GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The Free Speech Coalition (FSC) announced this week it has filed a legal challenge in Florida against the state’s age-verification mandate, which is scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2025.
The measure, HB3, provides the Florida attorney general’s office authority to bring civil claims of up to $50,000 per violation against websites that offer “material harmful to minors” if they do not “require visitors to upload a government ID, scan their face, or otherwise verify their age and identity,” the FSC noted in announcing the lawsuit. FSC also observed that other provisions of the same new law, those requiring age-verification for social media access, “have already been challenged by other litigants.”
“These laws create a substantial burden on adults who want to access legal sites without fear of surveillance,” said Alison Boden, Executive Director of FSC. “Despite the claims of the proponents, HB3 is not the same as showing an ID at a liquor store. It is invasive and carries significant risk to privacy. This law and others like it have effectively become state censorship, creating a massive chilling effect for those who speak about, or engage with, issues of sex or sexuality.”
FSC is challenging similar laws in Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, Utah, Indiana and Montana. The Texas case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in January 2025.
In the new complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, FSC and their co-plaintiffs argued that HB3 “places substantial burdens on Plaintiff website operators, content creators, and countless others who use the internet by requiring websites to age-verify every internet user before providing access to non-obscene content that meets the State’s murky definition of ‘material harmful to minors.’”
“The Act violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments to, and the Commerce and Supremacy Clauses of, the United States Constitution because it impermissibly burdens Plaintiffs’ exercise of their rights thereunder in myriad ways,” FSC added in the complaint.
Arguing that HB3 “violates the First Amendment in several respects,” FSC asserted the law “imposes a content-based burden on protected speech that requires narrow tailoring and use of the least restrictive means to serve a compelling state interest, yet it captures a substantial quantity of protected speech in a dragnet manner without accomplishing its stated purpose of protecting minors from materials they may easily obtain from other sources and via other means.”
The law also compels “providers of online content to place an age-verification content wall over their entire websites unconstitutionally labels them as ‘adult businesses,’ with all the negative implications and ramifications that follow,” the FSC added in the complaint.
FSC also asserted that by “requiring the use of some particularized approval method as a condition to providing protected expression, the Act operates as a presumptively unconstitutional prior restraint on speech.”
Joining Free Speech Coalition as co-plaintiffs are the sex education platform O.school (Deep Technologies, Inc.); sexual wellness retailer Adam & Eve (PHE, Inc.); adult fan platform JustFor.Fans (JFF Publications, LLC), and Florida attorney Barry Chase.
