Age verification laws in the US have repeatedly hit constitutional road blocks for obvious reasons. Another lawsuit has been unsurprisingly filed.
Age verification developments has been something I’ve been covering for a while. This is for a very critical and fundamental reason. At its core, age verification laws being pushed these days represents a shift where government is getting into the business of censoring constitutionally protected speech. No matter how you slice it, this is a dangerous development and direction the government is going in where freedom of expression is actively being attacked by government.
In the past, these warnings that I was sharing (and I wasn’t alone on that) were generally dismissed as nonsense or conspiratorial in nature despite being rooted in legal fact. As uncomfortable as some people might find this, pornography is, in fact, constitutionally protected speech. This is true in multiple countries such as Canada and the United States. Discussions surrounding how stopping children from accessing pornography is the end goal and overall “protecting the children” were always a distraction because it was always a scheme to convince the general public that censoring constitutionally protected speech is now suddenly OK and simply part of the government looking after your best interests (even though nothing could be further from the truth).
The real question here is if big government is going after pornography, what other kinds of content are they going after? In recent months, multiple governments have finally started giving up all pretense and started to tip their hand over what kinds of content they want to censor next. That list of content has been gradually expanding. Australia, for instance, wanted to expand age verification laws to video games and social media. In both the US and Europe, there are efforts to try and expand age verification laws to capture app stores as well.
In short, people such as myself are 100% right when we said that age verification laws for pornography are an open invitation for government to censor gradually more and more content on the internet. If video games, social media, and app stores are becoming a target for the censorship brought on by age verification laws, the sky really is the limit for what they want to censor next.
Of course, while countries are moving ahead with plans to push censorship creep into greater and greater swaths of the internet, the fundamental problems of age verification laws still remain unresolved. For one, the laws being pushed envision the deployment of non-existent technology that both fully protects the privacy of users and is completely accurate in determining the age of the user before allowing them to proceed (no doubt powered by magical fairy dust and unicorn farts). For another, it is largely ineffective given the existence of anonymous tools. Additionally, it is constitutionally problematic because it still censors legally protected speech in the first place. These problems were never resolved, yet that isn’t stopping the government from taking the hammer they have finally gotten and looking at everything like they are nails.
For that last point about violating constitutional protections, this has repeatedly played out in the courts – at least in the US. Legal analysts have long found that age verification laws in the US are unconstitutional. Such analysis has since been bolstered by US courts ruling in that direction as well, finding that such laws are, indeed, unconstitutional.
As a result, it is unsurprising that similar lawsuits are being filed to challenge other state age verification laws in the US. One such challenge was recently filed in Tennessee and the arguments are definitely familiar to say the least. From The Tennessean:
A free speech advocacy group has filed a federal lawsuit against a new Tennessee law that requires websites with content deemed “harmful to minors” to age-verify users through an upload of a state ID or other means, claiming the law infringes on the First and Fourth amendments.
The Free Speech Coalition, a nonprofit trade association that represents adult entertainers in First Amendment cases, along with a number of plaintiffs including Nashville-based adult content creator MelRose Michaels, are claiming the state law, which was signed by the governor in June and is set to go into effect Jan. 1, is “censorship.”
“Engaging in legal speech is not a criminal act,” Alison Boden, the executive director of Free Speech Coalition, said in a statement. “This law, and others like it, have effectively become state censorship, creating a massive chilling effect for those who deal in sex or sexuality, and creating significant privacy risk for Tennesseans who want to access sexual health information, adult content or any other controversial speech.”
Nothing is stopping parents from parenting (such as using filtering rules and technology on their own personal internet connection). Nothing is stopping websites from requiring its users to be of a legal age to view such material. Moreover, nothing is stopping people from, you know, not consuming such content. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. Further, nothing is stopping parents from enrolling their children in proper educational programs about such material. There’s nothing wrong with all of the above. Where things cross the line is when the government steps in and orders such material to be censored. That is where we go from innocuous behaviour to free speech attacking activity. It’s precisely what the constitution should be guarding against.
Already, we are seeing the damaging implications for normalizing such legislation and laws. As such, it’s a really good thing that such laws are being challenged in courts.
Obviously, there is the legal complication of the Supreme Court of the United States being packed with right wing activist judges who want to undo a lot of the fundamental protections of ordinary citizens, so nothing is really certain even if the legal arguments against such laws are sound. Still, it’s a good thing that these laws are being challenged in the first place.
