Age Verification for Porn Sites Now Required in North Carolina

RALEIGH—North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, has signed House Bill (HB) 8 into law. HB 8 features a provision requiring adult entertainment websites to verify the ages of users who log in from IP addresses based in North Carolina. But there’s a catch: House Bill 8 originally had nothing to do with protecting minors from viewing age-restricted content on the internet. State Sen. Amy Galey, a Republican who represents the community of Alamance, managed to insert age verification language into a proposal that initially focused on high school computer science curriculum. Nothing in the original language has any mention of pornographic content. Sen. Galey’s amendment to the legislation applies to “any commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material.” HB 8 is officially titled “Various Statutory Changes,” covering the broad nature of the legislation. The law enters force on January 1, 2024. Adult industry trade organization the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) sent a letter to Gov. Cooper asking him to repeal House Bill 8, or at least the language dealing with age verification. Alison Boden, the executive director of the FSC, said that “this age verification law is flawed and deeply unconstitutional and will face many of the same legal challenges as laws in states like Texas and Louisiana have faced.” Boden refers to lawsuits that the FSC has brought with other stakeholders in the adult entertainment space. The Texas lawsuit, currently on appeal at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, found that age verification in the Lone Star State was unconstitutional and violated the First Amendment. The American Civil Liberties Union and several other civil society organizations have filed amicus briefs in support of the plaintiffs in the Texas lawsuit urging the appeals court to block the law.