Seven states adopted legislation last year to require age verification proving that a user is 18 to gain access to pornography sites. In 2024, by some counts, as many as a dozen additional states are considering bills of their own. If successful, this trend would erect a multi-state barrier between children and pornography platforms, a strong position which could potentially support efforts to enact federal legislation as well.

This kind of legislation has broad support among the general public, which recognises that the state routinely age-verifies kids to block them from consuming things that we deem inappropriate for them. But this simple logic is not shared by powerful entrenched interests which seemingly can bear no amount of regulatory protection for kids online.

As lobbyists converge on the US Capitol to protect the right of Big Tech to addict and advertise to children — according to one study, there is one social media lobbyist in Washington per every four members of Congress — they are also flooding the states in an effort to sweep away laws designed to give kids more freedom from pornography and social media sites.

Vulnerable

It is necessary to defend these laws from powerful interests that will not take regulation lying down. In October, the New York Times published a story on how the policy ideas of my organisation, the Institute for Family Studies, as well as our close collaborators, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, have been "a catalyst for the laws targeting online pornography and social media" across the country. With a few degrees of separation, these bills now being considered are modelled after our work.

This legislation is bipartisan, having been signed into law by Democratic and Republican governors alike. In August 2023, Politico described age verification laws as "perhaps the most bipartisan policy in the country." Our polling among parents confirms this description overwhelmingly. In a national poll we commissioned in late 2022 with YouGov, 86 percent of parents agreed that it is "too easy" for kids to access pornography online. Large majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents agreed.

The reason so many parents agreed is because pornography is bad for their kids. A conservative estimate of the average age that an adolescent first encounters pornography on their smart devices is 13 years old. Other estimates put the average age far younger.

A child addicted to pornography has more difficulty forming stable relationships and is more likely to suffer from mental health problems. According to a 2020 study of more than 1,000 college students, 17.0, 20.4, and 13.5 percent of students reported severe or extremely severe levels of depression, anxiety and stress, respectively, with compulsive pornography use significantly affecting all three mental health parameters.

Worse, pornography sites are exposing children to moral horrors. In a 2020 exposé on Pornhub in The New York Times, for instance, columnist Nicholas Kristof writes the following:

Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for "girls under18" (no space) or "14yo" leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren't of children being assaulted, but too many are.