Louisiana Law Now Requires Age Verification At Any Site Containing More Than One-Third Porn

Very few issues have generated as much ridiculous legislation as preventing minors from accessing pornography. Almost everyone agrees something must be done. And most seem to agree that doing anything - no matter how stupid - is better than doing nothing.

Extremely stupid versions of something" have cropped up around the nation, most of them propelled by a self-proclaimed anti-porn activist who once tried to marry his own computer in protest of gay marriage and has engaged in a number of performative lawsuits, including one against Apple for failing to prevent him from accessing porn on his devices.

Many of these bills have gone nowhere. However, a few have actually become law, providing the legislation's supporters with some cheap wins that look good on the anti-porn resume, if it they don't really do much to actually prevent children from accessing explicit content.

A law passed last year in Louisiana has just gone into effect, requiring age verification at sites that meet the state's watershed for porn content.

The porn industry has been around for a while and in today's digital age business is booming. When Laurie Schlegel isn't seeing her patients who struggle with sex addiction, she's at the Louisiana State Capitol.

The Republican state representative from Metairie passed HB 142 earlier this year requiring age verification for any website that contains 33.3% or more pornographic material.

Pornography is destroying our children and they're getting unlimited access to it on the internet and so if the pornography companies aren't going to be responsible, I thought we need to go ahead and hold them accountable," said Schlegel.

There's some weird stuff going on here, likely due to the law [PDF] being about 90% performative nonsense and 10% legalese.

First off, there's the strangely arbitrary cutoff point of one-third porn content. Unmentioned anywhere is how porn percentage will be determined. Also unmentioned is whether or not the law still applies when the total percentage of porn content dips below 33%.

This language appears to borrowed from the UK's disastrous porn filter legislation, which proposed the same cutoff line while similarly being vague about how the porn percentage of sites would be determined.

That sets the baseline for enforcement, suggesting a government entity might have to access all available content on a site to determine whether or not it can be held liable (via civil suits brought by residents or the state attorney general) for failing to properly conduct age verification.

But to get to all of this, one first has to wade through a paragraph presumably written by Rep. Schlegel, which supposedly justifies everything that comes after it.

Pornography contributes to the hyper-sexualization of teens and prepubescent children and may lead to low self-esteem, body image disorders, an increase in problematic sexual activity at younger ages, and increased desire among adolescents to engage in risky sexual behavior. Pornography may also impact brain development and functioning, contribute to emotional and medical illnesses, shape deviant sexual arousal, and lead to difficulty in forming or maintaining positive, intimate relationships, as well as promoting problematic or harmful sexual behaviors and addiction.

This sounds a lot like the stuff said by others pushing anti-porn legislation, a lot of it composed by a man who sued Apple for allowing him to access porn. It's a smokescreen that allows prudish legislators to hide their desire to control what content even adults can consume (by raising state-sponsored barriers) behind statements about concerns for the health and well-being of constituents.

This may be Schlegel's own writing, however. Her statements to WAFB contain plenty of other absurd assertions.

She said problems like depression, erectile dysfunction, lack of motivation, and fatigue can be directly linked to porn. She also said to prevent these issues from occurring at younger ages, this law is imperative.

It's tied to some of the biggest societal ills of human trafficking and sexual assault. And in my own practice, the youngest we've ever seen is an 8-year-old," noted Schlegel.

There's little if anything linking porn to sexual assault. And I don't know which of these problems the state rep observed in an 8-year-old, but I sincerely hope it wasn't erectile dysfunction.

The law may prevent sites required to verify the ages of visitors from collecting or storing credentials/personal info used for verification, but the author of the bill thinks the easiest way to verify age is to run it through a verification app created by a private company in partnership with the Louisiana government.

According to Schlegel, websites would verify someone's age in collaboration with LA Wallet. So, if you plan on using these sites in the future, you may want to download the app.

I would say so," said Sara Kelley, project manager with Envoc. I mean, I think it's a must-have for anyone who has a Louisiana state ID or driver's license."

LA Wallet is a digital drivers license. At the time of its creation, it was the first of its kind in the country. Nudging porn viewers towards state-sponsored apps is all part of the plan. If people believe (correctly or incorrectly) the government may have some way of knowing they're visiting sites containing at least 33.3% porn, they're less likely to visit these sites. So, this law may claim it's for the children, but it's all about steering people away from content certain legislators don't like.

It also will nudge sites to more directly police user-generated content for porn to help ensure they don't inadvertently pass the one-third mark and open themselves up to litigation. The law controls content on both ends of the equation: the distributor and the consumer.

Not that the law is going to actually prevent kids from accessing porn. Plenty of porn can be found on sites not subject to the law. And plenty of porn can be easily accessed even with a state mandate in place. Since most sites affected by this aren't actually located in Louisiana, they're under no obligation to verify the ages of users, even if the users are located in this state. And the law creates no demand (nor could it without creating even greater privacy concerns) that sites police incoming internet traffic for users' locations at the time of access.

It's all a bunch of performative stupidity that, at best, will encourage stupid, performative people to file stupid, performative lawsuits. And maybe that's really the end goal: the pointless hassling of tech companies for not being better parents to the children of Louisiana.