Louisiana now has a law requiring age verification of users on sites that contain pornography.
The policy of the law is that sites that contain 33.3% or more pornographic content must require users to verify that they have reached the age of 18. This list also includes Pornhub, which will now require an official ID card.
A video posted on Twitter appears to demonstrate what users in Louisiana are already seeing. Pornhub asks users to verify their age with AllpassTrust, which works with Louisiana’s LA Wallet digital ID service.
Hello from the surveillance state of Louisiana. People in Louisiana should use their drivers license to go to pornhub. This is truly wild. Under his eye. pic.twitter.com/pVKEeVcCGw
— Public Defending (@fodderyfodder) January 2, 2023
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To use LA Wallet on pornography sites, you need to scan your government ID to create a digital license that will be taken as official identification.
Vice confirmed this with a VPN, noting that other adult sites like XVideos and XHamster are still available as usual. The OnlyFans site hangs on the loading page showing the logo only when accessed from a Louisiana IP address and eventually times out before the site loads.
Louisiana’s law was passed last year and will go into effect in early 2023, marking a major step in a series of government actions aimed at keeping children safe. Legislators in several US states have declared pornography a “public health crisis”, others have taken some precautionary measures – in Utah, for example, they require sites to provide users with warnings before accessing the content.
California also passed a law in August aimed at making online platforms safer for children and requiring web services to conduct surveys to assess potential risks for users under 18. Among other measures, sites must limit the use of personal information from minors and avoid collecting geolocation data. They should also limit the use of dark templates.
Age verification measures have been problematic in the past. Among other things, this requires the third-party service to provide sensitive information about your views, and this potentially puts large companies, who can easily afford the service, ahead of smaller independent sites. The UK failed years of efforts to introduce verification on adult sites, although it has recently revived its plans.
In 2022, the French data protection agency CNIL concluded that “there is still no solution” for age verification that is sufficiently reliable, comprehensive and confidential. The CNIL also noted that users can often bypass localized bans by using a VPN.
Earlier, YouTube blocked the account of Pornhub with 900 thousand subscribers, and Meta permanently blocked Pornhub’s account on Instagram: the companies say that the site repeatedly violated the terms of use of resources regarding nudity, adult content and sexual harassment.
Pressure on Pornhub and its Luxembourg-based parent company MindGeek continues to mount. Some have accused the site of not moderating content and allowing videos containing child abuse material and videos of people without permission to be posted. These concerns led to the resignation of Pornhub CEO Feras Antun and COO David Tasillo, and affected Pornhub’s relationships with other companies. In 2020, Visa and Mastercard stopped transactions on Pornhub due to the site’s “illegal content”, although both companies are still dealing with a lawsuit that accuses them of “helping MindGeek monetize child porn”.
Source: The Verge
