Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

This article is incorrect.

The Supreme Court’s ruling only applied to obscene sexual material. It doesn’t apply to sex scenes within artistic works or sexual content in general.

There’s a test used to determine whether sexual material is considered pornographic. It’s known as the “I know it when I see it” test.

More info on this test here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

More specifically here is what is considered obscene:

The criteria were:

1. whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;

2. whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, as specifically defined by applicable state law;

3. whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The third criterion pertains to judgment made by "reasonable persons" of the United States as a whole, while the first pertains to that of members of the local community. Due to the larger scope of the third test, it is a more ambiguous criterion than the first two.

Nope. A key aspect of this ruling is that it's about "sexual content that is obscene to minors but not to adults". "Adults have the right to access speech obscene only to minors [..] and submitting to age verification burdens the exercise of that right. But adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification."

The Texas law at issue takes the same three factors you quoted and lists them verbatim, but tacks on "for minors" to each factor, e.g.:

> (C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

There's no precedent yet on what it means for something to "lack [..] artistic [..] value for minors", but it's almost certain to be interpreted as a harder standard to satisfy than the normal one.