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The digital landscape is undergoing a radical transformation, driven by new age-verification mandates that extend far beyond adult websites. Recent landmark legal decisions, including a U.S. Supreme Court ruling affirming Texas’s age-verification law and the implementation of the UK’s Online Safety Act, signal a profound shift in how we access online information and interact with digital platforms. These developments are not merely about restricting access to explicit content; they are fundamentally altering internet freedom, digital privacy, and the free flow of information for everyone.
Age verification laws, broadly defined, compel websites hosting explicit material to verify user age. While language and requirements vary by region—from facial scans and credit card authentication in the UK to diverse state-level provisions in the U.S.—their real-world application is far-reaching. These regulations are increasingly being imposed on mainstream social media platforms, independent websites, and even apps, forcing adults to surrender personal information to navigate vast portions of the web. Experts warn that this is just the beginning of a “doom and gloom” scenario for our online lives.
The Expanding Reach of Online Censorship
The UK’s Online Safety Act, for instance, doesn’t just age-gate adult content; it blocks material deemed “harmful” to minors. Shortly after its enactment, reports emerged of non-explicit content on social media being restricted. Subreddits ranging from discussions on global events to smoking cessation forums have become inaccessible in the UK. Video games, music streaming services like Spotify, and dating applications are also implementing or planning age verification protocols.
“The rollout of the Online Safety Act has shown just how disastrous this type of regulation can be,” states Mike Stabile, public policy director at the Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry trade organization.
Despite being widely unpopular in the UK, these measures have proven largely ineffective. Users are circumventing restrictions with ease, evidenced by a surge in VPN downloads (allowing users to appear in different geographical locations) and creative workarounds like using video game character selfies for verification. A preliminary study by NYU echoes these findings for the U.S., where a patchwork of vague state laws has yet to provoke a broad public backlash. However, the Supreme Court’s decision sets a precedent for the continued proliferation of such legislation.
Creators on the Front Lines: A Battle for Livelihoods and Expression
Adult performer and activist Siri Dahl expresses profound exhaustion, not only from the recent SCOTUS decision but also from the public’s widespread misunderstanding of censorship’s far-reaching implications. Online sex workers, already familiar with content suppression, have faced escalating challenges. The 2018 FOSTA/SESTA bills, ostensibly aimed at combating sex trafficking, altered Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, making online publishers liable for third-party content. This led major platforms like Facebook and Instagram to aggressively crack down on sexual and even sexually suggestive material, affecting not just sex workers but also sex educators, artists, and LGBTQ+ creators. Studies indicate these policies paradoxically make sex workers less safe.
Further legislative proposals, such as the EARN IT Act and the Kids Online Safety Act, have drawn criticism from free speech advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for their potential “trickle-down” censorship. The recently passed TAKE IT DOWN Act also raises concerns about its capacity to censor legal, consensual sexual content.
Dahl, currently on her eighth Instagram account, reports increasing platform strictness. Even common bio link services, like Linktree, are being “blacklisted” due to their association with adult content creators. This forces creators to adopt more indirect advertising strategies, such as viral videos that subtly hint at their paid content – a tactic born directly from censorship attempts. Dahl’s income has consequently dropped by 30% in 2025, partly due to the burden on platforms like Pornhub, which has self-blocked in numerous states to avoid compliance complexities.
Porn Bans by “Back Door”: The Political Agenda
The blocking of major adult platforms like Pornhub in states with age verification laws is, according to leaked recordings, a deliberate “back door” strategy to enact a broader porn ban. Russell Vought, a co-writer of Project 2025 (a conservative policy framework for a potential future administration), has reportedly indicated this is the ultimate objective. Despite these clear intentions, Dahl notes that a common public response to her activism is, “there’s no way they’d actually ban porn.”
This widespread denial persists even as Project 2025 explicitly lists banning porn as a core objective. Legislative efforts like the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, introduced in May, aim to redefine “obscenity” (which is not First Amendment protected) to effectively ban porn. Following a previous presidential inauguration, an Oklahoma senator even introduced a bill to ban porn and imprison creators. Stabile warns that with the Supreme Court’s decision, state legislatures may become even more aggressive in restricting internet content, particularly targeting LGBTQ+ and other content deemed “harmful to minors.”
A Dystopian Online Future and Privacy Perils
“Legislatures feel no inhibition about trying to, quote, ‘protect children online,’ and so they’re going to do the craziest shit,” warns Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. He predicts a future where age authentication becomes the norm for most online interactions, categorizing these mandates as “segregate-and-suppress” laws.
Jess Miers, a visiting assistant professor of law, believes the UK’s experience, with its reliance on facial recognition and physical ID submission, is imminent in the U.S. YouTube has already begun requiring age verification, using AI initially, but demanding ID or credit card verification if AI cannot determine age. Miers attributes this trajectory partly to mainstream tech companies’ reluctance to engage with the issue of age verification due to its association with pornography, failing to recognize the “second-order censorship” that inevitably follows primary regulation, such as cracking down on VPNs.
“Censorship begets censorship,” Goldman states. The privacy implications are also dire, as users are forced to hand over sensitive personal information to third parties, increasing the risk of data breaches and identity theft. The anonymity that once fostered free speech online is rapidly eroding.
The True Cost: Impact on Children and the Path Forward
While framed as protecting children, age verification laws often achieve the opposite. In the UK, children are already being blocked from accessing vital information on topics like menstruation and sexual assault. Goldman warns that many children will grow up with a “sanitized, controlled, censored internet,” potentially stunting their ability to learn effective and safe internet usage, socialize, and find like-minded communities. “When we see crackdowns on spaces on the internet, we’re essentially stripping away that potential for self-actualization,” he says. “We’ve really reached the dystopian stage of the internet.”
Despite the grim outlook, the adult industry has historically proven resilient. Creators have endured prosecutions, raids, and imprisonment, demonstrating an “adeptness at growing in really hostile circumstances and figuring out ways to exploit the cracks and the resources that are available to survive,” according to Stabile.
Industry stakeholders advocate for alternative, more effective solutions, such as device-level filters, which can protect minors without impeding adult access or forcing users onto unmoderated, less safe sites. Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, publicly supports user age verification but stresses the importance of methods that prioritize user safety and privacy. They note that in Louisiana, where ID submission is required, Pornhub traffic plummeted by 80%, indicating users simply migrated to “darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content.” This, they argue, makes the internet more dangerous for everyone.
The current state of the internet appears dire, but experts liken it to bracing for a hurricane: while havoc is expected, measures can still be taken to protect what remains. This struggle, they assert, is not the end of a battle, but merely the beginning of a larger fight for digital rights and an open internet.