Failure To Protect Kids From On-Line Porn
While the Biden administration offers a token gesture, Texas is leading a powerful initiative to require internet porn sites to block access to children by verifying the age of users.
Ed. Note: The U.S. Supreme Court on 6/27/2025 in a 6-3 decision upheld the TX law requiring websites with at least one-third “sexual material harmful to minors” to verify users’ ages to ensure they are 18 or older. The majority said the law “incidentally burdens” adult speech but is constitutional.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy this week called for warning labels on social-media platforms, contending urgent action is needed to address a mental-health emergency involving young people.
Warning labels?
Murthy concedes that the health of young people is harmed by exposure to “violent and sexual content’ on the internet. “We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis, and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis - one that we must urgently address,” he said.
Is a warning label an effective response?
Dr. Murthy essentially is telling the half of teens who view pornography online not to look.
Promising Texas Initiative
Meanwhile, a promising effort is underway in Texas, where the legislature in 2023 adopted a law backed by Attorney General Ken Paxton to require websites offering “sexual material harmful to minors” to employ reasonable methods to verify a user’s age. Failure to do so results in heavy fines and litigation.
In the past, more than a dozen states adopted laws to protect children from internet porn, but the laws were ineffective because they depended on individuals to file lawsuits. The Texas law looks to the Attorney General for enforcement, and Paxton is aggressively filling the bill.
In April, Paxton secured a $675,000 settlement from a national company, Multi Media, LLC, for operating a pornographic website, chatubate.com, without an age check method. Multi Media is a California-based company without an office in Texas.
Bloomberg reported in May that Texas was the only state to actively enforce its age check law and had filed six lawsuits against porn companies.
At least eight states have adopted laws similar to the Texas law.
A leading internet porn site, Pornhub, began blocking access to Texas consumers after Paxton brought a $1.6 million lawsuit against its parent company, Aylo Global Entertainment, based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Aylo attempted unsuccessfully to block the Texas law, arguing it violated free speech rights and privacy. In March, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, LA, upheld the age verification portion of the law.
The Texas law, H.B. 1181, states that pornography is “potentially biologically addictive, desensitizing brain reward circuits, increasing conditioned responses, and weakening brain function.” The legislature said exposure to porn can be associated with many negative emotional, psychological, and physical health outcomes for preadolescent users.
The law states a commercial entity that publishes pornography must require an individual to provide digital identification or comply with a commercial age verification system that verifies age using government issued identification or “a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data to verify the age of an individual.”
The law provides a civil penalty of $10,000 per day the company operates the internet website in violation of the age verification requirements.
A Porn Epidemic
Common Sense Media in 2023 surveyed teens (age 13-17) in the U.S. and found that 54% have watched porn on-line. Here are some of the disturbing findings from the survey:
• 15% of teens said they first saw on-line pornography at age 10 or younger. The average age reported was 12.
• 44% saw pornography intentionally, while 58% saw it accidentally.
• 52% of teens saw pornography showing violent and/or aggressive content, including what appears to be rape (19% of viewers), choking (36%), or someone in pain (37%). Just 33% saw pornography that depicted request for consent prior to sex.
Research shows that on-line pornography contributes to expectations that aggressive or violent sexual activity is normal in a healthy sexual relationship.
The U.S. Congress could enact a sweeping law similar to the one passed in Texas to protect children around the nation but it has not done so.
There is widespread agreement the internet has caused an explosion of pornography that is easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection. But there is little research on what kind of porn is being marketed and how it is affects U.S. society.
Why is Congress so uninterested in the porn industry? One reason might be that various estimates say on-line pornography is a $12 billion to $97 billion industry that makes more revenue than the combined revenues of major TV networks and U.S. sports leagues.
The porn industry in recent years has launched a strong lobbying effort to preserve legal protections like Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet publishers. Lobbyists include a group called “The Free Speech Coalition,” which opposed the Texas law.