In today’s ever technologically advancing world, access to any information, image or video is quite literally at our fingertips. With smartphone users becoming the global majority, we are experiencing unprecedented abilities to consume endless streams of online content – with no discriminating on what kind of content that may be. And, with a huge percentage of these internet users being children, this inevitably raises concerns surrounding the prevalence of minors consuming adult content.
Over the last year, the US has seen a major influx of laws enforcing stricter rules regarding access to online pornography. In July, Idaho joined a slew of states that now require age verification to view websites that publish and distribute porn with House Bill 498.
This is enforced either through submission of a digitized form of identification or via a third-party age verification tool. Instead of conforming to the new law, popular sites like PornHub have chosen to entirely do away with offering their services to those who reside in parts of the country spearheading this effort. In states like Idaho, Texas, and Utah, attempting to visit the site redirects you to a landing page, denying everyone access to the site’s content – child or adult.
The porn industry, by nature, is one that is exploitative of women and children and reinforces cultural ideals of sexual violence. I personally am in support of minimizing access to such content that compounds the issues of rape and sexual harassment, like so many genres of porn tend to do. However, this topic is vastly nuanced, and as long as humans are sexual beings, the demand for (and, therefore, production of) porn will always exist.
While the protection of children is always positive, the methods of age verification in use and the effects of such a ban leave many Americans with major hesitations. At the forefront of people’s minds is the issue of privacy: with the internet already having increasing access to personal information such as purchase history, the idea of providing a pornography website with an ID that displays one’s legal name and home address is laughable. Once that information is uploaded, where is it stored? And what’s stopping criminals from extorting users, threatening to share with employers and family members their private internet activity if they don’t pay a hefty sum? For experienced cyber attackers, it’d be like taking candy from a baby.
These new laws aim to prevent minors from consuming adult content altogether. What they don’t take into account is that where there is a will, there is a way. No matter your stance on pornography, people of all ages are going to look for this content regardless of the law. And, with mainstream websites like PornHub disabling their services for all users, people are then going to go looking for their fix from other sources – ones that fall outside the jurisdiction of the US government and potentially have far fewer regulations. This rise in traffic to sketchy sites exacerbates the issues of sex trafficking, child porn, and the overall abuse so many sex workers endure.
Laws like Idaho’s House Bill 498 are a feeble attempt at decreasing the amount of inappropriate content minors have access to. While its intention is to protect children, it may very well be inadvertently both exposing kids to unregulated porn and exacerbating the exploitation of those in the videos. Governmental and technological intervention in internet consumption is, at best, ineffective and, at worst, harmful.
At the end of the day, the control of what children are consuming is most effective when it is left to parents to determine. Not only does this method diminish the scope of control the government has concerning personal information, but it also can open up discussions on the ethics of porn and what is and isn’t appropriate for children.