Seven states push to require ID for watching porn online

After decades of America fretting over minors potentially being overexposed to pornography online, several states are suddenly moving fast in 2023 to attempt to keep kids off porn sites by passing laws requiring age verification.

Last month, Louisiana became the first state to require ID from residents to access pornography online. Since then, seven states have rushed to follow in Louisiana’s footsteps. According to a tracker from Free Speech Coalition, Florida, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia introduced similar laws, and laws in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Virginia are seemingly closest to passing. If passed, some of these laws could be enforced promptly, while some bills in states like Florida and Mississippi specify that they wouldn’t take effect until July.

But not every state agrees that rushing to require age verification is the best solution. Today, a South Dakota committee voted to defer voting on its age verification bill until the last day of the legislative session. The bill’s sponsor, Republican Jessica Castleberry, seemingly failed to persuade the committee of the urgency of passing the law, saying at the hearing that “this is not your daddy’s Playboy. Extreme, degrading, and violent pornography is only one click away from our children.” She told Ars that the bill was not passed because some state lawmakers were too “easily swayed by powerful lobbyists.”

“It’s a travesty that unfettered access to pornography by minors online will continue in South Dakota because of lobbyists protecting the interests of their clients, versus legislators who should be protecting our children,” Castleberry told Ars. “The time to pass this bill was in the mid-1990s.”

Lobbyists opposing the bill at the hearing represented telecommunications and newspaper associations. Although the South Dakota bill, like the Louisiana law, exempted news organizations, one lobbyist, Justin Smith, an attorney for the South Dakota Newspaper Association argued that the law was too vague in how it defined harmful content and how it defined which commercial entities could be subjected to liabilities.

“We just have to be careful before we put things like this into law with all of these open-ended questions that put our South Dakota businesses at risk,” Smith said at the hearing. “We would ask you to defeat the bill in its current form.”

These laws work by requiring age verification of all users, imposing damages on commercial entities found to be neglecting required age verification and distributing content to minors online that’s been deemed to be inappropriate. The laws target online destinations where more than a third of the content is considered harmful to minors. Opponents in South Dakota anticipated that states that pass these laws, as Louisiana has, will struggle to “regulate the entire Internet.” In Arkansas, violating content includes “actual, simulated, or animated displays” of body parts like nipples or genitals, touching or fondling of such body parts, as well as sexual acts like “intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation, flagellation, excretory functions,” or other sex acts deemed to have no “literary, artistic, political, or scientific value to minors.”

When Louisiana’s law took effect last month, Ars verified how major porn sites like Pornhub quickly complied. It seems likely that if new laws are passed in additional states, popular sites will be prepared to implement additional controls to block regional access to minors.

Ars could not immediately reach other lawmakers sponsoring age verification bills in these states for comment.

Is age verification the answer?

While Castleberry declared South Dakota’s bill dead, the proposed law in Arkansas has already passed the Senate and will be reviewed by the state’s House Rules committee tomorrow. That bill warns that exposing minors to pornography can negatively impact minors’ brain function and development, exacerbate their emotional or medical issues, trigger deviant sexual arousal, promote harmful sexual behaviors, and cause self-esteem issues or body image disorders in minors.

The Republican senator sponsoring the Arkansas law, Tyler Dees, told Vice that he introduced the bill after many constituents voiced concerns about “the growing problems related to pornography and the advancement of technology and devices around our children.”

It could be that Dees’ constituents were alarmed by the results of a recent survey on teens and pornography, which was published by Common Sense Media a week before Dees’ bill was introduced and was widely reported by media outlets like CNN and The New York Times. That survey found that 73 percent of teens reported that they consumed pornography, with more than half claiming they’d been exposed to porn accidentally and 15 percent of minors reporting they were first exposed to porn at age 10 or younger.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1917664