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Arizona governor Katie Hobbs just vetoed an age verification bill that would have required anyone visiting an adult site from the state to show ID before continuing.
The bill, HB 2586, is a copycat of legislation sweeping the country: sites with more than 33.3 percent material that’s “harmful to minors”—defined in the bill as anything of “prurient interest” and as a long list of pornographic imagery and terms, including “touching, caressing or fondling of nipples, breast, buttocks, anuses or genitals” and “sexual intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, beastiality, oral copulation,” the list goes on—would be subject to fines if they didn’t check all users’ ages.
“The legislation goes against settled case law. Children's online safety is a pressing issue for parents and the state,” Hobbs wrote in a letter announcing her decision on Monday. “While we look for a solution, it should be bipartisan and work within the bounds of the First Amendment, which this bill does not.”
The adult advocacy group Free Speech Coalition, American Civil Liberties Union, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Chamber of Progress, Woodhull Freedom Foundation, The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, and the the Erotic Service Provider Legal, Educational and Research Project lobbied against the bill.
Emanuel Maiberg
“We thank Governor Hobbs for her courage in standing up to calls for censorship, and look forward to working with the legislature on effective methods of keeping minors from accessing age-inappropriate material online,” the Free Speech Coalition wrote in a press release.
The nonprofit free speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression wrote in a letter to Hobbs, urging her to veto the bill: “Requirements for age verification online — because they ultimately require identity verification — violate the right to anonymous speech. They chill the use of websites by security- and privacy-conscious people, and they pressure websites to shut down entirely.”
Pornhub’s parent company Aylo has blocked access in multiple states to its network of more than a dozen sites following age verification laws passing in Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Utah. In Louisiana, visitors have to upload a form of government-issued ID to a state-run verification process.
Samantha Cole
Similar legislation has spread across the U.S., each similar in text and requirements. In a bill headed for the governor’s desk in Kansas, the bar for liability is lower than any other state: sites containing just 25 percent adult content would be held accountable with heavy fines if they don’t verify users’ ages.
As we’ve written, age verification laws threaten to drag us all back to a dark age of the internet. Laws that require site visitors to verify their ages won’t stop minors from seeing porn. They will, however, drive people to more dangerous, exploitative websites.
