During oral arguments, SCOTUS seemed open to a Texas law requiring age checks to view online porn, but could send the case back to a lower court
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/u... Allie Shenkin / @shenkin : Not that anyone asked for a large experiment on the presumably-mollifying effects of porn on violence by teenagers, but looks like we're about to get it. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/u... Gwen Howerton / @kissphoria : Justice Kagan gets into the other laws in other states. A third of the country now has some sort of age verification law on the books. Kagan asks: will some of these pass through the eye of the needle and satisfy strict scrutiny? www.chron.com/culture/arti... Gwen Howerton / @kissphoria : There are compelling arguments that age gating is effective and constitutional. But the Texas law is a badly written, overly broad law. For one, it classifies pornographic websites as any sites where “one third” of its content is “harmful to minors” — bsky.app/profile/davi... [embedded post] Elizabeth Spiers / @espiers : Sam wants you to know he only ever read Playboy for the articles [embedded post] Gwen Howerton / @kissphoria : Alito gets into a question of whether or not the ID verification at stake in Ginsberg - showing ids to buy porn at a store - burdens youngish looking adults who are of age but get carded because of how they look. Gwen Howerton / @kissphoria : After a discussion of what percentage of material can be considered material “obscene to children”, which FSC says is around 70% on websites FSC represents, Kagan asks to get back to the questions of scrutiny. Gwen Howerton / @kissphoria : Justice Alito is asking if websites like Pornhub have “essays, modern day Gore Vidal, stuff like that” like the old playboy Gwen Howerton / @kissphoria : Gorsuch says he's worried about creating a “constitutional regime that prefers technology” when discussing the differences between brick and mortar stores and online porn X: Gwen Howerton / @kissphoria : Justice Alito is asking if websites like Pornhub have “essays, modern day Gore Vidal, stuff like that” like the old playboy Matt Stoller / @matthewstoller : People dunking on Alito for this are being idiots. The lawyers for porn sites are trying to make the claim they are protecting important speech, Alito is forcing them to admit it's just about selling porn. Forums: r/technology : Supreme Court Seems Ready to Back Texas Law Limiting Access to Pornography r/scotus : Supreme Court seems open to age checks for online porn, though some free-speech questions remain r/politics : Supreme Court Seems Ready to Back Texas Law Limiting Access to Pornography r/politics : Supreme Court Seems Ready to Back Texas Law Limiting Access to Pornography
Context & Ripple Effects
The dispute arrived at the Court after a federal judge temporarily blocked Texas' age-verification requirement and after the justices agreed to review the First Amendment challenge. The oral argument therefore tests both the constitutional limit and the path for resolving the existing litigation.
It also sits alongside the Court's scrutiny of Texas and Florida limits on social-media moderation, where justices had raised companies' First Amendment concerns in related challenges to state platform rules.
First-order effects
- Texas, the adult-content industry, and the challengers get a clearer signal that the Court may permit an age-check requirement, while a possible remand would defer a final resolution to further lower-court proceedings.
- The immediate legal focus shifts to whether the law's verification mechanism can survive the applicable First Amendment review rather than to the policy goal alone.
Second-order effects
- Operators subject to comparable state measures will have stronger reason to assess whether their age-gating systems and privacy practices can withstand litigation, rather than treating age checks as a uniform compliance task.
- States pursuing online child-access rules may draft more narrowly and prepare for challenges centered on the burden imposed on lawful adult access.
Third-order effects
- If courts continue to accept targeted age-gating mandates, access controls could become a more durable regulatory tool for online content, with constitutional review determining how far states can extend them.
- The unresolved boundary is whether this framework remains confined to adult content or becomes a precedent invoked for broader categories of online services; the related social-media cases show that expansion would face distinct speech concerns.
The trend: This is one data point in the shift from platform self-policing toward state-mandated access controls for age-sensitive online content.