Anti-porn activists are scoring big wins after a 21st century rebrand

Utah state Sen. Todd Weiler doesn’t mind the jokes. In 2016, after the Republican passed a resolution on the “public health crisis” of pornography and proposed a bill that would let individuals sue its producers for inflicting psychological harm, he was mocked by late night comics; Stephen Colbert even made a fake ad for “pornography lawyers.” This week, as his law requiring tougher age verification from adult sites went into effect, Weiler shared his hate mail on social media (“I hope your wife stops putting out,” one message read).

“I grew up watching David Letterman’s viewer mailbag,” Weiler told Semafor. “I think it’s fun for people to see what kind of feedback I’m getting, especially when it’s over the top.”

Weiler was winning, and Utah was setting a trend. Since 2016, fourteen other states have passed resolutions that declare pornography a public health crisis, in line with tobacco or drunk driving. This year, Utah and Louisiana implemented similar laws that make media companies liable if people under 18 access pornography.

“I don’t think that the point of this is child protection,” said Mike Stabile, the public affairs director of the Free Speech Coalition, which on Wednesday filed a challenge to the Utah law. “I think the point is the chilling effect. In the Utah case, we cannot find an age verification provider that complies with the law, meaning that the law as written doesn’t actually allow compliance.”

The age-verification law, which passed unanimously, inspired Pornhub to block any Utah-based ISP from the site; anyone who tried to visit saw a sex-free video from adult performer Cherie Deville urging them to contact their legislators. Weiler laughed about how many VPNs he must have sold, which allow residents to bypass the restrictions by hiding their location.

The trade-off — some ridicule from liberals, but no Pornhub access — was just fine by Utah’s Republicans.

“I fully support Pornhub’s decision to remove their content in Utah,” Gov. Spencer Cox said in a statement.

The new state laws would make it harder for minors to access pornography than at any time since life went online — if they’re upheld.

Both laws were criticized as possible First Amendment violations on the way to passage; in Louisiana, Democratic Sen. Jay Luneau warned the law’s sponsor, Rep. Laurie Schlegel, that the state might spend “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on lawyers before it was struck down.

Schlegel, a licensed sex addiction therapist, told Semafor that she studied precedent before writing the bill, and made sure the technology made it workable. “The precedent says that government has a compelling interest to protect children, and we’ve neglected that for the last couple of decades,” she told Semafor.

She also consulted the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, a decades-old anti-pornography organization. Benjamin Bull, its general counsel, said that the new age verification law was well-designed to survive a challenge — and in doing so, end the freedom to operate that pornography providers have taken for granted since the passage of the Communications Decency Act.

“I count noses at the Supreme Court, and there are at least six votes there to uphold this kind of law,” Bull told Semafor. “They’re looking for the right case to basically eliminate immunity that online providers have enjoyed, through a misreading of Section 230.”

New anti-pornography laws in red states haven’t stirred up the same emotions as abortion bans or anti-trans bills. Nobody’s filling the gallery of state legislatures to defend Pornhub, and the conventional wisdom is that the laws won’t be enforceable; that if VPNs don’t make them irrelevant, courts will strike them down.

But there is political momentum for restricting access to pornography, starting with the enforcement of laws that already prevent people under age 18 from accessing it — laws that the internet have made difficult to enforce. Anti-porn campaigners are gaining ground by warning about sexual exploitation and damage to young minds, rather than trying to brand material as fundamentally obscene.  That change is epitomized by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation: Until eight years ago, it was called Morality in Media.

Fears about human trafficking, child abuse, and revenge porn have drawn attention across the political spectrum, from mainstream feminists to the Qanon-addled fringe, and forced major changes at Pornhub and other sites already.

“We’re in a political environment where the right, and in some cases the left, is really invested in surveillance and in monitoring what we’re looking at and what we’re purchasing,” said Stabile, the free speech advocate. “I think we should all be scared.”

More broadly, anti-porn crusaders have sought to connect a wide range of buzzed-about social trends to their cause. Declining birth rates, decreased sexual activity among young adults, increased loneliness — conservatives see easy access to pornography as the X-factor in all of them.

“The generation raised in the last 20-25 years is the first to have basically unlimited exposure to pornography, whenever they want it, on every device,” said Bull, who was previously chief counsel at the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom. “Any psychotherapist will tell you that there’s a growing body of clients and patients that didn’t exist, or hardly existed at all, 30 years ago.”

Two of the GOP’s youngest senators have issued the same sort of warnings, and been ridiculed for it. When Ohio’s J.D. Vance told a Catholic magazine that “the combination of porn, abortion have basically created a really lonely, isolated generation,” and that he’d ban pornography if he could, liberal media outlets covered it like a gaffe. When Missouri’s Josh Hawley warned the National Conservatism conference that men were “withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games,” he got the same did-he-just-say-that reaction. And he kept saying it.

“Why don’t you turn off the computer, and log off the porn, and go ask a real woman on a date?” Hawley advised the young audience at last winter’s Turning Points USA AmericaFest.

“2023 is the end of access to pornographic sites for our children,” French Minister for Digital Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot told Le Parisien earlier this year. The government is working on its own system of age verification checks, Euronews reports, and American anti-porn activists are watching their efforts closely to see if they succeed.

Libertarians don’t see how any of this would do what proponents say. “Attempting to ban porn would at best be a foolish, expensive, and futile project, and at worst a path to a new and radically expanded police state devoted to punishing people for engaging in acts of consensual self-expression,” Peter Suderman wrote in Reason in 2018.

• In the New York Times, Natasha Singer looks at Louisiana’s law as an experiment that could “remake the internet for millions of adults, ushering in a tectonic cultural shift to a stricter, age-gated online world.”
• In Congress, a bipartisan group of legislators are sponsoring the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require publishers to prevent minors from accessing content that could lead to mental health disorders. But CNBC reports that its authors are struggling to satisfy concerns from civil rights groups that its provisions could block a wide range of healthy content and create an avenue for politicized campaigns to expand its reach even further.