Pornography Restriction Bill to Protect Minors Proposed in Tennessee
By Movieguide® Contributor
A Tennessean legislator just introduced a bill that protects children from viewing pornography and explicit content online.
“The ‘Protect Tennessee Minors Act,’ sponsored by state Rep. Patsy Hazlewood (R), would mandate pornography distributors put in place age-verification measures to ensure minors in the Volunteer State are barred from accessing sexually explicit content,” Faithwire reported.
This would make the online leader of pornography, Pornhub, inaccessible to young users. Similar laws exist in Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas and Utah.
The legislation would make companies such as Pornhub require valid government identification from their users. Companies that don’t comply face $10,000 fines and up to 15 years in prison as a felon.
Movieguide® reported on Texas’s age verification bill in June:
The bill, HB 1181, would require any online platform that contains pornographic material to verify with ID that users are 18 or older. The sites would not be able to retain any ID information from the users.
HB 1181 has been passed on to Texas Governor Greg Abbott for approval. If passed, Texas would become the fifth state that has passed legislation that protects children from pornographic content.
“Exposing children to pornography is a form of child sexual abuse and exploitation that can severely damage a child’s intellectual development and emotional well-being,” the legislator said. “It can lead to difficulty in forming and maintaining positive relationships. This legislation will apply the same safeguards and restrictions to the online world that we already have in place in the physical world. The standard should be the same.”
ABC’s News Channel 9 reported further comments from Hazlewood: “There’s so many things, so many places that our children can go they’re exposed to so many things that as grandparent, as a parent might not even cross our mind that this would be something that you need to guard against,’ Rep. Hazlewood told us on Thursday. ‘So I think we all have a responsibility as a society to protect our children.”
Laila Mickelwait at the Washington Examiner noted in 2020 that it is all too easy not just to view pornography on Pornhub but to upload it too.
She said:
In fact, all that is needed to upload pornography onto Pornhub is an email address. No government-issued ID is required, not even to become “verified” with its trusty blue checkmark that makes everything seem a-OK.
I know this, because I tried it.
It took me under 10 minutes to create a user account and upload blank test content to the site, which went live instantly. I could have then gone on to become Pornhub-verified, and all I would need to do is send a photo of myself holding a paper with my username. That’s it.
This legislation would also restrict minors from uploading pornography on these sites.
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