Louisiana Approves First Regulation Requiring Age Verification to Access Pornography Sites

Louisiana’s House of Representatives passed the bill against age verification in the porn industry, making it the first state to take measures against the detrimental impact of pornographic and hypersexualisation for minors, on June 15th, 2022. 

The freshman lawmaker of Louisiana achieves a goal that no other lawyers or activists have claimed. State Representative, Laurie Schlege, introduced the bill that stated, “Pornography is creating a public health crisis and having a corrosive influence on minors.”  The new bill was appreciated by everyone in the state of Louisiana, especially in the capital, Baton Rouge, and got signed by the Louisiana House by 96-1 and the state Senate by 34-0. Upon the passing of the bill in the state, pornography websites’ IP addresses are blocked until they apply “reasonable age verification methods.” 

The law explicitly states that porn websites are not banned because of adult content, but they are required to identify the age of the user by authentic measures. They can confirm age verification by attesting the documents of the user. Instead of complying with this law, the Pornhub website is blocking the IP addresses of Louisiana state by stating that this law is harming their users and damaging their reputation. 

MindGeek, the private company which operates many official pornography websites, wrote in a message, “While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”

Louisiana is not the only state to introduce this bill; dozens of other US states have issued a similar bill. Unlike the efforts in the past, which only declared these websites harmful to health and did not take any steps to stop their usage, almost six states have already complied with this law, including Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia, and Texas. The law was accepted in Arkansas and Utah without any opposition. 

The industry is infuriated at this bill as they state it “harms the viewership of porn websites.” Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity company which owns Pornhub, stated that Louisiana web traffic had dropped 80%. The Free Speech Union filed a lawsuit against Utah and Louisiana to stop the violation of first amendment protected speech in the state. But the federal judge in Utah dismissed the lawsuit against the state, so in the meantime, the porn industry has only one option, to comply with the age verification law.

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