(C) Florida Phoenix
This story was originally published by Florida Phoenix and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Florida Republicans want age verification on porn sites. Here’s how that worked out in other states [1]

['Jackie Llanos', 'More From Author', '- January']

Date: 2024-01-08  

Florida could join the growing list of states attempting to shield children from accessing pornography online under a proposal from Rep. Chase Tramont, of Central Florida. Although age verification laws in other states have had bipartisan support, those attempts have resulted in sites blocking access to entire states.

Tramont, who represents parts of Brevard and Volusia counties, filed HB 3 on Friday, which would require entities that publish content harmful to minors to use third-party services to verify that the person attempting to view the content is an adult. In the bill, harmful content is described as something that:

The average person applying contemporary community standards would find, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;

Depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct,

Lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors.

With this move, Florida is following the lead of Virginia, Louisiana, Utah, Montana, Texas, North Carolina, Arkansas and Mississippi. But enforcement of the age verification laws in those states hasn’t been straightforward. At the end of 2023, Pornhub blocked Montanans from accessing its website because the state’s age verification law went into place on Jan. 1, according to Florida Phoenix’s sister publication, the Daily Montanan.

An August analysis by the Virginia Mercury, another Phoenix sister publication, found that only one porn website was using age verification methods mandated by the law, 10 had blocked access to Virginians and 56 continued did not attempt to verify users’ ages. In both Montana and Virginia, the laws passed with bipartisan support.

There have also been legal challenges to the age verification laws. Most recently, a federal judge in Texas struck down an age verification law in Texas while another dismissed a suit in Utah, according to the Associated Press. There is also a pending lawsuit in Louisiana, where Phoenix’s sister publication the Louisiana Illuminator reported that porn websites require users to log in with an app that can carry a state-issued identification card. Users in those states can also use a virtual private network to disguise their location to use the blocked sites.

Social media restrictions

Another age verification proposal from a Florida Republican focuses on social media platforms.

HB 1, from Rep. Tyler Sirois of Brevard County, would require companies to make sure their users are over 16 years old. House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell criticized the proposal during a press conference Monday morning.

“The Florida Legislature should trust parents to raise their kids and focus on issues we can do something about like our housing crisis. So I don’t really see how this law can be enforced or used,” she said. “It seems performative to me. I do think social media can have bad effects on our society and kids specifically, but I don’t know that this bill is going to solve the problem at all.”

In October, Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody joined other states in suing Meta — the parent company of Instagram and Facebook — citing its use of “addictive” features to collect information from children.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/01/08/florida-republicans-want-age-verification-on-porn-sites-heres-how-that-worked-out-in-other-states/

Published and (C) by Florida Phoenix
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/floridaphoenix/