The U.S. Supreme Court will allow Texas to continue enforcing a law requiring online age verification to access pornographic websites.
The one-sentence order was handed down by the high court without comment or public dissent on April 30. Challengers of the law argue that it compromises free speech and opens users to privacy violations.
The 2023 law requires commercial entities “that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material on any Internet website, including a social media platform, more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors, shall use reasonable age verification methods” to verify that an individual attempting to access the material is 18 years of age or older.”
The law also requires pornography websites to include “health warnings” on their landing page using a 14-point font or larger.
“TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function,” reads one of the required warnings.
A second health warning advised that pornography is “associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, and other emotional and mental illnesses.”
The Free Speech Coalition, a trade association of the pornography and adult entertainment industry, sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in September 2023, arguing that the law violates First Amendment and privacy rights. They also said the law would do nothing to restrict access to pornography on social media or search engines, where content is available in abundance.
While the opinion handed down by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit unanimously upheld the preliminary injunction precluding the Lone Star State from requiring “health warnings” on adult websites, it also lifted the injunction against the age verification mandate by a decision of 2-1.
The Texas law took effect on Sept. 19, 2023. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Pornhub owner Aylo (formerly known as MindGeek) for violating the law.
The complaint, filed in Travis County District Court in February, sought civil penalties of up to $10,000 for each day that PornHub’s website remained functional in the state retroactive to the day the law took effect.
Pornhub acquiesced. The adult content website based in Montreal, Canada, which markets itself as “the world’s leading free porn site,” disabled its website in the state.
“As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors,” Pornhub’s message said, as quoted by ARS Technica.
Facing substantial fines, Pornhub said it “made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas.”
“In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users,” it said.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the victory on social media.
“Sites like Pornhub are on the run because Texas has a law that aims to prevent them from showing harmful, obscene material to children,” Mr. Paxton said on social media platform X. “We recently secured a major victory against Pornhub and other sites that sought to block this law from taking effect. In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children. If they don’t want to comply, good riddance.”
Pornhub does appear to be selective in deciding whose privacy rights should be protected.
Following a complaint filed by a woman in Canada—whose ex-boyfriend uploaded an intimate video of her to Pornhub and other websites owned by Aylo without her knowledge or consent—the Privacy Commissioner concluded in February that the company “had contravened Canada’s federal private sector privacy law.”
‘We Should Be Wary’
Mike Stabile is the director of public affairs for the Free Speech Coalition.
In an interview with The Epoch Times, he said the age verifications for adult websites are easier to get around than filters. However, children are known to be adept at finding their way around filters.
HowToGeek noted that “Teens are clever, and they’ll find ways around filters if they want to,” describing several methods kids use to circumvent parental controls and filters.
If a parent uses OpenDNS for filtering, for example, minors could change the computer’s DNS server to get around it. They could also find a proxy or VPN that isn’t blocked by the filter.
They could also resort to simple methods, like peeking over a parent’s shoulder to learn the PIN so they can disable restrictions. They can also simply access content blocked by parental controls through someone else’s device.
However, while laws like the one in Texas can block someone from accessing a particular website, such as Pornhub, Mr. Stabile noted that “there are millions of sites on the web.”
“Even within this law, it exempts Reddit and Twitter that has tons of adult content and shows up in Google searches,” he explained. “One of our issues with these laws is that they don’t do very much to protect kids from accessing adult content. They’re super easy to get around and they don’t address most of the adult content online.”
They do expose adults to high levels of identity theft and risk, he said, noting that most adults will move onto another website to find what they’re looking for rather than complying with age verification requirements.
“So, when you do comply with laws you are suddenly at a disadvantage to illegal and pirate sites because those sites are showing up on Googe and are easily accessible,” Mr. Stabile explained. “So, you’re actually pushing people to worse sites and punishing websites that are compliant.”
Mr. Stabile also suggested that people should be wary of government surveillance, regardless of political ideology.
“We should be concerned about the government saying you can’t access something without presenting an ID,” he argued, saying it’s a “dangerous” practice used by authoritarian regimes such as China “where there is not a free internet and where the government does have surveillance.”
“We’re not disagreeing that there is an issue, and we need to work to keep kids from accessing adult content. But the law is really ineffective.”
Mr. Stabile also contends that laws like the one in Texas “put adults at risk of exposure,” noting that one of the biggest internet scams involves threats coming from people who claim they’ve hacked your computer, learned what websites you visit, and demanded money to keep your secret.
The Better Business Bureau issued a warning in 2020 that online extortion was one of the top three most common internet scams.
“Sextortion” is when someone threatens to expose a person’s browser history or evidence that they have downloaded pornography. They also threaten to release explicit videos or images of their victims, which they claim to have pulled from their computers.
“We’ve seen identity theft. We’ve seen documents being sold on the dark web. We’ve seen extortion threats where people say they have a video of their age verification process and a video of them watching adult content,” Mr. Stabile explained. “There’s a real risk here so it is something I think we should be wary of. ”
“Adult content is the canary in the coal mine of free speech,” he proposed, saying, “When the government starts restricting access to this type of speech it opens the door to blocking access to all types of speech saying, ‘That’s harmful to minors,’ or ‘That’s harmful to society.’ I just think we need to be wary. While filters aren’t perfect, they are much more effective than the legislation that’s been put forward.”
Kansas recently enacted a law similar to the one in Texas.
Considering the Republican supermajorities in both the state’s House and Senate, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, chose not to veto the measure, which passed the Senate on April 2, saying she would allow the bill to become law without her signature.
“While well-meaning in its efforts to protect children from content the Legislature considers ‘harmful to minors,’” Gov. Kelly said, as quoted by Kansas Reflector, “this bill is vague in its application and may end up infringing on constitutional rights, which is an issue being litigated in other jurisdictions over similar bills.”
Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Utah, and Virginia have also passed similar bills.
The Epoch Times reached out to Pornhub owner Aylo for comment.
Jana Pruet contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times
