triggers strict judicial scrutiny. And for good reason: Legislation that discriminates based on content can often mask disagreement with the ideas of a speaker under the guise of concern with the effects of speech.

The standard does not change when a law is targeted at minors. Minors are entitled to significant First Amendment protections, and these protections include not just the right to speak but also the right to access speech. Applying a relaxed standard to Texas’s suppression of speech on relevant topics like harassment and mental health would not protect youth. Rather, it would be a license to weaken their collective intellectual development as independent citizens.

Strict scrutiny demands that legislation be narrowly tailored to advance a state interest of the highest order. But there is no compelling interest in broadly restricting minors’ access to purportedly “unsuitable” speech. History shows repeated generational anxieties over new speech mediums, from Shakespeare’s plays to video games. Yet all were ultimately recognized as protected by the natural right to freedom of speech. Notably, HB 18 sweeps well beyond traditional prohibitions on obscene speech or speech facilitating criminal activity. Rather, it bans speech merely because of the passions it inflames in listeners—precisely the government interest ruled out by the First Amendment.

Even if Texas could establish a compelling interest, HB 18 remains egregiously overinclusive, encompassing clearly protected speech. For instance, speech that “facilitates eating disorders” could easily encompass factual nutritional information or medically accurate educational videos. Moreover, the law’s mandated filtering through vague “keywords,” hashtags, and emojis incentivizes companies to excessively censor content to avoid liability, resulting in unjustifiable suppression of protected speech.

The Supreme Court consistently rejects blanket speech prohibitions justified by isolated harms. Narrower regulations, such as parental notification requirements or artistic safe harbors, could adequately serve legitimate state interests without infringing on fundamental First Amendment freedoms. The Fifth Circuit should strike down HB 18 as unconstitutional.