Sam Amico
If you like to watch pornography online in Arkansas, you may soon need to prove who you are.
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At the very least, a bill advancing through the state’s legislature is setting out to make it more difficult for residents to access porn sites.
The bill is known as Senate Bill 66: the Protection of Minors from Distribution of Harmful Material Act. It aims to make people provide a “digitalized identification card,” to prove they are old enough to watch porn.
This is likely to mean taking a picture of your driver’s license to prove you’re of age, then downloading that age-verification ID to the website in which you intend to view the material.
Senate Bill was filed in the Arkansas Senate last month, before being passed to the House on February 1.
Arkansas Proposes Requiring ID to Watch Porn
All of this fills a similar bill in Louisiana, which now requires age verification to access adult content online. “After that bill became law, Pornhub started requiring users who log in from a Louisiana-based IP address to verify their age,” VICE wrote.
Louisiana’s success at implementing this law is inspiring several states to create “copycat” bills, per the Free Speech Coalition. Florida, Kansas, Mississippi, South Dakota, Virginia and West Virginia are cited as other states working on similar bills.
Republican Senator Tyler Dees told Motherboard that the bill was actually “inspired by many constituents in my district who are concerned about the growing problems related to pornography and the advancement of technology and devices around our children,”
He added that children having access to online porn has become a problem.
“My hope is that we protect children and their innocence in state of Arkansas and then send a message across the country that we need something similar built into federal law as well,” he said.
