§ 143A.002.Censorship Prohibited

The operative prohibition, and the heart of House Bill 20.

A social media platform may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person based on: the viewpoint of the user or another person; the viewpoint represented in the expression; or a user’s geographic location in this state or any part of this state.

Three protected objects. The user, their expression, and — distinctly — their ability to receive what someone else said. The third gives an audience member a claim, not only a speaker.

Viewpoint rather than subject matter is the test. A platform may decline to host a topic; it may not host one side of it. That distinction is borrowed from First Amendment doctrine, where viewpoint discrimination is the gravest form of speech restriction when practised by government.

The geographic limb addresses a predictable response: a platform could comply by withdrawing service from Texas or from part of it. The section forbids treating Texas users differently on that basis.

Subsection (b) reaches conduct off the platform: the section applies regardless of whether the viewpoint is expressed on a social media platform or through any other medium.

So a platform may not ban a user for what they said in a newspaper, a speech, or on a rival service.

The chapter has been in constitutional litigation since its enactment in 2021, on the argument that requiring a platform to carry speech is itself compelled speech. The United States Supreme Court addressed challenges to this chapter and a comparable Florida statute in 2024, and the litigation continued afterwards.