States leave kids vulnerable to porn by pretending they're protecting them
In taking the role of parents, politicians screw it up again
Idaho, Texas and seven other states have passed laws to keep internet pornography out of the hands of children. The laws require age verification before the websites can be accessed. Accordingly, some adult websites have simply stopped providing content to anyone of any age from those states.
One well-known website, Pornhub, greets users with this message when accessing it from Idaho:
Dear user,
As you may know, your elected officials in Idaho are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk. … Until a real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Idaho.
Problem solved, right? Wrong. It takes about 30 seconds to bypass Idaho’s age restriction, as I did while sitting at a Boise park bench one sunny afternoon. Simply turn on your device’s VPN (virtual private network), pretend that you’re connecting from another state or another country and, boom, access is restored.
For my experiment, I told my VPN to connect me via a server in Spain, but I could have chosen just about any other country in the world.
And while sites such as Pornhub have blocked access in states with age verification laws, less scrupulous websites operated by foreign actors aren’t really interested in following state laws, and so they continue to operate and make content available.
Idaho’s law (and the laws of other states that have implemented age restrictions for certain internet content) is useless if the intent is to keep pornography away from kids. It simply doesn’t work. Worse, the law leaves parents with the mistaken belief that their kids won’t be subjected to online sex sites thanks to legislative action. As I’ve demonstrated, that’s not the case.
The U.S. Supreme Court is set to consider Texas’ age verification law, which will impact all of the others. Even if the court upholds the Texas statute, the problem remains that these legislative attempts to “protect” kids are shallow, ineffective, and likely to catch unsuspecting parents off guard when they find Little Timmy is still getting his kicks from porn sites anyway.
The Idaho statute passed the Legislature unanimously, a vote that kept politicians from being challenged on the issue of allowing pornography to fall in the hands of kids. They’re the only ones the new law protects. For kids and parents, however, the law is a big fail.