People in Louisiana who visited Pornhub in recent months were faced with a surprising new question. Before they could stream sexually explicit videos, they had to prove they were at least 18.
That’s because lawmakers in Louisiana passed legislation last year requiring publishers of online material that could be “harmful to minors” to verify that their users were of legal age.
Louisiana is spearheading a sweeping national effort to protect young people from potentially harmful content by requiring certain online services to ban or restrict minors on their platforms. As a result, people in many other states will soon find that they too will need to use credentials such as digitized driver’s licenses to access a host of services, including popular social media apps.
The proposed restrictions, introduced by at least two dozen states over the past year, can’t just change the online experiences of children and adolescents. They could also remake the internet for millions of adults, heralding a tectonic cultural shift towards a stricter, age-dependent online world.
The surge in new bills may come as a relief to parents who fear their kids are bombarded by sexualized images or targeted by strangers online. But civil liberties groups say certain bills could make it difficult for Americans, including minors, to view online information they have a constitutional right to, in violation of free speech principles.
Utah and Arkansas recently passed laws requiring social apps like TikTok and Instagram to verify the age of their users and obtain parental consent before granting accounts to minors. While many sites are already asking people to sign up for accounts for their date of birth — a self-reporting system that kids can often undermine by entering a fake birth year — the new state rules could prompt many platforms to introduce stricter age-verification systems where government involved IDs.
At the end of April, four US senators introduced the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act. The bill would require social networks to verify users’ ages, exclude children under 13, and obtain parental consent for users ages 13 to 17.
Laurie Schlegel, the Republican state representative who spearheaded Louisiana law, said she was inspired to act last year after hearing a podcast in which singer-songwriter Billie Eilish told Howard Stern that watching online porn as a child “had destroyed my brain.”
Ms Schlegel said she believed the digital world needed the same kind of adult zones as in the physical world, where consumers are often asked to show government ID before they can buy alcohol. For example, she noted that Louisiana already required online gambling and alcohol delivery services to verify the age of customers through credentials such as driver’s licenses.
“We have agreed as a society not to let a 15-year-old go to a bar or strip club,” Ms Schlegel said. “The same protections should be online so you know a 10-year-old isn’t watching hardcore pornography.”
Ms Schlegel added that she had created her age verification bill with potential freedom of speech challenges in mind. To prevent health platforms from being gobbled up, she said, the Louisiana measure covers sexually explicit sites whose content meets a lengthy legal test for “material harmful to minors.”
But civil liberties experts said some of the proposed restrictions on harmful material and social media sites could create age verification barriers for Americans seeking free access to information online. If the rules weren’t overturned, these experts argue, they could revolutionize the internet — either turning the online world into a patchwork of walled fiefdoms or causing popular platforms to shrink their offerings to avoid breaking the rules. are activated.
“It could hinder free speech not only for minors,” but also cut off access to online information for adults, said Nadine Strossen, a former national president of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Civil liberties groups said they were considering a lawsuit to try to stop certain new laws.
Attempts to impose age restrictions on the Internet have run into constitutional challenges in the past. In 1997, the Supreme Court struck down federal rules that would have made it illegal to knowingly send or display “obscene or indecent” material to people under the age of 18 because the rules curtailed free speech.
At that time, age verification software was not widely available online. That is no longer the case.
Louisiana emerged as a national leader in this area, in part because it had ready-to-go technology: a state-approved mobile app, dubbed “LA Wallet,” that allows residents to digitally scan their Louisiana driver’s licenses.
LA Wallet works by verifying a user’s ID with the State Department of Motor Vehicles. That allows Louisianans to use the app as they would a physical permit to, say, prove their age in a bar.
After the online pornography age verification law went into effect in January, the number of new users on LA Wallet more than tripled to about 5,200 a day, according to Envoc, the Louisiana software company behind the app. Now when Louisiana users visit a site like Pornhub, the site asks them to enter a unique code to verify their age through LA Wallet. The app then checks the user’s age and notifies the porn site if the person is an adult.
The system is designed to protect privacy, said Calvin Fabre, Envoc’s president. LA Wallet does not send personal information about its users to porn sites, he said, nor does it store information about the sites for which its users request age verification.
Since Louisiana introduced the measure last year, at least a dozen other states have introduced similar age verification bills for viewing online porn. Among them is Utah, which also has a digital driver’s license program. Many other states are testing mobile licenses.
Still, there are loopholes. For example, to get around age checks, people in Louisiana can use location masking software, making it appear as if they are in another state.
But many sexually explicit sites have yet to set up age verification systems for users in Louisiana, says Solomon Friedman, a partner at Ethical Capital Partners, a private equity firm that recently acquired MindGeek, the company behind adult sites like Pornhub.
“Pornhub is fully compliant with the law,” said Mr. Friedman, “despite the fact that we know it doesn’t really protect kids because a lot of other sites don’t adhere to it.”
To encourage greater compliance, Ms. Schlegel recently introduced a bill that would allow the state to impose specific monetary penalties on porn sites that failed to verify users’ ages.
Some social media platforms said they were stepping up their efforts to identify and remove underage users.
Meta said it had started using artificial intelligence tools to help identify young people who misrepresent their age on Instagram and Facebook Dating. TikTok, which uses various methods to identify underage users, said it deleted more than 75 million accounts last year that appeared to belong to children under 13.
Still, Ms. Schlegel in Louisiana is pushing for broader safeguards.
Her state’s civil code, she noted, does not allow companies to sign contracts with minors without parental consent. In March, she introduced a bill to clarify that online services fall under contracting rules. The Louisiana House unanimously passed the bill in late April and it will now go to the Senate. Such a measure could require sites like Reddit and Roblox to obtain parental consent for all Louisiana users under the age of 18.
Ms Schlegel said her legislation was intended to send a message to powerful online platforms: “You have to take more responsibility when it comes to our children.”
Kashmir hill reporting contributed.
