In June 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Texas law requiring pornography websites to verify that users are at least 18 years old, ruling 6-3 that the First Amendment permits states to impose such requirements on sites where more than one-third of the content is sexually explicit. The Pornhub Supreme Court ruling, formally decided in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, established that age-verification laws for adult content are judged under intermediate scrutiny rather than the tougher strict-scrutiny standard the adult industry had sought.1Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, decided June 27, 2025 The decision effectively validated similar laws in more than 20 other states.
What the Court Decided
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. The Court rejected two competing positions. The Fifth Circuit had upheld Texas H.B. 1181 under rational-basis review, the most forgiving standard; the Court said that was too lenient. The Free Speech Coalition wanted strict scrutiny, which would have required Texas to prove it chose the least restrictive means available; the Court said that was too demanding.
Intermediate scrutiny sits between the two. A law survives if it advances an important governmental interest unrelated to suppressing speech and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary. Thomas wrote that adults have no constitutional right to avoid age verification, and that any burden on adult access is “incidental” to the law’s real target: keeping children away from material that is obscene from their perspective. Age verification, the majority reasoned, is an “ordinary and appropriate” enforcement tool, no different in kind from ID checks required to buy alcohol or a handgun.
The majority distinguished two decisions that had defined online-speech law for a generation, Reno v. ACLU (1997) and Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004). Those earlier statutes, Thomas wrote, functioned as near-total bans on protected speech or relied on verification methods that were “illusory” given the technology of the time. Modern verification, including government-issued IDs and checks against transactional data, is “plainly legitimate” and far more practical than what existed in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The Court also signaled that its narrow question mattered. It had “never before considered whether the more modest burden of an age-verification requirement triggers strict scrutiny,” and warned that applying that standard would “call into question all age-verification requirements, even longstanding in-person requirements.”
The Dissent
Justice Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson. The dissent argued that H.B. 1181 targets specific categories of sexual content based on their communicative message, which makes it a content-based regulation demanding strict scrutiny under the framework the Court had built over three decades.
Kagan rejected the majority’s characterization of the burden on adults as incidental. Requiring someone to hand over a government ID or banking information to access lawful content, the dissent argued, creates a substantial chilling effect. Many adults will stop accessing the material rather than create a record tying their identity to it. That, Kagan wrote, was precisely the dynamic the Court had recognized in Ashcroft, where age-verification requirements were found to suppress “a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive.”
The dissenters also argued that less restrictive alternatives remain viable, particularly user-side filtering software, and that Texas had not demonstrated why those alternatives were insufficient.
What the Texas Law Requires
H.B. 1181 took effect on September 1, 2023. It applies to any commercial website where more than one-third of the content qualifies as “sexual material harmful to minors.” Covered sites must verify each visitor is at least 18 before granting access. Acceptable methods include submitting a digital ID, using a system that checks government-issued identification, or relying on a commercially reasonable method drawing on public or private transactional data. The law does not require face scanning.
Sites are also barred from retaining a user’s identifying information after verification. News organizations, internet service providers, search engines, and cloud hosting companies are exempt.
Enforcement runs through the Texas Attorney General. Penalties reach up to $10,000 per day of noncompliance, an additional $10,000 per day for illegally retaining a user’s information, and up to $250,000 if a minor accesses sexual content because a site failed to verify ages.
Pornhub Blocked Texas Instead of Complying
Pornhub, operated by Aylo Global Entertainment, did not comply with H.B. 1181. It blocked access for Texas users in March 2024, shortly after the Fifth Circuit lifted a lower-court injunction. The company called the law “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous,” arguing that it fails to protect minors and drives users to less regulated sites with weaker privacy and safety measures.
By late 2025, Pornhub had blocked access in 23 states with similar laws, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. Aylo extended the same approach abroad, blocking new users in the United Kingdom in February 2026 and in Australia the following month.
The company points to its Louisiana experience as the basis for the strategy. When Louisiana became the first state to enforce an age-verification law in January 2023, Pornhub complied. According to the company, traffic dropped roughly 80%, with users migrating to unregulated competitors. After that, Pornhub stopped complying with individual state laws.
Blocking has not ended the company’s legal exposure. In February 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Aylo for violating H.B. 1181, alleging its sites “immediately presents minors who access their websites with pornographic content” without verification. The lawsuit seeks an injunction requiring compliance and potentially millions in civil penalties. After the Supreme Court ruling, Paxton said he would “continue to enforce the law against any organization that refuses to take the necessary steps to protect minors from explicit materials.”
User behavior shifted in measurable ways once sites went dark. VPN demand in Texas rose roughly 235% the day after the Fifth Circuit’s ruling took effect, and Google searches for “Texas VPN” spiked 1,750%. Utah saw a 967% VPN spike after Pornhub blocked access there in 2023; Louisiana saw a 200% surge.
Privacy Concerns the Court Set Aside
Privacy risks ran through the litigation but did not sway the majority. The core concern is that requiring users to submit government IDs or banking credentials to access legal content creates databases of sensitive information linked to adult content consumption.
A 2025 academic study cited the 2015 Ashley Madison breach, which exposed 36 million users and led to blackmail, job losses, and suicides, as a cautionary example, and found that many third-party verification vendors operate with “minimal cybersecurity transparency,” use unencrypted protocols, or retain data longer than necessary. Iain Corby of the Age Verification Providers Association told the BBC that “the only non-hackable database is no database at all.” Some verification companies say they never retain personal data after confirming age; others acknowledge holding encrypted data for up to 28 days.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed an amicus brief supporting neither side, urging the Court to evaluate age-verification laws based on the specific methods they require and the privacy protections built in, rather than applying a blanket standard. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology also filed briefs raising concerns. The majority treated the privacy burden as incidental.
What This Means for Other States
The ruling’s most immediate practical effect reaches beyond Texas. The Court’s opinion noted that at least 21 other states had already enacted “materially similar” age-verification laws, and analysis published after the decision put the total at 25. Because intermediate scrutiny is now the standard for this category of legislation, those laws are presumptively constitutional.
Some pending challenges remain. In Tennessee, where the Free Speech Coalition is challenging a law that classifies violations as a Class C felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison, a district court granted a preliminary injunction in December 2024, but the Sixth Circuit stayed it the following month. Proceedings had been paused while the Supreme Court decided the Texas case. The Free Speech Coalition filed a status report in July 2025 saying it intended to continue the fight, though Paxton significantly weakened its position.
The decision is narrower than it may look. The Court’s reasoning was tied specifically to content that is obscene for minors. Laws targeting broader categories of speech, including social media access generally, may still face stricter constitutional scrutiny. By mid-2025, over 40 states had considered youth online safety legislation of various kinds, and legal analysts cautioned that Paxton should not be read as a green light for every age-verification mandate.
Federal activity accelerated after the decision. By January 2026, a House subcommittee was considering 19 digital safety bills. The SCREEN Act would require platforms to implement age-verification technology for sexually explicit content. The Kids Online Safety Act, which passed the Senate in 2024 but stalled in the House, was reintroduced in a revised form that omitted its earlier “duty of care” standard and directed federal agencies to study device-level verification. The App Store Accountability Act would shift some verification responsibility to app stores rather than individual websites.
Whether the Paxton framework holds as states push age-verification requirements into new contexts is the open question. The dissent argued the majority was rewriting precedent under the guise of distinguishing it. As similar rules move into social media, gaming, and general internet access, courts will have to decide whether intermediate scrutiny applies broadly or remains tied to the specific terrain of sexually explicit content.