California Advances Bill for Porn Site Age Verification

California is another state lining up to pass a law requiring adult sites to verify the ages of porn watchers.

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The California State Assembly passed the Parent’s Accountability and Child Protection Act that will require porn companies doing business in the state to verify that users are 18 years or older. This law would also affect other businesses such as fireworks, body branding, and even BB guns. Democrat Rebecca Bauer-Kahan and Republican Juan Alanis pushed for passage of the bill, which ended up receiving 65 out of possible 80 yes votes, and zero no votes with 15 assembly members listed as not voting.

Before the bill becomes law, it still has to pass the State Senate and then be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom.

Louisiana was the first state to pass an age verification law for adult sites in 2022. In the past year, several other states jumped on the bandwagon including Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.

One of the largest porn sites around, Pornhub, has taken issue with the age verification laws passed by the states. The company has instead pulled out of those states requiring verification.

“As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website,” reads a message Porhub visitors in Texas find when clicking on the site. “Unfortunately, the Texas law for age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas.”

Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, says it supports age verification, but “we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults.”

The company says that users who are required to verify their age instead go visit other sites that don’t comply with state law.

“In Louisiana last January, Pornhub was one of the few sites to comply with the new law. Since then, our traffic in Louisiana dropped approximately 80 percent,” the company said in an emailed statement to Gizmodo on Thursday. “These people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content. In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and children.”

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