Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
Tl; Dream
- Texas House Bill 1181 requires age verification for users trying to access websites that offer adult content.
- After lower courts decided on the contradictory, the Supreme Court has confirmed the bill in a ruling of 6-3.
- States are now free to force sites to demand a copy of your ID, increasing significant privacy considerations.
Being asked to prove who you are is just an everyday part of walking online: Choose all bikes if you are not a robot; Click on this box confirming that you are 21 before browsing these bongs for sale. But the vast majority of the time, all the information is offered on the honor system, without any kind of meaningful controls to make hard confirmation. If you prefer it does not change and do not like the idea of sharing a copy of your ID -with all these sites, we have some bad news for you and you have the US Supreme Court (Scotus) to blame.
The issue concerns Texas House Bill 1181, which required websites that offer a significant amount of content that is harmful to minors, verifies the identity of visitors to determine that they are of a suitable age (Via Techcrunch). Free speech coalition sued in response, and characterized the law as a constitutional restriction in freedom of speech – an argument that had been used successfully in the past. And in fact, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.
Texas pressed back, which led to Scotus taking up the case, and in a judgment of 6-3 today, the Conservative-stacked court has decided in support of HB 1181. Opinions quoted in The court’s ruling Expects exactly the type of pearl connectivity of protecting minor interests in justifying limiting speech that former courts had rejected. But in 2025’s carefully designed legal landscape, conservative interests finally managed to push their agenda through.
Beyond Texas, about half of the states in the United States have either similar age verification laws, or will soon get them into force. With this Scotus recognition of the books, we can almost guarantee that more states will feel authorized to follow, and in all likelihood we can expect that further “will not think of the children” laws to target more forms of content on adult content.
So far, when met with age verification laws, websites like Pornhub have simply blocked access in areas with these rules instead of complying, and shutting out millions of millions of users. But we can quickly reach a tipping point there, and it feels like a future where several websites give and demand ID scanes to access them may be just around the corner. Between the obvious desire for anonymity when using adult content, and concerns about potential data breaks with some age control providers, it does not sound like a great direction the internet is heading in.