Supreme Court maintains the Texas Age Verification Act for porn sites

Washington, the Supreme Court on June 27, confirmed the Texas Law, requiring pornographic websites, to verify that users are at least 18, if concerns about the protection of minors from concerns about breach of the rights of the first adult correction.

The court divided 6-3 on ideological grounds with the three liberal judges who disagreed.

The majority stated that the Texas Act is progressing an important interest in protecting children from sexually explicit content and does not excessively burden adults, as it rely on “established methods for providing government data and sharing transaction data”.

The use of pornography has always been the subject of the social stigman, Klarence Thomas wrote justice for the majority.

“This social reality has never been a reason to release the pornography industry from the otherwise valid regulation,” he writes.

Justice Elena Kagan stated that the court should require Texas to show that there is no other way to block the minors from considering the material, which better protects the rights of free speech of adults.

As the first amendment defends sexually explicit adult materials, it writes in its disagreement: “The state cannot focus on this expression, as there is Texas here, more than it is necessary to prevent it from reaching children.”

Eighteen others, to a large extent, conservative countries have adopted similar laws in recent years, as access to an increasing cache of online pornography has exploded and the material has become more graphical.

Defenders of the freedom of speech and the commercial group representing the adult entertainment industry said the requirement of users to upload a government identification number or to use another approved method to check age make them vulnerable to their personal information, which is hacked or unintentionally revealed. They said that content filtration technology can prevent children from watching porn without violating adult confidentiality rights.

Texas counters that the content filtration technology for parents has been available for decades and does not work, an argument that at home with some of the judges at home when discussing the free -speech coalition against Paxon in January.

“Filtering content for all these devices, I can say from personal experience, it is difficult to consider,” says justice Amy Connie Barrett, who has seven children, the oldest of which was born in 2001.

The first federal structure, which reviewed the Texas law, blocks the implementation, saying that it is unlikely to experience a constitutional challenge, since the requirement to check age is as much like the federal law to protect children from online pornography, which the Supreme Court said in 2004 that it was too depressing for adults.

5^th The US Court of Appeal overturned this decision and allowed the law to enter into force in 2023.

The Court of Appeal referred to a 1968 Supreme Court’s decision that the state could limit the access of minors to sexually explicit materials – in this case what the court calls “Girl” magazines.

But while this decision – Ginsberg vs. New York – focuses on the rights of minors, the court’s decision of 2004 – Ashcroft against ACLU – addressed whether the adult rights are trampled in the minor protection process.

When the court issued the 2004 decision, high -speed Internet, social media and smartphones were in the early stages.

Today, children can spend hours online every day on their smartphones and other devices.

Texas law requires websites to check the user if at least one third of the content of the site is sexual material, considered harmful to minors.

Websites can be fined up to $ 10,000 a day for not complying. The fines hit $ 250,000, if an amino that has not been checked, access to the site.

Pornhub stopped working in Texas and several other states because of the laws.

This article originally appeared in USA Today: The Supreme Court maintains the Texas Age Verification Act for porn sites