Age verification laws seek to protect minors from porn online. But some say they actually do more harm than good.
Are platforms like Pornhub against these age verification laws because it impacts their profits or because it risks the privacy and protection of their users?
The Supreme Court heard arguments last week in a case that seeks to challenge a Texas state law requiring pornography websites to confirm a user’s age before allowing them to view adult content, either by uploading a photo of their government-issued ID or allowing their face to be scanned.
Such laws, which have been passed in a total of 19 states since 2023, are intended to protect minors from a variety of harmful effects that, studies have found, online pornography can have on underage viewers, including increased misogyny, sexual aggression, mental health issues and unsafe sex. But critics argue that the laws threaten to undermine the rights of adults who use these sites.
The Free Speech Coalition, the nonprofit behind the lawsuit challenging the Texas law, argued before the Supreme Court on Jan. 15 that the law does little to protect minors while violating U.S. law that categorizes adult content as protected speech under the First Amendment and posing a serious threat to users’ privacy.
“I think it is telling that Texas has not considered the possibility of educating parents, encouraging parents,” Derek Shaffer, an attorney representing the Free Speech Coalition, told the court. “I think that their interest is … a broader anti-porn interest in preventing willing adults from accessing this content. And they want to make it more difficult. They want to make it costlier. They want to make it chilling.”
Aaron Nielson, the Texas solicitor general, argued at the Supreme Court hearing that “Age verification today ... is simple, safe and common, including non-identifying means.”
“Petitioners don't dispute that their websites are not meant for children, that they harm children and that children are watching,” Nielson said. “We've tried content filtering for decades, and the problem has only gotten worse.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that adults must show identification in order to enter “a movie theater that displays pornographic movies” and asked how age verification laws for online pornography were any different.
However, Shaffer argued in response that being asked to quickly flash your identification at a store or movie theater is less burdensome — and less permanent — than uploading and submitting that information online.
The privacy concerns associated with these age verification laws have led Pornhub, the world’s largest pornography website, to block the site in nearly all of the U.S. states that have implemented such rules, meaning it is now unavailable in more than a third of the country.
In a statement provided to Yahoo News, Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, said that the company supports protecting underaged users from inappropriate content but “believes that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy.” Aylo also argued that in order to avoid sharing their highly sensitive personal information with websites like Pornhub, users will “simply access noncompliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.”
After Louisiana enacted its age verification law in 2022, Pornhub was one of the few adult content sites to comply, only to see its traffic from the state drop 80% immediately after, according to Aylo.
“They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age,” the statement from Aylo said, referring to Pornhub’s Louisiana user base. “In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and kids.”
Critics of the age verification laws also point out that anyone who wants to circumvent these restrictions can easily do so by downloading a virtual private network (VPN), a service that can encrypt internet traffic and hide IP addresses.
“We consistently see significant spikes in VPN demand when access to popular online platforms or websites is restricted, and this situation is no different,” Lauren Hendry Parsons, a privacy advocate at ExpressVPN, said in a statement to Yahoo News. “We know that when legislators restrict consumer access to services like porn, citizens still find a way to access it.”
While ExpressVPN could not share download numbers with Yahoo News, the company noted that after Florida’s age verification law went into effect on Jan. 1, ExpressVPN saw a 99.24% increase in web traffic from Florida users to its website compared with the previous week.
Vera Eidelman, a senior staff attorney with the Speech, Privacy, and Technology project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Yahoo News that, because laws like the one considered by the Supreme Court this week don’t apply to social media, they actually do little to prevent minors from seeing explicit content online.
“At the same time, the Texas law makes it harder for adults to access sexual content they have every right to see because it forces people to transmit their government ID, bank or mortgage records, or other transactional data online to prove their age,” Eidelman said. “That exposes people to privacy and security risks.”
Supporters of the Texas law and others like it, such as the American Principles Project, were outside the Supreme Court last week to argue that such laws are no different from regulations requiring age verification to purchase alcohol or gamble online.
Groups like the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank most recently known for its involvement in creating Project 2025, call the age verification laws constitutional and a “straightforward solution to the competing interests of what some adults want and what all children need.” The Heritage Foundation has also argued that sites like Pornhub are against age verification laws because, as was the case in Louisiana, they result in a decrease in traffic, and “fewer viewers means less money.”
While the high court isn’t expected to issue a decision on the Texas law until the summer, the justices appeared to lean in favor of upholding the law.
“Do you dispute the societal problems that are created both short-term and long-term from the rampant access to pornography for children?” Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked.
In a now-viral question, Justice Samuel Alito seemed to dismiss the value of websites like Pornhub, asking, “What percentage of the material on [Pornhub] is not obscene? Is it like the old Playboy? You have essays on there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.?”
