MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday the 16th of January.
Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.
MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.
First up on The World and Everything in It: free speech and age verification.
This story deals with online content not appropriate for children, so you can skip ahead 6 minutes and come back later, and please do come back.
REICHARD: Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. At issue is a Texas law that requires websites featuring sexually explicit material to verify the age of users accessing those sites.
We’ll cover oral arguments in Monday’s Legal Docket…but today, we’ll hear from citizens and scholars who filed friend of the court briefs.
WORLD’s Paul Butler has the story.
PAUL BUTLER: A few dozen people gathered in front of the Supreme Court on Wednesday morning before oral arguments.
JON SCHWEPPE: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for braving the cold…
Jon Schweppe is Policy Director with the American Principles Project.
SCHWEPPE: We are here today to rally to protect kids online!
That’s a tall order these days. Sexually explicit material is no longer confined to magazine racks. Instead it’s just a few swipes away on a smartphone, and internet filters often fail to protect young people from seeing content that is increasingly obscene and violent.
Here’s Clare Morell, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.
CLARE MORELL: Filters don't always work for the in app browser, so they're actually accessing the pornography websites all from within an app, and that's really difficult for a lot of filters or parental controls to see into…It’s just a lot of layers of solution are necessary in this kind of app-based ecosystem on a smart device.
Last year, Morell submitted a brief arguing that the Supreme Court should consider how much technology has changed since its 2004 ruling in ACLU v. Ashcroft. That decision said content filters are the least restrictive means for protecting children from the harms of pornography without burdening adult speech rights.
MORELL: The changes in technology has meant filters are largely not enough to protect kids. And so age verification is a really critical layer of protection for parents.
In 2023, Louisiana became the first state to require online pornography suppliers to verify that their users are legal adults. Rather than comply, some of the largest players in the industry blocked access in the state and sued. Other states followed Louisiana and passed their own laws, including Texas.
ELLIOT GAISER: You want the state to be able to step in and say some kinds of content are really psychologically ruinous for young eyes and young minds.
Elliot Gaiser is Solicitor General for the State of Ohio and Counsel of record for the 24 states that submitted a brief supporting Texas.
GAISER: As states, we have reserved powers to protect children, and like Texas, many of the states in Ohio have contemplated or have similar laws that require age verification for adult websites and websites that have content that is harmful for children.
Advocates for the adult websites say those laws violate First Amendment protections for free speech and violate the privacy of adults seeking out explicit material online.
BRENT SKORUP: The issue here is that every adult to prove they're not a minor must submit their identifying information to a website. And that is clearly a burden.
Brent Skorup is a legal fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. His organization submitted a brief arguing that the way Texas is seeking to protect children from online harms is unconstitutional.
SKORUP: It's not about defending pornography, per se. It's about defending the principle that adults in America should not need to submit ID to obtain protected speech.
So how exactly do age verification tools work, and what kind of a burden do they impose on speech?
IAIN CORBY: If American technology can put a man on the moon, it is absolutely possible to prove your age without disclosing your identity and to do so with very little burden.
Iain Corby is Executive Director of the Age Verification Providers Association based in the United Kingdom.
In 2015, Great Britain’s Conservative Government laid out a plan to require age verification for pornographic content, and Corby’s organization worked with developers building third-party tools.
CORBY: So my new party trick is demonstrating six different ways of doing age verification in sixty seconds…
Tools on the market today can compare selfies with photo ID or even use AI to estimate a person’s age without storing a record of that data.
CORBY: Your data for some of the latest apps does not even leave the palm of your hand…we can compare the ID to the face match on the device…and it takes a few seconds…
Some pornography businesses already use age verification tools to ensure creators of this content are legal adults. But Skorup at the Cato Institute believes adult websites and smartphone companies should voluntarily fix their technology to protect children without government intervention.
SKORUP: I absolutely do want Apple and Google and these websites to do more to keep this out of the hands of minors.
A more fundamental problem is whether the content at issue is the sort of speech previous rulings say is protected. Here’s Ohio Solicitor General Gaiser.
GAISER: You have to look at the whole breadth of the content that these pornography companies are arguing is speech. Most of it is nothing of the sort. In fact, many of it is violent and degrading and demeaning… [8:54] We do not think that even adults have a First Amendment right to access the vast majority of this material.
It will be up to the Supreme Court to decide whether or not to review the constitutional status of pornography as free speech. In the meantime, Clare Morell at the Ethics and Public Policy Center says states have a right and a responsibility to help parents protect young minds from obscene material.
MORELL: And so these are collective problems, and that's why age verification laws, again, it's not a silver bullet, but it would provide a really critical layer of protection for parents, to protect all children as a more collective solution.
Back at the American Principles Project rally, Jon Schweppe promised to keep fighting, regardless how the court decides.
SCHWEPPE: We're going to keep coming until this, this industry, this porn industry is defeated and until kids are protected online. That's our, that's our goal. So again, I want to thank everyone for coming today. Let's go win this case. Thank you so much.
Reporting for WORLD, I’m Paul Butler.
WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.
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