Utah’s online porn law puts teens’ digital rights at risk

A new Utah law intended to keep kids from accessing pornography and other kinds of “harmful material” online is raising critical questions about the First Amendment rights of young people and the privacy implications of checking IDs at websites’ proverbial doors.

Policymakers who pushed for the law say it will help protect kids from mental health issues and other risks that can arise from viewing certain kinds of material online. But what counts as “harmful,” exactly? The law is aimed at pornography, but it extends to virtually any commercial website with content that does not have “literary, artistic, political or scientific” value for minors and that makes up more than a third of all material on that site. With the law now in effect this month, anyone in Utah can sue violators if a minor accesses content on their website. Nonprofit-run sites, search engines and news-gathering organizations are exempt from liability.

Utah passed another law earlier this year to regulate minors’ access to social media platforms, which requires teens to get parental consent to use the platforms and prohibits them from using such platforms between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. Research has shown that social media can be harmful to the mental health of young people. But age verification and time curfews might not be the best solutions to the problems that lawmakers have trained their focus on.

Heidi Tandy, a lawyer and First Amendment speech researcher, says it’s worrying that policymakers don’t consider kids’ rights. “It’s very clear that there is a sliding scale of First Amendment rights for those under the age of 18,” Tandy told me.

On Twitter, Electronic Frontier Foundation researcher Jason Kelley pointed out that while politicians tend to frame these laws as protection for children, they apply to everyone under the age of 18. He warned against “lumping in 10 year olds with seventeen year olds who can work, apply for emancipation, and drive.” Older teens are much more likely to seek out sexual content online — and have legitimate reasons to do so — than kids who are just nine or 10 years old.

Kelley suggested that the Utah law might end up pushing well past pornography to cover things like sexual education materials or fiction that includes sexual themes.

“The goal is often not just to remove or block what most of us would consider adult content, but go beyond that,” he told me. Kelley says advocates have “a certain reasonable fear that larger swaths of sites would be swept up in the law.”

“You’ve seen that, with definitions of what’s considered pornography or adult content in places like Florida, they’re removing books from libraries,” Kelley said, referring to recent legislation targeting books that are considered “sexually explicit” or that deal with gender identity, sexuality and related subjects.

Experts and adult film industry voices have also noted that these restrictions could send teens toward more obscure sites that parents or policymakers might not be aware of. This is a key argument that Pornhub makes, the Canada-based adult content site that consistently ranks among the most popular websites in the world. Earlier this month, Pornhub blocked access to videos on its site for all users based in Utah to show its opposition to the law. People in Utah who tried accessing the site were instead redirected to a video featuring adult film actress Cherie DeVille explaining the company’s objections to the law. Among other things, she noted that it could lead teens to sites with no protections against videos depicting th