The Conservatives On The Supreme Court Are So Scared Of Nudity, They’ll Throw Out The First Amendment

This is extremely bad.

Masnick hits right on just how dangerous this ruling is. He hits on some of the major themes but the big inevitable first expansion of this will almost certainly be targeted at websites with LGBTQ+ content. States, especially Texas, want to erase trans people from history and the web and you better believe they're going to use this as yet another tool to take any sort of non cis, straight, content off the web for people who live in Texas and then other states will follow.

The real danger here isn’t just Texas’s age verification law—it’s that Thomas has handed every state legislature a roadmap for circumventing the First Amendment online. His reasoning that “the internet has changed” and that intermediate scrutiny suffices for content-based restrictions will be cited in countless future cases targeting online speech. Expect age verification requirements to be attempted for social media platforms (protecting kids from “harmful” political content), for news sites (preventing minors from accessing “disturbing” coverage), and for any online speech that makes moral authorities uncomfortable.

And yes, to be clear, the majority opinion seeks to limit this just to content deemed “obscene” to avoid such problems, but it’s written so broadly as to at least open up challenges along these lines.