With the New Year, 17 states, in addition to Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee, have enforced over-18 age verification laws for viewing porn sites. These include:
- Alabama
- Arkansas
- Idaho
- Indiana
- Kansas
- Kentucky
- Mississippi
- Montana
- Nebraska
- North Carolina
- Oklahoma
- Texas
- Utah
- Virginia
Georgia and Louisiana have passed restrictions on adult-site content, but have not banned them outright. The former’s age-verification bill is set to go into effect in July.
Legislation for banning minors now requires online visitors to provide state-approved identification, such as a passport or driving license.
Critics claim that this is a violation of user privacy, with Pornhub, RedTube and YouPorn parent company Aylo pointing out that it vulnerabilizes personal data.
Aylo, instead of complying, has withdrawn its websites from these states .
“Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults,” a spokesperson said.
Indeed, it’s hard to argue that this move wouldn’t open the door to online activity monitoring.
This has simply seen VPN use surge.
Searches for “Texas VPN” increased by 1,750%, Slasher found.
Donald Trump’s 2024 Presidential Transition Project, or Project 2025, proposes criminalization of pornography:
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 any 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. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
The conservative think tank states that pornography has no First Amendment protections relating to free speech, and refers to it as “addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime”.
