The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday approved a lower court ruling that said states can require that porn sites have a procedure in place to verify the age of people who visit their sites.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion for the 6-3 court. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett concurred.
Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“The statute advances the State’s important interest in shielding children from sexually explicit content,” Thomas wrote in the majority opinion backing the 2023 Texcas law, according to the New York Post.
“And, it is appropriately tailored because it permits users to verify their ages through the established methods of providing government-issued identification and sharing transactional data,” he wrote.
“The power to require age verification is within a State’s authority to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit content,” Thomas wrote, according to The Hill.
“The First Amendment leaves undisturbed States’ traditional power to prevent minors from accessing speech that is obscene from their perspective,” he wrote “That power includes the power to require proof of age before an individual can access such speech.”
Kagan led the liberal wing’s argument, noting “[n]o one doubts that the distribution of sexually explicit speech to children, of the sort involved here, can cause great harm.”
But she said the Texas law impinged on the rights of adults.
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“Speech that is obscene for minors is often not so for adults. For them, the category of obscene—and therefore unprotected speech—is narrower,” she wrote. “So adults have a constitutional right to view the very same speech that a State may prohibit for children.”
“What if Texas could do better—what if Texas could achieve its interest without so interfering with adults’ constitutionally protected rights in viewing the speech?” she wrote.
Opponents of the Texas law claimed identity theft and other compliance problems would result from the law. Thomas swatted away those concerns.
He wrote that the “specific verification methods that H. B. 1181 permits are … plainly legitimate.”
“Verification can take place on the covered website itself or through a third-party service,” he wrote. “Other age-restricted services, such as online gambling, alcohol and tobacco sales, and car rentals, rely on the same methods.”
The law requires users to have a government-issued identification or a “commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data,” according to Fox News, which noted 21 other states have similar laws.
The site Pornhub reacted to the law by blocking customers from Texas.
The company Verifymy said the ruling “cleared a key obstacle in the path to a safer internet.”
“It will reassure parents across Texas about the type of content their children can access online and lay out a legislative blueprint for other states to follow to keep explicit material in the hands of adults only,” Lina Ghazal, Verifymy head of regulatory and public affairs, said in a statement.
“Online platforms have been allowed to rely on users self-reporting their age for too long, leaving the door ajar for children to spaces they are not mature enough to navigate. Robust age checks are a common-sense safeguard that put the online and offline world on the same footing.”
“The technology already exists to carry out these checks effectively, while also respecting privacy,” Ghazal said. “Methods like email-based or facial age estimation are tools adult websites can easily implement, with minimal impact on user experience. What has been missing is a clear legislative precedent. … Children’s safety must now be embedded into the foundation of every platform.”
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