In Supreme Court oral arguments over a potentially seismic change to the internet, the most memorable question came from Justice Samuel Alito. “One of the parties here is the owner of Pornhub, right?” Alito asked Derek Shaffer, lawyer for the adult industry group Free Speech Coalition. “Is it like the old Playboy magazine? You have essays there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr.?”
The massive adult web portal Pornhub, in case you’re wondering, does not publish essays by distinguished intellectuals. (Shaffer notes that it does host sexual wellness videos.) The question inspired a slew of commentary on social media, alongside a few quips directed at Justice Clarence Thomas, who declared during oral argument that “Playboy was about squiggly lines on cable TV.” But as funny as the quotes were, what the justices were getting at was hardly a joke: how much protection does sexual content and other legal speech deserve, if hosted online?
FSC v. Paxton concerns Texas’ HB 1181, which requires sites with a large proportion of sexually explicit content to verify users’ ages and post scientifically unproven health warnings about how porn “is proven to harm…