Porn industry fights viewer age checks at Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday heard attorneys for the pornography industry argue that adult viewers should not bear any burden in order to protect children from harmful content. The state of Texas in 2023 passed a law requiring pornographic sites to verify that their users were over the age of 18 using means such as a photo ID or credit card information. Texas did so to protect children from the harmful effects of pornography, the state argued in a legal brief. The pornography industry sued, alleging the law infringed on adults’ First Amendment rights to access free speech. Eighteen other states have passed similar laws.

In a 2022 study, nearly three-quarters of all teens surveyed reported that they had at some point viewed pornography. More than half of those teens reported viewing pornography accidentally; just under half reported viewing it intentionally. Meanwhile, more than half of the teenage pornography viewers in the survey reported that they viewed pornography for the first time when they were under the age of 13.

What questions did justices have for the pornography industry? All of the justices seemed to present a hostile front to attorney Derek Shaffer, who was arguing on behalf of the porn industry. Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked him if there was a difference between checking an ID at a brick-and-mortar store and verifying someone’s age online. Shaffer argued that online age verification systems posed more security risks for individuals providing proof of their age.

Shaffer said he agreed it was a problem that children were accessing pornography. Shaffer argued that Texas should have pursued other means, such as content filtering, to attempt to protect children from pornography. He also acknowledged that the government had a compelling interest in protecting children from obscene content. But he claimed that not all the content on the websites he represented was harmful to children. Justices questioned why Shaffer claimed not to know what the second-most common porn site was in the United States, while he was representing the pornography industry.

What did the state of Texas have to say? Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielson argued that no one disputed the fact that pornography was harmful to children—and that children were currently accessing it. Age verification was simple, effective, and did not jeopardize adults’ privacy, Nielson argued. To explain how age verification software didn’t jeopardize the safety or privacy of users, he referred the justices to a friend of the court brief filed by the Age Verification Providers Association. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pushed back, probing whether age verification software did still infringe on adults’ freedoms.

Dig deeper: Read Erin Hawley’s column in WORLD Opinions about how adults only need to bear a small burden in order to protect children from the harmful effects of pornography.