RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has signed into law Senate Bill (SB) 1515, which requires porn websites to do more to verify that each user is 18 years of age before gaining access to the site’s adult content. SB 1515 also requires sites to retain personal data in an extreme regulatory scheme that is similar to age verification laws recently passed in Louisiana, Utah, and Arkansas.
Republican state Sen. William M. Stanley, Jr., introduced SB 1515. It was adopted with “near-unanimous” support by state legislators in both parties, according to local news media outlets. Inside NoVa reports that the bill goes into force on July 1. According to the new law, websites are ordered to implement age verification if 33.3 percent of the content on the site is considered “harmful to minors.”
Virginia Legislative Information System indicates that SB 1515 now “creates a civil cause of action for any commercial entity that knowingly or intentionally publishes or distributes on the internet material harmful to minors, as defined in the bill, and that does not take reasonable steps to verify that the age of a person attempting to access such material harmful to minors is 18 years of age or older.” The bill also termed “sexual conduct” that it is “neutral regarding sexual orientation for the purpose of crimes related to prohibited sales and loans to juveniles.”
Youngkin issued a broad statement through his public affairs team late last week announcing the adoption of SB 1515 and several other bills.
“I greatly appreciate the General Assembly’s hard work, but certain recommendations were necessary for effective implementation, and therefore, I have vetoed them,” Gov. Youngkin said broadly. “The legislative work is not complete,” he added. Local coverage also indicates that a civil lawsuit could be brought against adult websites that don’t use proper online age verification measures like in Utah and Louisiana.
Louisiana became the first state in the U.S. to adopt mandatory age verification legislation. The law became effective January 1 and was received with aggressive criticism from civil liberties and privacy rights proponents alike. Utah’s measure is considerably more extreme. Indication of this occurred when Ethical Capital Partners-owned Pornhub.com and its portfolio of blue-chip adult sites geo-blocked all access to their sites from IP addresses located in Utah. Arkansas’ measure emulates Louisiana’s law. All three laws are viewed by critics as overly punitive.
Virginia’s @GlennYoungkin has just signed the state’s “antiporn” censorship bill into law — it’s an abhorrent invasion of privacy that opens the door to government control of online speech. Every Virginian should be concerned, https://t.co/QoHeEWiplY
— Mike Stabile (@mikestabile) May 13, 2023
The Free Speech Coalition’s public affairs director Mike Stabile told The Virginian-Pilot that Youngkin’s adoption of Stanley’s bill is very bad.
“I think when people talk about age verification for adult content, it seems very simple,” Stabile said in the statement to the Norfolk-based newspaper. “I don’t think they always understand what age verification could mean in terms of government surveillance, identity theft, and the burdens that come for an adult trying to access legal content.”
Alison Boden, executive director of the FSC, announced recently that the trade group has sued Utah Attorney General Sean D. Reyes and Public Safety Commissioner Jess L. Anderson in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah to overturn the verification legislation signed by Gov. Spencer Cox. If the courts overturn the law in Utah, there is a legal precedent for other state-level age verification laws to also be repealed.
