Porn sites were dealt a decisive blow last month when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Texas law that requires websites with pornographic material to verify all users are 18 or older. Pornhub, the world’s most popular porn platform, has been blocking its material from Texas in protest. But it sounds like Pornhub’s parent company might be considering a move to conduct age verifications after all, according to a new report from Bloomberg Law.
The suggestion that Pornhub could just do age verification came on Thursday during a federal court hearing over a dispute on whether Pornhub’s parent company Aylo Global should pay fines over initially not conducting age checks in 2023. A lawyer for the company, Scott Cole of Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg LLP, told the judge, “Everyone’s reevaluating the new landscape after the Supreme Court opinion.”
A spokesperson for Pornhub told Gizmodo over email, “We are in the process of assessing the decision and are not commenting on any possible changes at this time.” It did not elaborate on what potential changes might be in the works.
Pornhub started blocking all users from Texas in March 2024 rather than face further fines for non-compliance, though visitors can still use a VPN to get around the block. Anyone trying to visit Pornhub right now is met with a long message that starts with, “As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website.”
The porn sites, which formed a group called the Free Speech Coalition, argued against age verification laws on First Amendment grounds and said the burden to verify ages opened up users to all kinds of hacking and unnecessary exposure for constitutionally protected speech. Requiring a credit card or driver’s license for age verification does open up a new avenue for hackers to unmask folks for behavior they may be embarrassed about. The case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (Ken Paxton is the Attorney General of Texas), was decided 6-3 along ideological lines.
“History, tradition, and precedent recognize that States have two distinct powers to address obscenity: They may proscribe outright speech that is obscene to the public at large, and they may prevent children from accessing speech that is obscene to children,” conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his opinion.
“In addition to their general interest in protecting the public at large, States have a specific interest in protecting children from sexually explicit speech,” Thomas continued.
But the liberals on the court disagreed with the reasoning behind a requirement for age verification, noting that, historically, any protections for children need to be done in the least restrictive way in order to allow adults to access material they’re entitled to see. The liberal justice who wrote the dissent, Elena Kagan, argued that “speech that is obscene for minors is often not so for adults.” She asked, “Is the law the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state interest?” while insisting that the conservative opinion was “unfaithful to the law.”
At least 19 states currently have laws on the books requiring user age verification for porn sites, and if Pornhub decides to just implement a way to do that, it seems likely that other states will follow. Perhaps even Democratic-leaning states will pass laws, since almost all of the states that currently have age verification requirements are controlled by Republicans.
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