A federal judge has partially blocked a new Texas law by disallowing requirements that social platforms identify minors and filter content for their safety. The Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, signed last year, threatens free speech due to its “monitoring and filtering” requirements the court ruled as the basis for a temporary injunction. Under the law, registered users under 18 will be subject to limited data collection, target advertising bans and parental consent for financial transactions. SCOPE would affect a range of online services, with large social platforms a focus.

The law, also known as HB 18, imposes broad content monitoring requirements on platform operators, saying “services must implement a plan to ‘prevent the known minor’s exposure to harmful material,’ including content that promotes or ‘glorifies’ things like suicide, self-harm, substance abuse, and ‘grooming,’” writes The Verge, which calls the approach unusual for a U.S. law.

“Social media firms cannot be forced to block certain content from teens,” writes PhoneArena, noting that “the plaintiffs who initiated the legal action” against HB 18 “were tech industry groups NetChoice and the CCIA” (the Computer & Communications Industry Association). A third group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), also filed suit opposing the law.

NetChoice and CCIA argue the law “violates Texans’ fundamental rights, creates a disaster for their online privacy and security, and replaces parents with government bureaucrats.” The judge ruled partially in favor, putting an injunction in place as to the monitoring and filtering provisions.

“The ruling didn’t find that the entirety of HB 18 posed a threat to First Amendment-protected speech, and some provisions — like the data collection rules and the age verification for sites with large amounts of adult content — remain in force,” The Verge reports, explaining that “Texas already required age verification on adult sites.”

A Meta Platforms spokeswoman said in a statement to The Verge that “due to new laws in Texas, people in the state may experience some changes to our services including how teens and parents access and use our apps.” The Verge says TikTok didn’t respond to its request for comment.

In his ruling, Judge Robert Pitman wrote that “a state cannot pick and choose which categories of protected speech it wishes to block teenagers from discussing online” and “criticized the language used in the law, writing in his decision that terms like ‘glorifying’ and ‘promoting’ are ‘“politically charged’ and ‘undefined,’” notes Engadget.