Supreme Court Rules on Age Checks for Porn Sites

The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a Texas law aimed at blocking children under 18 from seeing online pornography, reports the AP. Nearly half of all states have passed similar age verification laws, as smartphones and other devices make it easier to access online porn, including hardcore obscene material. The 6-3 ruling, with the liberal judges dissenting, per SCOTUSblog, comes after an adult-entertainment industry trade group called the Free Speech Coalition challenged the Texas law. The group said the law puts an unfair free-speech burden on adults by requiring them to submit personal information that could be vulnerable to hacking or tracking. It agreed, though, that children under 18 shouldn't be seeing porn.

HuffPost notes this is the first time that SCOTUS has greenlit a major restriction on access to online porn. A leading adult-content website, Pornhub, has stopped operating in several states, citing the technical and privacy hurdles in complying with the laws. The Supreme Court has confronted the issue before. In 1996, it struck down parts of a law banning explicit material viewable by kids online. A divided court also ruled against a different federal law aimed at stopping kids from being exposed to porn in 2004 but said less-restrictive measures like content filtering are constitutional.

Texas argues that technology has improved significantly in the last 20 years, allowing online platforms to easily check users' ages with a quick picture. Those requirements are more like ID checks at brick-and-mortar adult stores that were upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1960s, the state says.