As a queer, brown teenager growing up in a conservative part of Texas, Sarah Philips, a campaigner for Fight for the Future, said the internet served as a place to find community. “Most people I know with that experience looked to some sort of online connection when they didn’t find it in-person,” Philips reflected. Back in October, with Texas poised to restrict minors’ access to social media and other apps in 2026, student organizers took the issue to court.
Texas and federal lawmakers are seeking to expand online age verification requirements to limit minors’ internet use, citing cyberbullying, harmful content, and criminal extortion risks. “Today’s youth are robbed of their innocence far more easily than ever before,” Joel Thayer, president of the Digital Progress Institute, told the U.S. House on Dec. 2.
The Texas App Store Accountability Act (Senate Bill 2420), which was scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, required that all Texans verify their age when creating an account on app stores on platforms like Apple and Google, and mandated parent permission for every single app download and purchase made by a minor, with parents also needing to verify their age each time.
Per the bill, Apple, Google, Amazon, and other app software companies would be required to verify age using a “commercially reasonable method,” such as uploading a picture of one’s driver’s license, and assign age ratings for every app and in-app purchase.
But as of last Tuesday, Dec. 23, the law is blocked from taking effect through a preliminary injunction. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled the act a likely violation of the First Amendment after hearing two conjoined lawsuits the previous week: one brought by two high schoolers and the student advocacy group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, and a second by the Computer and Communications Industry Association.
“Youth deserve that privacy – not only data privacy, but privacy from parents,” Cameron Samuels, executive director of the plaintiff, SEAT, told the Chronicle before the decision was released. “We deserve to hold that agency and decision-making.”
“The Act is akin 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,” Pitman wrote in the order against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the would-be enforcer of the act. Pitman also pointed to age verification requirements for websites containing “sexual material” that already exist in Texas.
The attorney general appealed the decision the same day, seeking to overturn the injunction order blocking the act from taking effect.
“For LGBTQ+ teens in particular, online communities are a huge resource if your family, or your household, or your religious community, or your school aren’t affirming and accepting places for you.”
Sarah philips, campaigner for fight for the future
“We built this bill to equip parents with common sense tools to protect their kids AND to survive court challenges by those who may have lesser priorities. We are committed to seeing it through,” the bill’s author, state Sen. Angela Paxton, wrote in a statement.
Amid lawmakers’ claims that increased parent oversight would make the internet a safer place for children and teens, advocacy groups like Fight for the Future, the Genders and Sexualities Alliance Network, and SEAT argue that an expansion of existing age verification requirements to entire app stores poses a safety risk, especially for LGBTQ+ youth.
“For LGBTQ+ teens in particular, online communities are a huge resource if your family, or your household, or your religious community, or your school aren’t affirming and accepting places for you,” Philips said. “Online ID check laws functionally are creating a system where young people would be fenced off from those spaces.”
Critics of online age verification requirements also argue that government or corporate collection of personal data, such as driver’s licenses or AI-evaluated face scans, is a privacy and surveillance risk, pointing to a Discord data breach in October in which 70,000 government IDs may have been leaked through a third-party company who used them to verify user’s ages.
“There are so many social media outlets and generative AI services that people use as search engines now,” said Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project. “Imagine that service has been required to verify your age, has your government ID linked to your account, and that service experiences a data breach. … The most sensitive thing you have ever looked up [would] be linked to your identity.”
Maya LaFlamme, co-executive director of the GSA Network, connected the act to Senate Bill 12, also being challenged in court right now, as a similar push for increased “parental rights” in the name of protecting children. The law, in part, prohibits cultural and queer affinity groups in Texas public schools. “We see both as intentions to limit access to online and in-person communities that keep queer, trans, and Two Spirit youth connected, safe, and honestly alive,” LaFlamme said. “Safety does not equal censorship.”
While the act is blocked for now, the debate over how to best “childproof” the internet remains alive at the state and federal level. LaFlamme argues that young people should be brought to the table to inform how such legislation is crafted.
“We just can’t take a bunch of lawmakers who are afraid of the internet and afraid of, quite frankly, what they don’t know, and let them sell our data to corporations,” LaFlamme said. “Let’s take our time and ask. It’s not going to be a quick answer.”
This article appears in January 2 • 2026.