A meritorious bill to curb kids’ access to online porn has limitations, downsides

It’s a good bet that an election-year bill to crack down on juvenile access to online pornography, which elected legislators of both parties passed overwhelmingly, will become law in Virginia. Penalizing smut purveyors plays well on campaign brochures, ads and websites.

Political cynicism aside, however, there is meritorious intent behind Sen. Bill Stanley’s bill to hold internet publishers of material harmful to children, specifically that of a sexually explicit nature, legally liable if they do not secure documented proof of a user’s age before granting access. That proof would take the form of some sort of government-issued ID.

Stanley, R-Franklin County, is correct in calling underage consumption of internet porn an epidemic. Exploitative, graphic and outright gross representations of human sexuality over the past 50 years has proliferated from magazines in sleazy bookstores to instant, on-demand access on smartphones ever-present in the pockets of teens.

A study Common Sense Media released in January found that an alarming three-fourths of teens have viewed online porn by their 17th birthdays with the average first exposure at age 12. So pervasive is internet flesh-peddling that 41% of the minors surveyed reported viewing nudity or sex acts during the school day.

Psychologists and organizations that treat addictive behaviors have long warned of the norm-shattering, mind-twisting, lifelong damage from exposure to porn at such a vulnerable age. As much as many position the issue as a moral and a societal failure, it is also, unquestionably, a mental health crisis.

And it’s imminently reasonable to empower people to sue deep-pocketed online smut purveyors for the wreckage they cause in children’s lives, as Stanley’s bill does. The New York Times reports that data gathered by XBIZ, an adult-content trade publication, shows  revenues for porn influencers and platforms rose from $5 billion in 2012 to at least $15 billion last year.

Stanley’s legislation, now on Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s desk, would require submission of some form of government-issued identification to prove that users are 18 or older to access nothing-left-to-the-imagination sex sites.

That has caused alarm about entrusting highly sensitive personally identifying data to porn sites, many of which operate in the darkest alleyways of the web and in countries outside the reach of U.S. (and Virginia) law. There is legitimate fear that identity thieves will be the ultimate beneficiaries of porn age-verification measures such as Virginia’s and a similar one that took effect in Louisiana earlier this year.

According to PrivacyHub, a newsletter published by privacy advocates, some websites can properly handle the data gathering, but not all would be so adept or scrupulous.

“… The additional data handling still opens up new avenues for cybercriminals and government entities to abuse these systems for data harvesting. Using that personal information, cybercriminals can steal your identity or carry out a number of cyber-attacks, including sextortion and spear phishing,” said a PrivacyHub article earlier this month.

Or, you can just bypass your state’s restrictions using a virtual tool people in totalitarian regimes such as Russia, China and Iran use to evade their countries’ internet censors and access news from the West: virtual private networks. Developed to protect people from internet snoops, VPNs conceal a user’s IP address, meaning that a user in, say, Norfolk could appear to be logged in from Phoenix or Seattle or virtually any city.

Today’s children are more tech savvy before they reach kindergarten than most of their parents. My 2-year-old grandson not long ago began playing with his family’s TV remote and, in just a few minutes, had purchased a Disney movie. 

Workarounds to the Louisiana law are already being posted online. And there’s the age-old standby of stealing mom’s or dad’s ID to access porn sites.

Outright proscriptions of various activities harmful to kids, though necessary, are largely ineffective.

We ban people younger than 21 from buying or consuming alcohol, yet underage drinking contributed to more than 3,900 deaths in that age group annually and cost the U.S. economy $24 billion in 2010, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

We ban vaping by those younger than 18, yet the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration last year reported that underage e-cigarette usage is reaching pre-pandemic levels, when it was blamed for widespread juvenile nicotine addiction and serious lung ailments among high school and even middle school students.

Until the government and the economy give a break to parents or other children’s primary caregivers — hopelessly stretched thin and often working multiple jobs to meet rising expenses — there aren’t enough cops, courtrooms and lawyers in the world to ward off pornographers and the other wolves at their doors.