Texas’ age verification law for porn upheld by U.S. Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld a Texas law requiring pornography websites to verify users’ ages to prevent access to minors.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who authored the majority opinion, said the statute “advances the state’s important interest in shielding children from sexually explicit content.”

The Texas law, passed in 2023, requires companies that distribute “sexual material harmful to minors” to use any commercially available online system, including ones that verify users’ government-issued IDs, to confirm visitors are over age 18.

READ MORE: Pornhub disables website in Texas over objection to age verification law

Websites that don’t comply can face fines of up to $10,000 per day and up to $250,000 if a minor is exposed to explicit content.

The adult entertainment industry and other critics had argued the law violates their free speech rights and puts users’ sensitive information at risk of cybercrime. In response to the law, PornHub, one of the most-visited adult content sites in the country, shut down its site in Texas.

Thomas said the law is “appropriately tailored because it permits users to verify their ages through the established methods of providing government-issued identification and sharing transactional data.” He noted that states have used age-verification measures when dealing with in-person age-restricted transactions, and Texas’ law “simply adapts this traditional approach to the digital age.”

The decision was split along ideological lines, 6-3, with justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent. The ruling will apply to Texas and nearly two dozen other states that have passed similar laws attempting to shield minors from pornography.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a statement on social media Friday applauded the ruling.

“This is a major victory for children, parents, and the ability of states to protect minors from the damaging effects of online pornography,” Paxton, a Republican, said on X. “Companies have no right to expose children to pornography and must institute reasonable age verification measures.”

The Free Speech Coalition, an adult-entertainment industry trade group, that brought the suit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The coalition and other opponents of the law had argued that age verification systems put people’s personal data at risk of breaches from inside and outside the organization. There is also a risk that scammers will create dummy websites with the goal of collecting and exploiting users’ authentication data, they argued.

Pornhub disabled access for Texans last March after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the company for not complying with the law. In a statement on the website, the company said the “only effective solution” would be putting the age-verification onus on the manufacturers and operating-system providers of devices that have internet access, such as computer, tablet and cellphone makers.

Another site, Chaturbate, agreed to verify users’ ages after Paxton sued its parent company in 2024. A similar case, against xHamster’s parent company, is ongoing.

U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra in August 2023 had blocked the law, finding that it was likely unconstitutional by infringing on the plaintiff’s First Amendment rights. But the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in November of that year ruled in the state’s favor, finding it has a legitimate interest in preventing minors from accessing pornography.

Last spring, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to block the law while the case was ongoing but later agreed to hear arguments over the Fifth Circuit’s opinion. The court heard arguments on the case in January.

Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent Friday, argued that Texas should have been held to a higher legal standard when it came to assessing whether its law imposed too much of a burden on free speech rights. Kagan said the state could have pursued a less restrictive method to achieve the same goal of protecting minors.

She disagreed with Thomas’ contention that Texas’ law mirrored existing in-person age-verification requirements, “like having to flash ID to enter a club,” because it requires turning over sensitive personal information at great risk to a person’s privacy.

“We recognized the problem in a case involving sexual material on cable TV: Similar demands, we decided, would ‘restrict viewing by subscribers who fear for their reputations should the operator, advertently or inadvertently, disclose the list of those who wish to watch the “patently offensive” channel,’” Kagan wrote. “The internet context can only increase the fear.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story said Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, it was Justice Clarence Thomas.