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By Jordan King
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A total of 16 states have now approved legislation requiring pornographic websites to ask their users to prove that they are over 18 years old.
The following states have passed, or have agreed to pass, age restriction laws—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Virginia.
Each state features its own version of the age verification law, but the principle is similar across all of them.
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In Kansas, which passed its law to go into effect on July 1, websites with material that is deemed "harmful to minors" on at least 25 percent of its pages have to verify a user's age with a database or age-verification technology approved by the state's Attorney General's Office.
Proponents of the law said the legislation will protect children.
"The harms that pornography cause to our Kansas kids compel us to create barriers for their access," Kansas Republican state Rep. Susan Humphries said of the bill in April, according to The Topeka-Capitol Journal.
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One of the sponsors of the legislation in Oklahoma, Republican State Rep. Toni Hasenbeck, said the law was necessary in the state "because it is commonplace in our society for a child to be alone with their digital device in their bedroom."
She said porn is much more available than in the past when "there might be a sixth-grade boy who would find a Playboy magazine in a ditch somewhere."
The proposed bills have faced some pushback with the porn industry, and some who are concerned about free speech, fighting against the new proposals in the interest of adult users maintaining privacy.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court struck down a plea from the Free Speech Coalition to block an age verification law in Texas.
Republican Texas State Rep. Matt Shaheen told the Catholic News Agency, "A coalition of porn distributors unsuccessfully sued to block the requirement that porn sites perform age verification and now Texas children are safer from their filth. I will continue to fight to protect children from being sexualized."
Pornhub, one of the world's most frequently visited porn sites, has completely blocked its website from Texas users in protest of the law.
Executive Director of the Free Speech Coalition Alison Boden said in a statement, "Despite proponent's claims, age-verification online is simply not the same as flashing an ID at a check-out counter. The process is invasive and burdensome, with significant privacy risks for adult consumers."
Vera Eidelman, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney who represented the Free Speech Coalition in the Texas case, said this is an example of where "concerns about minors' access have led legislators to pass unconstitutional laws."
"Though it purportedly seeks to limit minors' access to online sexual content, the law in fact imposes significant burdens on adults' access to constitutionally-protected expression, requiring them to provide personal identifying information online to access sensitive, intimate content," She continued.
"We've gone through this time and again, with everything from drive-in movies to video games to websites, and courts have repeatedly struck down laws imposing requirements that burden adults' access to non-obscene sexual content in the name of protecting children."
One of the few Republicans to vote against this type of legislation, southeastern Kansas state Rep. Ken Collins said, "The information used to verify a person's age could fall into the hands of entities who could use it for fraudulent purposes," according to NBC 5.
Others are concerned that limits are being placed on the freedoms offered by anonymity for not enough gain, given that children will still be able to access pornography through the dark web or unregulated social media sites.
Kansas State Democratic Rep. Brandon Woodard said supporters of the new restrictions "don't understand how technology works."
Pornography exists on 12 percent of all websites and is viewed by 69 percent of American men and 40 percent of American women, on average, each year, according to Ballard Brief Research Library's report from last spring.
The report also found that "many children are first exposed to pornography between the ages of nine and 13."
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