Online Safety Act Places US Adults At Risk
The US State of Utah now has a law requiring adult websites to verify the age of their users and this comes after a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit from an industry group challenging its constitutionality.
In May this year, Utah became the 2nd US State to create a law requiring adult websites to verify the identities of the user. The law requires websites that host porn to use one of several methods to ensure visitors are 18 years or older, including state-issued digital IDs and third-party age verification services.
Critics say the bills could make the Internet less safe for children by censoring content that could help them and giving parents tools to surveil children in unsafe home environments.
And so opponents have argued that age verification laws for adult websites not only infringe upon free speech, but also threaten digital privacy because it’s impossible to ensure that websites don’t retain user identification data.
Recently, the Free Speech Coalition, which is also challenging a similar law in Louisiana, vowed to appeal the dismissal.
The law was created because of worries that most websites do almost nothing to prevent minors from accessing porn online. But currently it also discourages adults from using these sites, the stigma around watching porn means that very few people want their face or government name linked to their browsing on a site like Pornhub.
To the anti-porn Republicans this broader challenge to adult websites is an excellent effect of the law. Yet a popular adult websites, Pornhub, went offline in Utah as a protest against this new law.
In 1998 the US government restricted access to adult content by requiring websites to verify users’ ages. This was the Child Online Protection Act, but after a decade of litigation, the Supreme Court refused to hear the government’s final appeal that the law was unconstitutional.
The reason is that the First Amendment prevents the government from weighing in on what kinds of content might be “harmful to minors.”
Platformer: AP: Utah State Legislature: The Verge: Mediashift: Hacker News: Cyberscoop
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