SHIELD Your Eyes! Louisiana Republicans Pass Age Verification to View Porn Sites
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January 3, 2023On our list of good things that have happened so far in 2023, we can officially add a small victory in the fight against online pornography.
The bill, known as the SHIELD Act, was passed in Louisiana and requires “porn sites to verify the age of their users, or risk the consequences,” Fox News Reported.
If porno sites fail to comply, they risk being sued by parents. And Representative Laurie Schlegel hopes that Congress will step up on a national level and pass further legislation to protect minors.
When she isn’t fulfilling her duties as a Representative, Schlegel actually counsels patients with porn addiction and says the youngest patient she has seen for the disorder was 8-years-old.
EIGHT.
Is this law going to stop the problem? Probably not.
Will it slow the problem? Ummm, still probably not.
BUT at least it’s an attempt to do something—anything—to fight against the damage online pornography is inflicting on children and our society.
4 Comments
I can appreciate an attempt to keep kids away from porn, but this bill does nothing. All the threats of lawsuits will do nothing when the acceptable adherence to the law is a popup that says “If you are 18 years old or more, click OK.” Plus a ton of sites already do that, it’s not like this law even makes porn sites go through any additional work greater than a CEO calling their legal counsel.
I never like it when the government “feels a need to do something, anything to help” because it nearly always ends up an unmitigated disaster. The PARENTS should be monitoring this stuff.
Oh I know, I know – everyone has a phone or computer these days and can access porn for free. Most of the kids are already more tech aware than their parents and know about free VPNs that can easily get around the location parameters, so it’s not likely to work with geo-location awareness at the site level. And the sites – they’ll just move overseas where US law doesn’t apply to them. And like porn “stars” – the sites go up and down so often and quickly that tracking/tracing them would prove near impossible.
I don’t have a solution other than God and good parenting/awareness – but can tell you this will be a nothing-burger.
The way people are attacking the problem is dumb and works against the technology instead of with it. There are already DNS records that allow you to block incoming pornographic content. If you want to try to prevent children from accessing it I suggest doing it at the ISP or DNS level instead of at the website level. This might require forcing a consistent top level domain (.com, .gov, .net etc) for porn sites but that is a far easier change than forcing them to add functionality and trying to sue them for not having it.
The .xxx domain already exists but there was nothing compelling already-established porn sites to embrace it. The best you’ll find on that domain is PornHub wannabes and subscription sites.