Who benefits from Texas’s anti-SLAPP law?

Read Part 1 of our special analysis series about the Texas Citizens Participation Act, which addresses claims that anti-SLAPP cases are clogging up Texas appeals courts.

The Texas Citizens Participation Act provides essential protections for defendants in the state facing what are known as strategic lawsuits against public participation. Such SLAPP suits are brought not to win, but to intimidate their targets into silence. The TCPA serves to discourage these frivolous claims by providing defendants with an avenue to dismiss SLAPPs early, before a lawsuit becomes burdensome and expensive.

In a previous special analysis, we addressed claims that TCPA motions to dismiss had been overwhelming the dockets of appellate courts in Texas. Contrary to those claims, we found that anti-SLAPP motions made up about half a percentage point of the state’s total civil appellate workload from fiscal years 2011 through 2023. 

Opponents of the TCPA have been levying another argument against the law: that it primarily benefits large media companies, not local news outlets or ordinary Texans. 

So, we set out to test that theory. Surveying cases in a representative sample of five appellate districts across Texas, we categorized the parties filing motions to dismiss under the TCPA. Based on that survey, it appears that individual Texans and non-media businesses and organizations are the primary beneficiaries of the TCPA, with local and national media organizations being about split at roughly five percent of TCPA cases each. 

In short, this new critique of the law also holds little water.

Methodology

To estimate the general breakdown of TCPA movants, we selected five appellate districts that geographically criss-cross the state: Austin’s Third District, San Antonio’s Fourth District, Dallas’s Fifth District, El Paso’s Eighth District, and Beaumont’s Ninth District. These districts cover a mix of rural and urban communities, and include the state capital. Together, the five districts account for about 40 percent of the state’s population, as well as roughly 40 percent of the total decisions issued by Texas appellate courts (including the Supreme Court), and about 45 percent of appellate decisions addressing the TCPA. 

Using Westlaw, we then surveyed opinions featuring a TCPA motion to dismiss under section 27.003 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code across these districts. We attempted to categorize the movants as national media, local media, non-media businesses or organizations, and individuals. We then tallied those results across the same time period we looked at to determine the TCPA workload findings (2011 through 2023).

We defined “national” media as outlets with a nationwide or international audience; “local” media as outlets with a state, regional, or community beat; “non-media businesses or organizations” as all businesses or organizations other than media; and “individual” movants as persons asserting TCPA protections for themselves and not for some other corporate or organizational structure.

Results

The topline result is that individual Texans are the primary beneficiaries of the TCPA’s protections. 

Across the five districts, from 2011 through 2023, individuals brought about 53 percent of TCPA claims, or 151 of 286. Businesses and organizations were next, seeking relief under the law in about 37 percent of cases, or 105 of 286. And media movants, as noted above, were split with national and local media accounting for five percent of cases, or 15 of 286, each. In short, media defendants of any kind account for only 10.5 percent of TCPA motions in those sample appellate districts and over that time span.

Zooming into the individual districts, those trends continued. 

Understandably, the more urban the district, the more media movants there were, though, even then, not by much. For instance, Dallas had the highest number of media movants — at 13 percent, or 15 of 114 cases. Only six of those cases in Dallas involved national media; the other nine featured local media outlets. Similarly, Austin’s Third District had four media cases out of 85 TCPA opinions, with two being national media and two being local. (Austin also had six cases involving Alex Jones or his company, Infowars.) San Antonio, by contrast, had just two media TCPA cases — about five percent of the total TCPA cases in the district — with one local and one national media movant.

In the less populous, more rural districts, media movants were rare. There was only one such case in Beaumont and two in El Paso, with all three being local media outlets. The vast majority of TCPA cases in rural districts involved individual Texans filing TCPA motions to dismiss.

Conclusion

Given the increasingly vocal criticism of the TCPA, it’s important to have an accurate sense of how the law works, and who it benefits. As our analysis shows, individual Texans rely on its protections the most — by a fair margin. Far from being a tool of powerful out-of-state interests, this law directly promotes the free speech and free press rights of the Lone Star state’s residents.