If you go to Pornhub in Texas today, you won’t see pornography. Instead, porn star Cherie DeVille appears in a video, explaining that the site is no longer accessible in the state. The same is true in 17 other states, including Florida, Indiana and Virginia, with more to soon take effect.
This is Pornhub’s response to the recent spate of age verification laws — laws which require visitors to pornographic websites to provide proof of age in order to enter the site.
The issue is now before the Supreme Court. Texas House Bill 1181, Texas’s age verification law, requires websites with more than one-third of their content containing “material harmful to minors” to verify the age of all users.
The Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the porn industry, is suing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, arguing that the law violates the First Amendment. The court is expected to rule on Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton in July.
After oral arguments, in which the six conservative justices and Justice Elena Kagan seemed receptive toward age verification requirements, the state of Texas appears likely to win. The public has also sided with Texas. Eighty percent of Americans, including 75 percent of Democrats and 88 percent of Republicans, support H.B. 1181.
But Americans have been dangerously misled. Age verification laws fail to protect minors and threaten the free speech of all Americans in ways that go far beyond pornography.
First, these laws do not reduce minors’ exposure to pornography. Social scientists have found that age verification requirements merely spur users to find workarounds, such as foreign VPNs, to access these sites. Today’s teenagers, who grew up as digital natives, are likely more adept at these strategies than most adults.
But age verification laws are not just ineffective — they are insidious.
By requiring users to share personally identifying information, such as government IDs, they could expose users to hacks and leaks. (Remember the Ashley Madison data breach?) The American Civil Liberties Union argues that such requirements are unconstitutional because they impose undue burdens on adults’ access to protected speech.
This chilling effect is by design. Pornography has long been the canary in the coal mine for other restrictions against free speech. Indeed, some conservatives have acknowledged that age verification laws are a back door to fully criminalizing pornography.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a conservative presidential administration, has been clear on this goal. It proposes outlawing porn entirely, with those who produce and distribute it imprisoned and registered as sex offenders. If Texas prevails, the U.S. could be pushed further down the slippery slope towards autocracy.
To be sure, porn can be harmful to minors. Today’s internet offerings are far more extreme than a vintage Playboy. In the U.S., 75 percent of teens have seen pornography before the age of 18. Teenagers who consume it frequently are more likely to believe porn reflects real sex and to imitate potentially dangerous acts like choking.
But abstinence doesn’t work, online or off. Unless we exile teens from the internet entirely, trying to stop them from ever viewing porn is a losing battle. Instead, we should prepare them. This means teaching porn literacy as part of comprehensive sex education.
We already have a model. Emily Rothman, professor and chair of the Boston University Occupational Therapy Department, developed and piloted a porn literacy curriculum for high schoolers that asked students to think critically about how porn is produced and the ways it portrays consent, pleasure, power and bodies.
The result? Students were significantly less likely to believe that most porn depicted realistic sex or was a good source of information about sex.
Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton will have far-reaching effects on free speech, greasing the wheels for these laws to be extended to other online activities. Just last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a bill requiring app stores like Apple’s App Store and Google Play to obtain age verification and parental consent from minors before downloading any app.
We may not all want to defend porn. But if we care about free speech and digital privacy, we must. Because what starts with porn rarely ends there.
Hannah Wohl is a public voices fellow of The OpEd Project and an associate professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.