More than a dozen states have passed or are considering laws to require porn sites to ask adults who want to visit them for personal information to prove their age.
So far, each of them — including Texas, whose law had an audience with the U.S. Supreme Court last month — have applied the rule to sites on which a third or more of the content counts as pornography.
South Dakota could soon be the first state to affix the expectation to any site that hosts any pornography in the “regular course of the website’s trade or business.”
On Wednesday at the state Capitol, the Senate voted 34-0 to send that bill to the desk of Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden.
“It’s a huge step forward,” said Sen. Jim Mehlhaff, R-Pierre, a prime sponsor of House Bill 1053. “It’s time to jump on board and protect our children from pornography on the internet.”
No senators spoke against the bill on the Senate floor. The Senate Judiciary Committee spent more than an hour hearing testimony on age verification on Tuesday, however.
There was broad agreement in the committee room on the need to address the omnipresence of online pornography.
“It used to be years ago that when we went into schools, we only heard the word ‘porn’ in schools. Then it became middle school,” said Holly Strand, a Rapid City forensic interviewer in child sex crime investigations. “About five years ago, we had a kindergartner ask us how to handle pornography. It was all downhill from there.”
Two options: One-third porn or any porn?
The Senate panel had two options for age verification on its plate Tuesday.
Each aimed to force adult sites to ask visitors for something like a credit card or state-issued driver’s license to prove they’re old enough to be there. Both required the deletion of that data after the visit. Each would let South Dakota’s attorney general levy criminal fines against companies that don’t comply.
One of them, Senate Bill 18, rejected by the committee, follows the model of Texas by targeting sites where one-third of the content is adult material.
HB 1053 draws no such line.
The House bill came from Rep. Bethany Soye, R-Sioux Falls. On Tuesday, she said the one-third figure was pulled from thin air by Louisiana lawmakers looking to preempt concerns about an overly broad restriction in their age verification legislation.
“Every state just blindly copied them,” said Soye, who is an attorney. “And I think that we can do better than that.”
To her, the one-third standard amounts to an invitation for porn sites to find ways to keep their total adult content just below the line, perhaps at 29.9% pornography.
“You can already see the loophole,” Soye said.
You can read the full article at South Dakota Searchlight.