State laws requiring pornography websites to verify the age of users will remain in place following a major decision the Supreme Court issued on June 27.

The case, Free Speech Coalition Inc. v. Paxton, concerns a Texas law known as HB 1181 that imposes $10,000-per-day fines on website operators that fail to implement age-verification measures. The penalty rises to $250,000 if minors access sexual material covered by the law.

The Supreme Court voted 6–3 to uphold the law. If the justices had struck down the Texas law, similar laws in other states would have been in legal jeopardy. However, the new ruling may encourage other states to pass age-verification laws now that they know that they are constitutional.

A porn industry group mounted a legal challenge to the Texas law, arguing that it violates the free speech provisions of the First Amendment. Texas argued that the law was both constitutional and necessary to prevent underage people from accessing graphic sexual materials.

In the new ruling, the justices discussed the history of laws regulating pornography in the United States and state governments’ power to regulate expression.

Here are some key takeaways:

The Verification Requirement Is Constitutional

The industry group argued that because the age-verification requirement of HB 1181 interferes with adults accessing pornographic material, the law had to be “narrowly drawn” to achieve its goal of protecting minors from sexually explicit content. If it is not narrowly drawn, then it does not comply with the First Amendment and must be struck down, the group argued.

The online age-verification procedure required by the law makes users identify themselves by presenting government-issued identification, and this creates a “substantial chilling effect” by exposing adults to the “risk of inadvertent disclosures, leaks, or hacks,” according to the group.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion, said even though the law interferes with the right of adult visitors to these websites, it is consistent with the First Amendment. The law advances an important government interest, which is the state’s interest in protecting children from sexual content. The law goes no further than what is needed to advance that interest, he wrote.

Having to submit to age verification by itself does not prevent adults from exercising their right to access the material, Thomas said.

“Any burden experienced by adults is … only incidental to the statute’s regulation of activity that is not protected by the First Amendment,” he wrote.

At Least 22 States With Age-Verification Requirements

In addition to Texas, at least 21 other states have enacted similar age-verification laws “to access sexual material that is harmful to minors online,” Thomas said.

Among those other states are Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina, according to a list the justice provided.

The Age Verification Providers Association stated that the figure is higher—24 states.

The trade association welcomed the new Supreme Court ruling, which it stated recognizes that “age assurance technology has now progressed to the point that it is no more unreasonable to require that users prove their age to access adult websites than it is to make them do so to buy a beer or enter a strip club.”

Thomas said states have long had the authority to forbid obscene material for the public at large and to stop minors from accessing material that is deemed obscene to children. Since the late 1800s, the Supreme Court has accepted the government’s power to ban obscenity, he said.

Obscenity is a complex legal concept, but Miller v. California (1973) held, in part, that it covers works that depict sexual conduct in a way that is offensive according to contemporary community standards and “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

The new decision could lead to more age-verification laws in the country.

“This ruling paves the way for other states to pass similar legislation and will have a profound positive impact on preventing children from being exposed to pornography online,” Dani Pinter, senior vice president and director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation Law Center, told The Epoch Times.

Easily Accessible to Children

Thomas said that as of 2024, 95 percent of U.S. teenagers had smartphones and that 93 percent accessed the internet multiple times daily. Watching videos is one of the most common activities online.

Minors can easily view pornographic videos. Pornhub, a website involved in this case, reported that in 2019 it published 1.36 million hours—equivalent to more than 150 years—of new content. Much of the material today is more violent in nature than what was available online in the 1990s, according to Thomas.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett said during oral arguments on Jan. 15 that voluntary screening measures by the porn industry are not effective.

“Kids can get online porn through gaming systems, tablets, phone, computers,” said Barrett, who is a mother of seven children.

“Let me just say that content filtering for all those different devices, I can say from personal experience, is difficult to keep up with.”

Governments Have Long Recognized Children Need to Be Protected From Obscenity

Court rulings early in the nation’s history held that restricting obscenity curbs “corruption of the public mind in general” and protects “the manners of youth in particular.” Early obscenity laws targeted works “manifestly tending to the corruption of the morals of youth,” Thomas said.

By 1868, states had laws on the books that punished publications deemed indecent because they corrupted “the morals of youth,” he said.

In Ginsberg v. New York (1968), the Supreme Court ruled that even if material is not deemed obscene, its marketing may still be regulated because it may be harmful to children.

Ginsberg held that minors are more susceptible to harm from sexually explicit content than adults and have difficulty understanding “the role it might play within a larger expressive work.” As a result, minors enjoy “a more restricted right … to judge and determine for themselves what sex material they may read or see,” Thomas said.

Kagan Says Ruling Abandons Precedent

Justice Elena Kagan dissented, saying keeping pornographic material away from children can be problematic because adults and children “do not live in hermetically sealed boxes.”

Here, she said, the majority applied an inappropriately relaxed First Amendment analysis to the Texas law that allowed it to be upheld, but when considering related cases in the past, the court had applied a tougher standard known as strict scrutiny.

Strict scrutiny is the highest level of review used by the courts. Under it, the government has to show that a law is narrowly tailored to advance a compelling governmental interest and that the law is the least restrictive way to serve that interest.

“There is no reason to change course,” Kagan said, noting that Texas should not be allowed to restrict “adults’ access to protected speech if that is not in fact necessary.”

Samir Jain, vice president at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the ruling “overturns decades of precedent.”

“[Age-verification requirements] still raise serious privacy and free expression concerns,” he said. “If states are to go forward with these burdensome laws, age verification tools must be accurate and limit collection, sharing, and retention of personal information, particularly sensitive information like birthdate and biometric data.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared June 28, 2025, in The Epoch Times. It was updated June 29, 2025.