The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to take up a challenge to Texas’ law intended to prevent minors from accessing porn websites.
Texas’ law, which it enacted in June 2023, requires websites that publish “sexual material harmful to minors” to confirm its users are over 18 years old. A district court initially blocked Texas from enforcing the law, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals later allowed it to take effect.
“While purportedly seeking to limit minors’ access to online sexual content, the Act imposes significant burdens on adults’ access to constitutionally protected expression,” the Free Speech Coalition, an advocacy group representing online pornography distributors, argued in its petition. “Of central relevance here, it requires every user, including adults, to submit personally identifying information to access sensitive, intimate content over a medium—the Internet—that poses unique security and privacy concerns.” (RELATED: PornHub Is Now Inaccessible In Texas)
WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 26: The Supreme Court is seen on June 26, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images)
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued in filings with the Supreme Court that nothing about the law’s requirement is “exceptional.”
“H.B. 1181 does not prohibit the performance, production, or even sale of pornography,” Paxton wrote. “Instead, it simply requires the pornography industry that makes billions of dollars from trafficking in obscenity to take commercially reasonable steps to ensure that those who access the material are adults.”
In February, Paxton filed a lawsuit against PornHub’s parent company for allegedly failing to properly implement age verification measures, writing that its methods “cannot be said to verify anything at all.” The pornography website PornHub entirely disabled access to its website in Texas in March as a result of the law.
A number of other states, including Utah, Virginia and Arkansas, have implemented similar age-verification laws, sparking litigation and prompting pornographic websites to shut down in many of those states.
PornHub did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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