The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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Over the years, I’ve had many conversations with friends and peers who, unlike me, do not work in the adult entertainment industry, in which those friends and peers have expressed their confusion over why the adult industry opposes things like age verification mandates for porn websites.
Who could be against preventing kids from accessing online porn, right? Isn’t it just sensible and reasonable to impose the same limitations we have in the brick-and-mortar world on the internet, when it comes to accessing pornography?
Frankly, if verifying a person’s age online were as simple and straightforward as checking a patron’s ID as they walk into an adult shop, I doubt many (if any) folks in the adult industry would be against it. The problem is, checking someone’s ID on the internet isn’t remotely the same as doing so in person – and the circumstances requiring a merchant or service provider to check the ID isn’t nearly as straightforward as it is in the physical world, either.
As state level age verification mandates continue to proliferate across the U.S. and the globe, it’s fair to say most legislators are firmly in favor of these measures. And while plenty of people are noting some of the downsides of age verification statutes, including emerging evidence that such regulation tends to drive users to darker, less safe corners of the web, there seems to be no slowing the momentum of the drive to impose age verification in a global fashion.
As governments continue to adopt these rules, it falls to those of us who must live under them to at least try to keep those governments honest, to assure that if they must pass these laws and establish these regulations, they at least do so under a set of clear, easily understood and narrow definitions.
Spoiler alert: Staying within clear, easy to understand definitions typically isn’t a strong suit of governments or legislators.
In critiquing social media age restrictions, which are supported by arguments that closely track the ones used to argue in favor of age verification mandates for adult sites, the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that in the UK, the choices made about which platforms and sites are subject to the rules is a “process is devoid of checks or accountability mechanisms as ministers will not be required to demonstrate specific harms to young people, which essentially unravels years-long efforts by Ofcom to assess online services according to their risks.”
“And given the moment the UK is currently in, such as refusing to protect trans and LGBTQ+ communities and flaming hostile and racist discourses, it is not unlikely that we’ll see ministers start restricting content that they ideologically or morally feel opposed to, rather than because the content is harmful based, as established by evidence and assessed pursuant to established human rights principles,” adds Paige Collings for EFF.
Collings adds that we already know from actions taken in other jurisdictions, including the U.S., “that legislation seeking to protect young people typically sweeps up a slew of broadly defined topics.”
“Some block access to websites that contain some ‘sexual material harmful to minors,’ which has historically meant explicit sexual content,” Collings notes. “But some states are now defining the term more broadly so that ‘sexual material harmful to minors’ could encompass anything like sex education; others simply list a variety of vaguely defined harms. In either instance, this bill would enable ministers to target LGBTQ+ content online by pushing this behind an under-18s age gate, and this risk is especially clear given what we already know about platform content policies.”
In other words, these regulations are going to be applied in ways the sponsors of age verification legislation never copped to when crafting or debating the laws. In some cases, the people who wrote the laws may not even have foreseen the problem created by their loose approach to statutory construction.
At this point, we probably can’t stop the forward march of the age verification mandate trend. More of these laws will be written, more will be passed and – given the Supreme Court’s ruling in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, more will survive court scrutiny.
What we can do, as citizens of the jurisdictions covered by these age verification mandates, is make our voices heard on the more problematic aspects of these laws. We can contact our legislators, lobby for changes to the laws, lobby for better definitions and support candidates who show a willingness to listen. After all, a law surviving court scrutiny doesn’t mean we have to like it – or that we must stop telling our elected officials we don’t like it.
The bottom line is, porn continues to be popular, whether the people who would like to ban it (or effectively regulate it into a dark corner) like it or not. If people who enjoy adult entertainment are willing to speak up, we may not be able to strike a decisive blow in the War on Porn, but we can at least mitigate the collateral damage.
