hortly before Christmas, US District Judge Robert Pitman issued injunctions in companion cases, Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) v. Paxton and Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) v. Paxton. In doing so, he preliminarily blocked enforcement of Texas’s App Store Accountability Act (Senate Bill 2420), a measure whose supporters claim only “regulates contracts with minors,” not “speech or content.”

That government-friendly framing, however, didn’t hold up. Through an unconstitutional combination of age-verification, parental-verification, parental-consent, and content-ratings mandates, the Act imposes onerous burdens on app developers and app stores while severely restricting minors’ access to what Pitman called a “vast universe of speech” protected by the First Amendment.

Just how broad is the Act? Pitman analogized it “to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book.” It’s so sweeping that anyone under age 18 must first obtain parental permission to download “apps providing a wide variety of information, content, and forms of expression protected by the First Amendment, such as Coursera, Spotify, YouTube, ESPN, Kindle, the Austin-American Statesman app, and the New York Times app, to name a small few.”

Pitman readily acknowledged “broad support for protecting children when they use apps” and Texas’s interest in “preventing minors from accessing harmful material.” He also noted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s concerns about “the impacts of social media on youth” and apps posing a “health hazard,” as well as Paxton’s contention about the Act’s interest in “mitigating the impact of excessive phone use and overall screen time, algorithmic targeting, and artificial intelligence on youth users of social media.”

Noble intentions, however, don’t give lawmakers a pass from complying with entrenched First Amendment principles that protect minors’ rights to access and engage with lawful speech, as well as the rights of app developers and stores to create and distribute vehicles for conveying such expression. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick wrote, “you can’t just run into federal court screaming ‘but think of the children’ and expect judges to hand you a blank check to age gate the entire internet.”

Indeed, Pitman concluded the Act likely: (1) “violates the First Amendment,” (2) fails the demanding strict scrutiny standard of judicial review, as well as the more forgiving, government-deferential intermediate scrutiny test, and (3) includes “unconstitutionally vague” obligations. Pitman’s easy-to-comprehend, 20-page opinions in both CCIA and SEAT provide numerous lessons for lawmakers who’re concerned about safeguarding app-using minors. Without going into the legalese, here are four takeaways, accompanied by illustrative snippets from Pitman’s decisions.

Consider Alternatives to Speech-Restrictive Legislation. Texas easily could have incentivized companies to provide “voluntary content filters or application blockers” and adopted its own program to educate “children and parents on the importance of using such tools.” Alas, it didn’t.

Respect Minors’ First Amendment Rights. Pitman observed that in “attempt[ing] to block children from accessing harmful content on select apps, Texas also prohibits minors from participating in the democratic exchange of views online by curtailing their access to all apps.”

Draft Narrowly, Targeting Only Speech Proven to Cause Harm. Pitman noted that:

nothing in the record suggests . . . teens suffer from mental health disorders due to using an app for their debate team preparation . . . [or] reading the news on CNBC . . . or the New York Times, or accessing e-books via Kindle, even though those apps are age-restricted and subject to parental override under the Act in the same way as social media.

Blanket assertions of sweeping health problems and those lacking an evidence-supported “direct, causal link” between speech and harm won’t pass legal muster and rightly so. As Professor Eric Goldman asserts, “permitting censors to broadly justify censorship on ‘public health’ grounds would take society down a clearly dangerous and unsustainable path, as is the case in most authoritarian regimes.”

Don’t Mandate a Rating System Without Providing Guidance. Texas’s Act requires app developers to “assign an age rating to every app and every feature available for in-app purchase based on four age categories,” but it “provides no guidance to app developers about how to assign an age rating” and holds them (and app stores) “liable for getting age ratings wrong.” That, Pitman wrote, renders the Act “impermissibly vague.”

Ultimately, Pitman’s opinions represent free-speech victories for multiple stakeholders. As CCIA senior vice president Stephanie Joyce encapsulated it, they “preserve the First Amendment rights of app stores, app developers, parents, and younger internet users” and safeguard “parents’ inviolate right to use their own judgment in safeguarding their children online using the myriad tools our members provide.” Whether these wins will hold up on appeal with the sometimes social media-unfriendly Fifth Circuit remains to be seen.