WASHINGTON – During a Supreme Court session on Wednesday about protecting minors from the vast array of explicit content on the internet, Justice Amy Coney Barrett shared her own frustrations as a parent.

Barrett, a mother of seven, challenged the idea that filtering or blocking content could reliably replace the need for adult websites to verify users’ ages.

“Hold on a second,” she remarked to the attorney for the adult industry who is contesting the Texas age verification law.

She pointed out that children can access pornography through various devices like gaming consoles, tablets, phones, and computers.

“From personal experience, I can attest that keeping up with content filtering on all these devices is quite challenging,” she expressed. “The rise in addiction to online porn shows that content filtering isn’t effective.”

Two decades earlier, the court had faced a related question, concluding there were less demanding approaches to controlling access to explicit online content than age verification.

However, on Wednesday, Barrett wasn’t the only one who seemed to concur with Texas that age verification technology is becoming increasingly manageable while content filtering remains largely ineffective.

Justice Samuel Alito posed a question to Derek Shaffer, representing the adult entertainment industry and advocates for free speech, asking if many parents could outsmart their 15-year-old kids when it comes to technology.

Shaffer argued that Texas and the other eighteen states supporting similar measures did so without fully exploring the effectiveness of content filtering.

He asserted that moving directly to age verification opens adults—who have the right to access explicit content—to risks of personal information being hacked, leaked, or unintentionally shared.

“You are creating a permanent online record,” he explained, highlighting the difference between this and merely showing an ID at a strip club. “It’s susceptible to hackers.”

Shaffer cautioned the justices about amending the standards for assessing laws that influence protected speech, suggesting it could lead to a surge of regulations that threaten online free speech.

In a 2004 ruling, the court adopted the strictest review standard, deciding that a federal law intended to protect children from online porn placed overly burdensome restrictions on adults accessing this content.

On Wednesday, Barrett and other justices expressed worry that siding with Texas might dilute the standards applied in First Amendment cases.

Brian Fletcher, representing the Justice Department, advised the justices that they have the flexibility to navigate this situation without reversing their 2004 verdict or excessively widening the scope for additional speech limitations.

He explained that age verification requirements for pornography sites are attempting to tackle a specific issue: the protection of adults’ constitutional speech rights while addressing the concern of minors accessing such material.

When questioned about whether Texas’ law strikes the right balance, Fletcher mentioned that the constitutionality of state laws can hinge on the types of age verification methods permitted.

Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielson asserted that his state’s law could withstand the strictest First Amendment scrutiny, describing age verification as “simple, safe, and common.”

“We’ve been trying content filtering for years,” Nielson stated, “and the complications have only intensified.”