Supreme Court To Weigh Laws in Texas, 18 Other States Requiring Age Verification To Access Adult Content Online

This week, a long-simmering battle between conservative states and online purveyors of adult content finally approaches its conclusion as the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments against a Texas law requiring age verification to access the sites.On Wednesday, the court will hear arguments in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, in which the plaintiffs argue that the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, is infringing on Americans’ free speech and privacy rights. A new state law championed by Mr. Paxton requires websites with over a third of their content classified as “sexual material harmful to minors” to verify a user’s age by forcing them to upload a digital copy of an official ID and submit to facial recognition scans.The Free Speech Coalition, an advocacy organization for the adult entertainment industry, says that the Texas law and ones like it in other states is trying to shut down the industry. “Porn is the canary in the coal mine of free speech,” a spokesman for the Free Speech Coalition, Mike Stabile, told CNN. “These bills are meant to put the adult industry out of practice.”Following the lead of Texas, some 19 other states — most of them in the South and Midwest — have passed similar legislation in recent years and, as a result, major adult content sites have begun blocking users in those states from accessing the content. Users in those states are now faced with a black screen explaining the new laws and telling consumers to contact their state legislators if they want to complain. Previously, users visiting the websites were greeted with a pop-up window asking if they were over the age of 18. All they had to do was click “yes” to enter. The law in Texas, which went into effect in 2024, says that’s not enough to prevent minors from accessing pornographic material.“[The law] protects the innocence of childhood and helps prevent the destructive behavior resulting in porn addiction,” the author of the Texas law, Representative Matt Shaheen of the state assembly, wrote in an op-ed last year for the Dallas Morning News.The Supreme Court will have precedent to consider as it hears arguments in the case. In 1997, in Reno v. ACLU, the Federal Communications Decency Act — which initially aimed to impose criminal sanctions for the transmission of obscene material to a minor — was ruled “an unconstitutional restriction of free speech” by the court.The justices said that “less restrictive alternatives” are available and that the law was “an unnecessarily broad suppression of speech addressed to adults.”In 2023, a federal judge struck down the age verification law in Texas based on the precedent, writing that it would “allow the government to peer into the most intimate and personal aspects of people’s lives.”The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals then reviewed the law and ruled that it was constitutional because the state had a “rational basis” to shield children from online pornography.“Under existing law, you can protect children from access to what’s obscene,” a University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, told CNN. “The key question is to what extent you can do that in a way that interferes with the access of adults to this material, which is constitutionally protected for them.”He added that the law in Texas would “probably not be constitutional under existing precedent,” but with a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, the Justices could “change that precedent.”The law in Texas will continue to be in effect until the court’s decision is released later this year. It is believed that the outcome of Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton would set a new precedent for similar cases in other states.

Supreme Court To Weigh Laws in Texas, 18 Other States Requiring Age Verification To Access Adult Content Online

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