Supreme Court Rules Texas Can Require Age Verification for Porn Sites
“Because H. B. 1181 simply requires proof of age to access content that is obscene to minors, it does not directly regulate the protected speech of adults.”
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Texas can require porn sites to verify age before accessing the site.
“Age-verification laws like H. B. 1181 fall within States’ authority to shield children from sexually explicit content,” stated Justice Clarence Thomas. “The First Amendment leaves undisturbed States’ traditional power to prevent minors from accessing speech that is obscene from their perspective.”
Honestly, this case illustrates just how out of hand lawsuits have become, as it should not have even reached the Supreme Court.
HB 1181 requires the user to “comply with a commercial age verification system” using a “government-issued identification” or “a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data.”
At least 21 other states have implemented a similar law to protect minors from pornography.
The petitioners claimed the law violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.
“History, tradition, and precedent recognize that States have two distinct powers to address obscenity: They may proscribe outright speech that is obscene to the public at large, and they may prevent children from accessing speech that is obscene to children,” wrote Thomas.
I mean, the law is not banning porn sites or telling them what they can or cannot publish on the websites.
“A State may not prohibit adults from accessing content that is obscene only to minors,” noted Thomas. “But, it may enact laws to prevent minors from accessing such content.”
Thomas pointed out the many laws at the state and federal level that require proof of age:
- Alcohol
- Tobacco
- Lottery ticket
- Tattoo
- Piercings
- Fireworks
- Driver’s license
- Register to Vote
- Purchase certain medications
- Guns
I have eight tattoos. I go to the same place and have the same tattoo artist each time. I still have to show my license every single time.
Thomas reminded everyone:
Obscenity is no exception to the widespread practice of requiring proof of age to exercise age-restricted rights. The New York statute upheld in Ginsberg required age verification: It permitted a seller who sold sexual material to a minor to raise “‘honest mistake’” as to age as an affirmative defense, but only if the seller had made “‘a reasonable bona fide attempt to ascertain the true age of [the] minor.’” 390 U. S., at 644. Most States to this day also require age verification for in-person purchases of sexual material. And, petitioners concede that an in-person age verification requirement is a “traditional sort of law” that is “almost surely” constitutional. Tr. of Oral Arg. 17.
“H. B. 1181 thus falls within Texas’s traditional power to protect minors from speech that is obscene from their perspective,” added Thomas. “Because H. B. 1181 simply requires proof of age to access content that is obscene to minors, it does not directly regulate the protected speech of adults.”
[Featured image via YouTube]
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Comments
Buy stock in Nord VPN… 🙂
I honestly can’t believe this had to be decided by the Supreme Court. Isn’t there AMPLE precedent already that obligates retailers/service providers to verify ages of users so that they don’t provide age-inappropriate products or services to minor children? That a company/business interests would sue to circumvent Texas’ law – a very common sense law at that – tells you everything you need to know about these vile people. Yes, they’re after our children.
If your business model is to make money from advertising then you want as much traffic as possible. As such any impediments to traffic is a problem. Requiring age verification which usually takes the form of a credit card or in some cases facial recognition is an impediment to maximizing traffic since many people prefer to remain anonymous on a sin site. This is why they sued, It is a pure business decision having nothing to do with whether they want children on the site or not, They don’t since that could lead to them be shutting down.
I agree with you though that there is ample precedence for restricting children by age verification so I have no idea why this suit got this far. What boggles my mind is that the decision was 6-3. It’s like the three progressive nutjobs voted out of habit and not on the merits of the case.
“Requiring age verification which usually takes the form of a credit card or in some cases facial recognition is an impediment to maximizing traffic since many people prefer to remain anonymous on a sin site.”
I suspect the opposition argument goes deeper than this. In nearly every case cited by Thomas as analogous (I suspect “fireworks” and “in-bar transactions” are exceptions), one verifies one’s identity in a face-to-face transaction to a licensed professional bound by client privacy laws (however violated in practice); and even in the lower-trust instances (bartenders, bouncers), one SHOWS his ID to the gatekeeper, one does not let him KEEP A COPY of it. But that is simply not the way the Internet works. Copying information is now a zero-price foundational “feature.”
Look at the outrage by mom-and-pop self-employment corporations when the Biden Administration decided they were all potential money launderers, so now had to send digital images of all their consequential owners’ licenses/passports in to a federal cyber registry, And something like 90% of affected citizens complied with the law before the deadline, the day before which some judge found the entire process to be the unconstitutional overreach it obviously was — but the feds already had their database assembled. Gotcha!
It’s hard to beat the federal government when it comes to outrageous identity scams, but if anyone can do it, it would be sleazy website owners.
>one SHOWS his ID to the gatekeeper, one does not let him KEEP A COPY of it.
Actually a lot of bars over the last couple of decades use electronic ID scanners that do have to capability of storing all your ID data. I even got junk mail from a bar I visited presumably via the address on my driver’s license.
Man, sorry to hear that.
I won’t even “sign my name” on self-checkout registers. I execute a random squiggle.
My signature looks like a random squiggle.
Disagree. First the we’re back to ‘community standards’ on obscenity but now applying that standard to individual Citizens on their personal electronic devices in the privacy of their home. This isn’t the same as requiring an ID to buy a Playboy Mag like the ’70s. It would be as if made the purchase and every time you picked it up in home you had to show ID again. Then there’s the question of allowing States to require ID to access ‘what Texas considers obscene’. That’s a pretty broad grant of authority for a State or its political subdivisions to utilize. What if a local City/County makes the case that ‘war’ is obscene and requires anyone seeking a parade/event permit for Memorial Day, Independence Day or Veteran’s Day to screen for an age restriction?
Second there’s a much easier way to do this if the goal is to ‘protect minor children’. Use settings on the devices themselves. Require an ‘age lock’ on electronic devices. Limit removal/unlock to Admin rights on the devices. If a Parent buy s their child a phone/CPU they log in as Admin at purchase reset admin PW and now they alone decide if they will unlock the ‘age’ restrictions on all content.
There’s a much easier mechanism than age verification for each separate instance of accessing the material.
Requiring parents to parent is a non-starter among many parents on the left and the right. I for one, don’t want to make the government our parents any more than they already are. If you’re concerned about what your child is doing online, get them a “dumb” phone. Limit access to electronic devices to the home where you can exert some control over what’s being viewed. Yeah, it’s more difficult but that’s part of being a parent.
“Then there’s the question of allowing States to require ID to access ‘what Texas considers obscene’.”
(Once again, the law doesn’t require “states” to do anything, it requires it of commercial websites.)
That was once a sticky point when one’s portal to the Internet was not an IP address of one’s own, but some collective connection originating at a gatekeeper like AOL or CompuServe, and no external website knew where “you” really were. And in those days, a couple southern states (I think MS was one) did write laws that would have required every person in any state accessing adult fare in any state to care about what MS thought (same as California vehicle standards always have). And that’s why they got struck down.
Today, it’s simple to determine with fair accuracy whether a user is connecting from a TX ISP or not. (Modulo systems like StarLink or HughesNet, which operate a lot more on the AOL model, but they could presumably be strongarmed into telling a requester, I’m less clear about the legalities of that than I am about the tech).
The biggest legal hole here is the jurisdictional issue of whether a law in Texas can force a website in California to give a flying crap about whether they’re being accessed by Texans or non-Texans. What is Texas going to do about it?
Must one really be over 18 to watch, “Judge Jackson Does Washington?”
The answer to your question is once must be over 50 to watch that movie, It’s not for the young or faint of heart
The law is on the books. But how is it enforceable?
It’s trivially enforceable. It’s the same mechanism as everything from MSM paywalls to China’s Internet “great wall.” If you want to see it at work, log into a VPN outlet in a country with speech restrictions, like Germany, China, England, Saudi Arabia. Then use a global search engine, such as Google, to search for terms that are sensitive in those countries. You will receive explicit admonitions that would be unthinkable in the USA. (Here in the USA, our tyrants must rely on more subtle censorship, such as having the search engine silently 86 any content the PTB don’t want you to see.)
I believe that it is literally child’s play to circumvent the law. Teens are often ahead of politicians who make these kinds of laws. If free VPN connects to server in texas, then disconnect the VPN and reconnect until the VPN provides connection to server in NY or CA. Law enforcement can demand VPN logs, but never does unless their is active investigation which is reserved for crimes like sex trafficking. I doubt this is going to work for gate keeping like politicians hoped.
I described elsewhere how website owners could simply disallow any connection from known VPN service addresses.
But I agree with you that circumventing this law is child’s play, precisely as gun controls are, and for the same reasons. And every year we have several children who unarguably prove this. When the gamut of child’s play includes killing your grandmother so you can steal her stuff to shoot up a school, opportunities are practically limitless.
And a lot of the VPNs don’t keep logs for precisely that reason. Can’t turn over what you don’t have. This law is almost entirely for show, another example of politicians pretending to solve a problem that’s beyond their ability to affect.
There are free VPNs can put you different state, or country.
This is true. However, there are also services that maintain records of the IP addresses of popular VPN outlets, allowing websites to determine when requests arrive from addresses likely being used to obscure the user’s actual location. To comply with the law, they simply refuse to permit traffic from known VPN outlets. Several streaming services already do this. (If you want to see identity authentication pursued with a vengeance, you need look no further than the DMCA crowd.)
There’s always the TOR (The Onion Route). Even if the government instantaneously blocks every known exit node, this would not affect any site with a “.onioin” domain. Even many search engines, like DuckDuckGo, have their own .onion domain and it wouldn’t surprise me if even more “adult” sites set up such sites as a gateway.
My problem with the ruling is that it makes online anonymous speech more tenuous (if you can do it for “adult” sites, you have the means to do it for everyone), in large part because in involves building up breechable databases.
Your observation about TOR is of course correct — and analogizing TOR to “trunk-based firearms dealers” imports the entire repertoire of arguments about “why gun control can never work” — at least for those who believe the goal of gun control is public safety and not honest citizen oppression.
Keep in mind that “the government” isn’t blocking anything — they are requiring private industry to perform the blocking for them, a legal nicety.
Finally, consider the argument that TOR (like Signal app) was initially engineered by the IC, and may be the biggest Trojan Horse since the ANOM Smartphone and the Mossad Pager.
When gov’t conscripts the private sector by compelling them to perform actions that the Govt would (in theory) be prohibited by the Constitution from performing that’s not a valid workaround/sidestep.
Except a lot of those wank-sites aren’t in the United States and aren’t subject to such laws.
To view anything “firearm” related on the web in California, one must click box that over 18. I guess seeing a picture of a firearm nudges one to commit murder.
It sure does in California.
(But always remember, “lame and gay” Disney product does not turn kids lame and gay,)
That’s only because only those already lame and gay are watching disney.
And you forgot the chick
I have no problem with this. As the court says, it place no undue burden on adults. As has been mentioned above, adults who don’t wish to identified by the state as a porno-watcher can easily get a VPN.
Can Texas demand proof of age to read “Gender Queer” and other such material in school libraries?
Texas can just say no, given that they have power over their own school libraries.
then why not for a fb page tiktoxic etc
The beauty of this bill, from the state’s perspective, is that the state doesn’t actually have to make any of this work — they just have to sue pornsites who don’t make it work FOR them… for free.