No, it isn't.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Congress hasn't acted here, these are private entities.
Perhaps not Congress, but...
Interactive Digital Software Association v. St. Louis County (8th Cir. 2003): The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned an ordinance that restricted children’s access to
graphically violent video games and held that
video games are as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the best of literature.
Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (Supreme Court case, 2011): Affirmed that
video games are protected speech and that laws restricting their sale to minors based on
violent content are unconstitutional. The ruling rejected the idea of creating a new category of unprotected speech for video games or for violent content, or for minors.
HOWEVER:
Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton (Supreme Court, 2025): The Supreme Court
upheld a Texas law requiring age verification for access to pornography (as defined in 1973, Miller vs California, by 'The Miller Test') websites, finding it a reasonable regulation of access to material that
may be harmful to minors.
The Miller Test:
1. Prurient Interest: The average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the
prurient interest (excessive interest in sexual matters).
2. Patently Offensive: The work must depict or describe,
in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law.
3. Lacks Serious Value: The work, taken as a whole, must
lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
If
all three are met, then the material is considered obscene and can be legally restricted.
To my knowledge, pornography in video games has
not been addressed in U.S. court as the issue has been handled until now by the ESRB and the AO rating. And the cases involving hentai instead questioned the "artistic depiction of minor-looking drawings" directly and not pornography in general.
But what is Congress doing?
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) & Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), 2025,
claims to protect kids online. These acts demand that citizens provide their government-issued ID to access certain websites (which WILL include everything from fanfiction and pornographic websites to
Wikipedia - if not just to access the internet in general) and to show your face so websites can verify your age via AI face scanning. Both are an overreaching government censorship program that is a straight-up violation of free speech and the 1st amendment, but then so is The Patriot Act. Utilizing KOSA/COPPA, the government can yeet any website out of existence by claiming it is harmful to children, including websites belonging to political opponents.
Keep in mind that government programs are created by people who don't understand the subject, are built by the lowest bidder and/or cronyism/nepotism, and is maintained by people who are under-qualified, over-worked, under-paid, over-stressed, and exist under the assumption that "Password_1" is a 'strong password' for databases containing enough information to allow criminals to steal your personal information.
Should KOSA/COPPA pass, this site will disappear for all US citizens not on VPNs. Expect VPNs to be outlawed shortly after their passage.
