May 4, 2023
Decoding the Utah law mandating pornographic websites verify their users’ age
By
Rajan Laad
Just yesterday, a new
Utah law requiring pornographic websites to verify the ages of their users took effect.
After
Louisiana, Utah is the second state to enact an age verification law to prevent underage individuals from accessing sexually explicit material online.
Republican State Sen. Todd Weiler who sponsored the law
said the following:
It’s part of our job as a society — and maybe a subset of my job as a lawmaker — to try to protect children[.]
I’m not gonna blame all of society’s ills on pornography, but I don’t think it’s helpful when a kid is forming their impressions of sex and gender to have all of this filth and lewd depictions on their mind.
Under federal
law, it is illegal to show pornographic content to underaged individuals, however, that law is seldom enforced.
So how will this new Utah law work?
Senate Bill 287 mandates that websites with “a substantial portion of material that may be harmful to minors” must verify the age of individuals attempting to access their portals.
The age is verified by comparing the information entered by a user with information from a government database, for mobile phone users this can also be done by a “digitized identification card”.
The law also allows age to be verified by “any commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data to verify the age of the person attempting to access the material.”
Companies that don’t comply will be liable to be sued if a minor accesses their content.
In response to the legislation, “adult content” giant Pornhub
blocked access to would-be users in Utah.
(Internet service providers and hosting entities are exempted from being sued.)
Another recently-passed
law also
requires social media companies to verify all Utah users’ ages, starting March 1, 2024, and block accounts of users who don’t supply age verification.