Woodhull Calls for SCOTUS to Protect Free Speech and Find Age Verification Law Unconstitutional
January 15, 2025
Today, January 15, 2025, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v Paxton. This extremely consequential case for the protection of free speech challenges Texas House Bill 1181, an age verification law that Texas enacted on September 1, 2023. Age verification laws clearly violate prior Supreme Court First Amendment protections – and those decisions need to be held as the law of the land!
Woodhull Freedom Foundation, through the financial support of MojoHost, has supported the legal challenges to age verification laws, including today’s hearing by the Supreme Court. In this effort, Woodhull, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and TechFreedom, filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the Supreme Court, urging it to strike down Texas’ HB 1181. In the brief, Woodhull argues that HB 1181 unconstitutionally burdens adults’ access to protected speech online and that it forces adults to surrender their anonymity and exposes them to privacy and security risks when accessing legal sexual content.
The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that when the government tries to control sexual content, even to protect kids, it can’t make it too hard for adults to access legal material. This is because adults have a right to view certain sexual content.
In two important cases, Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997) and Ashcroft v. ACLU, 542 U.S. 656 (2004), the Supreme Court struck down laws that would have forced websites to check users’ ages before letting them see specific content. The Court said these laws went too far in restricting what adults could see online, even though the goal was to keep kids away from inappropriate material. The Court held that requiring users to verify their age to access protected content is unconstitutional when less restrictive alternatives exist, like filtering software. Those decisions noted that protecting children is important, but not so important that it justifies making it really difficult for adults to access legal content online. Any law that does this has to pass a very strict test to be considered constitutional.
And that’s what this case is about – the Fifth Circuit’s reasoning that the burden on adults’ First Amendment rights only has to have some rational basis–not face strict scrutiny–because the aim is to protect children. Unless the Supreme Court intervenes, this decision will effectively reverse decades of precedent protecting the free speech rights of adults.
Proponents of age verification have offered many reasons to justify this violation of the law, and Woodhull addresses some of those lies in our Fact Checked by Woodhull series. We debunk the myth that age verification is easy and seamless and that it is a secure process. We also address the truth that age verification for websites is not the most effective way to ensure child safety online and explain why age verification laws contradict the First Amendment.
As stated by Woodhull President and CEO, Ricci Joy Levy, “The gravity of today’s case in front of the Supreme Court must not be underestimated. In Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v Paxton, the Supreme Court will decide the future of a basic tenet of life in the United States: free speech. You don’t need a crystal ball to predict that speech about abortion and LGBTQ+ issues will be the obvious next targets. We can and must protect children and adults’ constitutional and human rights and do not need do this through censorship. The Justices must rule in favor of freedom of expression.”