Bill to require additional proof of age for porn sites in Virginia heads to Youngkin’s desk

Virginia lawmakers recently passed a bill with near-unanimous support that would require pornography websites to more stringently verify whether a person is 18 before allowing them access to the site. However, some say the legislation raises data privacy concerns while doing little to keep minors out of pornographic websites.

Under the bill, verifying the age of a person trying to access these sites would go a step further than simply typing in a date of birth, said patron Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin, during a House subcommittee last month. Websites, he said, would have to implement more advanced methods of their choosing to verify age, such as requiring users to submit copies of government-issued identification, biometric scans or use other forms of commercial age verification software.

“What we’ve had is the unfettered wild, wild west ability of these pornography sites, such as YouPorn and Pornhub, to have someone who accesses their site without restriction to age,” Stanley said.

The legislation aims to address the “epidemic” of childhood exposure to pornography, Stanley said.

Most children see adult material online by the age of 12, with 15% seeing it by age 10 or younger, according to a 2022 report by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit media company focused on kids and families.

Stanley said that under the bill, a civil cause of action, or a lawsuit, could be brought on behalf of a minor who suffered damages from access to pornographic websites that didn’t use age verification measures.

In an interview this week Stanley said he crafted the legislation after talking with parents and doing research, which led him to a similar statute that went into effect in Louisiana this year.

Porn sites were “easily able” to implement age verification techniques in Louisiana so they wouldn’t be exposed to civil liability, Stanley said.

A wide range of research has shown that childhood pornography exposure is a form of sexual trauma that can lead to lifelong consequences such as trouble forming healthy relationships, depression and body image disorders.

“Everybody agrees that we want to address pornography directed at children,” said then-Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, during a Feb. 7 Senate committee meeting.

While acknowledging the harmful impacts pornography exposure can have on children, some say the legislation wouldn’t effectively address these problems and raises concerns of data privacy.

The Age Verification Providers Association, a global nonprofit trade body representing organizations that provide age verification services, assured Stanley that any data collected would not be shared with other parties, he said in an interview.

“I’m pretty confident that it will not put users’ personal information at risk,” Stanley said.

However, this data can be vulnerable to security breaches, wrote the Free Speech Coalition, a national trade association for the adult industry, in a letter to the House Courts of Justice Committee. The group said it has already received reports from Louisiana of potential identity theft as a result of scammers creating fake adult sites to solicit identification documents.

No one spoke in opposition when the bill was debated during the session, but some people took to social media to express their concerns.

“I get the idea of stopping kids from accessing it, but I’m not super comfortable with having to give PornHub my ID,” wrote a Reddit user last week.

The coalition also wrote that social media websites containing pornographic content wouldn’t be regulated under the bill because it would only apply to sites where more than one-third of the content meets the definition of “material harmful to minors.”

The 2022 report from Common Sense Media also found that 18% of teens aged 13 to 17 who have seen adult content accidentally did so through social media.

MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub, told the Mercury in an email, “It is vital that any age verification measures implemented preserve user privacy and are easy to use. All regulation must be enforced equitably and effectively across all platforms offering adult material.”

A recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found 41% of children aged 11 to 14 use a virtual private network, an encryption method that allows easy access to pornography sites regardless of what state they live in.

“We fear that consumers will at best simply evade the measures, or at worst fall prey to criminals eager to rob and extort them,” wrote the Free Speech Coalition.

Stanley acknowledged children are more savvy than their parents when it comes to use of the internet, but called the bill a necessary “tool in the toolbox” for parents who can’t monitor their children all the time.

Sen. John Edwards, D-Roanoke, one of two lawmakers who voted against the bill, raised concerns about its constitutionality. He pointed to a similar law that passed in 2000 but was later struck down by a federal judge in Virginia who ruled that it violated the First Amendment.

“We should not be passing bills that are unconstitutional,” said Edwards on the Senate floor early last month.

But Stanley said the harm pornography has on children is too significant to do nothing.

“I think the compelling state interest is the protection of our children,” Stanley said during the House subcommittee meeting. “And I would rather try and have a Supreme Court tell me I was wrong than not to try at all.”

The bill now heads to Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s desk for his signature.

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This article first appeared on Virginia Mercury and is republished here with permission. Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence.