The War on Porn

When your nickname is “Hang ’em High Henry,” it’s a safe bet that you’re not a figure famous for demonstrating excessive compassion or forgiveness.

And when the best you can muster after finding out that you’ve prosecuted and convicted the wrong man for a murder is to say “I certainly wish him the best, and regret what happened. However, I offer no apologies,” chances are you’re an even bigger prick than your nickname implies.

Of course, what brings former prosecutor and current U.S. District Court Judge Henry E. Hudson to the pages of this website isn’t his general reputation as a “hard-on-crime” figure in the criminal justice system, but specifically his anti-porn activism, which reaches back to his early days as the Commonwealth Attorney of Arlington County, Virginia.

Back then, Hudson was leading the charge against adult bookstores and any other sort of establishment that might sell sexually explicit materials. His crusade not only resonated with his fellow social conservatives there in Arlington County, but it also earned him a seat at the table of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, better known as the “Meese Commission.” In fact, Hudson didn’t just earn any seat on the Commission; he was placed in the captain’s chair, tapped to lead the Commission’s work.

Ultimately, even thought the Commission claimed pornography has a causal connection to sex crimes (something disputed by most mainstream social scientists and academics, both then and now) and made dozens of recommendations on ways to staunch the distribution of porn and the growth of the adult entertainment industry, Hudson felt their conclusions were too timid.

Among other things, Hudson griped that the report should have been “couched in more forceful language” and that its “recommendations for enhanced law enforcement, particularly with respect to violent and degrading materials,” also should have been more pronounced.

While Hudson certainly agreed with the Commissions’ conclusions with respect to visual pornography, he dissented from the panel’s recommendation that obscenity prosecutions should not be brought in connection with written works that included sexually explicit descriptions or descriptions of sexual conduct.

It’s worth noting that around 16 years before the Meese Commission concluded that porn was driving a wave of sex crimes, a different Commission empaneled by a different Commander in Chief, Lyndon B. Johnson, came to a very difficult conclusion. The President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which published its findings in 1970, recommended the repeal of legislation that prohibited the sale of sexually explicit material to adults.

If you follow the rhetoric surrounding the current wave of age verification mandates and other efforts to curb the distribution of porn, the reasoning offered by the Meese Commission as to how it came to a conclusion directly opposite its predecessor will sound hauntingly familiar: There had been “enormous technological changes” in the years between the two Commissions doing their respective work.

“These technological developments have themselves caused such significant changes in the practices relating to the distribution of pornography that the analysis of 16 years ago is starkly obsolete,” the Meese Commission wrote.

During oral argument in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a case which has fundamentally altered the framework of constitutional analysis for First Amendment claims involving statutes like those at play in state-level age verification mandates, Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted “it’s been 20 years since Ashcroft,” referencing the case Free Speech Coalition v. Ashcroft, then proceeded to detail how things have changed.

“The iPhone was introduced in 2007, and Ashcroft was decided in 2004,” Barrett said. “I mean, kids can get online porn through gaming systems, tablets, phones, computers. It’s – let me just say that content filtering for all those different devices, I can say from personal experience, is difficult to keep up with. So… I think that the explosion of addiction in – to online porn has shown that content filtering isn’t working.”

I’m sure Hang ‘em High Henry would agree! For that matter, Hudson would probably go one further and assert that even though it’s hard to argue books represent some form of emerging technology, now that we can read them on screens instead of off paper pages, this emphasizes the urgency of indicting some bookstore for its flagrant distribution of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

And if they prosecuted and convicted the wrong bookseller? Well, Henry would regret it, sure – but he’d certainly offer no apologies.

As you might have read recently, Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s regulatory agency covering the broadcasting, telecommunications and internet sectors, has opened an investigation into whether TikTok is complying with the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA).

While TikTok is nobody’s idea of a “porn site,” sexually explicit content does get uploaded to TikTok, despite doing so being against both the platform’s terms and conditions and its community guidelines. (Specifically, the TikTok’s community guidelines prohibit “some types of body exposure or sexual behavior, including nudity, sexual activity, sexual services, or any sexually suggestive behavior or significant exposure involving young people.”)

Ofcom, of course, doesn’t particularly care what the TikTok terms say, or what the company’s intent might be in terms of keeping porn off the platform and/or protecting minors from harmful content. For Ofcom, the mere fact a minor canaccess what the agency deems to be “inappropriate” or “harmful” suggests a platform isn’t fully compliant with the OSA.

The big issue here appears to be that while TikTok is doing something to assess the age of users, its methods don’t satisfy the standard as determined by Ofcom.

“Our message to social media companies is clear: those which use age inference models to comply with their child protection duties should switch to other methods listed in our guidance as highly effective without delay,” Ofcom said in an announcement assessing the efficacy of the OSA in the initial months since it became enforceable.

The UK is also mulling the possibility of introducing a social media ban for users under the age of 16. If enacted, clearly this ban will mean ‘mainstream’ platforms like TikTok will need to employ more stringent age verification methods, as Ofcom has made clear that “age inference” models simply won’t cut it.

I suspect what we’re seeing in the UK right now will spread around the globe in the months and years to come, creating a version of the internet quite unlike the one we’ve been using for the last 30+ years. As I see it, where this is headed is universal age verification requirements for all platforms that permit “user generated content” to be uploaded or otherwise published in their ecosystems.

As has been the case with the internet since it first crawled out of the cyber-primordial ooze of the ARPANET, the difficulty in regulating online content boils down to the fact that just about anyone can upload just about anything to any site or platform that allows them to do so.

In the earliest days of my online explorations, message boards and Usenet groups were flooded with dodgy content, from pilfered intellectual property to hate speech and all points in between. There was virtually no regulation (or at least none that clearly applied to this new digital environment) at the time, so for end users it was “surfer beware” out there, effectively.

These days, we’re flooded with regulations, from state and local governments trying to tame the internet as accessed by their citizens to national governments seemingly trying to throw an age-gated blanket over the entire world wide web.

For the people who support these measures, I suppose no amount of inconvenience to adults is unjustified in their quest to protect children online. And while I can understand that perspective, the question is, how far will regulators go to make marginal gains toward their goal?

In the statement published last week, Ofcom noted something that jumped out at me: “Among the minority of online children who attempt to access pornography (8%), the presence of age checks acts as an effective deterrent.”

Previously, Ofcom cited a study which reported that “Twitter was the online platform where young people were most likely to have seen pornography.”

Put those two statements together and you can see where this is heading. If porn sites aren’t where most kids are being exposed to porn, then agencies like Ofcom are going to turn more of their attention to non-adult platforms, like TikTok, X, Snapchat and others of their ilk.

The bottom line, as I read it, is this: If you operate a platform that allows users to upload content, you will eventually be roped in by age verification regulations, whether it’s the OSA being enforced by Ofcom, or one of the other (eventually countless) regulations and agencies cropping up around the world.

There’s one small problem, though. While the web may seem more ‘tamed’ now than it did in the 1990s, the modern internet still has something important in common with its ancestral forms: All it takes to launch a new website or platform is the will to do it and at least one internet-connected device. What gets shut down on Monday morning can be back up later the same morning, albeit at a different IP address.

As such, the government-led game of Whack-A-Mole by law and regulation will continue to aim at moving targets, even as new targets appear in the wake of those they’ve already shot down.

Good luck with your enforcement regime, Ofcom. And good luck to all those platforms who try in good faith to comply with their rules. Meanwhile, cyber criminals will simply continue to dodge the mallet and pop up somewhere else.

LONDON—Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s digital regulator, announced Wednesday that it is investigating TikTok as it released its first report on age-verification use since the country’s Online Safety Act took effect last summer.

Over the past year, major digital platforms operating in the U.K. have rolled out age checks at what Ofcom described as an “unprecedented scale.” The regulator said more than 69 million checks have been completed across 32 platforms.

Ofcom said the measures are an important step as the country considers a ban on social media use for people aged 16 and under. Among adult-entertainment platforms and pornography websites, the 10 most popular sites in the U.K. and most of the top 100 porn sites have introduced age checks. Ofcom said the share of minors asked to verify their age before accessing a site rose from 25 percent in July 2025 to 43 percent in January 2026.

Ofcom noted, “Among the minority of online children who attempt to access pornography (8%), the presence of age checks acts as an effective deterrent. Half of these children only reached sites with age checks in place. Nearly nine in ten of these children’s visits (87%) to porn sites were for under 30 seconds, and 65% were for less than 10 seconds.”

Dame Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive, praised the agency’s work.

“Age checks are a cornerstone of the U.K.’s online safety laws,” she said. “When implemented properly, our evidence shows that age checks are helping to create a safer life online for children in the U.K.

“But the job is not done, and tech companies need to go further. Too many services have no or inadequate age checks in place, which is not good enough,” Dawes added.

Dawes said Ofcom has opened an investigation into TikTok. The video-sharing platform is also used by adult-industry creators and companies to promote scenes and productions. The new enforcement effort also includes search engines such as Google and Bing.

She explained, “We’ve today launched an investigation into whether TikTok’s age checks are effective in preventing children from seeing harmful content on its platform. And search engines must urgently work with us to solve the problem of children finding porn sites without age checks too easily via their results pages.

“As the U.K. prepares for further new social media restrictions at 16, the age check landscape is already shifting towards a stronger, whole-of-system approach, which is important to avoid any single point of failure,” Dawes concluded.

“We want to see continued innovation from the wider tech industry to strengthen protections for children—including from operating systems and at an app store and device-level.”

A TikTok spokesperson said the company “strictly enforces age-appropriate experiences through expert-informed platform rules and advanced age inference technologies, in line with major industry peers.” The spokesperson added that TikTok is “confident” it complies with the requirements.

Any time someone says they favor “family values,” I wince a little – not because I am against families, of course, but because almost invariably, that person is talking about a specific kind of family, with a specific sort of ‘values.’

Generally, when people talk about family values, they mean a family with two heterosexual parents, at least a couple children and an inclination towards Bible-reading. (For the record, the family I grew up in was two for three on that family values matrix, as the Bible never made the family reading list, alas.)

Take anti-porn crusader and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, for example. Dobson wasn’t one to mince words when it came to what constituted a ‘real’ family. When then-President Jimmy Carter set up a Conference on Families that included a “diversity of families” Dobson lost his shit. Only the “traditional” family unit – with a male head of household who brings home the bacon and a female caregiver who then fries the bacon and dutifully feeds it to her husband and spawn – ought to be endorsed, or even recognized, by the government, as Dobson saw it.

Dobson’s presence on my list of people and organizations who deserve ‘credit’ for starting the modern War on Porn isn’t because he thought just about anything other than a conservative Christian value set to be anathema, however. He’s here because included in his ceaseless lobbying and activism in favor of a variety of socially conservative policy positions was his drive to convince people pornography was among the roots of all evil.

To establish just how Very Bad porn is, Dobson went straight to the most credible, respected expert he could find: Convicted serial killer Ted Bundy.

Now, some might say the statements of a guy like Ted Bundy shouldn’t be given a whole lot of weight, in part because at different times, he made contradicting claims when asked the same sort of questions. But all Dobson cared about was that Bundy was willing to go on record saying that violent pornography had played a big role in shaping and driving his fantasies. Acting out those fantasies is what made him a serial killer, ergo – in the world of Dobson logic, at least – watching porn turns people into rapists and killers!

As noted by one of his many critics, Dobson’s interview with Bundy was “widely discredited as little more than a Dobson being willingly and eagerly duped by Bundy’s pathological manipulation. But Bundy’s fabricated narrative fit perfectly with Dobson’s view that it was the unchecked liberal, un-Christian, feminist, sex-crazed, anything-goes social context that led to the breakdown of society and created serial killers.”

One doesn’t have to put much thought into the “porn makes men into serial killers” argument to know it’s utter hogwash, of course. While it’s not true that researchers have been unable to find any men who haven’t watched porn to serve as control group subjects, it is doubtlessly true that a lot of men (and women) watch porn. It’s also true, I think it safe to say, comparatively few men become murderers or rapists.

No question, our society has far too many of both murderers and rapists, but if it was true that prolonged exposure to porn makes people into killers and rapists, that sort of clear causal connection would mean we had a great many more rapists and killers in our midst, surely. Not only is Dobson’s claim one that can’t stand up to rigorous scrutiny, but it also can’t even stand up to momentary rumination.

I’m sure Dobson wasn’t troubled by the criticism of his interview with Bundy, or even particularly concerned with whether Bundy was telling the truth about anything covered in their conversation. The Bundy interview tapes reportedly generated over a million bucks in revenue for Focus on the Family, the bulk of which it donated to anti-porn and anti-abortion groups.

Dobson continued his activism through the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute (founded in 2010) through 2022, when he handed off the reins to the organization’s new president. He continued to record his radio show, Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, and his frequent appearances on Fox News, though, until shortly before his death in August 2025.

Dobson’s advocacy lives on, of course, through the various organizations he founded and a new generation of self-righteous, censorious social conservatives – each of whom I’m sure is just as certain as Dobson that their definition of “family values” is the only one that matters.

CANBERRA, Australia—Australia’s digital regulator has told Parliament it will examine whether widely available virtual private networks, or VPNs, are being used to bypass the country’s age-verification rules for pornography websites.

Budget documents submitted to the Australian Senate in May show that eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant’s office is concerned that platforms covered by technology industry codes may still be receiving web traffic from IP addresses in Australia that has not gone through age verification.

“Under the codes, there are requirements that service providers must take reasonable steps to prevent workarounds like VPNs so eSafety will look at this when considering compliance with codes,” the budget documents state. The documents include an appropriations proposal for Grant’s office.

The concern follows Australian search-engine data from March showing increased interest in the terms “VPN” and “virtual private network.” The rise came as authorities began enforcing age-verification requirements for age-restricted platforms and moved to restrict social media access for minors.

The introduction of the under-16 social-media ban affected a broad range of online services in Australia. Around the same period, Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub.com, said its platforms would be restricted in Australia to comply with the new laws.

Industry codes in Australia require the parent companies of online pornography providers to establish and enforce “appropriate age assurance measures.” Those measures can include identity checks, credit-card verification, artificial-intelligence-assisted biometric age estimation, and other methods.

VPNs, however, have long been used to bypass content blocks and age-verification rules in Australia, the United States, and other countries.

Grant’s office told members of the Australian Senate that it is working on ways to limit unverified VPN traffic.

“This is similar to eSafety’s regulatory guidance for the social media minimum age, where eSafety considers VPN detection as a reasonable step to prevent underage users from having an account,” the documents submitted by Grant’s office state.

“[The] Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport, and the Arts knows that tech companies can tell when a VPN is in use.”