WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on June 27 upheld a Texas law requiring pornographic websites verify users are at least 18, in a case that pitted concerns about protecting minors against worries about violating the First Amendment rights of adults.
The court split 6-3 along ideologically grounds with the three liberal justices dissenting.
The majority said Texas’ law advances an important interest of shielding children from sexually explicit content and doesn’t overly burden adults because it relies on “established methods of providing government-issued identification and sharing transactional data.”
The use of pornography has always been the subject of social stigma, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority.
“This social reality has never been a reason to exempt the pornography industry from otherwise valid regulation,” he wrote.
Justice Elena Kagan said the court should have required Texas show there’s not another way to block minors from viewing the material that better protects adults’ free speech rights.
Because the First Amendment protects sexually explicit materials for adults, she wrote in her dissent, “a State cannot target that expression, as Texas has here, any more than is necessary to prevent it from reaching children.”
Eighteen other, largely conservative states have enacted similar laws in recent years as access toa growing cache of online pornography has exploded and the material has become more graphic.
Free speech advocates and a trade group representing the adult entertainment industry said requiring users to upload a government ID or use another approved method to verify age makes them vulnerable to their personal information being hacked, leaked or inadvertently disclosed. They said content filtering technology can stop kids from viewing porn without infringing onthe privacy rights of adults.
Texas countered that content filtering technology for parents has been available for decades and hasn’t worked, an argument that struck home with some of the justices when they debated the Free Speech Coalition v Paxton in January.
“Content filtering for all those devices, I can say from personal experience, is difficult to keep up with,” said Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has seven children, the oldest of which was born in 2001.
The first federaljudge to review the Texas law blocked enforcement, saying it probably wouldn’t survive a constitutional challenge because the age verification requirement is so similar to a federal law to protect children from online pornography that the Supreme Court said in 2004 was too oppressive for adults.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and allowed the law to take effect in 2023.
The appeals court relied on a 1968 Supreme Court ruling that a state can limit minors’ access to sexually explicit material – in that case, what the court then referred to as “girlie” magazines.
But while that decision − Ginsberg v. New York − focused on the rights of minors, the court’s 2004 decision – Ashcroft v. ACLU – turned on whether adults’ rights were trampled in the process of protecting minors.
When the court issued the 2004 decision, high-speed internet, social media and smartphones were all in their infancy.
Today, children can spend hours online each day on their smartphones and other devices.
Roy Gutterman, a law and journalism professor at Syracuse University and director of the Tully Center for Free Speech, said the decision marks a significant shift in how the courts evaluate laws governing the internet.
Previously, laws were held to higher standards because of the potential effect on adults.
“Today, the court is moving in a different direction,” Gutterman said. “Framing this entirely as a minors’ access issue justifies the government’s interest and somewhat shifts the focus away from adults’ First Amendment rights. We will now have to wait and see how the enforcement of this law plays out.”
Texas law requires websites to verify a user’sage if at least one-third of the site’s content is sexual material considered harmful to minors.
Websites can be fined up to $10,000 a day for not complying. Fines hit $250,000 if aminor whose age was not verified accesses the site.
Pornhub has stopped operating in Texas and several other states because of the laws.
Content adapted by the team from the original source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/27/supreme-court-decision-porn-website-age-verification-texas/84379183007/
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