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An effort to stop Texas' age-verification law has hit a wall with the US Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected an emergency appeal from the adult entertainment industry and free speech advocates to suspend Texas' age-verification law, which is already cracking down on porn sites available in the state.
The Supreme Court didn’t explain the denial, but it's a blow to an ongoing campaign to overturn these age-verification laws in Texas and other states across the US. In Texas' case, the law requires online porn providers to verify users' ages through government-issued IDs before they can browse the sites. Otherwise, they risk facing fines.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has defended the law as a necessary way to prevent minors from accessing pornographic content. However, adult entertainment providers such as Pornhub oppose the law, arguing it violates First Amendment rights while forcing users to hand over sensitive personal information in the form of their government-issued IDs. As a result, the site's parent company blocked people from accessing Pornhub and its other sites in Texas and a handful of other states with similar laws. Users can get around the restriction with a VPN, though.
To fight the Texas law, a lobbying group from the porn industry called the Free Speech Coalition, along with American Civil Liberties Union, urged the Supreme Court to intervene. Specifically, the groups called on the court to reverse a 2-1 decision from the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld the age-verification law.
"Though it purportedly seeks to limit minors’ access to online sexual content, the (Texas) law in fact imposes significant burdens on adults’ access to constitutionally-protected expression, requiring them to provide personal identifying information online to access sensitive, intimate content,” the ACLU said at the time.
But in his own filing to the Supreme Court, AG Paxton said states have always enforced rules prohibiting minors from accessing porn. “Texas’ methods of enforcing those age restrictions has evolved, however, because it must,” he wrote. “This unprecedented explosion of access to hardcore pornography by kids ‘is creating a public health crisis.’”