Porn Groups Sue to Block Texas’ Looming Online Age-Checks Law

Parties in the adult entertainment industry asked a Texas federal court to block state officials from enforcing a new law that would require pornography websites to verify the age of their users and display a health warning notice.

Those two requirements of the law set to take effect Sept. 1 are the “least effective and yet also the most restrictive” method of trying to protect minors from adult content online, according to the complaint seeking declaratory and injunctive relief filed Friday in US District Court for the Western District of Texas.

Texas is the latest legal battleground for age verification laws, as a growing number of states require social media companies and porn sites to use face scans or driver’s license photos to verify to verify the age of users accessing them. Despite the bipartisan popularity of such legislation, affected companies have raised concerns about user privacy and the practicality of implementing such verification tools.

The plaintiffs are led by the Free Speech Coalition, an industry group that has taken the most active role in litigating age verification laws across states including Louisiana and Utah. An anonymous porn actress and operators of adult content sites based from Florida to the Czech Republic cosigned the complaint.

Litigants said Texas’ age verification requirement is over broad and therefore violates Constitutional free speech protections, as does the mandated health notice.

Porn sites would need to implement age verification measures and display a “Texas Health and Human Services Warning” on their landing pages under the new law, which is set to take effect Sept. 1 barring relief from the court.

Compliance will be enforced by the state’s attorney general, with potential fines of up to $250,000 if a minor is found to have accessed sexually explicit material.

Minors could still circumvent age checks via services that virtual private networks and other avenues despite verification measures sites adopt, the complaint argued. Content filtering at the browser or the device level would allow parents to block adult sites effectively “without impairing free speech rights or privacy,” it added.

“But such far more effective and far less restrictive means don’t really matter to Texas, whose true aim is not to protect minors but to squelch constitutionally protected free speech that the State disfavors,” the lawsuit said.

The plaintiffs also alleged that the mandatory warning notice stating porn’s detrimental effects applies “an orthodox viewpoint on a controversial issue” and includes “statements that are a mix of falsehoods, discredited pseudo-science, and baseless accusations.”

The litigants claim that the Texas law infringes protections provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, thereby violating the Sixth Amendment’s supremacy clause.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP and Webb Daniel Friedlander LLP.