UPDATE: Jan. 16, 2025, 11:25 a.m. EST This article was originally published in March 2023. It has been updated in January 2025 in light of Trump’s second presidential term and the recent Supreme Court hearing, and includes original interviews from 2023 as well as updated law information.
Free speech online has been attacked in recent years, from the proposed TikTok ban to the death of net neutrality. Given President-elect Donald Trump’s second term on the horizon and the proposals of Project 2025 (a conservative wishlist for said term) a real possibility, U.S. lawmakers will likely continue to target access to the free and open internet. One such example is the growing trend of age-verification bills, which mandate individuals to provide proof of age in order to access adult content, or in some cases, even to browse social media platforms. Experts warn that these bills pose serious threats to digital privacy and free speech.
What are age-verification bills?
In 2022, Louisiana passed Act 440, which requires visitors to sites with over 33.33 percent of adult content to use a commercial age-verification system (AVS) to prove they’re over 18, such as with a government-issued ID. The law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2023.
Following this, a wave of similar bills emerged across the country. As of publication in early 2025, age-verification laws have been enacted in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. (Tennessee’s law is blocked as of this publication.) Georgia’s version, SB 351, will take effect July 1, 2025. The Free Speech Coalition, a porn industry lobby group, has been tracking these bills through a comprehensive database.
On Jan. 15, the Supreme Court heard Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a case about Texas’s age-verification law. The decision, which will likely come this summer, will set the precedent for these laws moving forward.
In the UK, similar legislation that called for age verification on porn sites, known as the “porn block,” failed in 2019. In January, UK communications watchdog Ofcom called for age verification for explicit content, such as with facial scans or photo ID.
Project 2025 and age-verification bills
Project 2025 calls for an outright porn ban and for porn creators to be imprisoned. One of the authors of Project 2025, Russell Vought (who Trump asked to return as the head of the Office of Management and Budget), was caught on a secret recording stating that age-verification bills are a “back door” way to do just that.
“We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use,” Vought told two men undercover as potential donors for his conservative think-tank Center for Renewing America, as reported by The Intercept, “as opposed to the person who visits the website getting to just certify” their age.
“We’ve got a number of states that are passing this,” Vought also said, “and you know what happens is the porn company then says, ‘We’re not going to do business in your state.’ Which of course is entirely what we were after, right?”
What Vought is referring to is companies like Pornhub blocking states with age-verification laws. As of this publication, Pornhub is blocked in 17 U.S. states.
The downsides to “porn passport” laws
While these bills may initially seem sound — no one wants children to access adult content — they are steeped in political implications, as stated above. Even beyond that, the experts say that they won’t work for their (so-called) intended purpose and will cause a host of problems.
In terms of the former, these statutes are difficult to enforce and easy to get around. For one, there are going to be websites based in other countries that won’t comply with these regulations, said Mike Stabile, director of public affairs at the Free Speech Coalition. “My greatest fear when I looked at [these bills] was that this is…going to push kids to more and more dangerous sites,” he said.
Mashable After Dark
For another, software like VPNs (virtual privacy networks) are built to make it seem like the user is somewhere they’re not. Days after the Louisiana law went into effect, a Redditor asked if they can use a VPN to get around it. “Yep,” the top comment read. “So easy a five year old can do it.”
Beyond enforceability, experts say they cause a tremendous privacy risk.
“The immediate concerns are that there is no foolproof age-verification system that is not intrusive, comprehensive, effective, and can be introduced quickly,” said Jason Kelley, associate director of digital strategy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on defending digital rights. Since there aren’t systems in place to implement these regulations, tech companies will scramble to respond to these laws. They may do the right thing or the wrong thing unintentionally, like setting up an AVS that’s insecure because they don’t know how AVS works, or they may do the wrong thing intentionally to gather people’s data.Â
“You create this whole ecosystem, where people’s individual behaviors — the websites that they visit — can be tracked and connected to their identity,” Kelley continued. “We’re essentially creating this immediate requirement for people to share their private information alongside their pornography preference with companies that don’t necessarily have a system in place to protect that data.”
A longer-term concern is that there will be a domino effect, which is already happening with the copycat bills. If they were all to pass, Kelley said we’d have an extremely complicated system where different states accept different forms of verification. This could lead to these websites requiring verification from everyone regardless of state to ensure they comply.Â
“The end result is that we won’t have access that’s anonymous to much of the web,” Kelley said of these flurry of age-verification bills, “which is important for free speech” and other things, like privacy protection. If all these bills went into effect, many people wouldn’t be able to access the internet at all without an ID. As it is, there’s a “digital divide” where millions of Americans don’t have an adequate internet connection at home; verification would only exacerbate this issue of access. While those who do have IDs could get through these barriers, they would need to give up anonymity to do so.
If all these bills went into effect, many people wouldn’t be able to access the internet at all without an ID, and those who could access would need to provide documentation.
That’s not the only potential issue. As former senior security analyst Max Eddy at PCMag (which is owned by Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company) warned, identity theft could increase in the wake of these laws. It’s already happening: “We’ve already heard reports of phishing going on in Louisiana, where people are impersonating adult sites, and getting people to upload their ID and then selling those IDs…for Bitcoin,” Stabile said. “We expect that…identity theft is going to skyrocket.”Â
Users aren’t the only people impacted by these laws; adult creators are, too.Â
Online sex workers are already pushed offline due to bills FOSTA-SESTA, an amendment to Section 230 meant to stop sex trafficking, but has resulted in the removal (or shadowbanning) of sex workers and remotely sexy content from major social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. (Only a single trafficker has been prosecuted under FOSTA-SESTA in its first five years.) Should age-verification bills progress, the problem will inevitably worsen.
“It’s just going to censor us,” said adult performer and advocate Alana Evans. “How is it going to affect a platform like Twitter?” Currently, Twitter does allow adult content, and Evans sees it as the only platform that has a safe space for performers — but that status hangs in the balance. “If Twitter decides that we can’t advertise my cam links anymore” or similar links, she said, “it would kill my business. It would kill my income.”
How to protect children from adult content
“I worked my butt off to keep my kids away from that material,” said Evans, who’s a parent. “The most important thing is actually being aware of what your kids are doing in the first place.” This includes checking their devices and having open conversations about sex and porn. She’s had talks with her son, who’s now an adult, where she explained that porn isn’t real but rather a “theatrical version” of sex.Â
“I don’t think parents should be afraid of having that conversation,” Evans said. One reason teens look at porn is simply because they’re curious. “If you’re having a conversation with them,” she continued, “the curiosity is taken away.”
Like Evans, Stabile also calls on parents to be involved with their kids’ internet browsing and to have those conversations. There’s lots of content beyond porn that’s not appropriate for kids — portrayals of violence, for example — and it may be impossible to protect kids from seeing any of it, but you can talk to them about it.Â
Beyond conversations, Stabile recommends device-level filters that block all websites that are registered RTA, or “Restricted to Adults.” “It signals to filters, whether it’s your Apple filter or Net Nanny or something like that, that this site should be blocked,” he explained. It doesn’t matter if a child tries a VPN or some other workaround — the site will be blocked on that device.Â
The idea behind these bills “is not wrong,” said Evans — no one, especially those in the adult industry, wants children watching their content. These bills, however, create risks and can cascade into an online privacy and censorship nightmare that hurts sex workers and other internet users.Â
“If even a few of them [age-verification bills] pass in different contexts, it will be dangerous for everyone in the United States who goes online,” Kelley warned, “because we will not be able to access things privately.”
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