Welp.
Texas’ law requiring Pornhub and other adult websites to verify users’ ages is constitutional and can remain in effect, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday.
The case stems from a 2023 law, HB 1181, that required websites to verify that a user is over the age of 18 if more than one-third of their content is considered harmful to minors. A group of adult entertainment websites sued, arguing this violated free speech and privacy protections.
Texas countered that the state had a right to protect children with what Solicitor General Aaron Nielson framed as “simple, safe and common” restrictions.
While the Supreme Court justices seemed divided on the free speech issues, a 6-3 majority of the Court ultimately sided with Texas, finding that requiring age verification “is within a State’s authority to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit content.”
The 2023 law “is an exercise of Texas’s traditional power to prevent minors from accessing speech that is obscene from their perspective,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority’s opinion. “To the extent that it burdens adults’ rights to access such speech, it has ‘only an incidental effect on protected speech,’ making it subject to intermediate scrutiny.”
The Court’s three liberal justices dissented, arguing that the law should have been held to the higher standard of strict scrutiny, the most stringent level of legal review used in cases related to fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech. The dissenting judges also argued that while states have a “compelling interest” in protecting children from obscene speech, doing so sometimes impeded the right of adults to access that speech.
In her dissent, which was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Kentanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan said that Texas’ law might well have passed strict scrutiny and used the least restrictive means to achieve its goals.
“But what if Texas could do better — what if Texas could achieve its interest without so interfering with adults’ constitutionally protected rights in viewing the speech HB 1181 covers?” Kagan wrote. “The State should be foreclosed from restricting adults’ access to protected speech if that is not in fact necessary.”
Texas’ law requires people visiting websites “more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors” to show they are over 18 by submitting digital identification, uploading government-issued identification or by using a “commercially reasonable method,” such as their banking information. Neither the website nor the party performing the verification can retain identifying information. Sites that violate the law face fines of up to $10,000 a day.
The law was passed amid a broader push in Texas and other states to prevent children from being exposed to sexual materials, which continued this legislative session. Friday’s ruling could have implications for more than a dozen states that have passed similar laws.
It was not the first time that these Texas bills have tested the boundaries of free speech protections: In two cases, the Supreme Court has ruled that laws aimed to prevent the distribution of obscene materials to minors unconstitutionally restricted free speech.
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Civil liberties groups decried the decision as a rollback of free speech protections.
“Today’s ruling limits American adults’ access to only that speech which is fit for children — unless they show their papers first,” Bob Corn-Revere, chief counsel of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in a statement. “Data breaches are inevitable. How many will it take before we understand the threat today’s ruling presents? Americans will live to regret the day we let the government condition access to protected speech on proof of our identity.”
See here for the previous update. While this was hardly the worst decision handed down this term, it’s still bad and has the room to be a lot worse. It’s not just the data privacy concerns and the needlessly broad restrictions on legal activity, it’s the open invitation for the book banners and the drag show banners and the homophobes to claim that the content they don’t like can be just as readily restricted. That door is now wide open and it will be clear as soon as bill filing season opens in 2027 how drastic and perverse that will be.
And it’s even worse than that. As 404 Media makes clear, you can’t begin to grasp how weird this is going to get.
A metal fork drags its four prongs back and forth across the yolk of an over-easy egg. The lightly peppered fried whites that skin across the runny yolk give a little, straining under the weight of the prongs. The yolk bulges and puckers, and finally the fork flips to its sharp points, bears down on the yolk and rips it open, revealing the thick, bright cadmium-yellow liquid underneath. The fork dips into the yolk and rubs the viscous ovum all over the crispy white edges, smearing it around slowly, coating the prongs. An R&B track plays.
People in the comments on this video and others on the Popping Yolks TikTok account seem to be a mix of pleased and disgusted. “Bro seriously Edged till the very last moment,” one person commented. “It’s what we do,” the account owner replied. “Not the eggsum 😭” someone else commented on another popping video.
The sentiment in the comments on most content that floats to the top of my algorithms these days—whether it’s in the For You Page on TikTok, the infamously malleable Reels algo on Instagram, X’s obsession with sex-stunt discourse that makes it into prudish New York Times opinion essays—is confusion: How did I get here? Why does my FYP think I want to see egg edging? Why is everything slightly, uncomfortably, sexual?
If right-wing leadership in this country has its way, the person running this account could be put in prison for disseminating content that’s “intended to arouse.” There’s a nationwide effort happening right now to end pornography, and call everything “pornographic” at the same time.
Read on for more or listen to the 404 folks talk about it on a recent podcast episode. It gets weirder from there, believe me. There’s a reason why Justice Potter Stewart said he was unable to define pornography. What this ruling does is allow freakish losers like Ken Paxton define it for the rest of us. That is a big loss for all of us, no matter how prurient or G-rated our actual media consumption habits may be. The 19th and the Chron have more.