The Next Round in the Obscenity Wars |
Photo by Nik Nikolla
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,........