Let’s give credit where it is due. The current Supreme Court has a decent record on free speech issues.

There have been some worrisome moves, such as the Court’s decision not to immediately reverse an appeals court decision that stripped activists of their right to organize street protests. But a bipartisan alliance of six justices have largely resisted efforts by states and the federal government to regulate speech.

Most significantly, in Moody v. Netchoice (2024) three Republican justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — joined the Court’s three Democrats in rejecting a Texas law that attempted to take control of content moderation at major social media sites like Facebook or YouTube. According to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the purpose of this unconstitutional law was to force these companies to publish “conservative viewpoints and ideas” that they did not want to publish.

Last June, however, the Supreme Court, in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, upheld a Texas law requiring pornographic websites to verify that their users are over age 18, effectively overruling Ashcroft v. ACLU, a 2004 Supreme Court decision that struck down a virtually identical federal law.

The Court’s decision to uphold age-gating laws for porn sites is defensible. I wrote before oral arguments in Free Speech Coalition that some age-gating laws should be allowed, though I also said that Texas’s specific law should be struck down because it is not well-crafted to survive a First Amendment challenge. But the decision is also significant because it is a contraction of First Amendment rights. (The First Amendment has long been understood to protect both the right of speakers and artists to say what they want, and the right of consumers to receive books and other materials that the government might find objectionable.)

The fact that the Court was willing to shrink Americans’ free speech rights in Free Speech Coalition suggests that they may do so again in a future case. And a case asking the justices to do so is now before them.

NetChoice v. Fitch, which is currently on the Court’s “shadow docket,” concerns a Mississippi law that requires social media platforms to verify the ages of their users, and to require young people to obtain a parent or guardian’s permission before they can set up an account with one of these platforms.

Under existing Supreme Court precedents, this Mississippi law is clearly unconstitutional. In

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