Free speech and privacy took a major hit as the US Supreme Court ignored caselaw and ruled that age verification is constitutional.
It’s no secret that the US Supreme court is packed with activist right wing judges trying to reverse numerous rulings that have helped usher in an era of prosperity in America. This in favour of a regressive ideology that favours the far right extremists vision for America where civil rights are only for straight white men and no one else. An excellent case in point is the overturning of Roe V Wade which protected a woman’s right to choose. Caselaw and precedent dictated that abortions are, in fact, legal. Yet, the current US Supreme Court with its activist judges threw out caselaw and overturned it last year. This prompted civil rights organizations to start releasing information on how women can best protect themselves now that they have fewer civil rights.
The decision was the clearest signal that the era of prosperity, civil rights, and law and order is over from the judicial perspective. The election of Donald Trump was the signal that all of the above is over as far as the federal government is concerned as well. That era was replaced by a fascist era where civil rights have been tossed in the trash, dissent from dear leader is punished severely, and military crackdowns occur on the population for daring to disagree with the fascist dictator of America. If science says that human made climate change is heating up the planet, “deeply held conservative beliefs” overrides that by denying that climate change is real no matter how much the planet burns.
So, that leads us to today’s ruling. There isn’t very much questioning whether age verification laws are unconstitutional. Age verification laws are, in fact, unconstitutional. The simple reason is that it allows the government to censor legally protected speech. Not really rocket science here. Courts have responded to various efforts to implement these mass government censorship initiatives by slapping them down repeatedly, pointing out that they are unconstitutional.
One case made it all the way to the US Supreme Court, however, where the court was set to decide, again whether age verification laws are unconstitutional. The last time such laws were put to the test were over a decade ago in the Ashcroft vs ACLU case. The ruling? Yeah, such laws are flatly unconstitutional. So, if it’s settled caselaw, why the heck are we going through this whole thing all over again in the first place? Well, simply put, politics. Deeply held conservative beliefs dictates that such speech should be censored by the government because that is the “bad” speech. After all, any speech the far right doesn’t like should be censored. Only speech they personally like should be protected. Not how free speech actually works, but that’s what they believe.
Now, if we had a normal US Supreme Court, this case would’ve been laughed out of the system a long time ago. Unfortunately, we don’t have that and we have a court that is trying to implement the Project 2025 agenda, tossing out whatever precedent that happens to get in the way of this obviously corrupt vision for America. That’s precisely what happened. The US Supreme Court has ruled that age verification is constitutional because reasons. From Gizmodo:
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday that states with laws requiring age verification for porn sites is constitutional. The case, known as Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (Ken Paxton is the Attorney General of Texas), was decided 6-3 with the court’s three liberal justices dissenting.
The Texas law, which requires age verification using a credit card or a government-issued ID document, went into effect in 2023 and Pornhub started blocking access to the site in the Lone Star State in protest. Justice Clarence Thomas, a far-right extremist, wrote the opinion of the court, noting that “not all speech is protected” under the First Amendment.
“History, tradition, and precedent recognize that States have two distinct powers to address obscenity: They may proscribe outright speech that is obscene to the public at large, and they may prevent children from accessing speech that is obscene to children,” Thomas wrote in his opinion.
“In addition to their general interest in protecting the public at large, States have a specific interest in protecting children from sexually explicit speech,” Thomas wrote.
In short, it is “tradition” that free speech has no place in America. The state gets to dictate what speech is “OK” and what is “not OK”. You know, because that’s how free speech works in America now. Because of that, over a decade of caselaw was just overturned, paving the way for the thought police to start becoming a thing as they get to decide what is “pornographic” and what is not. This while demanding websites adhere to shady “age verification” companies to handle (and probably leak or get hacked since those things have a history of being insecure) highly sensitive personal information.
TechDirt commented that this ruling basically takes a chainsaw to the first amendment:
As we’ve noted, in cases like Ashcroft v. ACLU and Brown v. EMA, the Supreme Court had long established that states couldn’t just throw around vague claims of “harmful to minors” to ignore the First Amendment, or at the very least to lower the standard of scrutiny from “strict scrutiny” to “intermediate scrutiny” (though not, as Ken Paxton hoped, all the way down to “rational basis.”).
The real danger here isn’t just Texas’s age verification law—it’s that Thomas has handed every state legislature a roadmap for circumventing the First Amendment online. His reasoning that “the internet has changed” and that intermediate scrutiny suffices for content-based restrictions will be cited in countless future cases targeting online speech. Expect age verification requirements to be attempted for social media platforms (protecting kids from “harmful” political content), for news sites (preventing minors from accessing “disturbing” coverage), and for any online speech that makes moral authorities uncomfortable.
And yes, to be clear, the majority opinion seeks to limit this just to content deemed “obscene” to avoid such problems, but it’s written so broadly as to at least open up challenges along these lines.
Thomas’s invention of “partially protected” speech, that somehow means you can burden those for which it is protected, is particularly insidious because it’s infinitely expandable. Any time the government wants to burden speech, it can simply argue that the burden is built into the right itself—making First Amendment protection vanish exactly when it’s needed most. This isn’t constitutional interpretation; it’s constitutional gerrymandering.
The conservative justices may think they’re just protecting children from pornography, but they’ve actually written a permission slip for the regulatory state to try to control online expression. The internet that emerges from this decision will look much more like the one authoritarian governments prefer: where every click requires identification, where any viewpoint can be age-gated, and where anonymity becomes a luxury only the powerful can afford. Thomas’s “starch” in constitutional standards? It just got bleached out of existence.
What is particularly stunning in all of this to me is that “free speech for me, but not for thee” isn’t just the doctrine of the far right, it is now enshrined into caselaw through this decision. Is certain speech OK? Well, that is to be left up to the far right oligarchs currently running this country. It’s ultimately a complete evisceration of free speech where the state gets to decide what is and is not OK speech.
What is also particularly worrying is that this ruling will only embolden anti-speech crusaders to push through their own mass government censorship legislation. Up here in Canada, we have one such lawmaker. That would be senator Julie Miville-Dechêne who has made it her ling long mission to similarly kill free speech in Canada through her own age verification legislation (Bill S-109).
What’s more, now that American lawmakers are armed with permission to start massively censoring the internet like this, they can start their next phase of mass government internet censorship by censoring apps in the app store. This was something Republican’s have been wanting to do and made that goal clear last year. There are those who are chomping at the bit to try and implement similar censorship laws on social media and video games. If you think this is going to stop with “pornography”, you’re only kidding yourself. This is the beginning salvo to crack down on free speech on the internet. The US government is going to proceed with further locking down the internet for the purposes of controlling what people do and do not think and other countries are going to try and follow suit if they haven’t proceeded already.
Ultimately, this is a very dark day for those who actually believe in free speech. This ruling represents the moment that no speech is safe on the internet. While this may be a boon for the VPN industry and encourage people to adopt TOR, it really is bad news for everyone else involved – including the government who will see the internet get further militarized in response to all of this censorship.
Today is indeed a horrific day Mr. Wilson. As you previously wrote about how stupidly wrong Miville-Dechêne is about all this, if you recalled in the Senate Hansard for June 3rd, Miville-Dechêne hinted that she may have been banking heavily on a Paxton victory (quote: “We are currently awaiting the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States” unquote), and today’s decision gives her fuel…almost enough to burn everybody’s Charter rights to hell and back to get S-209 into law…surely she is gloating about the decision somewhere.
I totally see her gloating somewhere as well. She’s definitely going to use this to try and implement age verification with the flawed argument that if it’s legal in the US, then it’s legal in Canada. Not looking forward to having to navigate those arguments to point out that age verification is still a free speech violation. Putting up with her and her colleagues vitriol is going to suck.
we got different laws in canada so while she may try to push that its ultimately irrelevant. I hope people going to bat to protect free speech see that.
As for the states, hopefully this gets reversed eventually. but I dont know how. Mabie the mass eventual lawsuits they’ll probably get from the ashley madison situation this will eventually cause?
Could theoretically be reversed, since SCOTUS overturned thier own ruling but take lot of time and money. And less politically sqewd bench. …but still possible.
How likely would Canadian courts use SCOTUS overturning thier own prior ruling as precendant?
And man all we’re hearing are crickets from right/libertarian side…until those useful idiots get the censorship hammer (and still blame the left).
honestly I dont think I ever heard of the canadian courts using what the states do as precedent. After all in several places we got different laws than the states.