WASHINGTON, June 27, 2025 (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a Texas law aimed at blocking children from seeing online pornography.

Nearly half of the states have passed similar laws requiring adult websites users verify users' ages to access pornographic material. The laws come as smartphones and other devices make it easier to access online porn, including hardcore obscene material.

The court split along ideological lines in t he 6-3 ruling. It's a loss for an adult-entertainment industry trade group called the Free Speech Coalition, which challenged the Texas law.

Th majority opinion, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, found the measure didn't seriously restrict adults' free-speech rights. “Adults have the right to access speech obscene only to minors ... but adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification,” he wrote.

In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the court should have used a higher legal standard in weighing whether the law creates free-speech problems.

Pornhub, one of the world’s busiest websites, has stopped operating in several states, including Texas, citing the technical and privacy hurdles in complying with the laws.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, celebrated the ruling. “Companies have no right to expose children to pornography and must institute reasonable age verification measures,” he said. The decision could pave the way for more states to adopt similar laws, the group National Center on Sexual Exploitation said.

While the Free Speech Coalition agreed that children shouldn’t be seeing porn, it said the law puts an unfair free-speech burden on adults by requiring them to submit personal information that could be vulnerable to hacking or tracking.

The age verification requirements fall on websites that have a certain amount of sexual material, not search engines or social-media sites that can be used to find it.

Samir Jain, vice president of policy at the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology, said that age verification requirements raise serious privacy and free-expression concerns. The court’s decision “overturns decades of precedent and has the potential to upend access to First Amendment-protected speech on the internet for everyone, children and adults alike.”

In 1996, the Supreme Court struck down parts of a law banning explicit material viewable by kids online. A divided court also ruled against a different federal law aimed at stopping kids from being exposed to porn in 2004 but said less restrictive measures like content filtering are constitutional.

Texas argues that technology has improved significantly in the last 20 years, allowing online platforms to easily check users’ ages with a quick picture. Those requirements are more like ID checks at brick-and-mortar adult stores that were upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1960s, the state said.

District courts initially blocked laws in Indiana and Tennessee as well as Texas, but appeals courts reversed the decisions and let the laws take effect.

The above article was written by Lindsay Whitehurts of the Associated Press. Associated Press writers Jonathan Mattise in Nashville, Tenn., Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco and Nadia Lathan in Austin, Texas contributed to this report.

What to know about online age verification laws

The Supreme Court has upheld a Texas law aimed at blocking children under 18 from seeing online pornography by requiring websites to verify the ages of all visitors. Many states have passed similar age verification laws in an attempt to restrict access to adult material from minors, but digital rights groups have raised questions about such laws' effects on free speech and whether verifying ages by accessing sensitive data could violate people's privacy.

What is the Texas law?

The law requires websites hosting pornographic material to verify the ages of users in hopes of stopping those under 18 from visiting. Adults would need to supply websites with a government-issued ID or use third-party age-verification services. The law carries fines of up to $10,000 per violation — fined against the website — that could be raised to up to $250,000 per violation by a minor.

Texas has argued that technology has improved significantly in the last 20 years, allowing online platforms to easily check users’ ages with a quick picture. Those requirements are more like ID checks at brick-and-mortar adult stores that were upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1960s, the state said.

However, internet service providers, search engines and news sites are exempt from the law.

How do sites verify ages?

It’s already illegal to show children pornography under federal law, however it’s rarely enforced. But various measures already exist to verify a person’s age online. Someone could upload a government ID or consent to the use facial recognition software to prove they are the age they say they are.

Websites and social media companies such as Instagram parent company Meta have argued that age verification should be done by the companies that run app stores, such as Apple and Google, and not individual apps or websites. This would mean that app stores need to verify their users' ages before they allow them to download apps. Unsurprisingly, Apple and Google disagree.

“Billed as ‘simple’ by its backers, including Meta, this proposal fails to cover desktop computers or other devices that are commonly shared within families. It also could be ineffective against pre-installed apps,” Google said in a recent blog post.

Can people get around verification?

Critics, such as Pornhub have argued that age-verification laws can be easily circumvented with well-known tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs) that reroute requests to visit websites across various public networks.

Questions have also been raised about enforcement, with Pornhub claiming those efforts would drive traffic to less-known sites that don’t comply with the law and have fewer safety protocols.

Who opposes such laws?

Though heralded by social conservatives, age verification laws have been condemned by adult websites who argue they’re part of a larger anti-sex political movement.

They’ve also garnered opposition from groups that advocate for digital privacy and free speech, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The group has argued that it is impossible to ensure websites don’t retain user data, regardless of whether age verification laws require they delete it.

Samir Jain, vice president of policy at the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology, said the court's decision on age verification "does far more than uphold an incidental burden on adults’ speech.”

“Age verification requirements still raise serious privacy and free expression concerns,” Jain added. “If states are to go forward with these burdensome laws, age verification tools must be accurate and limit collection, sharing, and retention of personal information, particularly sensitive information like birthdate and biometric data.”

This additional explainer was written by Barbara Ortutay of the Associated Press.