The Most Important SCOTUS Case You’ve Never Heard Of

On January 15, 2025, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a court case called Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. It hasn’t gotten a lot of press, and if you have heard of it, there’s a good chance you don’t think it affects you. But a diverse group of free-speech advocates—including the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the National Coalition Against Censorship—are deeply invested in the outcome of this case. And the Court’s ultimate decision has the power to dramatically reshape the internet, while potentially obliterating our current understanding of free speech.

So, What’s It All About?

In 2022, the state of Louisiana passed a novel law: Rather than relying on consumers to self-regulate and only access porn sites if they were above the age of 18, adult sites would now be required to screen and age-verify users. Superficially, the system sounded simple and straightforward. Lawmakers compared it to a bouncer checking an ID at the door of a strip club, noting that that system had been broadly accepted as a common-sense standard, and there was no reason to hold porn sites to a different standard just because they’d moved their businesses online. Similar laws began cropping up all around the country. At present, 19 states—including the entirety of the U.S. South—have age-verification laws on the books, with several more states considering implementing laws of their own. 

As these laws have stormed the country, the porn industry has been fighting back with the help of its trade and lobbying organization, the Free Speech Coalition (FSC). FSC has filed lawsuits in seven different states. As the lawsuits have progressed through the courts (and, in the case of Tennessee, prevented an age-verification law from going into effect), one has gone further than the rest: FSC’s challenge to Texas’s age-verification law has made it all the way to the Supreme Court. The outcome could reverberate across the nation.

But Age-Verification Laws Sound Like a Good Thing. I Don’t Want Kids Watching Porn!

Keeping kids away from porn is a worthy goal. But FSC and its allies argue that online age verification isn’t an effective way to do that. In the best-case scenario, online age-verification systems are cumbersome barriers that deter consumers from accessing porn while creating the potential for massive violations of privacy; in the worst-case scenario, they can have a broad chilling effect on a wide range of content that most people wouldn’t consider remotely pornographic. There’s also minimal evidence that these laws will work as promised. A 2023 Common Sense Media report on teens and pornography found that social media sites are a popular destination for young people seeking out adult content. And yet many of these laws explicitly exempt social media sites from age-verification requirements.

How Does Showing Someone Your ID Violate Your Privacy?

Although it’s been popular to compare age-verification laws to flashing your ID at a bouncer (New York Times Op-Ed columnist and former constitutional litigator David French just made that comparison in his recent defense of Texas’s law), the two experiences couldn’t be more different. Showing someone your ID is an ephemeral transaction: They check your age, hand back your ID, and retain nothing beyond the knowledge that you’re old enough to enter their establishment. Online age verification is an entirely different beast. Anyone who wants to access adult content has to have their ID uploaded to the internet—and, in some systems, even have their face scanned. While many of these laws bar age-verification systems from holding on to that data, there’s no guarantee that companies will comply. And as leaks like the infamous Ashley Madison data breach have shown, it can be very dangerous to have your data associated with an adult site, especially if your porn-consumption habits are something you’d prefer to keep private (as might be the case for, say, closted queer people).

And even in the absence of hacks and breaches, these laws can still cause major headaches for law-abiding adults. In Louisiana, consumers have found that the age-verification system only works with a Louisiana ID. If you’re an out-of-state visitor, or a resident who simply doesn’t have a Louisiana ID, you could be barred from accessing porn, despite the fact that you’re an adult who is legally entitled to watch as much porn as you want.

And These Laws Could Affect Other Content, Too?

Yes. Although age-verification laws present themselves as exclusively targeting operations like Pornhub, any site that contains 33.3% adult content is legally bound to comply with age verification. And as history has shown time and again, “adult content” is a nebulous term that’s often weaponized, not just against hard-core porn, but against anything remotely seen as sexual, including sex education content, queer content, and anything else that steps outside the narrow bounds of “child friendly” media as defined by the most prudish and conservative voices.

At a time when social media filters have led people to make TikTok reels about “le$beans” and “seggs” education, when children’s Drag Queen Story Hours attract armed vigilante groups, none of us should feel confident that our kid-safe content won’t be tagged as someone else’s porn. Conservative officials have already promised to use the Kids’ Online Safety Act (KOSA) to crack down on trans education content and resources. Age-verification tools offer another way to terrorize marginalized media makers—even if no one ever gets officially targeted by the laws. As the rising popularity of preemptive self-censorship has shown, the mere fear of consequences is enough to get people to comply. And if online age verification systems prove too cumbersome—or too expensive—for, say, a free sex education site to make use of, chances are good that these resources will simply begin to disappear from the internet entirely.

Could the Court Really Uphold These Laws?

It’s hard to say. In past cases, the Court has found that online age-verification is a violation of free speech, even when it’s intended to protect children from seeing adult content. In Reno v. ACLU, the Court found that the Communications Decency Act was overly broad and barred access to constitutional speech; in Ashcroft v. ACLU, the Child Online Protection Act was struck down for similar reasons. Supreme Court precedent holds that government-enforced age verification is a clumsy and overboard way of protecting children from dangerous content, and that active parenting and web filters are a more effective way of safeguarding children while leaving adults free to access whatever content they choose. So if the current Court chooses to uphold precedent, there’s every reason to believe that Texas’s age-verification law, and many other laws like it, will be found unconstitutional and unenforceable. 

But as the Dobbs v. Jackson decision demonstrated, this is a court that isn’t afraid to reject precedent—and indeed, is all too happy to overturn decades of established case law if it means furthering conservative Christian goals. If the current Court decides that squelching porn is more important than respecting freedom of speech, we could see a massive empowering of age-verification laws. And if that happens, it won’t just be porn sites that’ll suddenly look different. It could easily mean the disappearance of anything remotely sex-related from the web.