Texas minors are also challenging the law
The Texas App Store Accountability Act is similar to laws enacted by Utah and Louisiana. The Texas law is expected to go into effect on January 1, 2026, while the Utah and Louisiana laws will go into effect in May and July, respectively.
The Texas law is also being challenged in another lawsuit filed by a student advocacy group and two Texas minors.
“The First Amendment does not permit the government to require teenagers to obtain parental consent before accessing information, except in discrete categories such as obscenity,” attorney Ambika Kumar of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP said in an announcement of the lawsuit. “The Constitution also prohibits restricting adults' access to expression in the name of protecting children. This law imposes a system of prior restriction on protected expression that is presumptively unconstitutional.”
Davis Wright Tremaine LLP said the law “reaches well beyond social media and extends to mainstream educational, news and creative applications, including Wikipedia, search apps and internet browsers; messaging services such as WhatsApp and Slack; content libraries such as Audible, Kindle, Netflix, Spotify and YouTube; educational platforms such as Coursera, Codecademy and Duolingo; news apps from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN and the Atlantic; and publishing tools such as Substack, Medium and CapCut.”
Both lawsuits against Texas argue that the law is undermined by the Supreme Court's 2011 decision Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Associationwho struck down a California law that restricted the sale of violent video games to children. That's what the Supreme Court said Brown that a state's power to protect children from harm “does not include a free-floating power to limit the ideas to which children may be exposed.”
The tech industry has sued Texas over multiple laws regarding content moderation. In 2022, the Supreme Court blocked a Texas law that bars major social media companies from moderating posts based on a user's point of view. The lawsuit in that case is still ongoing. In a separate case decided in June 2025, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas law requiring age verification on porn sites.
