States may enforce age limits for porn websites, Supreme Court rules

Washington – Citing the explosion of online porn, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that states can apply age verification laws in the hope of projecting children and young adolescents.

By a vote of 6-3, the judges rejected a free complaint from the adult entertainment industry.

“The power to demand the verification of the age is the authority of a state to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit content,” said Judge Clarence Thomas for the Court.

The defenders of freedom of expression who challenged the law declared that this would relate to the rights of adults because they could be forced to disclose their identity.

But the court did not agree.

Texas law “advances the significant interest of the state to protect children from sexually explicit content. And, it is well suited because it allows users to verify their age thanks to the methods established to provide identification and share transactional data issued by the government, ”said Thomas.

The three Liberals of the Court dissident.

Under Texas Law, a website must use “reasonable age verification methods” to confirm that visitors are at least 18 years old if more than more than a third of its content is “harmful sexual equipment for minors”.

More than 21 other States led by the Republicans have adopted similar laws in recent years.

To defend the law of Texas, Atty. General Ken Paxton said that before the Internet, the court had confirmed the laws that required bookstores or magazine to “check the age of their customers before selling them from pornography”.

He argued that the movement of their online business should not give pornographers a right of the 1st amendment “to give access to almost inexhaustible quantities of obscenity to any child with a smartphone”.

State officials also said that online porn was increasingly violent and degrading.

“The average child is exposed to pornography on the Internet when he was still in primary school,” wrote state lawyers for Ohio and Indiana. “Pornography websites receive more traffic in the United States than Instagram social media platforms, Tiktok, Netflix and Pinterest combined.”