US Supreme Court poised to rule in challenge to Texas age-check for online porn
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on Friday in a challenge on free speech grounds to a Texas law that requires pornographic websites to verify the age of users in a case testing the legality of state efforts to keep minors from viewing such material online.
A trade group representing adult entertainment performers and companies appealed a lower court's decision allowing the Republican-led state's age-verification mandate, finding that it likely did not violate the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment safeguard against government abridgment of speech.
The Texas measure is one of 24 similar ones enacted around the United States, primarily in Republican-governed states, with some set to take effect in the months ahead, according to the Free Speech Coalition, which challenged the law.
The law requires websites whose content is more than a third "sexual material harmful to minors" to have all users submit personally identifying information verifying they are at least age 18 to gain access.
The case tested the limits of state powers to protect minors from explicit materials deemed by policymakers to be harmful to them with measures that burden the access of adults to constitutionally protected expression.
Supreme Court precedents have protected access by adults to non-obscene sexual content on First Amendment grounds, including a 2004 ruling that blocked a federal law similar to the Texas measure. If the 2004 precedent prevents Texas from enforcing its law, then it should be overruled, the state argued, noting how the digital landscape has changed dramatically in the two decades since.
The coalition, a trade association of adult content performers, producers and distributors, as well as companies that run pornographic websites including Pornhub.com, xnxx.com, xvideos.com and Brazzers.com, argued that online age verification unlawfully stifles the free speech rights of adults and exposes them to increasing risks of identity theft, extortion and data breaches.
Some sites like Pornhub blocked access entirely in states with age-verification laws.
Steps such as content-filtering software or on-device age verification would better protect minors while respecting the rights of adults, according to the challengers.
During Jan. 15 arguments in the case, the justices voiced worries about the pervasiveness of pornography online and the ease with which minors are able to access it. Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the mother of school-age children, noted that minors can get online porn through cellphones, tablets, gaming systems and computers, and noted that there has been an "explosion of addiction to online porn."
But some of the justices also expressed concern over the burdens imposed on adults to view constitutionally protected material, debating whether the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals should have applied a stricter form of judicial review to the Texas law than the one it actually used that gave deference to legislators.
U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra issued a preliminary injunction in 2023, blocking the law.
The 5th Circuit ruled in 2024 that the plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed in their First Amendment challenge to the age-verification requirement, lifting Ezra's injunction on that provision. The 5th Circuit upheld Ezra's injunction against another provision requiring websites to display "health warnings" about viewing pornography.
The Supreme Court last year declined to halt enforcement of the law while the case proceeded.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Star
an hour ago
- The Star
Colombian foreign minister resigns amid passport printing row
FILE PHOTO: Colombian Foreign Minister Laura Sarabia attends a press conference for a ministerial meeting of the China-CELAC Forum, at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, in Beijing, China May 13, 2025. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang/Pool/File Photo BOGOTA (Reuters) -Colombia's Foreign Minister Laura Sarabia announced her resignation on Thursday, as President Gustavo Petro's government faces turbulence over an administrative dispute involving the printing of national passports. Sarabia had expressed dissatisfaction with the government's decision to alter a previous passport printing agreement. "In the last few days, decisions have been made that I do not agree with," Sarabia wrote in a post on X, adding that she had decided to resign out of "personal coherence and institutional respect." Sarabia, who had previously served as Petro's chief of staff, was named the South American country's top diplomat by the leftist president in January. (Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta; Writing by Aida Pelaez-Fernandez; Editing by Gabriel Araujo)
The Star
an hour ago
- The Star
What's next for Sean 'Diddy' Combs after his sex trafficking trial?
Defense lawyers comfort Sean "Diddy" Combs while discussing how to handle a note sent by jurors that they had reached a verdict on four of the five counts against him, during Combs' sex trafficking trial in New York City, New York, U.S., July 1, 2025, in this courtroom sketch. REUTERS/Jane Rosenberg NEW YORK (Reuters) -Sean "Diddy" Combs was found guilty on Wednesday of prostitution-related offenses but cleared of more serious charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking. Combs, 55, had pleaded not guilty to all five felony counts he faced. Here's what's expected to come next in the case: COMBS REMAINS JAILED FOR NOW U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian denied Combs' request to be released from federal lockup in Brooklyn until sentencing, given the evidence presented at trial of violent acts Combs had committed. "It is impossible for the defendant to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that he poses no danger," Subramanian said. SENTENCING Subramanian suggested sentencing Combs on October 3, but said he would entertain a defense request for an earlier date. Combs faces a maximum 10-year prison sentence on each of the two prostitution counts. Prosecutors acknowledged in a court filing that federal sentencing guidelines appeared to recommend a sentence of at most 5-1/4 years total, well below the statutory maximum. Combs' lawyers argued that two years would be the outer limit. APPEAL After Combs' sentencing, his lawyers may file an appeal of both his conviction and his sentence. To succeed on appeal, the defense faces the high burden of convincingthe 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that Subramanian made legal errors that impacted the jury's verdict. Any appeal may take years to play out. For example, the 2nd Circuit upheld the sex trafficking conviction and 20-year prison sentence of British socialiteGhislaine Maxwell on September 17, 2024, nearly three years after her conviction. CIVIL LAWSUITS Rhythm and blues singer Casandra "Cassie" Ventura, a star prosecution witness, sued Combs in November 2023 for sex trafficking, the first of dozens of civil lawsuits accusing him of abuse. Combs settled with Ventura for $20 million, but many others are unresolved. Combs has denied all wrongdoing. (Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York;Editing by Noeleen Walder, Nick Zieminski and Bill Berkrot)
The Star
an hour ago
- The Star
Crimean Tatars, scarred by past, fear homeland will be ceded to Russia in peace deal
KYIV (Reuters) -When Ukrainian Leniie Umerova crossed into Russia on her way to see her ailing father in their native Crimea in late 2022, she was detained and forced to endure what she calls a "carousel" of charges and prison transfers that lasted nearly two years. The ordeal, which included stints in solitary confinement, crystallised a sense of generational trauma for Umerova, 27, a member of the Crimean Tatar community indigenous to the Black Sea peninsula that was annexed from Ukraine by Russia in 2014. "It was very difficult because I was constantly alone in my cell and they (the Russians) periodically tried to feed me their propaganda," said Umerova, who initially faced administrative charges and later accusations of espionage, which she denied. Umerova had grown up listening to her grandmother's stories of how in 1944 the family, along with hundreds of thousands of other Crimean Tatars, were deported to distant Central Asia on Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's orders for alleged collaboration with the Nazis, even though many Tatars including her great-grandfather were fighting for the Red Army. Thousands died from disease or starvation, and the Tatars were only allowed back to Crimea in the 1980s. Now Umerova fears that Crimea, as part of a final Ukraine peace deal, could be recognised as part of Russia - a scenario that the Trump administration in the United States has signalled is possible. "For so many years now, the same enemy has been doing evil to our family," Umerova said. "If we don't fight now and overcome this, where are the guarantees that my children or my grandchildren won't get the same (treatment)?" Always before her is the example of her grandmother, who refused to speak Russian when Umerova was young and immersed the family in Tatar culture and language. "Whatever happens, we must return to Crimea," was the message. Umerova returned to Kyiv after being released by Russia in a prisoner swap last September, and despite her suffering, she remains hopeful that the Tatars, a Sunni Muslim, Turkic people, will one day be able to live freely again in a Ukrainian Crimea. "Every day, every year... you live with the dream that now, now, now they will deal with this one thing and return Crimea... And so it will be, I am 100% sure of this," she added. RUSSIA WON'T BUDGE But Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that any peace settlement for Ukraine must include recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea and four other Ukrainian regions. Moscow denies Kyiv's assertions that it is violating the rights of Tatars and other people in Crimea, which it says is historically Russian. According to the Ukrainian President's Mission in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, some 133 Crimean Tatars are currently illegally imprisoned by Russia. Russia's Foreign Ministry did not respond to a Reuters request for comment. "To give (Crimea to Russia) is to simply spit in their faces," Umerova said of those detained Tatars and of the tens of thousands who continue to live in occupied Crimea. Russia's Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment on this article. At the time of Russia's annexation, Crimean Tatars accounted for around 12 percent of the peninsula's population of some two million. They rejected Russia's occupation and boycotted a referendum at the time, and community leaders estimate that some 50,000 have left since 2014, though most have remained there. Crimean Tatar rights activist and journalist Lutfiye Zudiyeva, who lives there, said Russia had subjected her community to what she called "active assimilation". "Of course, today in Crimea you can sing in Crimean Tatar and dance national dances, but the people have no political agency," she said. Crimea is internationally recognised as part of Ukraine by most countries but U.S. President Donald Trump told Time magazine in April that "Crimea will stay with Russia". Under peace proposals prepared by Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff, the United States would extend de jure recognition of Moscow's control of the peninsula. However, the two sides have made little progress in peace talks since April. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is trying to resist Trump's pressure to cede territory to Russia as part of any peace settlement, and he has cited Umerova's case as an example of what he says is Moscow's repression of the Crimean Tatars. For Ukrainian singer Jamala, who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2016 with her song "1944" about Stalin's deportations, any talk of legally recognising Crimea as Russian is "insane". "If a country like America says 'it's no big deal, let's just forget about it and move on', then there are no guarantees in the world," Jamala told Reuters. (Additional reporting by Elizabeth PiperEditing by Gareth Jones)
