- Tension: Lawmakers keep treating “ban targeted ads to minors” as a narrow, easily defensible rule, but courts keep finding that restricting which ads a platform can show functions as a speech restriction, not a data-privacy rule.
- Noise: Coverage of the ruling tends to flatten “Texas’s law was blocked” into one event, when it’s actually the product of two separate lawsuits that produced two different rulings, each one blocking a different slice of the law.
- Direct Message: The ad-targeting ban didn’t survive contact with the First Amendment the first time a court looked at it closely. It just took a second lawsuit to get a court to look.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
A Texas law banning platforms from showing targeted ads to minors lasted less than two years without ever being enforced. It survived one legal challenge, then failed the next — both decided by the same federal judge, in two separate lawsuits that most coverage treats as a single event.
What the SCOPE Act actually required
Texas passed the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act, known as the SCOPE Act, in the 2023 legislative session as House Bill 18. Beyond the advertising restriction, the law required social platforms to register the age of new users, deploy filtering technology against “harmful” material, and block minors from content that “promotes,” “glorifies,” or “facilitates” eating disorders, self-harm, substance abuse, or “grooming … or other sexual exploitation or abuse.” Two separate coalitions sued to block it: NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association on one side, and a group led by Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) and the Austin ad agency Ampersand Group, represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, on the other.
The first ruling left the ad ban standing
On August 30, 2024, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman granted NetChoice and CCIA’s request to block the SCOPE Act’s content-monitoring and filtering requirements, ruling that Texas “cannot pick and choose which categories of protected speech it wishes to block teenagers from discussing online.” But that same ruling denied the plaintiffs’ request to block the targeted-advertising provision. Pitman wrote at the time that it wasn’t immediately apparent to him that the ad restriction was unconstitutional, though he left the door open to revisiting it. For a few months, the ban on showing targeted ads to minors was the one part of the SCOPE Act still standing.
The second lawsuit finished the job
That opening let the SEAT and Ampersand Group coalition proceed with its own, broader challenge. On February 7, 2025, Pitman ruled again — this time granting FIRE’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the targeted-advertising ban along with the content-monitoring and age-verification requirements. Davis Wright Tremaine partner Adam Sieff said the court “enjoined every substantive provision of the SCOPE Act we challenged, granting even broader relief than its first preliminary injunction,” according to reporting from The Texas Tribune, which noted the new injunction blocked the same two sections as the first ruling plus three additional provisions. In other words: the ad ban wasn’t blocked twice by the same ruling. It survived the first case, then failed the second.
Why the ad ban specifically failed First Amendment scrutiny
Pitman applied strict scrutiny and found Texas hadn’t shown the restriction was narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest. “The targeted advertising requirements exclusively target speech, only a small portion of which, such as child pornography or defamation, falls outside First Amendment coverage,” he wrote. He also questioned the law’s internal logic: “Why, if the very use of targeted advertising toward minors creates a harm so acute as to create a compelling state interest, can a teenager view a targeted advertisement on a sports or shopping website but not on a social platform?” One of the plaintiffs, Ampersand Group, had argued the ban would have stopped it from running targeted ads warning teens about fentanyl risks and signs of sex trafficking — the exact kind of speech the state said it wanted minors to see less of, blocked by a law aimed at protecting them.
The law is still not resolved
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the February 2025 ruling to the Fifth Circuit immediately, and the case remains there. Both of Pitman’s injunctions are preliminary and temporary — they block enforcement while the underlying challenges continue, rather than settling the SCOPE Act’s constitutionality for good. As of this summer, no final judgment has been issued in either case, and the ad-targeting ban remains unenforceable in the meantime. FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere framed the ruling as a warning beyond Texas alone: age-verification and content-restriction laws aimed at minors have also been enjoined in California, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Ohio, part of a pattern of state legislatures passing laws that courts keep finding don’t survive First Amendment review.
For platforms operating in Texas, the practical result is a split screen. The targeted-advertising ban that would have applied to minors remains unenforceable while the appeal is pending, so platforms serving Texas users face no state-level restriction on ad targeting to teens right now. That’s a different legal position than the one taking shape in Arkansas, where a separate law banning targeted advertising to minors became enforceable this same month with no injunction in place. Two states, same underlying policy goal, and for now, opposite legal status.
