Alexander Rhodes, the founder of the pornography addiction self-help group NoFap and repeat plaintiff, sued the parent company of Pornhub, Aylo, along with the University of California Los Angeles, two scientists, and an academic publisher for defamation. Filed in a court of common pleas in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and since removed to federal court by the defendants, the suit has gone under the radar by most news outlets.

I wrote for one of my publishers about the lawsuit but little coverage has picked it up. I hope that changes in the coming months as litigation advances in the case.

The lawsuit alleges a civil conspiracy bankrolled by Aylo to defame Rhodes and NoFap. Rhodes is a divisive figure in the wider anti-porn discussion as he believes that breaking “pornography addiction,” (which is not an accepted diagnosis in the DSM-5) requires participants to not engage in masturbation or watching pornography in a bid to “reboot” their brains. The theory is not supported by most science.

Nonetheless, he and his movement have gained traction over the years. Some sexual health experts started to scrutinize the claims of the NoFap philosophy as well as its supposed scientific basis. Because there has been some research pushing back on some of NoFap’s claims, lawyers for Rhodes claims it is proof of organized and explicit coordination to defame him. According to the lawsuit, Aylo is supposedly at the center of this scheme and allegedly paid off two scientists who have published critical research on NoFap. Furthermore, the complaint argues that UCLA and the academic publisher Taylor & Francis engaged in this defamation scheme by “aiding and abetting” the pair of scientists and Aylo by publishing the research.

This is a very weird lawsuit.

But what makes it weirder and more alarming than it is stems from the narrative pushed by the plaintiffs. In a bid to demonstrate the conspiracy, Rhodes presents a theory that the scientists and Aylo actively engaged in media pitches to dozens of journalists and other media personalities, including myself, to advance messages that disparage the NoFap company and its founder. Companies doing media pitches happen every day. Media pitches do not make anything into a conspiracy.

According to this theory, Rhodes alleges a coordinated media narrative that advances Aylo’s interests with the supposed end goal of… silencing this random dude who makes money off of telling people not to watch porn and jerk off. Even though Rhodes has the right to believe and communicate what he believes, it is quite a reach to insist that research and criticism of his beliefs and movement, including bog standard press coverage, amount to a conspiracy to defame.

Having people review strong claims is part of how academic research works. Having the media cover that research happens every day. It is silly to conclude that this turns it into a conspiracy.

And this week, Rhodes ramped things up a notch by claiming not just your garden variety conspiracy, but a RICO claim. Rather than go into the details of that, we’ll just point you to an archive of Ken White’s lawsplainer: IT’S NOT RICO, DAMMIT.

His lawyers mention about 38 people who have written or tried to write about NoFap and Rhodes in a negative light. Their coverage has been almost entirely critical of his claims. For example, my writing on NoFap has been critical in the context that it pushes and reinforces anti-pornography sentiments among social conservative groups and is a constituent faction of the so-called online manosphere. I have heard that some publishers of mine have been served up threats of legal action and/or retraction demands for my reporting and analysis about these groups.

Other journalists, like Gustavo Turner, have written on some of the more outlandish claims of so-called porn induced erectile dysfunction (PIED). PIED is not an official diagnosis, and is more likely to be related to underlying issues as pornography is wholly unlikely to contribute to erectile dysfunction among men. Turner was called a “collaborator” against Rhodes in the suit, even though Turner has never directly written about him, and defamation has to be of and about someone specifically. The article linked above, which is also mentioned in the lawsuit does not discuss Rhodes and only mentions “NoFap” in the context of a hashtag “phenomena,” not having anything to do with Rhodes’ organization specifically.

Others mentioned in the lawsuit include authors with bylines at other outlets like Salon, Rolling Stone, Vice, and many others. He mentions “disparaging” media communicated by LGBTQ+ figures like Dan Savage of the Savage Love podcast because Savage hosted one of the defendants on his podcast talking about her research.

The lawsuit is quite expansive.

While I am not a defendant in the case, I still feel that listing out the simple mentioning of Rhodes’ critics as part of the grand conspiracy is a form of intimidation. It’s not as direct, but Rhodes appears to be trying to put on notice those who scrutinize the claims he makes that they could be the next defendant added.

This chills speech and reporting on more than just Rhodes and NoFap. It speaks to wider sentiments in today’s culture about how the courts can be a weapon to censor journalists from doing their jobs.

Already I have heard from journalists who claim that publications are rejecting pitches about Rhodes and NoFap, with the implication being that the publications are worried about litigation threats for merely writing about him. It feels like a classic case of chilling effects via a SLAPP suit, and it’s why anti-SLAPP laws are so important.

What is ironic is that Rhodes accuses the defendants in this case of intimidation: buying off journalists and the very outlets they allege advances the talking points of an organized civil conspiracy against his business and personage. Journalists aren’t a part of the conspiracy. They’re just reporting on what’s happening, and sometimes that includes research results. And, yes, sometimes that includes criticism of companies like Aylo for bad things they’ve done as well. Because journalists are reporting the news, not engaged in a grand conspiracy.

A thoughtful, reasonable, reflective person might take the time to personally reflect on why so many articles question the narrative he’s pushing. Others, however, might just claim a conspiracy against them.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

It appears that the illiberal, transphobic pipe dream of banning all pornography has reached an enterprising group of far-right Christian nationalist Republicans in Michigan who want to impose the moralistic agendas of a small few on the overwhelming majority of the people.

Rep. Josh Schriver leads five other lawmakers with the recent introduction of the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act, known as House Bill (HB) 4938, to the Michigan Legislature. He presents the measure as a public decency and public safety solution to what he views as harmful speech.

The Anticorruption of Public Morals Act is as bad as it sounds. If adopted by the legislature, the bill would prohibit the distribution of depictions of sexual acts that are “real, animated, digitally generated, written, or auditory” in nature. These acts include consensual depictions of sexual behavior among one or more adults, including all forms of protected consensual expression.

This means an individual or entity that violates the provisions of the bill would be charged with a felony offense punishable by up to 20 years in prison, a fine of $100,000, or a mixture of both. Individuals and organizations that violate the bill’s language that involves more than 100 pieces of “prohibited material” are guilty of the felony charge and are punishable by 25 years in prison or $125,000. 

A provision in HB 4938 also restricts internet service providers in the state from implementing mandatory filtering technology to prevent all residents from accessing said “prohibited material.”

This language was added to build on their definition of “circumvention tools.” Rep. Schriver defines “circumvention tools” as any form of software or service designed to bypass censorship provisions. The bill explicitly highlights virtual private networks, proxy servers, or other forms of secure encryption tunneling as these “circumvention tools.” Using VPNs to access prohibited material is a no-go under HB 4938.

Consider how the lawmakers define “prohibited material,” too. According to the draft language, prohibited material is a form of expression, “that at common law was not protected by adoption of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States respecting laws abridging freedom of speech or the press.” Further, these “prohibited materials” under the bill are defined:

 “[As] depiction, description, or simulation, whether real, animated, digitally generated, written, or auditory, of sexual acts, that includes any of the following:…vaginal or anal intercourse;…fellatio or cunnilingus;…masturbation;…ejaculation or orgasm;…penetration with sexual devices;…group sex;…bondage, domination, or sadomasochism;…acts involving bodily fluids for sexual arousal;…erotic autonomous sensory meridian response content, moaning, or sensual voice content;…animated, virtual, or sexual activity generated by artificial intelligence;…depictions of characters acting or resembling minors in sexual contextsl;…[and] any other pornographic material.”

Other forms of expression that are considered “prohibited material” include:

“[A] depiction, description, or simulation, whether real, animated, digitally generated, written, or auditory, that includes a disconnection between biology and gender by an individual of 1 biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be of the other biological sex by means of a combination of attire, cosmetology, or prosthetics, or as having a reproductive nature contrary to the individual’s biological sex.”

The only exceptions include “scientific and medical research or instruction” or “peer-reviewed academic content.” Not only does Rep. Schriver attempt to define entire categories of speech as obscene and criminal, but he goes the extra step of attempting to criminalize and written or audiovisual existence of transgender, gender non-conforming, and/or gender diverse people.

He wants to criminalize forms of expression that affirm and contribute to the basic humanity of transgender people by saying that gender affirmation, socialization, and any other material related to the subject is pornographic, while also conflating such material with actual sexually explicit content that is produced for private use by adults and is widely considered legal.

What kind of backward ass thinking is that? Rep. Schriver is pitching a worldview so extreme that it calls for criminalizing protected forms of expression, while also wanting to institute an entire offense for speech that deals with transgender and queer subject matter.

Instead of using a position in the state legislature to accomplish something reasonable and bipartisan, Schriver’s cabal intends to force further harm onto the national conversation against a class of people who are entitled to the same First Amendment rights he proudly utilizes as a member of the rising postliberal Catholic and Catholic integralism movements that feature prominent neo-fascists and (wink) J.D. Vance.

State Sen. Dusty Deevers of Oklahoma is the other high-profile case of a lawmaker wanting to upend the First Amendment in their state to ban pornography. Note that Deevers is an author of “The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel.” In this statement, Sen. Deevers calls for the abolishment of divorce, abortion, non-traditionalist culture, and “evils” like pornography. 

Schriver publicly joined Deevers’ fan club in early 2024 when the porn ban in Oklahoma was first put to pen and paper. It hasn’t passed the legislature.

Rep. Schriver quoted a Rolling Stone post on X criticizing Deevers, saying that “abortion is murder, porn is cancer, [and] divorce is a plague.” If bills like HB 4938 are the future of the conservative movement, then the true obscenity isn’t pornography—it’s the authoritarian urge to strip people of their rights under the guise of protecting morality: No one is protected; everyone is a criminal.

Let’s just hope this bill dies in committee and Schriver and his colleagues are reminded of how willfully ignorant they truly are.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

Age verification laws and regulations that target online pornography and digital sex work are far from being the “modest” child safety measures intended to protect public decency favored by the far–right.

Proponents of these laws benefit from the fearmongering and framing of age verification as a necessity to protect children from inappropriate material found on the internet. But often in the discourse, there’s a clear detachment between the political motivations of lawmakers and the realities of being a sex worker or working in a profession that is directly impacted by age verification laws targeting unfavored speech.

Because of the detachment, implications are far-reaching. Laws that require “age assurance” regimes are a clear impediment to labor and the ability of sex workers to legally earn income. There needs to be further discussion and analysis of age verification laws as a labor issue, in addition to the underlying contexts of free speech rights. While not a traditional “labor issue,” like union rights and equal pay, the government’s role in regulating and restricting forms of expression that can be produced, distributed, and monetized for entertainment media consumption is a dimension of the age-gating issue often overlooked and/or ignored.

Digital sex workers’ incomes and living conditions are dependent on platforms for content distribution. Sites like OnlyFans, Pornhub, xHamster, Chaturbate, and literally thousands more grant performers and content creators access to revenue generation opportunities that are remote, distributed, and confidential. 

Due to these platforms forming the foundations of a trend-setting, technology-innovating, digitally native entertainment industry, age verification laws target digital sex workers’ means of distribution and, in a lot of cases, means of production. The overwhelming majority of adult content creators and adult performers are self-employed—classified as independent contractors and/or small business owners. Some performers have incorporated, with others adding trademarks and intellectual property protections on their branding.

Consider a few examples of adult content creators actively engaging in the activity of running a small business or self-employed enterprise. Platforms such as OnlyFans issue tax forms so that content creators can accurately report their income to the IRS and their state tax authorities. Or take the example of the performer-creator, going by the stage name Gigi Dior, duking it out with high-fashion house Christian Dior in front of the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Activities and actions like these aren’t seen by the vast majority of consumers—or, importantly, the critics of the entire online adult ecosystem.

We all hear the “think of the children” mantra from the Helen Lovejoys of the world daily. We are seeing it now with Collective Shout teaming up with Visa and Mastercard to clamp down on NSFW gaming. We are seeing it in the United Kingdom with calls from both the House of Commons and the House of Lords to ban certain types of pornography to comply with a broad interpretation of the Online Safety Act of 2023.

At least 40 percent of all United States residents live in jurisdictions with age verification laws. Millions of adult content creators are diverse and dynamic. Faced with all of these mounting regulatory pressures, adult entertainment performers and adult content creators—particularly those operating with marginalized identities—have developed a range of creative strategies to sustain their work, visibility, and autonomy in the national digital space. Inaccessibility is a legitimate issue that goes far beyond concerns of consumers.

While these laws are often framed as protecting children, the actual barrier they create is for adults — the lawful consumers who make up the legitimate market for adult entertainment. Under laws like Texas’s HB 1181, anyone wanting to access adult content must submit government-issued ID or sensitive personal data to a third-party vendor. Many adults are unwilling to do this, not because they wish to evade age restrictions, but because they don’t trust where that data will go, how it will be stored, or who might access it.

The result is that large numbers of adults — the only legal audience for these performers in the first place — stop visiting legitimate platforms altogether. That loss of audience directly translates into a loss of income for adult content creators. For an industry where the majority of workers are self-employed, often operating as small businesses, the shrinkage of the paying customer base is an existential threat.

This is why age verification mandates should also be seen as a labor rights issue. They are not simply regulating content; they are regulating the ability of consenting adults to transact with one another in a lawful marketplace. By forcing privacy-invasive hurdles onto the consumer side, these laws effectively shut down the market for legal adult work, undermining the economic stability of performers and driving audiences toward unregulated, unsafe spaces.

Protecting minors is essential, but there are less harmful ways to do it — including privacy-preserving age estimation, community moderation, and robust sex education. Until lawmakers acknowledge this labor dimension, age verification laws will continue to function as a political tool that erodes the rights and livelihoods of both workers and adult consumers.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

Valve Corporation recently came under pressure from payment processors to purge Steam, the popular PC gaming storefront, of “certain kinds of adult-only content.” The news rippled across tech and gaming news media, even for adult entertainment industry journalists like myself. But if it weren’t for the reporting of Ana Valens (which Vice then deleted) then we wouldn’t know the source of this “pressure.”

Collective Shout, a far-right anti-pornography group from Australia, has claimed credit as one of the key organizers in the recent campaign against Steam. And it was Collective Shout’s Melinda Tankard Reist who took the victory lap on X, claiming victory over “pedo gamer fetishists.” The group also claimed responsibility for the campaign against indie gaming storefront Itch.io. Many reports indicate that the Itch.io campaign placed critically acclaimed game titles in controversy.

Despite this, Reist’s supposed tactics of signing “open letters” to the chief executive officers of the world’s credit card companies, payment processing platforms, and financial institutions are not new ones. Collective Shout learned it from another far-right anti-pornography group based here in the United States: the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). NCOSE is the same group that has published its so-called “Dirty Dozen” list each year, attempting to shame mainstream companies for engaging in “sexual exploitation.” But NCOSE and Collective Shout provide a glaringly broad definition of that term to describe anything that is even remotely out of line with their worldviews. Those organizations and other anti-pornography campaigners have used tactics like these in ways that led to rippling censorship across various platforms, verticals, and genres. 

The anti-pornography movement has proven effective in pressure campaigns targeting payment and banking partners for companies and individuals who produce controversial subject material.

We saw this with Pornhub and the moral panic that journalist Nicholas Kristof kicked off against the platform in December 2020. Credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard turned the screws on Aylo, referred to as MindGeek at the time, due to the unbalanced reporting of a washed-up Pulitzer Prize winner whose unrequited hubris presents him as a carceral feminist with a White savior complex. This caused a crisis for content creators and producers who use an adult tube site like Pornhub.com for distribution and monetization. Kristof and his confederates were able to whip up so much moral panic that it forced MindGeek to rebrand and be acquired by a private equity firm featuring sex work academics, law enforcement officials, and lawyers on the board of an ownership group called Ethical Capital Partners. That’s the power of moral panic.

Using present-day numbers, the market capitalization of Mastercard is said to be half a trillion dollars–nearly $512 billion. Visa has a market capitalization of about $686 billion. Visa and Mastercard are the leading credit card networks based on market share, with Visa accounting for over $6 trillion in purchase volume in 2024. Considering the insane amounts of money flowing through these credit card networks, Visa and Mastercard could’ve dealt a death blow to the entire Aylo conglomerate before their makeover and reorganization. 

Add the dimension that thousands of adult content creators at the time were actively enrolled in Pornhub’s model and revenue-sharing programs, the loss of payment partners like the two credit card companies could have been catastrophic. This is especially true if Pornhub did shut down due to Mr. Kristof’s columns in the New York Times opinion section in the five-ish years since.

Major players in the payments and financial industries are flush with great power. That power can be and has been used to censor forms of expression that are otherwise legally protected. In the vertical of sexual expression and sexual labor, the power exercised exceeds levels that could be considered unaccountable and inscrutable. There is extremely well-documented evidence – anecdotally, journalistically, academically, and legally – that speaks to this inscrutability: banks backing OnlyFans almost forcing the platform to ban porn, debanking of adult content creators, and the financial-related closures of independent small businesses that deal with sexual subjects.

To culminate this, the approach of Collective Shout allegedly pressuring the executives of firms like Visa, Mastercard, Discover, JCB, and others speaks to the love affair anti-pornography and far-right censorship campaigners have with the existing establishments in key financial sectors. It is a love affair that is incestuous by its very nature. This “incestuous love affair,” as I describe, is clear: the anti-pornography movement and the financial services sector have long been engaged in a relationship where one uses its morality as a weapon and the other uses virtue capitalism as a means to enforce censorship. All of this is in the name of supposedly protecting public decency. 

This all came full circle with Operation Choke Point under the Obama White House, and attacks on sexual expression have increased with the administrations of Trump 1 and Trump 2. President Donald Trump’s policies and his bullshit “federalism” arguments for weakening civil liberties for us all have resulted in a patchwork of inconsistency across the fifty states as it relates to issues such as age verification, privacy rights, and freedom of speech. The example of the Collective Shout group speaks to deeply seated prejudices against millions of people who simply wish to express themselves freely online – whether it’s adult entertainment or a racy video game.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

The conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled 6-3 in favor of upholding an age verification measure targeting adult content platforms on the internet that the state legislature of Texas adopted during the 2023 legislative session. As a quick reminder, the case is Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton and featured the parent companies of the world’s largest adult tube sites suing the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for targeting speech that is otherwise protected.

Mike Masnick already wrote for Techdirt about how the SCOTUS justices “threw out the First Amendment” to shield their eyes from seeing nudity on the internet. It’s bad news, to say the least. But what many in the discourse on the far-right will overlook or try to misinterpret is that this ruling is going to have negative impacts on so much more than just the pornography space.

When considering the true “winners” in the immediate aftermath of this ruling, age verification software providers are a visible class of beneficiaries. A trade group called the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) serves as the unified industry voice for companies that develop and market age assurance and identity verification software products. Member companies of the trade group include the likes of Yoti, Privo, Envoc, Experian, and AgeChecked.com. Yoti is one of the world’s foremost providers of age assurance technology, while Envoc is a Louisiana firm that developed the first white-label age verification measure used to require identity to access a website like the Aylo-owned property Pornhub within the statewide digital space. AVPA has a membership of around 30 companies, with many of the major players in the industry outside of the United States. For example, companies Yoti and Ondato are based in the United Kingdom.

I do not care about where these companies come from or if they have a trade group. The adult entertainment industry has the Los Angeles-based Free Speech Coalition, with members of the trade group based internationally. Aylo is in Montreal. xHamster’s parent company is in Cyprus. 

I do care when the legal and regulatory environment artificially creates a market that could be in a valuation at billions of dollars due to the regulatory regime and asymmetric retaliation by a few powerful groups that operate in a minority over the wider population. With this high court ruling, the age verification providers are being handed the keys to a market that members of an industry that isn’t even similar in nature must rely on as legally mandated vendors. Though age assurance laws in the United States are a patchwork across the states with no national harmonization, trends in lawmaking and policymaking from around the world – especially in Republican-held states like Texas and in Western Europe and Australia – suggest the age verification laws are not going away. 

And it will be a clear benefit for the aforementioned companies. According to AVPA data related to revenue published in 2021, the valuation projections for all member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that implement age verification laws and regulations will equate to GBP 9.8 billion within 10 to 15 years. Conversion to U.S. dollars is a sum of nearly $13.4 billion at today’s conversion rates. The OECD countries number 37, with the United States a founding member. No direct calculation has been made as to how much revenue will be generated by the forced adoption of these vendors by adult entertainment industry firms. 

But it is expected to be hefty, considering that pornography remains one of the most searched for categories of content on the internet. To further complicate matters, countries like Australia and the United Kingdom have sweeping national laws governing age verification for virtually every website on the internet, including pornography. Australia is even preparing to require age checks for search engine providers like Google and Microsoft. In the United States, around 20 of the 50 U.S. states have some form of age assurance requirement to access pornography. Aylo, one of the most visible adult entertainment industry companies, has blocked users in all 20 of those states. 

The most recent round of blocks occurred on July 1, 2025, with all Aylo-owned platforms being blocked in Georgia, South Dakota, and Wyoming. In my reporting for AVN on this development, a spokesperson for Aylo told me they blocked the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. That is a total population of 136.9 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2024 data. The same data estimates the national population to be 340.1 million. 203.2 million citizens are in jurisdictions without age assurance regulations and, therefore, aren’t (yet) blocked by Aylo’s websites.

About 40 percent of the U.S. population lives under these laws, meaning that four in 10 people do not have access to websites like Pornhub, RedTube, Brazzers, Men.com, or other Aylo sites. A consumer can simply download a VPN to circumvent the age gates, ultimately rendering such laws useless. However, this won’t stop AVPA’s companies from exploiting adult industry firms. 

All of this said, I wish to also remind you that age verification technology is still total dogshit. Though this tech has advanced significantly in the past few years, the studies on efficacy and deployability outside the United States and Australia still conflict with promotional material published by AVPA’s member firms.

For example, the Australian government’s Age Assurance Technology Trial (AATT) found that age verification can be “effective,” but accuracy has much to be desired. A test conducted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation found “key flaws” in facial scanning technology meant to confirm age verification. In the news outlet’s test, they found that AI-augmented age assurance scans of a 16-year-old student’s face misidentified him as 19, 23, 26, and 37 years old. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found some of the software for age assurance to be highly effective, but it still fails significantly in differentiating between adults’ and minors’ ages. The Open Technology Institute at the think tank New America also found age verification tech to not be up to snuff, despite the claims of accuracy and effectiveness. In the NIST tests, Yoti was found to be the most accurate age-estimation software with an average error of 1 year in age. Most software made age estimation mistakes by 3.1 years on average. 

Commenting in The Conversation about the AATT findings, an information sciences professor, Lisa M. Given of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, explained, “We are going to see a messy situation emerging immediately where people will have what they call false positives, false negatives.” This is consistent with other concerns for privacy rights violations and data loss.

Is all of this worth $13 billion for companies that a vast majority of people have never heard of? I think not.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

I’ve long maintained the certitude that anti-pornography campaigners aligned with the far-right and conservative Christian movements are directly or indirectly transphobic and anti-LGBTQ. 

A body of evidence in my own reporting and experiences covering the rights of sex workers and the online pornography business has built out this schema of anti-LGBTQ and anti-pornography campaigners being tied at the hip in one form or another. One recent news item validates this.

As Mike Masnick summarized in a crucial Techdirt column a few days ago, the U.S. Department of Justice ordered the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to comply with GOP President Donald Trump’s Executive Order (EO) 14168 — his transphobic “gender ideology” directive blocking federal government agencies from even recognizing trans people.

NCMEC is one of the world’s leading authorities on fighting and mitigating sexual exploitation of minors on the internet through its CyberTipline program. Though imperfect, the program still serves a critical purpose for law enforcement, survivors, and their families. That purpose is to detect, track, and try to fight the proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other image-based sexual abuse material on the internet — especially offending material found on social platforms such as Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter).

Considering NCMEC’s mission here, a reasonable person could have suspected that the center would be immune from the politics of a staunchly ultraconservative White House. However, it appears that even in today’s world, that is too much to ask for. As several news outlets report, EO 14168 directs all federal agencies to remove any mention of trans people and any other gender-neutral messaging. The order also makes the disbursement of federal grants contingent upon whether the benefiting groups comply with EO 14168 and other anti-DEI Trump directives.

This is how the executive order impacts NCMEC. Founded by an act of U.S. Congress with the support of President Ronald Reagan, the foundation was incorporated as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization able to accept donations from the public. And NCMEC is supposedly independent. 

However, a large chunk of NCMEC’s annual budget is revenue generated from Department of Justice (DOJ) grants and interagency funding agreements from other federal funding sources. 

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), a program office in the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, awarded NCMEC about $41.38 million in fiscal year 2023, with $6 million from an interagency agreement between OJJDP and the U.S. Secret Service.

According to NCMEC’s Form 990 disclosure to the IRS, the center had $65,191,787 in revenues in that same fiscal year. Of that total, DOJ grants to NCMEC were over 70 percent of all generated revenues. Add the dimension that NCMEC has the function of serving as a global clearinghouse for CSAM and online child exploitation cases, Trump’s executive order is a punch in the gut that deserves a bit of scrutiny. NCMEC being ordered by OJJDP to remove mentions of trans and gender-diverse youth in reports, promotional material, and prevention documents is counterintuitive when it comes to protecting minors – especially when the Trump administration claims that it wants to protect kids from the perversions of the world. But under what standards?

Trump’s people base their standard on protecting children from so-called “gender ideology.” The mention of “gender ideology” in plans for an ultraconservative presidency can be traced back to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led “presidential transition project” that Trump claims he knew nothing about but then turned around and appointed key architects to high-level positions.

In a previous column for Techdirt, I discuss Project 2025’s central policy document, the nearly 1000-page Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise. Writing for the foreword, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts calls for the end of “transgenderism” and “gender ideology.”

He additionally calls for the prohibition of what he considers to be “pornography” and prison time for so-called “pornographers.” Roberts also links “gender ideology” and “pornography” as some sort of dark, interconnected left-wing indoctrination strategy that targets the country’s children.

Roberts wrote:

“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare.”

“Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

It’s worth noting that “gender ideology” is mentioned throughout the document. Other terms that are used to try and implicate our understanding of people’s most basic personal sexual identity found in the Mandate for Leadership include “transgender ideology” and “transgenderism.” Not only are Roberts’ words emblematic of some white Christian nationalist’s wet dream, but they reveal a more profound belief of people who now surround Trump. That belief is of “gender ideology,” and the otherwise First Amendment-protected right to produce porn are connected. There is absolutely no evidence that watching porn “turns” someone transgender or LGBTQ.

It’s foolish, conspiratorial rubbish. But it’s officially the policy of the federal government. I draw attention to the anti-pornography component because many of the same groups who supported Project 2025 also support efforts to restrict or outlaw legal and consensual pornography through “back door” age verification laws or to push content restrictions like bans on LGBTQ books in the public school and library systems. These are also the same groups that spread transphobic conspiracy theories and moral panics about trans people in athletics, the culture, and society.

It is also these groups that claim that platforms like Pornhub.com are supposedly hotbeds of criminal activity and exploitation. And, often, they point to NCMEC CyberTipline data as “truth” to these claims and suggest other equally as problematic right-wing organizations are much more credible and reliable than the premier child protection agency—case in point: the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). Though NCOSE is not a signatory to Project 2025, a body of growing evidence indicates direct links to organizations part of the Heritage-led effort and how some of the same organizations are regarded as anti-LGBTQ hate organizations by the civil rights groups Southern Poverty Law Center, Human Rights Campaign, and GLAAD. 

For example, on NCOSE’s board, Patrick A. Trueman serves as president emeritus. Trueman served as the president of NCOSE for years, especially before the group’s rebrand from Morality in Media in 2015. Morality in Media was a far-right Catholic anti-pornography pressure group. Trueman has also previously served in positions and as counsel for quite similar organizations, including the Family Research Council and the American Family Association. While NCOSE is essentially a byproduct of far-right anti-pornography campaigning, the origins of the group are still deeply connected to several hate groups that are a part of Project 2025 and have advocated against so-called “gender ideology” tropes under the guise of protecting minors from perverts.

In actuality, these groups have done very little to protect youth – especially NCOSE. If you draw your attention to NCMEC CyberTipline reporting data for the year 2023, the National Center for Sexual Exploitation only reported three potential cases of online child sexual exploitation – three out of a total of 35,944,826 reports. Despite framing Pornhub and similar platforms as the root issue of the problem, anti-porn groups often neglect to mention how these porn sites voluntarily report to CyberTipline. To wit, Pornhub’s parent company Aylo reported 2,597 reports across all of its platforms. Fenix International Limited, the parent company of OnlyFans, filed 347 reports.

Pornhub and OnlyFans additionally participate in NCMEC’s Take It Down program alongside the adult platforms Clips4Sale, RedGIFs, and popular social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, and Yubo. Take It Down was developed as a free, anonymous service for youth to use NCMEC’s resources to take down unwanted nude images found online.

It is also important to note that groups like the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, and the American Family Association have never reported potential CSAM to NCMEC’s tipline.

These groups and scores of others, not all linked to Project 2025 but still with similar agendas, use their platforms to advocate against equal rights for transgender people, especially youth. I point to examples of this in another column I did for Techdirt. I wrote about amicus briefs filed in the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in his defense of the controversial porn age verification law House Bill (HB) 1181. Adult industry stakeholders sued Paxton to block HB 1181, arguing that it violates adult platforms’ and users’ First Amendment rights. Oral arguments in the case were heard on Jan. 15, 2025. As customary with high-profile legal cases, amicus briefs are filed to support the petitioners and the respondents in the dispute.

Many of the groups supporting Paxton support the idea of restricting or banning pornography despite its First Amendment protections. These groups have also endorsed transphobic and anti-LGBTQ policy positions that President Trump is now implementing. One group that filed in support of Paxton is the “child’s rights” group called Them Before Us. Founded by the far-right journalist Katy Faust, this group is also on the cutting edge of transphobia and pseudoscientific fearmongering about IVF and surrogacy. Faust’s group says they “[protect] every child’s right to their mother and father,” and they do so by repeating bigoted tropes about transgender people.

Considering these additional details, it seems these organizations are getting what they want: carte blanche to discriminate against human beings. And it comes at the expense of helping fight child exploitation on the internet by staking critical funding on far-right ideological bullshit.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

Age verification laws saw an unfathomable renaissance in 2024. It’s quite frightening to see a political class of predominately far-right Christian nationalists implement the anti-porn vision of Project 2025 without President-elect Donald Trump yet entering the White House.

These laws coming out of state legislatures are scripted like how Russell Vought, a controversial architect of Project 2025 and one of Trump’s closest Christian nationalist allies, described in a viral undercover video revealing how age verification laws serve as a “back door” ban on porn. 

As of this writing, nearly 139 million U.S. residents live in states with age verification laws on the books that specifically target adult entertainment platforms like Pornhub.com or xHamster.com.

That is slightly over 41 percent of the country’s total population. They reside in 19 predominantly Republican-held states, which President-elect Trump won during the 2024 Presidential Election. Virginia going blue this past election is the one exception, despite having their age-gating law.

Several of these states will also have age verification laws in effect on Jan. 1, 2025. States with laws entering force include Florida (HB 3), Tennessee (SB 1792), and South Carolina (H. 3424). Georgia’s age verification law (SB 351) will enter force on July 1, 2025. 

The parent companies of platforms like Pornhub have geo-blocked or will geo-block these states.

The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on Jan. 15 in a case challenging the state of Texas and its age verification law, House Bill 1181. That lawsuit was brought by the Free Speech Coalition and a plaintiff class of the operators of the world’s largest adult websites.

The Free Speech Coalition additionally filed new federal lawsuits in Tennessee and Florida. 

In the lawsuit filed in Tennessee particularly, the Free Speech Coalition and its fellow plaintiffs – online sex education providers, pleasure product retailers, and fan platforms – not only highlight the clusterfuck of censoring protected speech but the fact that violators could face a felony.

How can Republican elected officials justify these laws when they say they support “freedom” and the First Amendment rights of their constituents?

The truth is that they can’t justify these laws. And most of them know that. 

Considering all of this, the reason far-right folks are successful in presenting anti-porn laws as so-called “public health” or “public safety” measures is that they excel at fearmongering and manipulating their base into believing in bigoted and outlandish falsehoods about sexuality.

What can be done? Resisting age verification laws and other content restrictions presented by the far-right as “protections” for minors or family values is paramount to the activism agenda in 2025. Lawsuits and lobbying can only go so far. Age verification laws are not only unpopular, but urging grassroots-level organizing that transcends the political spectrum is what we need to see.

A perfect example of this can be seen among the coalition of organizations urging the Supreme Court to kill Texas HB 1181 through amicus briefs and in the representation of the Free Speech Coalition and the porn companies. Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union took up the case along with the Free Speech Coalition’s private attorneys due to the civil liberties overlap.

The Cato Institute, Institute for Justice, and Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, and many other civil society groups in urging the court to rule against Texas and protect freedom of expression.

Here’s to 2025 and fighting Trump-emboldened far-right Christian nationalism.

Cheers, folks.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

Scores of organizations from across the anti-pornography movement have filed amicus briefs supporting the state of Texas and Attorney General Ken Paxton in a U.S. Supreme Court case dealing with his state’s draconian age verification law. In 2023, members of the Texas legislature adopted House Bill (HB) 1181, which explicitly singles out online adult platforms by requiring age-gating measures and health “warning labels.”

The Fifth Circuit erred in its ruling on HB 1181. Instead of applying strict scrutiny to review the law’s implications on protected speech, the court applied rational basis review, a lower standard of review. Since HB 1181 is a content restriction that censors speech the First Amendment otherwise protects, Supreme Court precedent says it should apply strict scrutiny. This error by the appeals court was so concerning that outgoing U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar filed an amicus brief supporting vacatur, asking the court to send this case back to the Fifth for the application of strict scrutiny.

However, this common sense approach is missing among those supporting Paxton’s defense of the law at the Supreme Court. A review of the amicus briefs on the docket supporting Paxton reveals a who’s who of censorial social conservatives and populists. Not surprisingly, the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) filed an amicus brief supporting Paxton. AVPA is a trade group representing companies, such as Yoti, that develop and market age verification software to clients, including online pornography companies.

Another amicus filing is led by 24 predominantly Republican state attorneys general who believe that legal pornography isn’t necessarily entitled to First Amendment protection. They argue that this type of expression pushes the so-called “ambit” of what falls under the First Amendment’s compass.

The attorneys general additionally argue:

“Texas’s law just requires the online equivalent and likewise has no constitutional defect…”

“Moving the strip club and adult bookstore online does not mean that commercial pornographers may escape regulation…The internet poses no barrier to States exercising their historic power to require age verification as a predicate to accessing adult content and activities.”

The attorneys general insinuate that pornography companies are attempting to skirt regulatory and legal commitments. Unfortunately, they urge the high court to simply overlook decades of its own precedent on First Amendment case law. Doing so would be irresponsible and plays into the hands of critics of the legal pornography industry who wish to see this entertainment sector censored entirely.

Meanwhile a set of Republicans in Congress, led by Sens. Mike Lee and Josh Hawley, call internet porn a “plague” in their filing. Most of the lawmakers attached to this brief include less-than-serious politicos like Lauren Boebert and Dan Crenshaw, who are often tied to Christian nationalist causes. Similar to the attorneys general, the MAGA members of Congress offer an outlandish explanation on current First Amendment case law.

They argue:

“Petitioners contend that a law banning child access to pornography must be evaluated under the same tier of scrutiny as a law banning the access of adults. This argument has no merit. Wherever the law draws a distinction between adults and children, adults will shoulder the modest burden of showing some proof of their age.”

This irony shouldn’t be lost upon you. Here, these lawmakers, elected by people who entrust them to protect their interests, outwardly believe that an adult lacks the right to privacy and anonymity for simply looking at age-restricted content. And, in no way, does such a sentiment supersede the rights of adults or minors. For example, Josh Hawley falls squarely in the camp that thinks LGBTQ young adult literature is “pornographic” and should be subject to similar content restrictions. Applying such a broad assumption undermines the level of safety and concern these lawmakers claim to have. It is also some of the lawmakers attached to this amicus who believe stupid concepts like how big tech makes minors gay or trans on purpose.

Other amicus filings by parties supporting Paxton are just as ill-informed. One group that filed in support of Paxton is the so-called “child’s rights” group known as Them Before Us. Founded by the conservative journalist Katy Faust, this group is on the cutting edge of transphobic campaigning and pseudoscientific fearmongering about IVF and surrogacy. Faust’s group says they “[protect] every child’s right to their mother and father,” and they do so by repeating bigoted tropes about trans people.

Also on the docket is an amicus filing led by the Council on Pornography Reform, which washed-up former child actor Ricky Schroder founded and leads. Schroder’s group, the Public Advocate of the United States and other ultraconservative legal funds further spew the weak legal argument that “freedom of expression” is anathema and that the First Amendment should only apply to “political speech.” I covered these nonsense peddlers for Techdirt before.

Fun fact: the Public Advocate of the United States is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group. This is also true for several other groups that filed amicus briefs supporting Paxton’s defense of rational review.

Organizations tied to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy platform for Donald Trump’s second term, also filed amicus briefs for Paxton.

As a reminder, the Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts, called for pornographers to be imprisoned and for the First Amendment rights of porn companies, LGBTQ+ activists, and teachers to be revoked via his foreword in Project 2025’s policy treatise, Mandate for Leadership.

Christian nationalist groups are in full force here.

Paxton’s defense of HB 1181 is being defended by people you’d expect to support anti-pornography laws, in general. These amicus briefs highlight the true intention behind the anti-porn movement: to remove anything remotely sexual, even if it’s legally not pornography, from the culture by any means necessary. Age verification might be argued as a child protection measure by the vast majority of these folks. But, as discussed here and by their own admission, that’s just lies.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

The die is cast. Donald Trump is heading back to the White House – a remarkable victory. But a lot of people who work in the adult entertainment industry are understandably scared. From the concerns for LGBTQ+ rights under the new Trump presidency to access to reproductive care at a state and national level, the next four years will be a significant challenge.

While all valid concerns that I share, it is the specter of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda that frightens me most. Previously, I’ve written across various outlets, like Techdirt, to address the “masculine policy” Trump and his new vice president, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, and his allies envision to “make America great again.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and the de facto head of Project 2025, a so-called “presidential transition project,” laid out the administration’s position on key culture war issues, such as access to online porn.

Roberts wrote in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025’s incendiary policy treatise nearly 1,000 pages long, that their camp believes “pornography” and “pornographers” should be imprisoned and stripped of First Amendment protection. Some folks have characterized Roberts’ words as simply rhetoric, but the past twelve months have verified a coordinated effort to significantly claw back the rights of all sex workers and adult industry firms.

This time around, Donald Trump has surrounded himself with outspoken Christian nationalists who want to demonize and then criminalize sexual expression that is otherwise protected by the First Amendment.

Russell Vought, one of the central architects of Project 2025, was caught on hidden camera a few months ago confirming that the efforts to ban porn will go through a so-called “back door” framework via a patchwork of state-level age verification laws and efforts in a newly GOP-controlled Senate. In addition to that, Vance has supported a porn ban. It was also under Donald Trump’s last term that the FOSTA-SESTA monstrosity that decimated legal sex work on the internet came to fruition. Imagine what will advance under Trump.

Expect to see a renewed effort to advance the Kids Online Safety Act or a beefier version of the bill. The current form of the bill, though supposedly reformed with the input of key LGBTQ+ groups, would make design code the law of the land in an affront to years of case law. As we’ve seen in California, age appropriate design mandates rarely hold up under strict scrutiny. But, relying on the history of FOSTA-SESTA, the Kids Online Safety Act in any form will be a legal flashpoint.

For example, when the Woodhull Freedom Foundation and other civil society organizations sued to render FOSTA unconstitutional, the appeals court in that case, though upholding it, affirmed that it’s overly broad and needs to be narrowly tailored to best address cases of online trafficking while respecting free speech rights. And it’s up to the courts to essentially hold a Trump presidency accountable for any sort of unilateral action taken against legally operating pornography platforms.

The conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court is, truly, the only check and balance on key freedom of speech issues moving forward when it comes to the next four years. And it begins in January. Oral arguments are scheduled in Free Speech Coalition et al v. Paxton for January 15, 2025. The American Civil Liberties Union took up the case due to expansive First Amendment implications associated with age verification laws like Texas House Bill (HB) 1181, which specifically targets online adult website operators with requirements to verify the age of users who navigate from local IP addresses. Existing case law suggests that a law like HB 1181 is unconstitutional and clashes with other rulings.

If the Free Speech Coalition is successful, this renders all other age verification laws that specifically target porn websites and require users to submit ID cards or other types of identity verification unconstitutional.

A win at SCOTUS for online speech could set the tone for a successful series of legal victories during Trump’s imperial presidency. That is all we can hope for, right?

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

PEN America published recent data on book bans and removals just in time for Banned Books Week.

Key findings indicate that most books challenged by censorship advocates this past year focus on LGBTQ+ subject matter. Additionally, Iowa and Florida are currently the two worst states for book bans amid Republican-backed content restriction laws.

The PEN America data indicates that more than 10,000 books were removed from the shelves of school libraries across the country during the 2023-2024 academic year. The tally of removed books climbed triple-fold from last year’s tally of 3,362 removals.

Also, the American Library Association’s latest data additionally tracked 695 ban attempts with 1,915 unique titles challenged. Challenges, per this dataset, showed a slight decrease but further substantiated the finding concluded by PEN that most books targeted dealt with LGBTQ+ materials or sexuality.

These are sobering tallies as we draw ever closer to the 2024 presidential election and the number of civil liberties concerns riding on the final result. While Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have their own concerning positions, like Harris’ inconsistencies on FOSTA-SESTA and Section 230, the real concern, unsurprisingly, is on the Republican ticket, Donald Trump and JD Vance.

Trump and Vance offer a very real opportunity for the Heritage Foundation’s fascist Project 2025 to become a reality.

And, some of the key proposals outlined by Project 2025’s policy document, Mandate for Leadership, deal with adopting laws that could strip the First Amendment rights of millions of individuals. I wrote for Techdirt awhile back about the project’s effort to outlaw “pornography.”

Kevin Roberts, current president of the Heritage Foundation and now-alleged dog killer, wrote: 

“Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today:…children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.”

“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection.”

“Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as an illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”

“Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders…“

Considering his words, the ‘Project 2025-worldview’ is a feigned belief held by far-right MAGA populists that young adult literature featuring a gender-diverse protagonist is tantamount to a feature film streaming on Brazzers.

And, it reminds us that those who are pushing book bans are also pushing laws that restrict consensual and legal online porn through inequitable age verification laws.

It’s an inconvenient, but unsurprising, truth. Consider Russell Vought of the Center for Renewing America as an example.

Vought is a Christian nationalist and former Trump administration official. His center previously published model legislation that would implement age verification requirements on virtually all websites with content the sponsor deems to be obscene or indecent to minors.

That model legislation was drafted in a way to justify age-gating and censorship of material that isn’t even legally considered “porn.” A case can even be made that this model legislation could be used to age-gate access to information about reproductive rights or LGBTQ+ mental health.

Vought was caught on hidden camera by undercover journalists not that long ago. He was pitching Project 2025 to the journalists posing as potential donors.

During the conversation, he said they intend to ban porn through a “back door.” The “back door” he refers to is the adoption of legislation that mandates age verification, like what was adopted in Texas. As I’ve covered extensively in my reporting and analysis, Texas lawmakers adopted House Bill (HB) 1181 in 2023.

Adult industry stakeholders, led by the Free Speech Coalition, sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to block the enforcement of HB 1181.

After a sordid litigation history in district court and the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton has developed into a landmark First Amendment case with broad implications.

Figures like Vought have openly advocated for book bans in addition to age verification measures that specifically target porn. And they do so without regard for the First Amendment.

An amicus brief filed in support of the Free Speech Coalition and the porn companies in the pending Supreme Court case makes this argument.

The amicus brief, filed on behalf of literary rights groups and book publishers, highlights the overlapping nature of book bans and age verification requirements.

The brief argues, “At a moment in which the political appetite for book banning is at an upswing, scaling back the searching review of such content-based restrictions poses an especially concrete threat to access to constitutionally protected materials.” Age verification is a “content-based” restriction.

Laws prohibiting access to books because of the content are virtually similar to laws prohibiting access to certain websites due to that content. Any argument to suggest otherwise is moot.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.