The Supreme Court upheld a Texas law requiring porn websites to verify the age of their visitors on Friday.
In an 6-3 ruling, the majority held Texas’ age verification law does not violate the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.
“The power to require age verification is within a State’s authority to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit content,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion. “H. B. 1181 is a constitutionally permissible exercise of that authority.”
Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“A State may not care much about safeguarding adults’ access to sexually explicit speech; a State may even prefer to curtail those materials for everyone,” Kagan wrote. “Many reasonable people, after all, view the speech at issue here as ugly and harmful for any audience. But the First Amendment protects those sexually explicit materials, for every adult.”
Texas’ law requires websites that publish “sexual material harmful to minors” to verify users are over 18 years old. PornHub entirely disabled access to its website in the state last year in response to the law.
There are 24 states that have passed similar age verification laws.
The case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, was brought by an advocacy group representing online pornography distributors, which argues the law burdens adults’ First Amendment rights.
“This is a major victory for children, parents, and the ability of states to protect minors from the damaging effects of online pornography,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement. “Companies have no right to expose children to pornography and must institute reasonable age verification measures. I will continue to enforce the law against any organization that refuses to take the necessary steps to protect minors from explicit materials.”
This is a breaking news story and updated.
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