Children are not adults

Since the dawn of the internet, we’ve allowed pornographers to get by with an extraordinary and dangerous euphemism. They like to refer to themselves as purveyors of “adult content” on “adult websites,” and yet they have steadfastly resisted any effort to ensure that the individuals accessing their sites are, in fact, adults. Twenty-one years ago, the industry succeeded in convincing the Supreme Court to rule that any age verification requirement posed an intolerable “burden” and “chill” upon First Amendment-protected “adult speech.” Ironically, a child born that summer may today be buying his first beer after providing ID but has been able to access hardcore pornography with just the click of a button.

Last Friday, that finally changed. Writing for a 6-3 majority in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, Justice Clarence Thomas unambiguously affirmed the right of the State of Texas (and any other state) to take firm steps to protect minors from exposure to “obscene content,” much of which in fact lies outside of First Amendment protections altogether. If the states have the right to protect minors, then they have a right to use whatever laws are “necessary and proper” to that end. Logically, that means requiring such websites to prove the age of their users, just as liquor stores and tobacco merchants must.

The implications of this decision are momentous, especially given the broad legal grounds on which this case was decided—much broader than almost any court-watchers had predicted. Not only will it clear the way for nearly two dozen similar state laws to come into effect, but it will put fresh wind into the sails of similar bills introduced in many more states and in Congress. More significantly, though, this ruling promises to galvanize two wider movements.

First, the porn industry’s “naughty but nice” façade is beginning to crack. Some progressives continue to trumpet porn as liberating adult expression, but these claims ring ever more hollow. Men know that it degrades them and saps their virility. Women know that it turns them into objects of violent fantasies. Children know that it robs them of their innocence. With lawsuits and exposés piling up, it is becoming clear that this industry is not built on “consenting adults” producing content for other consenting adults, but on systematic exploitation. Although this ruling itself addresses only the narrow question of age verification, it may help galvanize broader measures that will subject the industry to intense legal and regulatory scrutiny, putting many of its worst offenders out of business.

Second, however, while pornography represents the most egregious of the perils awaiting our children online, it is far from the only one. More and more we have come to realize that so many of the products and platforms peddled to our children—from Instagram to Snapchat to Roblox—are designed to addict them and are doing incalculable harm to their mental and emotional development. Parents have begun fighting back in recent years, energized by clarion calls like Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and Clare Morell’s The Tech Exit. Numerous states have now passed laws to ban smartphones from schools, set age-limits on social media, and most recently, require parental consent for all app store downloads by under-18s. All of these measures reflect a return of the commonsense conviction that the barrier between adulthood and childhood that we recognize in the real world should apply to the digital world as well, a conviction that the justices on the Supreme Court ringingly affirmed last week.

Indeed, when Congress first sought to impose such “age zones” in the early days of the internet back in 1996, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that “The creation of ‘adult zones’ is by no means a novel concept. States have long denied minors access to certain establishments frequented by adults. … The prospects for eventual zoning of the internet appear promising.” Why did it take so long then? The answer is that markets respond to incentives. As long as the Court told internet companies that they didn’t need to worry about age-gating their platforms, unsurprisingly, they expended very little effort on figuring out how. Now, however, that pressure has begun to build to make the internet safe for kids, technologists have responded quickly to the challenge, delivering numerous tools to quickly, securely, and anonymously prove your age online. With this decision, we can expect that technological trend to accelerate.

For too long, we have allowed ourselves to be lulled into passivity and resignation by the overwhelming power of the internet and the multi-billion dollar companies that control so much of it. We have accepted that online pornography is here to stay, and that parents can resist only by playing a constant game of whack-a-mole through inadequate parental controls. In reality, we still have the power to govern technology, rather than allowing it to govern us. Let’s hope that lawmakers rise to the challenge.