BATON ROUGE — A state legislator in Louisiana has proposed legislation that would permit residents to sue websites that provide pornographic content if they feel the site doesn’t have sufficient age verification measures in place.
Rep. Laurie Schlegel, R-Metairie, introduced House Bill (HB) 142 to give legal grounding for residents to file complaints against site operators who don’t require adults to provide their IDs to access porn content. While the bill doesn’t mandate age verification measures on companies that operate porn sites, it would pave a way for residents to sue platforms that don’t have an age verification measure.
The bill provides that “any commercial entity that publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the Internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall be held liable to an individual for damages resulting from a minor accessing the material if the entity fails to place reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material.”
The bill defines “reasonable age verification methods” as those that “include verifying that the person seeking to access the material is eighteen years of age or older” by having the user provide a “digitized identification card” as that term is defined under Louisiana law, or by requiring the user trying to access the material “to comply with a commercial age verification system that verifies” the identity of the user by requiring either “Government-issued identification” or “any commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data to verify the age of the person attempting to access the information is at least eighteen years of age or older.”
The measure is reminiscent of the conservative government of the United Kingdom pushing for mandated age verification measures nationwide. Known as the Online Safety Bill in the UK, this package of measures have sparked concerns from civil liberties and human rights groups over governmental overreach and the diminishment of encryption and anonymity.
Schlegel is a Christian conservative legislator with a background in faith-based counseling for couples and individuals struggling with sex and porn “addiction”, the very existence of which is hotly disputed. According to coverage on HB 142 from local media outlets, the representative also is adamant that porn constitutes a “public health crisis” — without presenting any evidence to support this claim, naturally.
At the time of publication, HB 142 has passed through the Louisiana House Civil Law and Procedure Committee without any notable opposition. The bill now advances for further debate, including a second reading to the entire chamber and potential passage to a final reading and introduction to the state Senate.
It can often be challenging to predict in the early stages of a bill’s development whether it will pass when presented to the full chamber for a vote. As things stand, however, HB 142 is facing very little challenge and appears likely to pass.
