Parents Can't Fight Porn Alone

Today, my colleague Brad Littlejohn and I have a piece out in First Things, explaining why parents can’t fight porn alone. The impetus for this piece is the case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton coming before the Supreme Court in oral arguments this Wednesday over the constitutionality of Texas’s age verification law for pornography websites, HB 1181. Brad and I are also both amici curiae in this case.

We conclude our piece, “For too long, the legal regime surrounding pornography has left parents to fight alone against Big Tech and Big Porn. It has refused to recognize the exploitative behavior of these industries. But the government has a duty to aid parents in protecting minors from parties who mean them harm and from addictive substances and behaviors—and to protect those minors whose parents are unwilling or unable.

Laws like Texas’s HB 1181 are hardly a silver bullet. They won’t stop pornography from being distributed within social media sites, for instance. But this reality simply underscores the need for maximal legislative discretion in fighting the porn hydra. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good, and a transformation of the incentive structure is a very good start. To date, tech companies have feared prosecution for suppressing adult ‘speech’ more than prosecution for allowing minors to view (or be featured in) pornography. If the Supreme Court upholds HB 1181, this can finally change.”

While our particular focus is why parents need help from the state to restrict children’s access to online pornography, the piece uses this example to illustrate a framework that could help “guide conservative thinking more broadly concerning the intersection of parents’ rights and the state in regulating technology: 1) Digital technology inherently disempowers parents; 2) parental will does not always correspond to parental ability; 3) technologies pose collective action problems; 4) tasking parents alone with protection is a social injustice, as it leaves the most vulnerable children the least protected.”

You can read the piece in full over at First Things.