The Age of Online Age Verification Begins. (Maybe?)
Last week’s groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling upholding Texas’s age verification law for access to adult content in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton demands attention now. Read on for a quick summary of the ruling and our thoughts on what this all means for video game companies and the ever-expanding patchwork of kids’ privacy, online safety, and social media laws.
The age of age verification begins: Online age verification mandates for kids and teens have been expanding around the globe for years. In the U.S., however, state efforts to impose such requirements have long clashed with the First Amendment. That may be changing. In a 6–3 opinion issued last Friday (the last day of this year’s term), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a First Amendment challenge to a Texas law, H.B. 1181, which requires adult websites to implement age verification for sexually explicit content that is “harmful to minors.” The “harmful to minors” standard refers to “material that is obscene from the perspective of an average person considering the material’s effect on minors.”
