Young people like watching pornography.   In 2023, an estimated 68 percent of U.S. adolescents viewed online pornography.  A 2022 survey of more than 1,300 teens (age 13 to 17) found that about 3 out of 4 teens reported that they had viewed online porn either accidentally or on purpose.  

In order to contain young people accessing porn via the internet, Texas adopted the “Online Age Verification Law” (HB 1181) in June 2023 that requires online content providers to implement effective age verification methods to ensure that only adults can access age-restricted content or purchase age-restricted products.  In January 2025, the Supreme Court heard testimony on Texas’s age-verification law, a law that has been adopted by 23 other states.  

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled, in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, that Texas’ adult-content age-verification law was legal. Judge David Alan Ezra of the Western District of Texas originally blocked the law, saying it would have a chilling effect on speech protected by the First Amendment.

By verifying information through government identification, the law allows the government “to peer into the most intimate and personal aspects of people’s lives,” wrote Judge Ezra, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan.

It runs the risk that the state can monitor when an adult views sexually explicit materials and what kind of websites they visit,” he continued. “In effect, the law risks forcing individuals to divulge specific details of their sexuality to the state government to gain access to certain speech.

In the wake of the Fifth Circuit ruling, Pornhub, the most trafficked porn website, blocked access in sixteen states, including Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, Arkansas, Utah, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana.

However, on June 25, 2025, the Supreme Court issued its decision, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, requiring people to verify their age through measures like the submission of government-issued IDs to access “pornography” accessed over the internet.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the 6 to 3 conservative majority, wrote:

The power to verify age is part of the power to prevent children from accessing speech that is obscene to them. Where the Constitution re- serves a power to the States, that power includes “the ordinary and appropriate means” of exercising it. …

Age verification is common when laws draw age-based lines, e.g., obtaining alcohol, a firearm, or a driver’s license. Obscenity is no exception. Most States require age verification for in-person purchases of sexual material, and petitioners concede that in-person requirements of this kind are “traditional” and “almost surely” constitutional. …

The statute advances the state’s important interest in shielding children from sexually explicit content. And, it is appropriately tailored because it permits users to verify their ages through the established methods of providing government-issued identification and sharing transactional data.

He concluded, noting, “But adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification. Any burden on adults is therefore incidental to regulating activity not protected by the First Amendment.”

Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.  She wrote that she would have used the higher standard.

The First Amendment protects those sexually explicit materials, for every adult. So a state cannot target that expression, as Texas has here, any more than is necessary to prevent it from reaching children.

Justice Kagan wrote that the case was “indistinguishable” from others in which the court has ruled the expression was protected.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation raised serious concerns about the Court’s decision:

Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is a direct blow to the free speech rights of adults. … This ruling allows states to enact onerous age-verification rules that will block adults from accessing lawful speech, curtail their ability to be anonymous, and jeopardize their data security and privacy. These are real and immense burdens on adults, and the Court was wrong to ignore them in upholding Texas’ law.

The Texas law forces adults to submit personal information over the internet to access entire websites that hold some amount of sexual material, not just pages or portions of sites that contain specific sexual materials. Many sites that cannot reasonably implement age verification measures for reasons such as cost or technical requirements will likely block users living in Texas and other states with similar laws wholesale.

Ever resourceful, there’s been an explosive uptick in VPN [Virtual Private Network] usage to subvert the age-verification laws.  For example, there’s been a 150 percent increase in VPN demand in Florida, 967 percent in Utah and 234.8 percent in Texas.

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Americans has been fighting moralistic wars against obscenity since before the U.S. was founded. Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan was published in 1637 and banned in Quincy, Massachusetts.  As the legal scholar Geoffrey R. Stone points out “[t]he first obscenity prosecution in the United States did not occur until 1815, at the height of the evangelical explosion of the Second Great Awakening, which triggered a nationwide effort to transform American law and politics through the lens of evangelical Christianity.”

In the years after the Civil War, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), among other religious groups, led a campaign in New York that culminated in 1868 with the state adopting legislation made it a crime to sell or give away any “obscene and indecent book, pamphlet, drawing, painting or photograph.” The Christian moralist, Anthony Comstock, led a campaign by “Committee for the Suppression of Vice” to make the New York law a national law. 

On March 3, 1873, President Ulysses Grant signed into law the “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literatures and Articles of Immoral Use.” It banned works deemed “obscene, lewd, lascivious, or filthy,” along with contractive products form the U.S. mails. 

In time – and as technologies evolved – censorship was imposed on the new media. The Motion Picture Production Code (aka the Hays Code), self-imposed by Hollywood studios, was a set of industry guidelines for the censorship of content that was applied to most motion pictures.  It was in effect from 1934 to 1968.

As Lux Alptraum reminds us in a recent New York Times op ed, “But the world of online sex is far more than just a depraved cesspool of the most abusive content.”  Sbe adds, “Vague, sweeping laws to rein in online sexual content could end up censoring those who want to share information about sexual pleasure and health, talk about L.G.B.T.Q. issues, celebrate kink or even distribute woman-friendly, consent-focused erotica.”

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