Supreme Court To Weigh Texas’ Porn Age Verification Law

The Supreme on Tuesday said it will weigh next term a dispute over a Texas law requiring age verification to access adult content, in a case that could shape the future of online pornography. At issue in the case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, is Texas’s HB 1181, which requires websites to “use reasonable age verification methods,” such as digital IDs, to ensure that anyone accessing porn is aged 18 years or older.Texas argues its law is a simple step to “combat the spread of pornography to minors,” while the American Civil Liberties Union and a nonprofit representing the porn industry, the Free Speech Coalition, say the law infringes upon the First Amendment rights of adults in the process. Texas is one of eight states that passed age verification laws in 2023, and 11 more states followed suit in 2024, according to Free Speech Coalition’s tracker.Texas argues that smartphones and easy internet access has led to an explosion of “omnipresent and instantaneous access to virtually unlimited amounts of pornography” for children and notes that 20 percent of children have had unwanted exposure to sexually explicit content, creating a “public health crisis.”Texas’s law, the state argues, “does not prohibit the performance, production, or even sale of pornography but, more modestly, simply requires the pornography industry that makes billions of dollars from peddling smut to take commercially reasonable steps to ensure that those who access the material are adults.”A district court blocked Texas’s law from going into effect last September, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted that injunction. The Supreme Court in April declined to block Texas’s law as the legal dispute proceeds. The groups suing over the law maintain that it creates an “impermissible burden on the exercise of adults’ First Amendment rights online.“Requiring individuals to verify their ages before accessing this protected speech robs people of anonymity, and threatens to bar individuals — for example, those who lack government identification or whose age is misidentified by the relevant technology — from accessing certain websites altogether,” a statement from the groups reads. “Despite proponent’s claims, age-verification online is simply not the same as flashing an ID at a check-out counter. The process is invasive and burdensome, with significant privacy risks for adult consumers,” the executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, Alison Boden, said. “In states where these laws have passed, the vast majority of users have refused to comply, leading to a massive chilling effect on their legal right to access constitutionally protected speech.”

Supreme Court To Weigh Texas’ Porn Age Verification Law

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