U.S. Supreme Court To Take Up Texas Age Verification for Porn Sites

You’ve pretty much got two options if you want to watch online porn in Texas right now. You can give up some privacy, uploading a picture of yourself and your ID to porn sites so they can verify that you’re of age. Or, you can pay for a VPN to bypass all of that BS. Neither is ideal. Well, some changes may be around the corner as the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal to Texas’ age verification law for porn sites.

House Bill 1181 requires porn sites to verify ages of users in Texas and stipulates fines of $10,000 a day for violators. The bill had bipartisan support and was signed by the governor in June last year. There are similar laws in Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, Utah and Virginia. The aim of these age verification laws, lawmakers say, is to prevent minors from accessing porn.

The Texas law was to take effect on Sept. 1, 2023, but was appealed by the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association representing the adult entertainment industry. Last year, the group was able to get the law blocked by a federal judge who said it was likely unconstitutional.

Then, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, saying the age verification requirement could take place. The appeals court said the law fell within the state’s “legitimate interest in preventing minors’ access to pornography.” However, Judge Patrick Higginbotham wrote in a dissenting opinion that the law “infringes upon adults’ protected sexually expressive speech,” adding that it could open the door for the state to begin logging and tracking visitors of porn sites through age verification.

The Free Speech Coalition, a plaintiff in the legal fight against the Texas law, is challenging a similar bill in Indiana and recently got a favorable ruling from a district court preventing the law from taking effect this month. Judge Richard L. Young in Indiana granted the Free Speech Coalition a preliminary injunction, saying it is “likely facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment.”

In a statement on June 28, Alison Boden, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition wrote: “As [the Free Speech Coalition] has repeatedly asserted, we can and should work to prevent minors from accessing age-inappropriate material and there are less burdensome solutions that do not violate the rights of legal adults to access the internet without enduring surveillance or risking their anonymity.”