5th Circuit blocks Texas law requiring websites to filter "harmful" speech
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit blocked Texas’s law that required websites to filter harmful speech for minors, citing preemption by Section 230. The ruling upheld a preliminary injunction granted to tech industry groups challenging the monitoring and filtering provisions of the SCOPE Act. Judges distinguished the decision from a prior case upholding an age‑verification requirement for porn sites, emphasizing that content filtering is barred by federal law.
- ▪The 5th Circuit ruled 2-1 that the Texas law’s monitoring and filtering requirement is preempted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
- ▪The Computer & Communications Industry Association and NetChoice successfully challenged the SCOPE Act provisions, securing a preliminary injunction.
- ▪Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the injunction but the appellate court did not reverse it, noting the law forces websites to act as publishers, which is prohibited under Section 230.
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Record
| Original publisher | Ars Technica |
| Canonical URL | https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/5th-circuit-blocks-texas-law-requiring-websites-to-filter-harmful-speech/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 27 Jul 2026 19:18:02 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-27T19:53:58.939Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-27T19:53:58.939Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Tp_hOELiecDT · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Unfiltered 5th Circuit blocks Texas law requiring websites to filter “harmful” speech Age verification is okay, but filtering is preempted by Section 230, judges find. Jon Brodkin – Jul 27, 2026 3:18 pm | 13 Credit: Getty Images | Kathryn8 Credit: Getty Images | Kathryn8 Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Texas cannot enforce a law’s requirement that websites block minors from seeing harmful speech, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled on Friday.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ars Technica.
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