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For most sites in most places in the world, verifying your age is a simple matter of picking a date from two decades ago and clicking “verify.” That’s no longer the case in Louisiana. Act 440, which went into effect on Sunday, requires the state’s 4.6 million residents trying to gain access to porn site likes PornHub to prove their age with government-issued identification.
Louisiana residents who try to visit PornHub are greeted by a screen stating that “Louisiana law now requires us to put in place a process for verifying the age of users who connect to our site from Louisiana.”
Through a third-party verification site called AllPassTrust, users need to connect their digital ID or driver’s license through LAWallet, Louisiana’s digital driver’s license platform. It appears that other porn streaming sites have yet to be affected.
Act 440 was authored by Republican state Rep. Laurie Schegel, passed by the state’s Republican-led House of Representatives and signed into law by John Bel Edwards, the state’s Democratic governor. Sites with a “substantial portion” of content deemed “harmful to minors” are made liable if they don’t perform “reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material.”
It’s getting awfully surveillancey in here. Anyone in Louisiana accessing pornhub will now have to link their drivers license or government ID in order to access the site. Under his eye. https://t.co/uji6Jo3Tde pic.twitter.com/mMNO2pfs96
— Public Defendering (@fodderyfodder) January 2, 2023
A “substantial portion” is defined as anything over 33.3% — so platforms like Twitter, where porn is allowed, are presumably unaffected. Content “harmful to minors” is described by the new law as that showing any of the following: “Pubic hair, anus, vulva, genitals, or nipple of the female breast. Touching, caressing, or fondling of nipples, breasts, buttocks, anuses, or genitals. Sexual intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation, flagellation, excretory functions, exhibitions, or any other sexual act.”
Some are hoping a similar law will be adopted at a federal level. On Dec. 14, Utah Sen. Mike Lee introduced the Screen Act (Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net), which would require porn sites to properly verify the age of its users across the US.
“Online pornography is extreme and graphic and only one click away from our children,” Louisiana’s Schegel wrote in a Dec. 30 Facebook post. “This is not your daddy’s Playboy. And if pornography companies refuse to be responsible, then we must hold them accountable. This law is a first step.”
Pornhub didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.