Students v. Paxton
Issue
In *Students v. Paxton*, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation argues that Texas's App Store Accountability Act — which requires parental consent before minors can download apps — regulates predatory engineering features like infinite scroll and autoplay rather than expressive content, and should therefore survive constitutional review under intermediate rather than strict scrutiny. The question turns on whether courts can distinguish between how an app is built and what it communicates — a line the Supreme Court explicitly declined to draw in *Moody v. NetChoice* (2024), leaving it unresolved going into this appeal.
What Happened
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation filed this amicus curiae brief in the Fifth Circuit on May 22, 2026, supporting Defendant-Appellant Ken Paxton and urging reversal of the district court's ruling that struck down the ASAA as unconstitutional. The brief makes four core arguments: that the ASAA targets design mechanisms rather than speech and is therefore content-neutral; that statutory exemptions for nonprofits and emergency apps do not trigger strict scrutiny under *Reed v. Town of Gilbert* because they track design characteristics rather than content; that a minor's act of downloading an app constitutes a commercial transaction governed by intermediate scrutiny under *Central Hudson*; and that parental-consent requirements are unremarkable exercises of state authority over minors, supported by a broad catalog of analogous Texas statutes. NCOSE relies heavily on *Uthmeier v. NetChoice* (11th Cir. 2025), which upheld a materially similar Florida law, and on the Fifth Circuit's own *Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton*, 95 F.4th 263 (2024), for the commercial-transaction framing.
Why It Matters
This brief pushes the Fifth Circuit to adopt a doctrinal framework — design regulation as content-neutral conduct — that, if accepted, would significantly expand state power to regulate how platforms engineer their products for minors without triggering the demanding requirements of strict scrutiny. The argument is sharpened by genuine uncertainty: *Moody* left open exactly where algorithmic curation ends and protected expression begins, meaning a receptive panel could use this case to draw that line in ways that would reshape both First Amendment doctrine and the broader landscape of minor-protection legislation. The exemption analysis is the argument's weakest link — if the Fifth Circuit finds that nonprofit-status-based carve-outs are speaker-based rather than design-based, strict scrutiny could apply regardless of the design-neutrality framing. The case is worth watching because it sits at the intersection of child safety, platform design liability, and unsettled post-*Moody* First Amendment doctrine, all in a circuit whose own precedent is already in play.
Related Filings
Other proceedings in the same litigation tracked by this monitor.
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