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The Supreme Court is about to decide if children still have free speech rights

The Court’s hearing a case which asks if the internet has made the First Amendment obsolete.

It’s not a great time to be a parent. Young people get their information from platforms that did not exist just a few years ago and that many adults have never even heard of. Many parents, who did not grow up using TikTok or even YouTube, do not know how to counsel their children on how to function in a hyper-online world. Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, which argues that smartphones kicked off an epidemic of mental illness among young people, is a runaway bestseller for a reason.

The Texas state legislature, meanwhile, has a simple solution to this problem. What if we just take away young people’s First Amendment rights?

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

Last year, Texas enacted the “App Store Accountability Act” (“ASAA”), which would forbid anyone under the age of 18 from downloading any app to a “mobile device” without their parent or guardian’s explicit permission. The law also forces app sellers such as Apple’s App Store or Google Play to verify the age of every single person who uses them, and to determine who is the parent or guardian of every minor who uses an app store.

This law is blatantly unconstitutional. In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011), the Supreme Court struck down a California law that prevented minors from purchasing “violent video games” without an adult’s permission. Texas’s ASAA is the same law on steroids. It would prevent young people from downloading any commercially available software without their parent’s permission.

Nevertheless, a pair of lawsuits challenging the ASAA wound up before the United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, a far-right court that frequently ignores Supreme Court decisions that its judges do not like. And the 5th Circuit allowed this unconstitutional law to go into effect in an opinion that does not even mention Brown.

These two cases, known as Students Engaged in Advancing Texas v. Paxton and Computer & Communications Industry Association v. Paxton, are now before the Supreme Court on its “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the justices decide on a tight timeframe.

These two cases (which I will refer to collectively as “Students Engaged”) are the latest in a series of Supreme Court cases asking whether longstanding First Amendment protections must vanish in order to deal with new social problems created by the internet. Several of these cases ask specifically whether children and teenagers should still have First Amendment rights.

The Court, in other words, is currently weighing one of the most consequential questions of the modern era, and one that will fundamentally reshape public discourse in the United States if laws like the ASAA are upheld: Is freedom of speech obsolete?

Freedom of speech in the United States is a relatively new invention

For most of American history, the First Amendment’s guarantee that speakers, artists, and even political activists may speak freely was completely unenforced. At the end of World War I, for example, a unanimous Supreme Court held that a politician and union leader could be sentenced to ten years in prison for giving a speech........

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