New Louisiana Law Forces You to Upload ID to Watch Porn Online

A new law went into effect in Louisiana on January 1, requiring that prospective porn watchers upload a copy of a government-issued ID card to gain access to adult websites like Pornhub and YouPorn.

Residents are displeased.

"I discovered it on accident while trying to view said material," Louisiana resident Sydney Blanchard told Futurism. "I thought Pornhub must have gotten hacked — why are they asking me for my personal information?"

Many, like Blanchard, feel blindsided by the law. But the bill's backers argue that kids are overexposed to porn and and negatively harmed by it, and that since anyone can check that "I'm definitely 18+" box, further action was needed to protect them.

Minors "are getting unlimited access to it on the internet," Representative Laurie Schlegel, the author of the bill, told New Orleans' Fox8 News. "If pornography companies aren't going to be responsible, I thought we would hold them accountable."

And sure, it's true that minors are online, and that studies have shown that early exposure to porn can negatively impact kids' mental and emotional health. There are dark corners of the internet out there, and parents absolutely have a right to be concerned about what their kids see.

But even so, the bill raises alarm bells. It feels invasive, critics say, and smacks of the sort of state surveillance and moral policing associated more with totalitarian states like Iran or China than the United States. At the end of the day, does anybody want the government peering at the smut they're watching? Is anyone sure it'll never leak, or that the data won't be used for nefarious purposes in the future?

"They claim that they don't keep all the information, that they'll just verify how old you are," Representative Mandie Landry, the only Louisiana house lawmaker to vote against the bill, told Futurism. "That's bullshit."

"I would point to the Ashley Madison situation," she said, referring to the infamous data breach that outed thousands of cheating spouses, and added that the state doesn't have the cybersecurity resources needed to ensure that the porn data could never be breached.

Data, after all, is a dangerous thing. Porn platforms are forbidden from retaining user information in the process of enforcing the new Louisiana rules, but the state makes no such claims of its own; indeed, data has to be collected in order for the system to even work. And though the state has made some vague promises about protecting user data outside of the bill's written language, there are multiple third-party vendors involved.

On Pornhub, for instance, users are required to make an account with a mysterious site called Allpasstrust, a third-party verification popup that connects to a state-backed digital wallet app called LA Wallet where user ID information is stored. While the Allpasstrust website promises that it only uses individuals' data to grant or block access, it all still feels a bit like a big, flimsy pinky promise. And when it comes to the most lascivious parts of your browsing history, that really doesn't cut it.

"I'm not sure where this information is actually going, who has access to it," said Blanchard. "And even if a representative that I've apparently elected is telling me that they're not collecting my information, I don't necessarily believe in that they have the grasp on the technology that would make me feel confident in the answer they're giving me."

Landry, an attorney, also pointed out that the law runs into more existential First Amendment questions that may render it both unconstitutional and unenforceable. And besides, she says, there are already many perfectly effective parental control systems out there.

"There's plenty of protections and programs that parents can put on phones and computers that don't run into First Amendment issues, or Commerce Clause issues, or data breach or overreach or anything," she added. "This is just way, way too far."

"There's a lot of loopholes," she added, and "negative angles to this."

And on top of it all, motivated adolescents — who are notoriously good at accessing any content they want, regardless of rules — will be able to outsmart the filter by obscuring their location with a VPN, many of which are available for free.

There are some other curious provisions in the bill that further limit its efficacy. The law only applies, for example, to sites if more than a third of their content is pornographic. In other words, if a platform is 10 percent hardcore porn and 90 percent nature documentaries, it's technically off the hook — a dumb loophole that means kids can still find adult material on sites that also host other types of content, like Reddit or Twitter.

The law's advocates, of course, push back by saying they're just trying to protect kids.

"We require brick and mortar businesses to check ID before providing anyone access to this type of material but somehow we've given the internet a free pass," Schlegel said in a statement. "How does this make sense? And because it's free and easily accessible without any need to verify your age, hardcore pornography is just a click away from our children.

"I always like to tell people, 'This is not your daddy's Playboy,'" she continued. "What kids are seeing on the internet today is extreme and graphic, hardcore pornography."

That's all true. But as anyone who's worked with kids knows, outlawing something only mystifies it and makes it fascinating. In real life, experts recommend that parents proactively talk to their kids about porn, aiming to communicate its dangers and shortcomings without imparting a sense of shame.

Plus, the specific reasons porn is bad for kids — that kids use it as de facto sex ed even though it promotes unrealistic body images, normalizes extreme acts, and provides warped narratives about consent without the crucial context that it's make-believe for grownups — would almost certainly best be combatted with comprehensive sexual education.

Sex education in Louisiana, however, is far from comprehensive. Schools aren't required to tech sex ed at all, and if they do offer the program, parents are given the option of removing their kids from the class. Louisiana sex ed is also required to be an abstinence-only curriculum, a form of sexual education that researchers believe is harmful to kids' development as well as laughably ineffective at preventing outcomes like teen pregnancy and the spread of STIs. (This in mind, the CDC's most recent teen pregnancy stats have the state clocking in at third in the country for teen birth rates. And that's the 2020 number — post-Roe, Louisiana has a near-full ban on abortion in place, a reality that may have already exacerbated that figure.)

We'd also be remiss not to mention that the implementation of the porn law comes against a broader state and national political backdrop in which "parental rights" regarding school curriculums, efforts to ban LGBTQ+ and progressive books from school libraries, and widely-stoked parental fear of so-called LBGTQ+ "grooming" of children have taken center stage. Louisiana's current Attorney General and gubernatorial Governor hopeful Jeff Landry — no relation to Representative Mandie Landry — has made the banning of these LBGTQ+ stories central to his ongoing campaign.

All of these issues center on similar "protect the kids" messaging, a narrative that's proven to be wildly effective at motivating parent groups around the country. On the one hand, that's because children are indeed vulnerable, and should be protected. But it's also because of kids' vulnerability that their protection is easily weaponized as a political tool, and in practice, it's unclear how any of these efforts — the new Louisiana porn law included — have done much of anything to actually protect young people.

The issue here isn't necessarily that the law is ill-intentioned. It mostly just seems ineffective, especially considering that Louisiana is failing to provide the educational resources that could offer its kids a bit of emotional and intellectual defense against the negative impacts that porn might have on their developing minds.

Also, critics point out, not everyone is a parent.

"I think we all agree that probably children and adolescents have too unfettered internet access. But I don't have kids in my household," said Blanchard. "I'm an adult, I should be able to watch material that is available to me that I pay for on my own devices with my own internet service."

And elsewhere, it may well be a major data liability, not to mention a discomforting digital overreach into citizens' bedrooms.

"It felt," said Blanchard, "like a total shock and violation."

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