Latest news with #FreeSpeechCoalition
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
US supreme court backs age checks for pornography sites to exclude children
The US supreme court ruled that a Texas law requiring that pornography websites verify the ages of their visitors was constitutional on Friday, the latest development in a global debate over how to prevent minors from accessing adult material online. 'HB 1181 simply requires adults to verify their age before they can access speech that is obscene to children,' Clarence Thomas wrote in the court's 6-3 majority opinion. 'The statute advances the state's important interest in shielding children from sexually explicit content. And, it is appropriately tailored because it permits users to verify their ages through the established methods of providing government-issued identification and sharing transactional data.' Elena Kagan dissented alongside the court's two other liberal justices. The Texas law required would-be visitors to sites purveying 'sexual material harmful to minors' to submit personally identifying information to verify their ages and determine they were 18, of age to access a page with more than a third pornographic content, per the law's standard. The Free Speech Coalition, a trade group representing adult entertainment professionals and companies, including and had sued the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton. The coalition argued that the mandate unfairly hindered the constitutional right of consenting adults to access constitutionally protected explicit material and exposed the sites themselves to privacy risks by foisting the burden of verification on them. Related: US supreme court rules schools must let kids opt out of LGBTQ+ book readings The court heard arguments in Free Speech Coalition Inc v Paxton in January. After two hours of oral arguments, the justices appeared divided over the law's constitutionality. A federal appeals court had previously cleared the way for the law, lifting a lower court's injunction. The federal judge in the case had said the law furthered the US government's legitimate interest in preventing minors from viewing pornography. On Friday, the supreme court affirmed that decision. The ruling sets a precedent for the two dozen states in the US that have passed age verification laws. Pornhub, widely estimated to be the most-visited site for pornographic content in the world, has made itself unavailable in 17 of them. Texas, the second-most-populous state in the US with 31 million people, is the highest-profile example. The state legislature passed a law requiring the submission of identifying information to visit Pornhub and other adult sites in September 2023. In March of the following year, the site went dark in the state, greeting would-be visitors with a banner calling the law 'ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous'. It remains unavailable today. In Louisiana, which has also imposed age verification laws, Pornhub is still available, but it has seen traffic there decline by 80%, which the company attributes to the barrier of the ID requirement. Research into age-gate statutes in the US has found that they are not effective in their stated goal. Online search data showed that people in states with age verification laws sought out porn sites that did not comply with local laws so as to circumvent the age gates as well as virtual private networks to hide their locations from internet providers. Pornhub's parent company, Aylo, has argued in favor of content-filtering software or on-device age verification, in which a phone maker such as Apple or Samsung would determine a user's age and pass that information to the websites a person visits, rather than forcing the site itself to obtain and host the information. Aylo's suite of sites returned to France last week after a three-week blackout, a protest against an age verification law there. An administrative court suspended the law while it reviewed compliance with European Union regulations. The UK is likely to be the next front in the fight over age verification. Pornhub and other pornography websites have promised to implement age checks there in compliance with the Online Safety Act, which requires 'robust' age-checking methods be put in place this summer.
The Verge
11 hours ago
- Politics
- The Verge
The Supreme Court just upended internet law, and I have questions
Age verification is perhaps the hottest battleground for online speech, and the Supreme Court just settled a pivotal question: does using it to gate adult content violate the First Amendment in the US? For roughly the past 20 years the answer has been 'yes' — now, as of Friday, it's an unambiguous 'no.' Justice Clarence Thomas' opinion in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is relatively straightforward as Supreme Court rulings go. To summarize, its conclusion is that: Around this string of logic, you'll find a huge number of objections and unknowns. Many of these were laid out before the decision: the Electronic Frontier Foundation has an overview of the issues, and 404 Media goes deeper on the potential consequences. With the actual ruling in hand, while people are working out the serious implications for future legal cases and the scale of the potential damage, I've got a few immediate, prosaic questions. Even the best age verification usually requires collecting information that links people (directly or indirectly) to some of their most sensitive web history, creating an almost inherent risk of leaks. The only silver lining is that current systems seem to at least largely make good-faith attempts to avoid intentional snooping, and legislation includes attempts to discourage unnecessary data retention. The problem is, proponents of these systems had the strongest incentives to make privacy-preserving efforts while age verification was still a contested legal issue. Any breaches could have undercut the claim that age-gating is harmless. Unfortunately, the incentives are now almost perfectly flipped. Companies benefit from collecting and exploiting as much data as they can. (Remember when Twitter secretly used two-factor authentication addresses for ad targeting?) Most state and federal privacy frameworks were weak even before federal regulatory agencies started getting gutted, and services may not expect any serious punishment for siphoning data or cutting security corners. Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies could quietly demand security backdoors for any number of reasons, including catching people viewing illegal material. Once you create those gaps, they leave everyone vulnerable. Will we see deliberate privacy invasions? Not necessarily! And many people will probably evade age verification altogether by using VPNs or finding sites that skirt the rules. But in an increasingly surveillance-happy world, it's a reasonable concern. Over the past couple of years Pornhub has prominently blocked access to a number of states, including Texas, in protest of local laws requiring age verification. Denying service has been one of the adult industry's big points of leverage, demonstrating one potential outcome of age verification laws, but even with VPN workarounds this tactic ultimately limits the site's reach and hurts its bottom line. The Supreme Court ruling cites 21 other states with rules similar to the Texas one, and now that this approach has been deemed constitutional, it's plausible more will follow suit. At a certain point Pornhub's parent company Aylo will need to weigh the costs and benefits, particularly if a fight against age verification looks futile — and the Supreme Court decision is a step in that direction. In the UK, Pornhub ceded territory on that very front a couple of days ago, agreeing (according to British regulator Ofcom) to implement 'robust' age verification by July 25th. The company declined comment to The Verge on the impact of FSC v. Paxton, but backing down wouldn't be a surprising move here. I don't ask this question with respect to the law itself — you can read the legal definitions within the text of the Texas law right here. I'm wondering, rather, how far Texas and other states think they can push those limits. If states stick to policing content that most people would classify as intentional porn or erotica, age-gating on Pornhub and its many sister companies is a given, along with other, smaller sites. Non-video but still sex-focused sites like fiction portal Literotica seem probably covered. More hypothetically, there are general-focus sites that happen to allow visual, text, and audio porn and have a lot of it, like 4chan — though a full one-third of the service being adult content is a high bar to clear. Beyond that, we're pretty much left speculating about how malicious state attorneys general might be. It's easy to imagine LGBTQ resources or sex education sites becoming targets despite having the exact kind of social value the law is supposed to exempt. (I'm not even getting into a federal attempt to redefine obscenity in general.) At this point, of course, it's debatable how much justification is required before a government can mount an attack on a website. Remember when Texas investigated Media Matters for fraud because it posted unflattering X screenshots? That was roughly the legal equivalent of Mad Libs, but the attorney general was mad enough to give it a shot. Age verification laws are, rather, tailor-made methods to take aim at any given site. The question 'What is porn?' is going to have a tremendous impact on the internet — not just because of what courts believe is obscene for minors, but because of what website operators believe the courts believe is obscene. This is a subtle distinction, but an important one. We know legislation limiting adult content has chilling effects, even when the laws are rarely used. While age verification rules were in flux, sites could reasonably delay making a call on how to handle them. But that grace period is over — seemingly for good. Many websites are going to start making fairly drastic decisions about what they host, where they operate, and what kind of user information they collect, based not just on hard legal decisions but on preemptive phantom versions of them. In the US, during an escalating push for government censorship, the balance of power has just tipped dramatically. We don't know how far it has left to go.
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
The hilarious implications of the Supreme Court's new porn decision
The Supreme Court upheld a Texas anti-pornography law on Friday that is nearly identical to a federal law it struck down more than two decades ago. Rather than overruling the previous case — Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004) — Justice Clarence Thomas's opinion spends at least a dozen pages making an unconvincing argument that Friday's decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is consistent with the Court's previous decisions. Those pages are a garbled mess, and Thomas spends much of them starting from the assumption that his conclusions are true. All three Democratic justices dissented. That said, Free Speech Coalition makes two very significant changes to the Court's approach to free speech protections for pornography, and these changes are clearly stated in Thomas's opinion. In Ashcroft, the Court struck down a federal law that basically required pornographic websites to screen users to determine if they are over the age of 18. One reason for this decision is that it was far from clear that websites were actually capable of performing this task. As the Court had acknowledged in an earlier case, 'existing technology did not include any effective method for a sender to prevent minors from obtaining access to its communications on the Internet without also denying access to adults.' This mattered because, long before the internet was widely available, the Court had established, in cases involving phone sex lines and televised pornography, that 'the objective of shielding children' from sexual material is not enough 'to support a blanket ban if the protection can be accomplished by a less restrictive alternative.' These decisions established that adults have a First Amendment right to view sexual material, and this right cannot be diminished in an effort to keep that material from children. Accordingly, in Ashcroft, the Court ruled that the federal age-gating law must survive the toughest test that courts can apply in constitutional cases, known as 'strict scrutiny.' Very few laws survive this test, and the law at issue in Ashcroft did not. The Court's ruling in Free Speech Coalition, however, changes the rules governing laws that seek to block minors' access to pornography, but which also may prevent adults from seeing that material. While much of Thomas's opinion is difficult to parse, one significant factor driving the Court's decision is the fact that technology has evolved. The internet, and internet pornography, is much more widely available than it was two decades ago. And it may now actually be possible to reliably age-gate pornographic websites. Now, laws like the one at issue in Free Speech Coalition are only subject to a test known as 'intermediate scrutiny' — a test which, as the name implies, is less strict. Under this somewhat less rigid framework, an anti-pornography law will be upheld 'if it advances important governmental interests unrelated to the suppression of free speech and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further those interests.' According to Thomas, in Free Speech Coalition, the 'important governmental interest' at issue in this case is 'shielding children from sexual content.' Intermediate scrutiny, it should be noted, is not a paper tiger. Laws that discriminate on the basis of gender, for example, are typically subject to intermediate scrutiny. And most of these laws are struck down. But the new rule announced in Free Speech Coalition gives states broader leeway to restrict access to pornography. Additionally, Thomas's opinion also implies that adults have no legal right to keep their decision to view sexual material private. The plaintiffs in Free Speech Coalition argued that 'the unique stigma surrounding pornography will make age verification too chilling for adults.' Pornography users are likely to be reluctant to submit their ID to a site like Pornhub, for example, out of fear that the website will be hacked. This is likely to be especially true for people who are trying to keep their sexual orientation a secret, or people who could face serious career consequences if their private sexual behavior became public. But Thomas's opinion is exceedingly dismissive of the idea that privacy matters in this context. 'The use of pornography has always been the subject of social stigma,' he writes. But 'this social reality has never been a reason to exempt the pornography industry from otherwise valid regulation.' It's unclear just how far Thomas, or the rest of his colleagues, would take this conclusion. Could a state, for example, require everyone who wants to look at a pornographic video to submit their names to a government agency that will publish them on a public website? At the very least, however, Free Speech Coalition suggests that lawyers challenging anti-pornography laws may no longer raise privacy arguments as part of their challenge. Free Speech Coalition makes clear that the era when the courts struck down nearly all laws regulating sexual speech is over. The government will now play a larger role in regulating online content depicting sex. There is a very good reason, moreover, why pre-Free Speech Coalition courts took a libertarian approach to sexual speech. Although the First Amendment has been part of the Constitution since the late 1700s, it was largely meaningless for most of American history. And the government routinely prosecuted people for saying things, or for producing art, that regulators or law enforcement found objectionable. Under the 1873 Comstock Act and similar state laws, for example, people were routinely jailed for selling erotic literature or nude art, even works that are now widely considered masterpieces. This regime began to change in the middle of the twentieth century, when the Court started protecting speech of all kinds, including both sexual and political speech. In Roth v. United States (1957), for example, the Court established that sexual speech and art could only be banned if the 'average person, applying contemporary community standards' would determine that 'the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest.' Later Supreme Court decisions tweaked this rule, and they also focused on whether the challenged speech or art has 'serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.' Speech that does have such value is protected. All of these legal tests, however, are quite vague. And the question of whether a particular film or photo has serious artistic value is rather obviously in the eye of the beholder. Hence Justice Potter Stewart's infamous statement that he may not be able to come up with a coherent legal framework to determine what sort of material should be banned, 'but I know it when I see it.' The result was that, for much of the 1970s, the justices literally had to meet in the basement of the Supreme Court to watch pornographic movies that were the subject of prosecutions, in order to make subjective calls about which movies should be protected by the First Amendment. Those movie days, as described by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong in The Brethren, were thoroughly humiliating experiences. Justice John Marshall Harlan, for example, was nearly blind during many of these screenings, so one of his law clerks had to describe what was happening on the screen to him — often prompting Harlan to explain 'By Jove!' or 'extraordinary!' Meanwhile, filmmakers would often try to work within the Court's 'serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value' framework by including political discussions or similar matters in a movie that was otherwise about sex. According to Woodward and Armstrong, for example, one such film ended with a speech 'on the comparative merits of Communist and Western societies.' The point is that, once the Court decided that some sexual speech is protected by the Constitution, it was extremely difficult to come up with a principled way to distinguish art that is too sexy to be protected by the First Amendment from art that is not. And the Court's attempts to do so only made a mockery of the justices. Eventually, the combination of Supreme Court decisions that read the First Amendment broadly, and technologies like the internet that made it very difficult to suppress sexual speech, ushered in an era where pornography is widely available and mostly unregulated. In upholding the Texas law at issue in Free Speech Coalition, the Court could end this era. But the justices are likely to make their own lives miserable as a result. Texas's law incorporates many of the Supreme Court's past pornography decisions, only restricting speech, for example, that 'lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.' Thus, if Texas wants to apply this law to Pornhub, some poor judge will have to watch much of the content on that website to determine if it has literary, artistic, political, or scientific value — and whatever that judge decides, their decision will be appealed to other judges who will have to engage in the same exercise. Justice Thomas and his colleagues, in other words, should probably install a popcorn machine in the Supreme Court building, because they've just signed themselves up to recreate the humiliating movie days of the Court's past.
Bloomberg
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Supreme Court's Porn Ruling Continues the Conservative Revolution
In a landmark 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court upheld age-verification requirements for accessing online pornography sites, effectively overturning a precedent that had stood for more than 20 years. Alongside its January decision on TikTok, the ruling marks a new era in the court's online First Amendment jurisprudence: the justices are increasingly willing to uphold government suppression of free speech for policy reasons. The opinion in the case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, who, until recently, was something of a free speech absolutist. Thomas made it extremely clear that his goal was to find a way to uphold the Texas age-verification law at issue, regardless of precedent.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
US Supreme Court upholds Texas age-check for porn sites
The US Supreme Court on Friday upheld a Texas law requiring pornographic websites to verify visitors' ages, rejecting arguments that this violates free speech and boosting efforts to protect children from online sexual content. The court's decision will impact a raft of similar laws nationwide and could set the direction for internet speech regulation as concerns about the impact of digital life on society grow. Texas is one of about 20 US states to institute checks that porn viewers are over 18, which critics argue violate First Amendment free speech rights. Britain and Germany also enforce age-related access restrictions to adult websites, while a similar policy in France was blocked by the courts a week ago. US companies like Meta, meanwhile, are lobbying Washington lawmakers for age-based verification to be carried out by smartphone giants Apple and Google on their app stores. The Texas law was passed in 2023 by the state's Republican-majority legislature but was initially blocked after a challenge by an adult entertainment industry trade association. A federal district court sided with the trade group, the Free Speech Coalition, saying the law restricted adults' access to constitutionally protected content. But a conservative-dominated appeals court upheld the age verification requirement, prompting the pornography trade group to take its case to the Supreme Court, where conservatives have a 6-3 supermajority. Under the law, companies that fail to properly verify users' ages face fines up to $10,000 per day and up to $250,000 if a child is exposed to pornographic content as a result. To protect privacy, the websites aren't allowed to retain any identifying information obtained from users when verifying ages, and doing so could cost companies $10,000 daily in fines. During arguments in January before the Supreme Court, a lawyer representing the Free Speech Coalition said the law was "overly burdensome" and that its goal could be accomplished using content filtering programs. But Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the mother of seven children, took issue with the efficacy of content filtering, saying that from personal experience as a parent, such programs were difficult to maintain across the many types of devices used by kids. Barrett also asked the lawyer to explain why requesting age verification online is any different than doing so at a movie theater that displays pornographic movies. The lawyer for the Free Speech Coalition -- which includes the popular website Pornhub that has blocked all access in some states with age verification laws -- said online verification was different as it leaves a "permanent record" that could be a target for hackers. During the court's hearing of the case in January, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas, both Republican appointees, seemed to suggest that advances in technology might justify reviewing online free speech cases. In 1997, the Supreme Court struck down, in an overwhelming 7-2 decision, a federal online age-verification law in what became a landmark free speech case that set a major precedent for the internet age. arp/sms/bgs
