Latest news with #ageverification
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
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. 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. Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion 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.
Wall Street Journal
5 hours ago
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
TNB Tech Minute: Trump Halts Canada Trade Talks Over New Tax on American Tech Companies - Tech News Briefing
Full Transcript This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated. Victoria Craig: Here's your TNB Tech Minute for Friday, June 27th. I'm Victoria Craig for the Wall Street Journal. President Trump today terminated all trade talks with Canada, partly over a new digital services tax on American tech companies. The president said the US's northern neighbor has been, quote, a very difficult country to trade with. Trade negotiations have been taking place between the two sides for months. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is also considering executive orders aimed at increasing power generation to meet AI demand, according to people familiar with the matter. That could include giving federal land to tech companies to build data centers and expediting grid connections and permitting for advanced power generation projects. Elsewhere, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas law requiring certain websites that host sexual content to verify viewers' ages. The Texas law requires websites that contain more than one-third sexual material harmful to minors to use what it calls reasonable age verification methods to determine those visitors are at least 18 years old. Violations are punished with a monetary fine. Search engines and major social media networks are exempt from the state's law. And finally, New York's governor Kathy Hochul signed into law legislation requiring local governments in the state to report cyber attacks on their networks within 72 hours. It also compels organizations to report any ransom payments made to hackers within 24 hours, and mandates security awareness training for New York government employees. The state's new law is in line with pending federal regulations being hammered out by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. For a deeper dive into what's happening in tech, check out Monday's Tech News Briefing podcast.
CTV News
6 hours ago
- Politics
- CTV News
U.S. Supreme Court upholds Texas law aimed at blocking kids from seeing pornography online
The Supreme Court is seen on Capitol Hill, Feb. 27, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr., File) WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld a Texas law aimed at blocking children from seeing online pornography. Nearly half of the states have passed similar laws requiring adult websites users verify users' ages to access pornographic material. The laws come as smartphones and other devices make it easier to access online porn, including hardcore obscene material. The court split along ideological lines in t he 6-3 ruling. It's a loss for an adult-entertainment industry trade group called the Free Speech Coalition, which challenged the Texas law. Th majority opinion, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, found the measure didn't seriously restrict adults' free-speech rights. 'Adults have the right to access speech obscene only to minors ... but adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification,' he wrote. In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the court should have used a higher legal standard in weighing whether the law creates free-speech problems. Pornhub, one of the world's busiest websites, has stopped operating in several states, including Texas, citing the technical and privacy hurdles in complying with the laws. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, celebrated the ruling. 'Companies have no right to expose children to pornography and must institute reasonable age verification measures,' he said. The decision could pave the way for more states to adopt similar laws, the group National Center on Sexual Exploitation said. While the Free Speech Coalition agreed that children shouldn't be seeing porn, it said the law puts an unfair free-speech burden on adults by requiring them to submit personal information that could be vulnerable to hacking or tracking. The age verification requirements fall on websites that have a certain amount of sexual material, not search engines or social-media sites that can be used to find it. Samir Jain, vice president of policy at the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology, said that age verification requirements raise serious privacy and free-expression concerns. The court's decision 'overturns decades of precedent and has the potential to upend access to First Amendment-protected speech on the internet for everyone, children and adults alike.' In 1996, the Supreme Court struck down parts of a law banning explicit material viewable by kids online. A divided court also ruled against a different federal law aimed at stopping kids from being exposed to porn in 2004 but said less restrictive measures like content filtering are constitutional. Texas argues that technology has improved significantly in the last 20 years, allowing online platforms to easily check users' ages with a quick picture. Those requirements are more like ID checks at brick-and-mortar adult stores that were upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1960s, the state said. District courts initially blocked laws in Indiana and Tennessee as well as Texas, but appeals courts reversed the decisions and let the laws take effect. Associated Press writers Jonathan Mattise in Nashville, Tenn., Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco and Nadia Lathan in Austin, Texas contributed to this report. Lindsay Whitehurst, The Associated Press
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Elena Kagan Torches Supreme Court's Terrible Logic in Porn Ruling
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan ripped the court's majority decision Friday upholding age-verification requirements for pornography websites. In a scathing dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Kentanji Brown Jackson, Kagan accused the majority decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton of diluting First Amendment protections for sexually explicit speech. 'The majority's opinion concluding to the contrary is, to be frank, confused. The opinion, to start with, is at war with itself,' she wrote, because the majority opinion initially claims that age verification had nothing to do with the First Amendment, before ultimately it 'gives up that ghost.' Kagan argued that the Texas law requiring websites that host pornography or other sexually explicit materials to verify their users' ages before allowing them access had restricted the access adults have to protected speech. While the rule was designed to prohibit minors from accessing explicit materials, many adults would likely be unwilling to hand over their personal information, such as a passport, to websites hosting pornography. Kagan explained that the rule called for a higher level of scrutiny because it was not simply 'incidentally' restrictive, as Justice Clarence Thomas—who wrote the majority opinion—claimed. 'Texas's law defines speech by content and tells people entitled to view that speech that they must incur a cost to do so. That is, under our First Amendment law, a direct (not incidental) regulation of speech based on its content—which demands strict scrutiny,' she wrote. Under intermediate scrutiny, Texas was not required to demonstrate that it had selected the option that was least restrictive for free speech. Kagan argued that this was not sufficient. 'A State may not care much about safeguarding adults' access to sexually explicit speech; a State may even prefer to curtail those materials for everyone. Many reasonable people, after all, view the speech at issue here as ugly and harmful for any audience. But the First Amendment protects those sexually explicit materials, for every adult. So a State cannot target that expression, as Texas has here, any more than is necessary to prevent it from reaching children,' she wrote. 'That is what we have held in cases indistinguishable from this one. And that is what foundational First Amendment principles demand.'
Washington Post
7 hours ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
What to know about online age verification laws
The Supreme Court has upheld a Texas law aimed at blocking children under 18 from seeing online pornography by requiring websites to verify the ages of all visitors. Many states have passed similar age verification laws in an attempt to restrict access to adult material from minors, but digital rights groups have raised questions about such laws' effects on free speech and whether verifying ages by accessing sensitive data could violate people's privacy.
