Age Verification Laws Are Terrible

Free Speech

from the thanks-captain-obvious dept

Free Speech Coalition, a trade group representing the adult entertainment industry, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah to overturn Senate Bill (SB) 287 – the new law that requires age verification for all adult websites. As I wrote about in my last entry for this site, SB 287 prompted the leadership of Pornhub and its network of porn websites to block the whole state of Utah from accessing it in order to avoid potential civil penalties outlined by the new law.

The lawsuit challenges the age verification law on the ground that it is unconstitutional and is a direct violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Plaintiffs named in the suit include the coalition, a fan platform called JustforFans, sex education platform O.school’s founder Andrea Barrica, a Utah-based erotica author named D.S. Dawson, Kinkly journalist Ryn Pfeuffer, and a local lawyer going by the pseudonym John Doe. The coalition’s membership includes the adult tube site Pornhub and its ownership, including other companies that own various adult websites.

The defendants in the lawsuit include Utah’s attorney general Sean D. Reyes and public safety commissioner Jess L. Anderson, an appointee of Gov. Spencer Cox – the socially conservative LDS governor who signed the controversial law that Sen. Todd Weiler and Rep. Susan Pulsipher introduced earlier in the legislative session. Alison Boden, the Free Speech Coalition’s executive director, said Utah’s “law restricts adults’ access to legal speech and violates decades of Supreme Court precedent.” Discussion of the lawsuit in Utah dedicates the purposes of this column. As it is argued by Boden and the coalition in the lawsuit, the rash of age verification laws across the United States and Western Europe has very little basis in the applicable history of success. These proposals and laws, collectively, constitute textbook cases of censorship on the internet. Whether one such law only covers social media platforms for minors under the age of 16 or goes as far as the Utah statute, mandatory age verification will be a defining debate in the online culture wars.

Age verification mandates serve three functions: surveillance, intimidation, and social control. It is point-blank unacceptable to commit people to verifying their ages or identities in the name of safeguarding the digital well-being of young people. This is because this would force web users of all backgrounds and ages to further risk their personal information with sites that have very little business retaining that information for only the simple purposes of complying with local and state laws. The concept of age verification on content that is “pornographic” is also a trying issue to address. At a time when most mainstream right-wing lawmakers in the United States go as far as to liken queer young adult literature to hardcore pornography for adults, it’s naïve to say that age verification mandates aren’t tools of censorship. Utah, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Virginia are all at the heart of conservative America’s base that tries to justify anti-LGBTQ censorship as a means to “protect children” from so-called ‘wokeism’ and ‘gender ideology.’ Being that an age verification measure can be structured in a manner that is so punitive and restrictive, providers of non-pornographic sexual wellness and health information could fall victim to private tort action and intervention by the state for disseminating information that includes crucial sexual health and wellness material. LGBTQ advocates have also pointed out that an age restriction on social media websites, like in Utah, could prohibit the ability of young people looking for information and resources that could be life-changing. While this is a fear, it isn’t so far-fetched to consider.

Let’s consider laws that require pornography filters to be installed on mobile devices again. I mention in another Techdirt column that content filters aren’t consistent and could lead to the “under-” and “over-blocking” of content that is legitimately obscene to minors or it is actually dealing with health education, LGBTQ subject matter, or in dealing with youth relationships.

Age verification laws negatively impact young people and adults equally. When this type of data is shared, there is very little that users have control over when their data is handled. Some of the laws do have guidelines for the retention of data but the risk of a catastrophic security incident still hangs over the entire operation. Additionally, users are forced to favor the trust of companies that they have never heard of and are at the whim of as approved vendors that were ultimately preselected to manage the entire data business related to verification. That is kind of what has happened in Louisiana when they adopted their porn age verification law. In order to access porn in the state, residents and visitors must submit their identification cards to LA Wallet – a little known outfit that develops a mobile digital driver license application for the state government.

Pornhub adopted the LA Wallet age verification system as a measure to verify people who are navigating to their sites from Louisiana-based IP addresses. The company that runs LA Wallet, called Envoc, has very little transparency in its age software development initiatives. There are concerns that mandatory age verification could be used as a form of censorship if it is implemented in a way that overly restricts access to content that is legal for adults to view. If age verification laws and requirements are too strict or difficult to navigate, they effectively block access to content that is protected under free speech laws. The other concern is that age verification requirements could be used as a way for governments or other entities to gather information about individuals’ online activities, potentially leading to privacy rights violations or other forms of surveillance.

Disclosure: The author is a member of the Free Speech Coalition. He wrote this column without compensation from the coalition, its officers, or its member firms. 

Michael McGrady is a journalist and commentator focusing on the tech side of the online porn business, among other things.

Filed Under: age verification, utah
Companies: free speech coalition