AUSTIN – Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Aylo on Monday, claiming the company is violating the country’s controversial age verification law, which requires adult websites to post a health warning that repeats religious myths about anti-porn propaganda .
The law is currently being challenged on constitutional grounds.
Paxton Posted on his obscene materials.”
Texas, the AG continued, “has the right to protect its children from the harmful effects of pornographic content. I look forward to holding accountable any company that violates our age verification laws designed to prevent minors from being exposed to harmful, obscene material on the Internet.”
Industry attorney Corey Silverstein of Silverstein Legal told XBIZ: “This is both a troubling and troubling turn of events. The audacity of the State of Texas to pursue this case while the appeals court is weighing the unconstitutionality of this law is an absolute disgrace.”
Silverstein added that he believes it is likely that Aylo will file a request to move the lawsuit to a federal forum instead of Paxton’s chosen venue, a district court in Travis County, Texas.
Paxton is doubling down on forced speech
Paxton’s filing specifically highlights that HB 1181 “requires websites to warn about the harms associated with viewing such material, including possible addiction, impaired brain development and function, and other emotional and psychological conditions.”
As XBIZ reported, the law refers to these mandatory statements as health warnings, although Texas Health Authorities have declined to comment on whether they believe these propaganda points and largely debunked pseudoscientific theories have any factual support.
Last August, the Texas Department of Health and Human Services.
After several days of asking for an answer to the question, press secretary Tiffany Young declined to answer and deflected the questions with an invitation to contact “the authors of this bill for information about how it came about’.
XBIZ also reached out to Texas Department of Health and Human Services Chief of Staff Kate Hendrix and the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Matt Shaheen (R), but did not receive responses to the same questions.
HB 1181 was passed by the Texas Legislature in March 2024, including mandatory pseudoscientific anti-porn propaganda disclaimers declaring that “pornography is potentially biologically addictive, proven to impair human brain development, desensitizes the brain’s reward circuits , increases conditioned responses and weakens brain function. .”
The mandatory statements must be placed in 14-point font or larger on the landing pages of adult sites and in advertisements for adult sites.
The websites are also required by the state to publish the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration helpline phone number.
A controversial law that is already being challenged
HB 1181 is a vastly expanded version of Louisiana’s age verification law and its many copycats, and echoes the debunked “porn addiction” language of faith-based anti-porn groups. It was led by religious Republicans but supported by almost every Democratic state legislature.
When Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed this law into law, the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) condemned the Texas law – along with similar laws recently passed in Louisiana, Utah, Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas and Montana – as “ blatantly unconstitutional” and a “violation of the First Amendment rights of creators, consumers, and platforms.”
In August, FSC filed legal action in Texas over HB 1181.
“Texas isn’t just forcing sites to compromise the privacy of their visitors,” FSC director Alison Boden wrote at the time. “They force them to broadcast disinformation and pseudoscience about sex and sexuality. We stand up not only for the rights of adult companies and creators, but also for the rights of adult Texans to access legal content in the privacy of their own homes, without having to submit to surveillance or propaganda. We can all work to prevent minors from accessing adult content, but it is unconscionable and unconstitutional to allow the government to dictate what information adults can see.”
Joining Free FSC as co-plaintiffs were a range of mature platforms and employees, including MG Premium LTD; MG Freesites LTD (now Aylo Companies); Web Group Czech Republic, AS; NKL Associates, SRO; Sonesta Technologies, SRO; Sonesta Media, SRO; Yellow production SRO; Paper Street Media, LLC; Neptune Media, LLC; Mediame SRL; Midus Holdings, INC.; and Jane Doe, an adult content creator.
Issues surrounding the constitutional challenge continue to be debated at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Paxton missed the first part of that trial because he was impeached by a bipartisan coalition in the Texas Legislature for corruption and temporarily replaced as AG. He was later acquitted after his impeachment trial, when several Republicans who had voted to impeach him changed their minds and voted in his favor.
Texas vs. Aylo