The Texas law that would have required age verification on pornography websites has elicited debate over First Amendment and privacy concerns, even though a federal judge has temporarily blocked it from going into effect.
U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra issued a preliminary injunction on August 31 that temporarily blocked the enforcement of House Bill 1181 due to concerns that it would violate the First Amendment.
HB 1181 would require companies that knowingly publish content of which more than one-third is sexual material to “use reasonable age verification methods” to determine that a consumer is no younger than 18 years of age.
The bill states that companies may not retain any information from users and must publish Texas Health and Human Services warnings for viewers about the dangers of pornography.
Companies can be fined for failure to follow the guidelines outlined in HB 1181.
These fines include $10,000 per day for operating without an age verification system, $10,000 for every instance in which a company retains a user’s information, and up to $250,000 if a minor accesses the pornographic material due to a company not enforcing the law, according to Texas Scorecard.
The bill was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in June and was set to be enacted at the start of September.
Pornhub and other porn platforms, creators, and the Free Speech Coalition filed a lawsuit in August, claiming the bill violates the First Amendment.
The lawsuit alleges the bill imposes the “least effective and yet also the most restrictive means” to prevent minors from viewing pornography.
Furthermore, the plaintiffs state the bill violates Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, “which prohibits treating website operators as if they were responsible for alleged harm caused by content created by third parties.”
After reviewing the lawsuit and the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction, Ezra stated in the order that HB 1181 is “severely underinclusive.”
“It nominally attempts to prevent minors’ access to pornography, but contains substantial exemptions, including material most likely to serve as a gateway to pornography use,” he added in the injunction.
Ezra also stated that privacy is a concern for many since one of the age verifications is through a government-issued ID.
“By verifying information through government identification, the law will allow the government to peer into the most intimate and personal aspects of people’s lives. It runs the risk that the state can monitor when an adult views sexually explicit materials and what kind of websites they visit,” he wrote.
The Office of the Texas Attorney General filed an appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals immediately following the ruling by Ezra, as reported by the Kiowa County Press.
Mike Stabile of The Texas Freedom Coalition called the law “ineffective, dangerous and unconstitutional” following the ruling.
“We understand that many have moral opposition to adult content, but regardless of where we stand in faith or politics, we should all be concerned about the government instituting digital ID requirements to access the internet,” wrote Stabile in a statement sent to The Dallas Express.
“As citizens, we have the right, guaranteed by the First Amendment, to access legal information on the internet without risk of government surveillance.”