The War on Porn

Your bank may never send you a memo about it, but it’s quietly shaping your life.

Every time you click “buy now,” a small army of institutions decides whether that purchase gets to exist. And for adult creators, that army has been steadily tightening its grip. For years, people in the industry have been warning about financial discrimination and debanking — the sudden closure of accounts, the polite but devastating “we can no longer do business with you.” It’s happening more often now. And it’s happening quietly.

“I don’t know what could happen next or when it might happen,”

Adult VTuber, journalist, and activist Ana Valens says. In just two weeks last November, nearly every platform she relied on either removed her content or suspended her outright. “While my Patreon and Ko-fi were reinstated, I’ve spent the past two months waiting for the other shoe to drop — another Patreon ban, my PayPal deactivated, and so on.” She reached out for explanations. Most platforms couldn’t clearly articulate how she’d violated their terms. Ko-fi didn’t respond until repeated messages finally led to reinstatement.

That kind of uncertainty lingers. It’s like walking on ice that might crack at any moment.

“Deplatforming and debanking are an occupational hazard for any adult content creator,” says Gina, a co-founder of PeepMe, a startup that set out to build a worker-owned creator marketplace. PeepMe was imagined as an alternative to OnlyFans and Patreon — a space where creators could hold equity, elect a democratic board, and receive quarterly profit-sharing dividends.

Gina requested that a pseudonym be used, given her continued work adjacent to the adult industry and the very real fear of financial fallout. “Even still, I’ve never seen someone banned on so many sites before [as Ana has been],” she says.

And it’s not just adult creators feeling the pressure. Companies in oil and gas, cryptocurrency, tobacco, and firearms have also raised concerns about politically motivated debanking. The pushback has grown loud enough that U.S. regulators are now stepping in, attempting to rein in financial discrimination.

Who’s Blocking My Buying?

When you make an online purchase, your money doesn’t travel in a straight line. It passes through layers of gatekeepers. The pipeline often looks like this:

1. Platform (merchant) websites: where creators earn income — YouTube, Patreon, Etsy, DoorDash, Steam.

2. Payment processors: companies that route the transaction between card networks and banks — PayPal, Stripe.

3. Card networks: Visa, American Express, Mastercard — the rule-makers that standardize how buyers and sellers interact.

4. Your bank and the seller’s bank: Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and so on.

Each step has discretion. Beyond preventing illegal activity, these institutions can decide what kinds of money they’re willing to touch.

“The rules set by card networks are sometimes vague,” says Dr. Val Webber, a postdoctoral researcher at Dalhousie University’s Sexual Health and Gender Research Lab. Mastercard’s June 2025 rules restrict “any Transaction that […] in the sole discretion of [Mastercard], may damage the goodwill of [Mastercard] or reflect negatively on the [brand].”

“In the sole discretion” is doing a lot of work there.

Last summer, Steam and itch.io removed or deindexed adult games after pressure from payment processors and card networks. Steam cited pressure from Mastercard, conveyed through processors like Stripe. Stripe told itch.io, “Stripe is currently unable to support sexually explicit content due to restrictions placed on them by their banking partners, despite card networks generally supporting adult content.” Stripe’s prohibited business list includes “pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery, and other media) designed for the purpose of sexual gratification.”

Mastercard later denied involvement. In August 2025, the company stated, “Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.”

Meanwhile, Valens saw her articles disappear from Vice. “My suspicion is that it was easy for a financial company to flag me as high risk as a punitive measure for my content, or my activism work,” she says. Attempts to obtain comment from Vice were unsuccessful.

Who Can Get Debanked?

“We have lots of data to show that people in the adult industry face financial discrimination in the form of their accounts being closed, being denied mortgages, business loans, and other banking services — despite banks often not being able to substantiate legal reasons related to these individual accounts,” says Maggie MacDonald, a PhD researcher at the University of Toronto.

The tension escalated in December 2020 when Visa and Mastercard cut ties with Pornhub, citing child sexual abuse material (CSAM). “Our adult content standards allow for legal adult activity created by consenting individuals or studios,” Mastercard said at the time. “Merchants must have controls to monitor, block and remove unlawful content from being posted.” Pornhub denied hosting illegal content and emphasized the harm to “the hundreds of thousands of models who rely on [their] platform for their livelihoods.”

But here’s the inconsistency that nags at people: X continues to process payments despite widespread reports of CSAM and non-consensual deepfake content. No sweeping financial freeze there.

Watching major platforms lose payment relationships makes smaller startups tread lightly. “We just can’t afford to lose our ability to do business with these financial companies,” Gina says. “Stripe takes only 2.9 percent from businesses they’re willing to work with, while high-risk processors willing to take on adult content can charge up to 15 percent.”

That difference can sink a company before it starts.

“Losing a relationship with card networks is a risk payment processors can’t afford, and losing relationships with payment processors is a risk that platform websites can’t afford,” explains Webber. “In the end, the responsibility of ensuring their content stays within the lines of these oftentimes unclear rules trickles down to each individual creator. Because ultimately, content creators are more expendable to platforms than payment processors and card networks.”

One justification often cited is chargebacks — when customers reverse credit card transactions. Gina isn’t convinced.

“Locking out entire industries makes less and less sense as fraud detection technology advances,” she says. “Payment processors and card networks already have processes to step in when an individual business has a high rate of chargebacks, there’s no reason to block out a whole industry.” Mastercard recently announced expanded generative AI fraud-detection tools, building on already sophisticated monitoring systems.

“We also haven’t seen the claim of high-chargebacks in adult content substantiated anywhere in terms of measured data,” adds MacDonald. “As a researcher, that makes me suspicious of the criteria these companies are using behind the scenes.”

The Evolving Landscape of Banking Regulations

In February 2025, the Free Speech Coalition filed a statement with the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, calling for due process protections, objective risk assessments, and explicit recognition that lawful adult businesses do not inherently present financial crime risk. Blocking entire industries without individualized evaluation, the statement argued, is regulatory overreach with serious implications for free speech.

Multiple efforts are underway in the United States to limit financial institutions from denying service for reasons beyond legal violations. In August 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing regulators to investigate and reverse politically motivated debanking. Bank regulators have begun removing “reputational risk” from compliance criteria, and proposed Senate legislation would impose civil fines on banks and card networks that avoid entire categories of customers.

“Card networks and payment processors began by blocking pornography, but they’ve moved into other online industries as well,” says Webber. “The line in the sand continues to shift, and it has recently expanded to video game creators and streamers as well. We don’t know how these rules might evolve, and what type of online content might be next.”

Valens has spent months urging customers to call Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and Stripe to question purchase restrictions and account freezes. Visa points to its policies for combating illegal activity; PayPal requires pre-approval for adult materials, similar to tobacco; Stripe states it does not support adult content.

“Private companies have been deputized to decide how we can earn and spend our money,” says MacDonald. “Anyone who is ideologically misaligned with any of these companies faces the risk of losing their livelihood.”

That’s the part that lingers.

It’s not just about porn, or games, or activism. It’s about the invisible committee that votes on your transactions — and whether one day, without warning, they decide you don’t get a vote at all.

The war on porn doesn’t look like a war anymore. It looks like a line item on a tax form.

As age-verification laws keep tightening their grip on the adult industry — and, quietly, on the broader idea of free speech online — an Utah lawmaker has proposed something new. Or maybe not new. Just sharper. A bill introduced last month would slap a tax on porn sites operating in the state.

Introduced by state senator Calvin Musselman, a Republican, the bill would impose a 7 percent tax on total receipts “from sales, distributions, memberships, subscriptions, performances, and content amounting to material harmful to minors that is produced, sold, filmed, generated, or otherwise based” in Utah. If passed, the bill would go into effect in May and would also require adult sites to pay a $500 annual fee to the State Tax Commission. Per the legislation, the money made from the tax will be used by Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services to provide more mental health support for teens.

Musselman did not respond to a request for comment.

There’s a certain rhythm to this moment in American politics. Conservative lawmakers across the country are circling adult content with renewed intensity. In September, Alabama became the first state to impose a porn tax on adult entertainment companies (10 percent) after passing age-verification mandates requiring users to upload ID before viewing explicit material. Pennsylvania lawmakers are weighing a bill that would add a 10 percent tax on “subscriptions to and one-time purchases from online adult content platforms,” even though digital products are already subject to a 6 percent sales tax, two state senators wrote in a memo in October. Arizona floated a similar idea back in 2019, when state senator Gail Griffin proposed taxing adult content distributors to help fund the border wall during Donald Trump’s first term. Meanwhile, 25 states have passed some form of age verification.

It’s not just about taxes. For years, efforts to criminalize or restrict sex work have ebbed and flowed, usually intensifying during moments of heightened online surveillance and censorship. But targeted taxes have struggled to gain widespread traction. Why? Because their legality is murky at best.

“This kind of porn tax is blatantly unconstitutional,” says Evelyn Douek, an associate professor of law at Stanford Law School. “It singles out a particular type of protected speech for disfavored treatment, purely because the legislature doesn’t like it—that’s exactly what the First Amendment is designed to protect against. Utah may not like porn, but as the Supreme Court affirmed only last year, adults have a fully protected right to access it.”

Utah, Alabama, and Pennsylvania are among 16 states that have adopted resolutions declaring porn a public health crisis. “We realize this is a bold assertion not everyone will agree on, but it’s the full-fledged truth,” Utah governor Gary Herbert tweeted in 2016 after signing the resolution. Utah’s long-running campaign against explicit material stretches back decades. In 2001, it became the first state to appoint an obscenity and pornography complaints ombudsman — a position colloquially known as the “porn czar.” That role was eliminated in 2017.

The industry, for its part, has been trying to keep up with the shifting rules. “Age restriction is a very complex subject that brings with it data privacy concerns and the potential for uneven and inconsistent application for different digital platforms,” Alex Kekesi, vice president of brand and community at Pornhub, said in a previous interview. In November, the company urged Google, Microsoft, and Apple to implement device-based age verification across their operating systems and app stores. “We have seen several states and countries try to impose platform-level age verification requirements, and they have all failed to adequately protect children.” To comply with new age gate mandates, Pornhub has blocked access in 23 states.

Critics argue that these policies were never truly about protecting children in the first place. In 2024, a video leaked by the Centre for Climate Reporting showed Russell Vought, a Trump ally and Project 2025 coauthor, describing age verification laws as a “back door” to a federal porn ban.

There’s a strange irony here. Platforms like OnlyFans and Pornhub helped mainstream digital sex work, bringing it out of the shadows and into subscription dashboards and creator analytics. But that visibility has made it easier to regulate, track, and now tax. As more states experiment with tariffs tied specifically to sexual content, creators — not lawmakers — are likely to feel the immediate impact.

The skewed ideology of cultural conservatism that is taking shape under Trump 2.0 wants to punish sexual expression, says Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the adult industry in the US. “When we talk about free speech, we generally mean the freedom to speak, the ability to speak freely without government interference. But in this case, free also means not having to pay for the right to do so. A government tax on speech limits that right to those who can afford it.”

OnlyFans states that it complies with tax requirements in the jurisdictions where it operates, and creators are responsible for managing their own tax affairs. Pornhub, which is currently blocked in Utah and Alabama, did not respond to a request for comment.

Douek notes that while the Supreme Court recently upheld age-verification laws in Texas — allowing states to regulate minors’ access to explicit material — “a porn tax does nothing to limit minors’ access to this speech—it simply makes it more expensive to provide this content to adults.” A 2022 report from Common Sense Media found that 73 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 have watched adult content online. Young people often encounter explicit material on social media platforms such as X and Snap, sometimes intentionally, often accidentally. A survey last year from the UK’s Office of the Children’s Commissioner reported that 59 percent of minors are exposed to porn unintentionally, primarily via social media, up from 38 percent the year before.

In Alabama, as in Utah’s proposal, tax revenue is earmarked for behavioral health services, including prevention, treatment, and recovery programs for young people.

Alabama state representative Ben Robbins, the bill’s Republican sponsor, said in an interview last year that adult content was “a driver in causing mental health issues” in the state. It’s an argument that surfaces again and again in debates about a nationwide porn ban. Some research suggests adolescent exposure may correlate with depression, lower self-esteem, or normalization of violence, but health professionals have not reached consensus.

With lawmakers reframing the conversation around underage harm, Stabile argues that the principle at stake is bigger than porn itself. Content-specific taxes on speech, he notes, have repeatedly been struck down as unconstitutional censorship.

“What if a state decided that Covid misinformation was straining state health resources and taxed newsletters who promoted it? What if the federal government decided to require a costly license to start a podcast? What if a state decided to tax a certain newspaper it didn’t like?” he says. “Porn isn’t some magical category of speech separate from movies, streaming services, or other forms of entertainment. Adult businesses already pay taxes on the income they earn, just as every other business does. Taxing them because of imagined harms is not only dangerous to our industry, it sets a dangerous precedent for government power.”

And that’s the quiet part that lingers.

When governments start deciding which kinds of speech deserve a surcharge, the debate stops being about porn. It becomes about who gets to speak freely — and who has to pay extra for the privilege.

It’s the kind of enforcement story that lands with a thud, not a gasp. No surprise raid. No dramatic shutdown. Just a regulator, a spreadsheet, and a very large number at the bottom of the page.

Kick Online Entertainment S.A., the parent company of the controversial adult tube site Motherless.com, has been fined by the U.K.’s digital regulator Ofcom for failing to comply with age-verification requirements under the country’s Online Safety Act. The penalty tops £800,000 — just shy of $1.1 million — and it’s not the only fine involved.

According to a statement issued Tuesday, Ofcom said Kick Online repeatedly failed to meet age-verification obligations despite multiple attempts by the regulator to engage with the company. Motherless.com had previously been flagged several times as noncompliant, and those warnings, it seems, went nowhere.

On top of that, Kick Online is accused of ignoring formal information requests from the regulator, triggering an additional £30,000 fine — roughly $40,876. It’s the regulatory equivalent of getting ticketed for speeding and then fined again for refusing to pull over.

“Having highly effective age checks on adult sites to protect children from pornographic content is non-negotiable. Any company that fails to meet this duty—or engage with us—can expect to face robust enforcement action, including significant fines,” said Suzanne Cater, Ofcom’s director of enforcement.

“We continue to investigate other sites under the U.K.’s age check rules and will take further action where necessary,” Cater added. Ofcom also noted that while Kick Online has made attempts to implement age checks, those measures fall short of the “highly effective” standard required under the Online Safety Act. Close doesn’t count anymore.

A significant portion of the penalties relates to noncompliance spanning July through December 2025 — months that now read less like a timeline and more like a paper trail. And as enforcement ramps up, one thing feels increasingly clear: regulators aren’t asking politely anymore.

It starts the way these things often do: quietly, procedurally, with a bill number most people will never remember — until it suddenly matters a lot. In Iowa, an age-verification proposal aimed at adult platforms and sites that host a significant amount of content deemed harmful to minors has moved one step closer to becoming law.

The measure, known as House File (HF) 2274, would require site-level age verification for both apps and websites operating in the state.

The bill is sponsored by Republican state Rep. Bill Gustoff, an attorney and conservative Christian who represents House District 40. Under HF 2274, parent companies behind adult websites, apps, and even mainstream social media platforms would be barred from operating in Iowa’s digital space unless they implement age-verification systems. It’s a wide net — intentionally so.

Platforms covered by the proposal are defined as those where at least one-third, or a “substantial portion,” of content is considered pornographic and/or harmful to minors. That wording alone leaves plenty of room for interpretation, which is usually where the real fights begin.

If the bill is signed into law, enforcement power would shift to the Iowa Attorney General’s Office, currently led by Republican Attorney General Brenna Bird. With that authority, the office could pursue injunctions and civil penalties against private companies, particularly in the adult entertainment space, for failing to comply. The penalties are designed to add up fast: each instance of non-compliance counts as a separate violation, with fines of up to $1,000 per violation, capped at $10,000 per day. Blink, and you’re underwater.

HF 2274 recently cleared a House subcommittee and is now headed to the House Judiciary Committee for further review and markup. Its chances look strong. Most Midwestern states already have some form of age-verification requirement for adult content, and momentum tends to be contagious when neighboring legislatures start moving in the same direction.

The adult industry isn’t ignoring it. Trade organization Free Speech Coalition is actively tracking the bill on behalf of its members — because for many platforms, this isn’t just another compliance box. It’s a question of whether operating at all will still make sense once the rules settle.

There’s something a little surreal about watching a modern internet dispute hinge on where a company’s legal address happens to be. One minute it’s about protecting minors, the next it’s about jurisdictional lines drawn decades ago. And suddenly, adult websites are at the center of a European legal chess match.

A German court has now blocked the Rhineland-Palatinate Media Authority from forcing telecom providers within its jurisdiction to cut off access to Aylo-owned adult sites Pornhub and YouPorn.

According to a statement released Thursday by the Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Justice, the Administrative Court of Neustadt an der Weinstraße sided with both internet access provider 1&1 and Aylo, overturning blocking orders previously issued by the media authority.

Those orders, handed down in April 2024, required DNS blocking of the sites on the grounds that they lacked sufficient age verification measures to prevent minors in Germany from accessing adult content, as mandated by the country’s Interstate Treaty on the Protection of Minors in the Media (JMStV). Both Aylo and 1&1 challenged the orders in court, arguing they overstepped legal boundaries.

The court’s 5th Chamber agreed, grounding its decision in two key points: the primacy of the European Union’s Digital Services Act over Germany’s JMStV, and the EU’s long-standing “country of origin” principle under the Directive on Electronic Commerce. Under that framework, online services are generally regulated only by the EU member state in which they are legally based — and Aylo is based in Cyprus.

The Ministry of Justice emphasized that since the Digital Services Act took effect in February 2024, there has been “a single, fully harmonized set of rules at EU level for the protection of minors in online media.”

“This regulation generally prohibits member states from imposing additional national requirements in areas already covered by the regulation,” the statement reads. “As the DSA already stipulates comprehensive due diligence obligations for online platforms to protect minors, it supersedes the previous German special regulations.”

It also pointed out that the European Commission has already asserted exclusive authority by launching its own proceedings against Pornhub and other platforms designated as “Very Large Online Platforms” under the DSA. In other words, Brussels is already on the case.

That likely won’t be the end of it. The Rhineland-Palatinate Media Authority is expected to appeal the ruling to the Higher Administrative Court of Rhineland-Palatinate — especially given that this same court previously ruled against Aylo in earlier blocking disputes.

And that’s where things get messy. Different German courts have reached different conclusions, and the supposed clarity between national and EU law isn’t as airtight as this ruling might suggest.

Last September, an advocate general at the EU’s Court of Justice issued a nonbinding opinion in a separate case involving WebGroup Czech Republic, which operates XVideos.com, and NKL Associates, which operates XNXX.com. That opinion suggested France could, in fact, require pornographic websites based in other EU countries to comply with French age verification laws. Not binding, but certainly eyebrow-raising.

However the Pornhub and YouPorn litigation ultimately plays out in Germany, it’s almost guaranteed to ripple outward. This isn’t just about a couple of adult sites or a regional regulator flexing its muscles. It’s about where authority really lives in a digital Europe — and who gets the final word when national instincts collide with EU-wide rules.

The Free Speech Coalition has published its legislative outlook for 2026.

Here are some highlights:

Punitive Taxation
Utah and Virginia both introduced bills this year adding special taxes for adult content. The Virginia bill has been tabled until next year. If Utah passes its law, the state will join Alabama to become the second state to institute a content-based tax on adult speech.  

Consent Minefields
Arizona has moved rapidly on HB 2133, a new bill that would require complicated, contradictory documentation for any adult content uploaded online. As with the laws enacted in North Carolina and Alabama last year, Arizona’s bill, which requires every model release to be notarized, would make it impossible for adult businesses to operate in the state. 

VPN Restrictions
Michigan, West Virginia and Wisconsin have both proposed significant VPN restrictions. While Michigan’s bill would ban VPNs entirely, and is likely dead, the West Virginia and Wisconsin bills would require adult sites to identify and block all VPN traffic.

Warning Labels
Wisconsin, Washington and Missouri have all introduced bills mandating warning labels on adult content. While FSC was able to secure an on-going injunction against a similar law in Texas, our case is on-going and Alabama’s health warning requirement remains in effect.

The complete piece is located HERE

A federal judge quietly slammed the brakes this week on a pair of lawsuits that were meant to test Kansas’ age-verification law — and in doing so, reminded everyone that the internet doesn’t neatly respect state lines, no matter how badly lawmakers might want it to.

Last year, a conservative anti-pornography group brought lawsuits against four adult websites on behalf of a 14-year-old Kansas resident and her mother. Two of those suits went after Titan Websites, which runs HentaiCity.com, and ICF Technology, which operates Jerkmate.com. The core claim was simple and familiar by now: the teenager allegedly accessed content on the sites without her age being verified.

But Judge Holly Teeter of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas wasn’t persuaded. She dismissed both cases outright, pointing to something that often gets lost in the political noise — jurisdiction still matters.

In the case against Titan Websites, Teeter ruled that the plaintiffs failed to show HentaiCity.com had “purposefully directed its activities at Kansas.”

“The contacts between Defendant and the forum were not due to discriminating, intentional conduct that targeted Kansas,” Teeter wrote. “Rather, they were the random, and fortuitous contacts inherent in the operation of an indiscriminate and universally accessible website … This is insufficient to support the exercise of specific personal jurisdiction.”

If you’ve ever run a website, that language probably lands with a thud of recognition. The internet is global by default. You don’t wake up deciding to “target Kansas” unless you’re buying billboards off I-70 or running a very specific ad campaign. Sometimes a click is just a click.

In a statement, the Free Speech Coalition welcomed the decision as a meaningful step forward.

“As the first age verification case filed by a private plaintiff to reach final resolution, the ruling suggests that private plaintiffs can lack personal jurisdiction to sue out-of-state website operators under the Kansas statute,” the statement reads.

The organization’s executive director said the ruling offers “critical guidance” for platforms trying to navigate age-verification laws in Kansas and beyond — a legal patchwork that’s getting harder to track by the month.

“While not precedent-setting, nor necessarily applicable in every case, the District Court’s ruling is an important victory against state laws enforced by private rights of action,” said Boden. “In the meantime, the threat of litigation is real, and we encourage our members to continue to comply with all applicable laws.”

That last part matters. This wasn’t a mic-drop that ends the conversation forever. The plaintiffs still have the option to appeal, and the broader legal fight is far from over.

Two other cases backed by the same group are still winding their way through the system. In the lawsuit against Multi Media LLC, which operates Chaturbate.com, the judge granted a motion to compel arbitration and paused the case while that process plays out. In the case against Techpump Solutions, which runs Superporn.com, the court hasn’t yet ruled on a motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.

So yes, one door just closed — but plenty of others remain cracked open. And if there’s a lesson here, it’s this: the battle over age verification isn’t just about who clicks what. It’s about where the law thinks the internet actually lives.

Something quietly fundamental is about to change on one of the internet’s most familiar hangouts. Discord’s senior leadership confirmed this week that age verification will become mandatory for all users starting in March 2026, alongside a shift to what the company calls “teen-by-default” settings across the entire platform.

The expanded safety rollout, according to the company, is meant to create “a safer and more inclusive experience for users over the age of 13.” On paper, it sounds tidy. In practice, it signals a pretty big cultural shift for a platform that’s long felt like the digital equivalent of a messy, unlocked group chat.

“As part of this update, all new and existing users worldwide will have a teen-appropriate experience by default, with updated communication settings, restricted access to age-gated spaces, and content filtering that preserves the privacy and meaningful connections that define Discord,” the company said. It’s a careful balance they’re trying to strike — safety without sanding off the personality that made people show up in the first place.

“Nowhere is our safety work more important than when it comes to teen users, which is why we are announcing these updates in time for Safer Internet Day,” said Savannah Badalich, Discord’s head of product policy, referencing the February 10 awareness initiative. “Rolling out teen-by-default settings globally builds on Discord’s existing safety architecture, giving teens strong protections while allowing verified adults flexibility.”

Badalich added, “We design our products with teen safety principles at the core and will continue working with safety experts, policymakers, and Discord users to support meaningful, long-term wellbeing for teens on the platform.” It’s the kind of statement you’d expect — earnest, forward-looking, and clearly written with regulators peeking over shoulders.

Under the new “teen-by-default” framework, users will have to go through age-verification steps to access channels and servers labeled as “age-restricted.” That includes spaces run by adult content creators, online sex workers, sexually themed communities, sexual animation hubs, and certain fan communities that live closer to the edges of the platform.

There’s also an unspoken tension here that’s hard to ignore. Discord has been down this road before, and not without bruises.

The platform previously experienced a data breach involving one of its age-verification vendors, exposing sensitive verification materials, including government-issued identification. For users who already feel uneasy about handing over personal documents online, that memory hasn’t exactly faded.

That incident stemmed from mistakes by a customer experience vendor, 5CA, which outsources work to customer service agents in countries including the Philippines. Discord’s primary age-verification partner, K-ID, later stated that it had no involvement in the breach tied to its standard verification systems.

So here we are again — a platform promising better protection, safer defaults, and stronger guardrails, while carrying the weight of past missteps. Maybe this time the systems hold. Maybe trust rebuilds. Or maybe the internet does what it always does and asks the same old question, just in a new tone: how much safety is worth how much control?

Over the decades I’ve worked in the adult entertainment business, it has struck me many times how concerned the industry’s critics appear to be about the welfare of those of us who work in the industry – and how quickly that concern turns to consternation and scorn, should we insist that we’re doing what we do gladly and of our own free will.

“Nonsense,” the critics say, “these poor souls only think they are engaging in this depravity willingly; the truth is they have been brainwashed, coerced, cajoled and manipulated into believing they want to participate in this filth.”

Granted, not a lot of people have spilled ink along these lines to fret over the wellbeing of freelance writers like me. I think we’re counted as being among the exploiters, rather than the exploited, or perhaps as enablers of exploitation. Still, there’s no denying I derive my living, meager though it may be, from adult entertainment, even if all I do is write about it, rather than perform in or film it.

While many of the regulations aimed at the adult industry are couched as attempts to protect minors from the alleged harm of viewing pornography, when these measures are discussed by their proponents, “success” is often defined as making the adult industry retreat from their jurisdiction altogether. If a site like Pornhub blocks visitors from an entire state, including all the adults in that state who are still legally entitled to access the site even under newly established age verification mandates, those who cooked up the laws often describe this development as a sign the law is “working.” As I’ve written before, the chilling effect is a feature of these measures, not a bug.

By the same token, if a new law or regulation makes it harder for adult content creators to make their own movies, distribute their own photos or perform live on webcams, that too is something to be celebrated by the legislators and activists who champion those regulations.

Gone is all thought or discussion of the wellbeing of adult content creators and performers, once the potential cause of harm is the law itself. This holds true of purported “anti-trafficking” statutes. While sex workers themselves largely oppose measures like FOSTA/SESTA and say the law has made them less safe, not more, the proponents and sponsors of such legislation don’t want to hear it. Yes, these paternalistic politicos and crusading critics will protect these wayward adults from themselves, even if it kills them.

I can only imagine that if a state legislator from any of the dozens of states that have passed age verification requirements were to learn that adult content creators (and the platforms that host their work) are having a harder time earning a living under these new regulatory schemes, their response would be brief and callous: “Good,” they’d probably say, “now they can go out and look for more respectable work!”

And what happens when former porn performers do find work in other fields? The stigma of porn follows them. They get fired. They are told their mere presence in a classroom is disruptive. They are hounded on social media. They are treated like pariahs by the very people who supposedly care about their welfare.

A law or regulation can be well-intended and still do harm. I don’t doubt some of the politicians involved in crafting age-verification laws and other purportedly protective regulations believe they are doing things in the best interests of both minors and the adults who work in porn, or in the broader world of sex work. But it’s hard to believe they truly care about the latter two when there’s so little thought given to the potential negative impact on them during the crafting of these laws.

As more states toy with the idea of establishing a “porn tax,” will any of them pause to consider the impact on the human beings targeted by such taxes? I’d strongly advise not trying to hold your breath while waiting for that manner of concern to be expressed.

It stalled quietly, almost anticlimactically — a pause button hit on a bill that was supposed to make noise. A Virginia House of Delegates subcommittee voted Monday to push off, until next year, a proposal that would slap a 10% tax on the gross receipts of adult websites doing business in the state.

The bill, HB 720, would apply that tax to revenue from adult sites “produced, sold, filmed, generated, or otherwise based” in Virginia — a definition broad enough to make even seasoned tax attorneys squint and reread it twice.

At a Finance subcommittee hearing, the bill’s sponsor, Delegate Eric Zehr, framed the measure as something more than just another line item in the tax code. While most proposed tax hikes, he said, tend to discourage businesses that “contribute in a positive way without societal detriment,” he argued that commercial adult sites fall into a different category altogether.

“They contribute to the mental health crisis straining our behavioral health system,” Zehr said. “Their profit is our loss.”

Under the proposal, money raised by the tax would flow into Virginia’s Behavioral Health and Developmental Services Trust Fund — a pool created to support care and treatment for people relying on public mental health, developmental, and substance abuse services.

“The purveyors of this content are profiting while the rest of us are paying,” Zehr argued. “Those profiting at the expense of our children need to pitch in.”

He also pointed to Virginia’s age verification law, passed in 2023, praising it as a step forward — but not nearly a final one. In his view, the law simply hasn’t gone far enough.

“This legislation would disincentivize these providers from further damaging our children’s mental health and development, and simultaneously help promote their mental health by increasing the income going into the Behavioral Health and Developmental Services Trust Fund,” Zehr told the subcommittee. “This isn’t simply an ideological attack. There is a direct connection, a direct line between this and what we’re paying for in the mental health system.”

Others in the room weren’t convinced. Subcommittee members raised red flags about constitutionality — concerns that legislative counsel tied to potential conflicts with freedom of speech — and about how the bill would work in practice, especially given the global, borderless nature of the adult industry.

Delegate Vivian Watts put it bluntly: “Trying to determine how we could enforce this, particularly as a tax matter, would be extraordinarily complicated.”

In the end, the subcommittee voted unanimously to carry the bill over until the 2027 legislative session, effectively shelving it for now.

As the gavel came down, Subcommittee Chair Phil Hernandez offered Zehr a parting note that sounded less like a rejection and more like a long pause: “We want to give you a chance to keep working on this.”