Age assurance gets warm early response from U.S. Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court appears to be leaning toward support for Texas’ age assurance law, as it weighs a host of arguments over whether or not porn sites should be required to ask their users for valid proof of age.
A PBS report on the proceedings, which began yesterday, says the court “seems open to age checks for online porn.” It quotes Chief Justice John Roberts, a member of the court’s conservative majority, who says “technological access to pornography has exploded.”
While the court has rejected past efforts to enact laws banning explicit material from being available to kids online, the case from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says the technology for conducting age checks with biometrics and other tools has evolved to the point that it is effective.
Indeed, there is proof in the pudding across the pond: UK regulator Ofcom has just published its criteria for “highly effective age assurance methods.”
The U.S., however, places more political weight on the free speech rights laid out in the First Amendment than some quieter nations. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson poses the question in terms of limits: “How far can a state go in terms of burdening adults showing how old they are?”
Meanwhile, conservative justice and mother of seven Amy Comey Barrett raises doubts that anything can stop a determined kid from skirting age restrictions. “Content filtering for all those different devices, I can say from personal experience, is difficult to keep up with.”
For his part, Justice Samuel Alito is interested in what percentage of content on Pornhub, exactly, is not pornographic – and what type of content that might be. MSNBC quotes the judge asking if Pornhub is “like the old Playboy magazine? You have essays there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.?”
Pornhub goes dark in Tennessee after age law allowed to come into effect
In Tennessee, where the courts have just let its age verification law take effect after a brief pause, users may well be pondering whether adding a few Margaret Atwood short stories to Pornhub could bring it back from its blackout.
Following Monday’s ruling that Tennessee can begin enforcing its own age assurance law even as a legal challenge continues, the porn portal cut off access within the state. That makes Tennessee the 17th state to find itself in the chastity belt of conservative American states in which Pornhub is no longer available.
Per an article in The Tennessean, the Protect Tennessee Minors Act passed in May but was temporarily blocked on December 31 over a lawsuit from the adult industry advocacy group Free Speech Coalition.
Tennessee’s law is more strident than most. The Act says any sites on which 33 percent or more of the content is deemed “harmful to minors” must “verify the age of each user who attempts to access the site every 60 minutes through uploading a state ID or other means, such as facial recognition, as well as retain seven years of anonymized data on users who access the site.” Violations come with felony penalties – the heaviest in the country.
Pornhub’s regretful pullout from Tennessee came with a statement. “Mandating age verification without proper enforcement gives platforms the opportunity to choose whether or not to comply,” the company says. “As we’ve seen in other states, this just drives traffic to sites with far fewer safety measures in place.”
It believes device-level age controls offer a fair solution.
Map of age assurance laws aligns with red, blue states
The age assurance argument has now been variously framed as a question of free speech and constitutional rights, child online safety, privacy burdens for adults engaging in legal activities, regulation, enforcement, cost per transaction, domestic violence, LGBTQ issues and (as it were) the literary merit of sexy librarian videos.
But it is just as much about culture – which, in the U.S., is currently sharply divided along partisan political lines. The Associated Press has a map of states that have enacted or will soon enact age verification laws for online porn. Considering the pattern, it would be unsurprising if Missouri, Wyoming, Iowa and the Dakotas were to join the club in the near future, creating a solid block of states with age assurance laws that map over partisan lines from the most recent U.S. election.
The Supreme Court’s decision is expected by June 2025.
Article Topics
age verification | biometrics | data privacy | digital identity | legislation | Tennessee | Texas | United States
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