Davis Wright Tremaine LLP Files First Amendment Challenge to Texas App Store Law

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AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct 16, 2025--

A federal lawsuit filed today by student advocacy organization Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) and two Texas minors challenges the constitutionality of Texas’s App Store Accountability Act, arguing the law violates the First Amendment by imposing sweeping restrictions on access to protected speech and information. Another lawsuit challenging the Act, brought by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, was filed earlier today.

Starting January 1, 2026, the law requires anyone in Texas—minor or adult—to prove their age before downloading any mobile application content. Teenagers are banned from downloading any app or making in-app purchases without parental consent. Parents must verify their identity and authority to provide such consent. And parents must provide a separate consent for every app download or in-app purchase.

The complaint alleges the Act violates the First Amendment on its face, defying the Supreme Court’s insistence in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association that governments have no “free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.” The Act imposes content-based prior restraints on speech that replace parents’ freedom to moderate their children’s access to sources for learning, communication, and creativity with “what the State thinks parents ought to want.”

The complaint describes the views of Vanessa Fernandez, mother of one of the minor plaintiffs, noting that she believes her son “deserves and benefits from having a certain amount of privacy and autonomy, including over his digital activities. The Act would require her to intrude on [his] privacy and autonomy to a degree she would not otherwise, effectively overriding her parental decision-making.”

The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, including partners Ambika Kumar, David M. Gossett, and Adam S. Sieff, counsel Abigail Everdell, and associates Celyra I. Myers, Erwin Reschke, and Haley Zoffer.

“The First Amendment does not permit the government to require teenagers to get their parents’ permission before accessing information, except in discrete categories like obscenity,” Kumar said. “The Constitution also forbids restricting adults’ access to speech in the name of protecting children. This law imposes a system of prior restraint on protected expression that is presumptively unconstitutional.”

The law’s reach extends far beyond social media to mainstream educational, news, and creative applications, including Wikipedia, search apps, and internet browsers; messaging services like WhatsApp and Slack; content libraries like Audible, Kindle, Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube; educational platforms like Coursera, Codecademy, and Duolingo; news apps from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN, and The Atlantic; and publishing tools like Substack, Medium, and CapCut.

Under the Act, SEAT, an organization that seeks to increase youth visibility and participation in policymaking, will be unable to reach audience members who are uncomfortable with submitting to age verification, as well as those under 18 whose parents are not comfortable submitting to both age-verification and parent-identification processes.

“SEAT relies on a variety of apps to provide information to its student members and broader youth audience about government policies that affect their lives, and to coordinate its political advocacy efforts," said Cameron Samuels (they/them), co-founder and Executive Director of SEAT. “More than this, SEAT’s constituents rely on a variety of app-based news, social media, publishing tools, and content libraries to communicate, organize, and express themselves politically and creatively. Students have just as much a right to access information as adults, and this law denies them that access.”

The minor plaintiffs, identified in the complaint as M.F. and Z.B., are high school students who use app-based platforms for educational, personal, and social purposes. The complaint notes that “Z.B., who is a student journalist, gathers news from social networking sites like X and shares her own journalism through social media platforms like Instagram, so her friends and schoolmates can access the information she and her newspaper colleagues have gathered.” And M.F., who “participates in debate at school and is a budding photographer,” “uses a variety of app-based social media platforms on his iPhone and iPad … to research topics for debate, read the news, connect with friends, find inspiration for his photography, and learn about new educational or professional opportunities.” The Act would jeopardize their ability to do so.

The Act’s age-verification mandate also forces disclosure of sensitive personal information, such as government-issued IDs. Sixty-six percent of Americans say they “are not comfortable sharing their identification documents or biometric information with online platforms,” and 70% say they are “uncomfortable with their children using such methods.”

Recent data breaches highlight these risks: A breach this summer of an app requiring identity verification resulted in over 72,000 images of users and identification cards being leaked online, with hackers reportedly creating a map to tie users to their locations. Another incident just this month, involving an age-verification vendor, resulted in the leak of 70,000 users’ photos.

This Texas lawsuit is part of a broader set of legal challenges to state age-verification and parental-consent laws being enacted across the country. Davis Wright Tremaine previously represented two of the same plaintiffs in obtaining a preliminary injunction against a different Texas social media law; the State’s appeal of that injunction is currently pending in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

The complaint, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas v. Paxton, seeks declaratory and injunctive relief to prevent enforcement of the Act’s unconstitutional provisions. The complaint is available here.

About Students Engaged in Advancing Texas

Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) represents a coalition of Texas students ranging from middle school to college-age who seek to increase youth visibility and participation in policymaking. SEAT provides students with hands-on opportunities for engaging in advocacy, legislative efforts, and education on issues of importance to youth.

About Davis Wright Tremaine

Davis Wright Tremaine LLP is an AmLaw 100 law firm with more than 600 lawyers representing clients based throughout the United States and around the world. Learn more at www.dwt.com.

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KEYWORD: UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA TEXAS

INDUSTRY KEYWORD: PUBLIC POLICY/GOVERNMENT LEGAL SOCIAL MEDIA STATE/LOCAL COMMUNICATIONS PROFESSIONAL SERVICES TECHNOLOGY APPS/APPLICATIONS

SOURCE: Davis Wright Tremaine LLP

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PUB: 10/16/2025 04:50 PM/DISC: 10/16/2025 04:49 PM

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