Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Texas House Bill 1181 requires age verification for users trying to access websites offering adult content.
- After lower courts ruled it unconstitutional, the Supreme Court has upheld the bill in a 6–3 ruling.
- States are now free to force websites to demand a copy of your ID, raising substantial privacy concerns.
Being asked to prove who you are is just an everyday part of going online: select all the bicycles if you're not a robot; click this box affirming you're 21 before you browse these bongs for sale. But the vast majority of the time, all that info is offered up on the honor system, without any kind of meaningful checks to do hard verification. If you'd prefer that not change, and don't like the idea of sharing a copy of your ID with all these websites, we've got some bad news for you, and you've the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) to blame.
The issue at hand concerns Texas House Bill 1181, which required that websites offering a substantial amount of content harmful to minors verify the identity of visitors to establish they're of a suitable age (via TechCrunch). The Free Speech Coalition sued in response, characterizing the law as an unconstitutional restriction on free speech — an argument that had been used successfully in the past. And indeed, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.
Texas pushed back, leading to SCOTUS taking up the case, and in a 6–3 verdict today, the conservative-stacked court has ruled in support of H.B. 1181. The opinions cited in the court's ruling reflect exactly the kind of pearl-clutching use of protecting the interests of minors to justify restricting speech that earlier courts had rejected. But in 2025's carefully crafted judicial landscape, conservative interests finally managed to shove their agenda through.
Beyond Texas, roughly half the states in the US either already have similar age-verification laws of their own, or will soon have them going into effect. With this SCOTUS ruling on the books, we can almost guarantee that more states will feel empowered to follow, and in all likelihood we can expect further “won't someone think of the children” laws to target additional forms of adult content online.
So far, when faced with age verification laws, sites like Pornhub have simply blocked access in areas with these rules rather than comply, shutting out millions upon millions of users. But we could rapidly be reaching a tipping point there, and it feels like a future where more sites give in and demand ID scans to access them could be right around the corner. Between the obvious desire for anonymity when consuming adult content, and concerns over potential data breaches with any age-check providers, that does not sound like a great direction the internet is headed in.
