Jan. 14 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday over a Texas law that requires online pornography sites verify the ages of users before providing access.
Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton is seeking to overturn the Texas law on the grounds it violates free speech as it requires adults to submit personal data to view pornography sites. Some sites, including Pornhub, have cut off access to Texas.
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton calls the law, which has been adopted in more than a dozen states, vital to public health as smartphones provide young people access to “unlimited amounts of hardcore pornography.”
The Texas law, known as H.B. 1181, was passed in June 2023. Under the law, users are required to provide a government-issued ID to prove their age. Pornography websites that fail to verify the age of their users face a $10,000 fine per violation or a $250,000 fine, if the violation involves a minor.
Last year, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted an injunction on the Texas law, after finding it does not violate the First Amendment with the state’s “legitimate interest in preventing minors’ access to pornography.”
“Congress and state governments have a critical role to play in protecting America’s youth from this ever-growing commercialization of sex through electronic devices,” according to a court brief, filed by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, four other Republican senators and 18 Republican House members.
Texas solicitor general Aaron Nelson reiterated that the law does not ban adults from accessing pornography and it does not require them to identify themselves. According to a Texas brief, the law only requires websites that host pornography “to take commercially reasonable steps to ensure that their customers are not children.”
“Texas has addressed only websites dedicated to pornography, has allowed them to comply by using common age-verification technology and has not imposed criminal penalties. Such a modest but important law satisfies any level of scrutiny,” the brief states, as the American Civil Liberties Union also weighed in.
“Adults in America have a First Amendment right to read about sexual health, see R-rated movies, watch porn and otherwise access information about sex if they want to,” Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said in a statement last year. “They should be allowed to exercise that right as they see fit, without having to worry about exposing their personal identifying information in the process.”
“No one has a constitutional right to view ‘teen bondage gangbang’ videos,” the state countered in court filings.
In Free Speech Coalition’s argument before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the group is expected to reiterate its claims that the law fails to protect other avenues, which allow young people to access pornography. The group also argues that content-filtering software would be a better way to limit minors’ access to inappropriate material “without burdening adults’ access to speech they have a right to receive.”
“While Texas’ law may sound reasonable on its face, in practice, it is extraordinarily burdensome and invasive, effectively deterring adults from accessing legal content,” Alison Boden, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, said in a news release.
Texas state Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Republican who drafted the bipartisan legislation, is optimistic the Supreme Court will uphold the law since age verification systems are already in use to purchase alcohol and tobacco online.
“People’s privacy is protected,” Shaheen said. “We mandated that in the law.”
