§ 143A.003.Waiver Prohibited

An anti-waiver provision, and an emphatic one.

Subsection (a): a waiver or purported waiver of the chapter’s protections is void as unlawful and against public policy, and a court or arbitrator may not enforce or give effect to it — notwithstanding any contract or choice-of-law provision.

Without this the chapter would be a dead letter. Every platform operates under terms of service the user accepts, and a clause consenting to moderation would waive the protection at the moment of signup.

Naming the arbitrator alongside the court is deliberate. Platform terms routinely require arbitration, and a prohibition binding only courts would leave the waiver enforceable in the forum where most of these disputes would land.

Subsection (b) is unusual drafting, and reads as a message to other courts: the prohibition is a public-policy limitation on contractual and other waivers of the highest importance and interest to this state, which the state is exercising and enforcing to the full extent permitted by the federal and Texas Constitutions.

That language is aimed at choice-of-law analysis. A forum applying another state’s law may decline to do so where it offends a fundamental public policy of its own — and the subsection is a legislative declaration that this is such a policy.

"To the full extent permitted" acknowledges the ceiling. A state cannot override federal law or constitutional limits by declaring its policy important, and the section does not claim to.

Read it with the venue and choice of law provision, which pursues the same objective from the procedural side.