Texas upholds decision to restrict access to porn
In the age of the internet, is it possible to restrict access to porn? The US state of Texas is taking on the challenge.
Back in 2023, the legislature of Texas passed a bill that requires adult websites to use “reasonable age verification methods” – such as government-issued identification – to ensure users who are accessing explicit content are aged 18 or older.
PornHub – which is the major online porn platform in the market – launched a legal challenge to the legislation, on the basis that the proposed restrictions violated First Amendment rights. The First Amendment of the US constitution protects freedom of speech.
However, the appeals court in Texas has upheld the age verification provisions of the legislation, citing as precedent a Supreme Court decision from 1968 which outlawed the sale of “obscene materials” to minors.
In response to the court’s decision, PornHub has blocked anyone with a Texas IP address from accessing the site.
Texas user trying to access Pornhub are currently being met with a large message which states that the legislation impinges “on the rights of adults to access protected speech” and “it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’ stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors”.
The statement goes onto say that similar bills in other states have “failed to protect minors” as it drives people away from websites with more robust safety guidelines to those without the same protections.
“The Texas law for age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous,” the statement reads. “Not only will it not actually protect children, but it will also inevitably reduce content creators’ ability to post and distribute legal adult content and directly impact their ability to share the artistic messages they want to convey with it.”
If people in Texas want to access PornHub – whatever age they are – they will need to use a VPN service which masks their geographic location.
Why don’t porn providers want to adopt age-verification requirements?
While it might seem fairly straightforward to require distributors of porn to implement effective age-verification requirements, there’s fairly broad consensus that this would be a bad idea.
For the porn platforms, the objection is primarily commercial. Not only would it be expensive to develop and implement age-verification that went beyond self-verification by the user, there’s the potential legal exposure if it was found that an underage user had bypassed the age-verification gateway.
From a user perspective, the main concern is privacy. Whatever form of age-verification is used, it creates and stores data about the users using the age-verification gateway. These databases of pornography users will have a commercial value, but would also be a target for scams and extortion.
Whatever your sexuality, you probably don’t want information about the kind of porn that gets you off to be publicly available – it’s a risk that you face when you have to input government-issued identification in order to fuel your fantasies.
What will the impacts of the Texas porn ban be beyond PornHub?
What’s not clear is what other impacts of the Texas porn ban will now play out.
Particularly vulnerable are adult content creators that are based in Texas – most likely distributing their content through fan-subscription platforms such as OnlyFans.
We’ve seen a comparable situation in Germany in 2023. The authorities in Germany implemented a new AI tool to identify instances where pornography was being distributed without adequate age-checks. It wasn’t just online platforms such as PornHub that they were investigating, the search also included Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram, and more – scanning thousands of public posts and web pages per day. It was reported that hundreds of infringement notices were issued to content creators in Berlin, with officials instructing Twitter to block the user accounts that had been identified.
It seems highly likely that we’ll see similar crackdowns attempted in Texas.
What is pornography?
It’s always helpful to try and agree some definitions when we’re debating what is and what isn’t harmful.
A fairly widely used definition of pornography is that it is the explicit depiction of sexual acts for the purpose of stimulating sexual arousal.
Sure, there’s plenty of variations within that genre – not everyone finds the same things stimulating or arousing – but even if what’s being depicted is something that doesn’t arouse you, it’s fairly straightforward to identify the intention.
Who can view pornography
Under UK law, there’s not a lot of logic to this.
While people can consent to engage in sexual activity from the age of 16 and above, the laws restrict access to pornography to those aged over 18.
Of course, the reality is that anyone who has access to the internet and can punch in a basic search query can view all sorts of content that is undeniably pornographic.
While we might have the legislation in place that can in theory prevent this from happening, we don’t have the mechanisms in place that can robustly restrict someone who is under the age of 18 from accessing porn on the internet.
Is porn harmful?
This really depends on who you ask.
Putting to one side the question of age/access threshold, and also any debate about how porn is produced, if we look at porn in a vacuum, it’s difficult to see where the harm is.
Remember, when we’re talking about porn it’s the explicit depiction of sexual acts for the purpose of stimulating sexual arousal.
Maybe you’ve got a moral or a religious objection to the depiction of sexual acts, or the concept of sexual arousal, but that’s a different conversation.
Perhaps I’m over-generalising, but it seems fairly clear to me that sexual arousal is an essential part of our humanity. Sure, becoming sexually aroused is not exclusively dependent on the explicit depiction of sexual acts but it certainly helps. Pretty much every civilisation throughout history has demonstrated a penchant for creating explicit artwork of some kind – there’s nothing new about porn.
Some people describe their consumption of porn as an addiction. That’s not great, and if your usage of porn is disrupting your day-to-day life then you’re going to want to get some help with that. But that’s not the porn that’s causing the problem, it’s at most a symptom of other underlying issues that you need to address.
There are some studies that look at the type of porn being consumed. For example, recent analysis by the Chief Censor in New Zealand found that one-third of all pornography being watched depicts a fantasy of non-consensual sexual activity. This seems to correlate with concerns raised by women about how the consumption of porn by men has a negative impact on the quality of sexual encounters for straight women.
We clearly don’t have all the answers, but it suggests to me that while porn in and of itself is not harmful, if you’re approaching your sexual encounters – and life in general – from a slightly distorted perspective, then your consumption of porn may feed into that world-view.
For example, if you’re a straight guy, and your sense of identity isn’t particularly well-grounded, and you’re struggling to form meaningful relationships with women, then you’re potentially going to be more responsive to porn that makes you feel better about where you’re at – the fantasies that you’re going to respond to are those that lean into your perspective of the world. Porn isn’t causing that, but porn is part of that picture, and we can’t completely disassociate the production, distribution, and monetisation of porn from the people that are consuming that content.