High Court Age-Check Ruling Could Have Wide Impact Beyond Porn

The US Supreme Court’s ruling affirming Texas’ age-verification requirements to access online porn sites has the potential to bolster the legal case in support of age-check laws aimed at other forms of online content, First Amendment attorneys say.

Free-speech advocates criticized the justices’ ruling, arguing the holding should be limited to restrictions for sites offering sexual content and doesn’t protect laws requiring age verification for social media sites and those offering other content.

In a 6-3 ruling last week, the justices said the Texas law was a legitimate effort to protect children, rejecting arguments that the measure violates adults’ speech rights by requiring them to submit identification online.

Kevin Frazier, an AI innovation and law fellow at the University of Texas School of Law, said the ruling could have a wide impact despite its focus on obscene content.

“What matters to me is that this opens the door for other states to pass similar laws that expand this sort of approach to different tools, different parts of the internet,” he said. “And so that’s what I think makes it potentially an important one that will expand the use of age verification as a regulatory mechanism to address certain concerns.”

“This law has failed to keep minors away from sexual content yet continues to have a massive chilling effect on adults,” said Alison Boden, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, which challenged the Texas law. “The outcome is disastrous for Texans and for anyone who cares about freedom of speech and privacy online,” she said in a statement.

But Ben Sperry, a senior scholar at the International Center for Law and Economics who focuses on civil liberties and government regulation, said the narrow ruling wasn’t the big win that proponents of age-verification laws were hoping for.

Ari Lightman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies the impact of emerging technologies, said age-verification barriers were unlikely to be effective in denying access to young people who have grown up immersed in online technologies.

But the ruling could spur state regulation of other forms of content, such as that related to LBGTQ+ communities, he said.

“There’s been discussions of limiting that type of content for, not just children, but everyone within the state,” he said. “I don’t know if you call it a Pandora’s box, but it’s a slippery slope to a state regulating what kind of content is available for anybody that it deems inappropriate.”

Social Media Suits

Texas is one of 24 states that have passed age-verification laws for porn and other online content since the beginning of 2023, according to the Free Speech Coalition. The Texas measure already has forced one of the biggest providers of online adult content, Pornhub, to disable access to its site in the state.

NetChoice, a trade group for social-media sites, has filed lawsuits challenging age-verification laws in Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and several other states. The group said in a statement that the Supreme Court’s ruling was limited in scope and won’t affect its challenges to broader age-check laws.

“The Court upheld ID checks for porn sites, which disseminate content already unlawful for minors,” NetChoice said. “By contrast, NetChoice’s lawsuits are about protecting access to speech that is lawful for all Americans—including political speech, news, and educational content. NetChoice is confident that we will continue to win.”

Sperry said the narrow ruling equalizes online access with physical access. And it isn’t and won’t likely to open the door to regulation of social-media sites, he said.

“What this really does is put things on par with the way the world works in the offline world, where kids can’t go into an adult bookstore and buy the content there without having to show” proof of age, he said. “And it’s pretty much going to be the same now in the online world.”

‘Incidental Burden’

Wayne Unger, a professor at the Quinnipiac University School of Law whose research focuses on constitutional law and emerging technologies, said the court upheld the law in part because of technological advances making it less burdensome to implement age-verification requirements.

“The court recognized the technological feasibility with respect to implementing this law, as that calculated into their decision regarding the ‘incidental burden’” on free speech rights, a component of the test for constitutionality, he said.

That focus on feasibility makes it more likely that the ruling could have a wide impact, according to John Ketcham, a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research who co-authorized the institute’s amicus brief in the case.

The ruling suggested that state age-verification laws that allow users to provide government-issued identification or a “commercially reasonable method” will likely pass muster, he said.

“Because most states with age-verification statutes incorporate similar commercially reasonable alternatives, today’s decision essentially authorizes the use of contemporary age-verification technologies across the nation,” he said.

There was a strong argument that the First Amendment has expanded “beyond its original meaning,” allowing an “online information ecosystem that has resulted in documented harms to minors’ well-being,” Frazier said.

“This decision may merely signal the Court’s effort to align First Amendment doctrine with broad popular concern about the mental and physical health of America’s kids,” he said.

The case is Free Speech Coal., Inc. v. Paxton, 2025 BL 222948, U.S., No. 23-1122, 6/27/25.