Another State Lawmaker Wants To Criminalize Porn Through Age Verification
from the the-first-amendment-does-still-exist dept
Here we go again, everyone. Another far-right state lawmaker has introduced a bill requiring age verification in order to access porn sites from within state limits. This time it is Tennessee state Rep. Patsy Hazlewood who introduced yet another extreme age verification proposal that essentially makes it a crime to own a legally operating porn website protected by the First Amendment – regardless of whether the material protects certain regional regulations.
Referred to as the Protect Tennessee Minors Act, her bill takes a few notes from other far-right lawmakers in Ohio and Indiana. Both state legislatures have bills that levy misdemeanors and felonies on companies that own adult entertainment websites that fail or choose not to follow age verification requirements. The proposal in Ohio makes it a crime for users to circumvent an age gate through legally available means, like a VPN. The act, or House Bill 1614, is a pre-filing for 2024’s legislative session, and it adopts a new Class C felony for failure to comply with the law.
While the official bill language has yet to be published, House Bill 1614 is what we in the adult entertainment industry press call a “copycat” of mandatory age verification first adopted in the state of Louisiana. Throughout this year, proposals targeting adult entertainment websites with age-gating rules have grown exponentially extreme. Rep. Hazlewood’s bill fits this clear mold.
In a statement to a local news station, Rep. Hazlewood said, “I think we all have a responsibility as a society to protect our children.” A grandparent herself, Hazlewood told the news station that she’s received input from parents in her legislative district that inspired her to propose this bill – nowhere else. It is hard to believe when every conservative lawmaker with a savior complex is buying into fascistic lawmaking trends set forth by select groups, such as Project 2025, Heritage Foundation, National Center on Sexual Exploitation, and the even crazier American Principles Project, among others. Minors shouldn’t view porn by any means. But we have to be realistic.
Rep. Hazlewood’s bill — and virtually every age verification proposal in state legislatures and Congress — certainly lack input from adult entertainment industry members, consumers, law enforcement, and actual anti-trafficking groups. Why are the Patsy Hazlewoods of the world so focused on digital content that is already heavily age-restricted? I’m well aware of the lawsuits against Meta Platforms and their social networks, Facebook and Instagram. I am also aware of the anti-LGBTQ+ Kids Online Safety Act and parents begging the government to do their jobs.
However, a significant volume of sexual abuse imagery isn’t tied to the online adult industry, and mandatory age verification for end users isn’t the answer to fighting against these heinous acts.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez argued in a new lawsuit that platforms like Pornhub and OnlyFans do more to counter CSAM and non-consensual intimate imagery (revenge porn) than platforms like Facebook and Instagram. National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline data overwhelmingly confirms this fact. Age gates on porn sites – or even social media networks – will not curtail CSAM online. Admittedly, the parent companies that own the mentioned platforms are involved in programs that locate, remove, and report cases of CSAM and non-consensual intimate imagery (e.g., NCMEC’s TakeItDown program). The age verification hypothesis certainly doesn’t solve this problem, and it shouldn’t come at the expense of the First Amendment rights of adults who are not breaking laws or imposing harm on others.
Michael McGrady covers the legal and tech side of the online porn business, among other topics. He is the politics and legal contributing editor for AVN.com.
Filed Under: adult content, age verification, csam, patsy hazlewood, tennessee
Comments on “Another State Lawmaker Wants To Criminalize Porn Through Age Verification”
Hey, we can’t allow all of the young boys to end up with hairy palms now.
Political objective.
To protect the children we will take all adult content off the Internet, and adults who disagree with our approach can just suck it up.
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“take all adult content off the Internet”
Does adult content includes things like signing up for military service?
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Oh, it could mean lots of things: records of government misconduct, records of police misconduct, information about sex and procreation that isn’t abstinence-only teachings, support groups for LGBTQ people, mental health resources, political opinions that don’t kiss the GOP’s ass…
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Nah, they encourage 18 year old kids without fully developed brains to join the military.
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Isn’t that potentially bad for their health?
/s
Will she be handing herself in? Keeping herself away from minors?
After all, bills like this are porn for fascists.
You know considering the state, I wouldn’t be shocked that the bill had a typo and was actually was supposed to be protecting Miners on the internet.
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Oh surprise, it’s the degenerates at TechDirt again arguing that kids should have access to porn. 🙄
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Oh, surprise, it’s the Nazis who want to turn children into workers and soldiers.
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Only an effeminate communist like you would think it’s objectionable to teach children the value of hard work and patriotism.
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Hard work? From the republican party? The party of rich fuckers who have never worked a day in their fucking lives?
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Your class envy is cute.
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Hahahaha. Good one.
Thanks for agreeing though. Nice of you to acknowledge they are rich and lazy.
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Donald told the world that one needs ID in order to purchase groceries. Envy .. lol it is clearly mockery you fool.
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Well those rich people need everybody else to work hard, so that they can become even richer. Where wealth is the fruit of labour, extreme wealth needs the labour of many to create.
Re: Re: Re: you
And only You would use the word Communist to explain your comment.
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Oh, it’s the same party that loves raping kids. This is the same state that protects pedos and makes sure stds spread.
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Oh, no surprise, what you wish for is having to prove your age when you follow every link on the Internet. Also, you lose any anonymity, by either having to present credentials, and hope somebody else has not stolen your identity for nefarious purposes, or you have a camera watching you all the time you are on the Internet.
If an age barrier is required to access adult material, then most sites will erect an age barrier just to be safe should some adult material appear on their site.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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Or not. Perhaps we don’t want children to be used as an excuse to get rid of privacy on the internet for everyone.
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Nobody here (that anyone takes seriously) has ever once advocated for exposing minors to porn or allowing minors to access porn without restriction. Thet actual argument that you’re ignoring goes like this: Using the airhorn issue of “think of the children” as a means to stifle criticism of a bill that (if made law) would erode privacy rights in multiple ways is a bad idea.
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Oh surprise, it’s the degenerates at TechDirt again arguing that adults should have access to porn.
FTFY. YW.
Watch your own fucking kids, you freeloading welfare queen.
So much for 'personal responsibility'
In a statement to a local news station, Rep. Hazlewood said, “I think we all have a responsibility as a society to protect our children.”
Correct, so, I take it you’ll be going after the parents of children in your state, providing government funding for education on how to talk to their kids, set boundries and make clear that if they run across something questionable they can and should take it up with their parents?
Perhaps instituting hefty penalties for parents who let(whether deliberately, through indifference or incompetence) their kids access porn to make clear that they live in a nanny state damnit and they will raise their kids according to what the state decrees.
No? Just blaming everyone but the parents and demanding that online platforms do the job the parents can’t be bothered with under penalty of legal sanctions and fines?
If this keeps up, PornHub will just end up geoblocking the US entirely.
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That is the objective for those supporting these laws, and they think ‘protect the children’ give them an end run around the first amendment.
Maybe Rep. Patsy Hazlewood made some porn and doesn’t want her children to see it. Please, think of her children!
The First Step
This is the first step. When positive ID is socially acceptable for adult sites, it will be required for sites like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Then Reddit, NYTimes, Facebook, etc. There are marketing dollars to be had!
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Banning porn simply won’t work.
What countries need to do is follow the Japanese model and censor genitals. Although breasts should be censored as well, to be honest.
Then just punish those who make, possess or share uncensored porn.
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What a dumb idea
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No, it’s not.
Nobody is entitled to look at naked females.
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ok right wing troll
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“look at naked females”
male nudity you do not consider to be porn?
interesting
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And no one is entitled to telling everyone else what they can and cannot watch, yet here we are.
Notice the flaw?
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Which was forced on them by…
Oh would you look at that, the history books say it was AMERICA.
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I have a ghastly confession to make. I make plant porn – photos of plant genitalia, plants engaged in the most flagrant baring of their genitalia and in flagrante delicto sex actions, including bestiality – oooh, those bestial bees!!!
As yet I have not found it possible to get rose bushes to pay to see pictures of other rose bushes, though humans quite readily pay to see pictures of rose bush genitalia, and I have even seen humans engaging in sniffing such genitalia. Likewise, apple trees do not pay to see other apple trees flashing their genitalia for all the world and the bees especially, to see.
Will no one think of the children!?! (Hint: there is a distinct possibility that this is satire. Laugh at your own expense!)
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Ah, yes, censor genitals, that will clearly solve all the issues regarding interaction between the genders and purity of the mind. You know what other wonderful innovations resulted from Japanese society deciding they were too scared to look at cocks and pussies? Tentacle porn, Monster Girl Encyclopedia, and the Fisherman’s Wife’s Dream. Not to mention all the fucking screaming in the porn like the woman’s about to die. That on top of Japan still being one of the most developed countries with the worst track records on treating women with dignity and equal opportunity.
…Okay, I think I answered my own question on why you’d want that shit…
That will drive porn sites offshore were us laws do not apply and cannot be enforced.
Just like Nikki Haley’s plan, if she becomes president, to make social media and message boards verify users by running their DL or id number.
That would require sore owners to connect to DMV computers in all 50 states making your info that vulnerable to being hacked as it will create a vulnerability in the system
That will drive websites offshore where American laws do not apply and cannot be enforced. If that ever goes through there go all the good paying jobs as websites will move their businesses offshore to avoid that
And vpns that are not in the United States are not subject to any American laws.
Since vons and Tor lol eave no logs somebody could use either to bypass and geo restrictions and there would be no logs.
Really?
Porn in person requires ID. So does liquor and tobacco and pot. The latter 3 require id online too. Why is porn so different
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Online is different because what is being defines as porn is far too broad, and is a backdoor attempt to remove all online anonymity. Further an online purchase of physical goods, by its nature, requires an ID, as verified by a payment method, and the verification covers the transaction, and not just use of a site.
For continued use of a site, how do you show that the per4son now using the site is the same person as provided the ID, as unlike a physical space, verifying who is opening the door does not guarantee they are yhe one that actually goes in.
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That’s a matter of how the site confirms things. Could use id and selfy like KYC does. It’s how I order wine and liquor.
Mind you there’s limited confirmation of age and identity for deliver now. Signature waivers have eliminated that. I’ve yet to get something registered or RR from the post but UPS leaves my orders despite “adult signature required” because of the waiver.
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Proving who you are to agree to a sale is very different from proving who is using the site now. For a Sale, it is I am proving you are old enough to make the purchase, and once that proof is given, the transaction is complete and verification will, or should be, needed for any subsequent sale. For a porn site, it opens the door, but then you could for instance, allow a younger brother to use the site. That is a sale is validation age for a past action, while for a porn site it is meant to guarantee that the person verifying their age is the person using that session in the future. In the sale case, you prove your age, the sale goes through, and use of the validation is done. For a porn site, the verification grants permission to proceed, and only proves that the person who validated their age was using the device at the time of validation, and does not guarantee that they will not hand the device over to someone else after validation. That is the difference between transient use and prolonged use of an age verification. Starting a session is not the same as going into a club, because there is no real door, only a validated connection anybody could use.
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The store clerk isn’t gonna steal your driver’s licence to resell to interested belligerent powers or worse.
Online, though, it’s a different thing.
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“Porn in person requires ID. So does liquor and tobacco and pot. The latter 3 require id online too. Why is porn so different”
So what … everything will require ID in your fantasy land utopia. You will probably have bar codes tattooed upon your foreheads for easy scanning.
Maybe, you should be a parent and be aware of what your curtain climbers are doing rather than demanding your neighbors do it for you.
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The people selling porn in meatspace aren’t storing a copy of a given customer’s information in a database that could be hacked and leaked, which could lead to consequences beyond identity fraud. The people demanding that you present an ID to watch/purchase online porn aren’t interested in online anonymity, privacy rights, or anything else that could be affected by a requirement for ID to access legally protected speech/expression.
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Most sites other than tube tumblers already require payment. Adding ID adds nothing to that info except a photo. And maybe your blood type.
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And what about sites that doesn’t require payment which happens to the majority of them.
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Payment, yes. Full photo ID, no. And that’s the point: Connecting someone’s full-ass government-ass identity to the kind of porn they watch makes a database of those identities—and the info connected to them, such as what videos they watch and what sites they visit—a hefty target for people who want to make money via blackmail. (“You watched this PureTaboo video a dozen times, you sick fuck! You wouldn’t want everyone in your town to know about your stepfamily kink, would you? I didn’t think so. Now wire the money to…”)
The fact that you’re using a screen name instead of your government name tells me that you respect the idea of having some distance between your meatspace identity and your cyberspace identity. Now imagine if you couldn’t have that distance because the law demands that you provide an ID to comment on this website. Proposals like the one mentioned in this article are a direct attack on online anonymity. Anyone who takes refuge in that anonymity for any reason—to speak truth to power, to express controversial opinions, to shitpost without reservation—deserves to have it preserved instead of ripped away. Anonymity is what gives a lot of people the freedom to speak their minds; as Oscar Wilde said: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
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I mildly agree with your point. Though still think it’s not as big of a concern as you make it out to be. The video store had a copy of your id and a database of your rental choices. Including porn. It’s not like the idea is anything new.
It’s one of those things I have just always expected to come about eventually. I think you’re fighting the inevitable. Like protesting a mudslide by standing in front of it.
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You are conflating being a member at a video-rental with buying a porn-mag and a six-pack at the liquor-store on the corner.
Me being carded at a liquor-store where I pay in cash doesn’t leave any information-trail at all except a purchase was registered in the POS as a cash-transaction. This is true for any purchase that require an ID as an age-gate.
Yes. It is absolutely vital, and about time, that we finally protect the children from being used as pawns in our messy divorce from reality.