How Arizona’s porn law could backfire

Could porn become prohibition? ... The plural is Agendi … And let the voters fix it.

By the end of the year, Arizonans won’t be able to watch online pornography without proving they’re 18 or older.

And some won’t be able to visit their favorite porn websites, like Pornhub, one of the most visited websites in the world. Its parent company completely blocks access in states that require age verification laws.

Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs made Arizona the 24th state to require online NSFW websites to check their visitors’ ages when she signed HB2112 last week.

Our art intern, ChatGPT, has a policy against “images that visually reference or depict adult content platforms.”

The new state law requires websites that contain more than one-third “sexual material” to verify users’ age through government-issued identification or “transactional data,” which can be a lot of things, like facial age verification scans or mortgage records.

But the concern for groups who lobbied against the bill — which range from the porn industry itself to a sexual violence prevention organization — isn’t that kids won't be able to watch porn. It’s that the bill’s language requires age verification for sites that show “sexual material that is harmful to minors.”

In a time when President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI policies have already caused the online erasure of LGBTQ+ support services, advocates worry that single line will be contorted to group sexual education or queer resources into the list of things that are “harmful.”

Mike Stabile, who runs public affairs for the adult industry’s national trade organization Free Speech Coalition, also argues that age verification bills don’t work.

“In most places, people aren't willing to do the face scans. So they just go to a different site. They go to some place that's located outside the U.S. and that isn't complying with state law, and those are easy to find,” he said.

Those who are currently 18 or younger grew up with the internet bombarding every aspect of their lives. And there is a lot of sex on the internet. Social media websites like Twitter and Reddit, which aren’t subject to the new porn law, are rife with porn.

Stanford University researchers found age verification laws corresponded with a decrease in searches for “pornhub” and a surge in searches for VPNs.

VPNs are fancy tools that have been around since the 1990s and let users mask their locations to make it look like they're accessing the internet from almost anywhere, like states where porn isn’t blocked.

Stabile visited Arizona’s lawmakers to outline those concerns. They didn’t listen.

The bill passed with bipartisan support.

Giant money-making industries like utilities and pharmaceuticals are afforded lawmakers’ attention, but even though the porn industry rakes in an estimated $100 billion annually, being on the side of Big Porn isn’t a good political look.

“There's a political downside to talking to porn sites about what works and what doesn't, so people just legislate away in a way that you never would with any other industry,” Stabile said. “As a result, you get these sorts of bad laws that are essentially written as censorship laws.”

Arizona is still in the green because the age verification law doesn’t go into effect until 90 days after lawmakers adjourn.

“Harmful to minors”

Arizona’s age verification bill was the first legislation that freshman Republican lawmaker Rep. Nick Kupper filed this year.

Kupper said he modeled his age verification legislation after a similar law in Texas — he even sent that Texas law to the Legislature's lawyers who draft bill language.

“A bill like this is very difficult to do right, because you have to balance individual privacy rights with the idea of protecting children,” he told us.

It's not totally clear that lawmakers did do it "right" — the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to make a final call on the constitutionality of Texas’s law this summer.

The nation's highest court has a lot of history with pornography. Justice Potter Stewart famously defined pornography in 1964 through the line “I know it when I see it.” That was before the advent of the internet, or when people could have virtual reality sex.

The description of things that are now considered “sexual material harmful to minors” in Arizona’s new law is enough to make you blush.

Read at your own risk.

But Stabile says that phrase — “sexual material harmful to minors” — has been used in a lot of different ways throughout the country. The Free Speech Coalition, where he works, is one of the defendants in the Supreme Court case challenging Texas’s age verification laws. One of its arguments is that “materials harmful to minors” is too broad a definition.

Moreover, Stabile argues, the phrase is harmful. Red states are repeatedly using that phrase to block minors’ access to a lot of things that aren’t porn.

• Seven Republican attorneys general told Target it was breaking the law because its pride displays were "potentially harmful to minors.” The products included LGBTQ-themed onesies, bibs, overalls and t-shirts labeled “Girls Gays Theys.”

• At least seven states have passed laws punishing librarians if books containing sexually explicit depictions get into kids’ hands. Several of those laws define illegal library books as “material harmful to minors.” Idaho’s book ban caused a middle school district to pull a book that depicted a gay couple.

• Oklahoma lawmakers ran a bill this year to ban children from watching drag show performances that are considered harmful to minors. (Hobbs has vetoed similar bills in Arizona.)

Jenna Panas, CEO of the Arizona Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence, said comprehensive sex education is the most effective preventative for sexual violence. A lot of those resources are online and might be considered harmful to minors under the law.

She says the bill’s blocking of descriptions of "sexual intercourse,” for example, could hinder sex education in a state where kids don’t have to learn about consent in schools.

“This isn't an anti-pornography bill," Panas said. “It is a bill that allows the government to determine what is harmful to minors without a lot of barriers.”

And even when states implement age verification for porn, people find ways to access it without giving their personal information to a porn website. But just like the bathtub gin bootleggers dealt during prohibition, the porn people do find can be dodgy, or even illegal. VPNs reroute digital addresses to places with less regulation.

“It's kind of like how teaching abstinence doesn't mean that your kids aren't going to have sex, it just means they're not going to know how to do it safely,” Panas said.

Kelley Dupps with the Education Action Alliance also lobbied lawmakers and Hobbs against the bill. His group promotes inclusivity in youth education, and he’s seen plenty of attempts to dismantle queer rights.

"We all share that goal of making sure that age-appropriate materials are in the hands of young people and students,” he said. But those “on the other side of the fence from advocates believe that any LGBTQ content is harmful to minors.”

And like Panas, Dupps is concerned that “students aren't going to be able to get those educational and historical resources they need,” like HIV-prevention materials.

Kupper said excluding access to sex ed or queer content is not the bill’s intention, and that’s not what he thinks it will result in.

The onus is on the websites that publish porn to put up a verification system, and enforcement takes place in the courts. Those in violation are subject to a $10,000 per day fine if they don’t have an age verification up, and as much as $250,000 if someone can prove in court that a minor accessed sexual material that they published.

“At no point does any other government entity ever have anything to do with it, other than the court system if the individual brings a suit,” Kupper said. “So there's nothing about us trying to make this more than what it is. It's just between the consumer and the pornographic industry.”

Kupper also acknowledged that minors can get around age restrictions or find porn on social media, but said the new law is “another layer of protection to assist parents.”

But like the 33 out of 40 legislative Democrats who voted against Kupper’s bill, he was sort of surprised when Hobbs signed it into law.

Kupper said Hobbs’ office was concerned about the impending Supreme Court decision on Texas’s law when he met with them earlier this year and felt like “they were leaning toward a veto.” Last year, Hobbs vetoed a similar bill from Republican Rep. Tim Dunn.

The governor’s spokesperson Christian Slater told us Hobbs “heard from parents and concerned Arizonans about the harmful impact explicit materials have on our children” and that "new evidence has emerged that confirms the harmful effects that certain online content is having on children.”

We never got clarification on what the “new” evidence was.

The governor is under increasing pressure to appear moderate in her reelection bid, and she’s signing bills like the age verification measure, which have considerable Democratic opposition.

But Stabile, who’s made the information campaign rounds to states enacting age verification laws, said he told Hobbs’ office how the “harmful to minors” language is being weaponized in other states.

“It was incredibly surprising, having made her aware of just how damaging this could be to LGBTQ people and to lots of other speech, to have her say, ‘Well, I've changed my mind,’” Stabile said.

The Free Speech Coalition supports an alternative solution, which Stabile spoke about to lawmakers in both chambers: blocking minors’ access to porn on the device-level. The adult industry already blocks access to devices with activated age-restriction filters.

“It's a one-stop shop. It doesn't have all of these downsides, and it's something that we've talked about for years because we already work with that within that system,” Stabile said.

California lawmakers introduced a bill this year to require device manufacturers to create an interface where parents can enter their child's age and signal to apps if they’re old enough to view certain content.

Republican lawmakers didn’t like that solution when Stabile presented it. Kupper rebutted that kids can just go to another device.

But under the new law, kids can also go to virtually any social media platform or download a VPN.

In Stabile’s experience, there’s an unspoken intention of making people give up their information to watch porn.

“Even if no data is leaked, people have concerns about it, and that means they don't submit it,” he said. “(Age verification bills) are meant to scare people, so I think that is generally the effect.”

At the Education Agenda, we usually focus on politicians and education officials — the people who come up with the “newsiest” stuff.

But that leaves out what education is really all about: the students.

So, this week we turned the spotlight on the kiddos and teenagers who are putting in the work and taking on new ideas.

We poked around local news stories, school district newsletters, and school competitions and found students overflowing with creativity, shockingly smart high schoolers, and much more.

Arizona students are a bright, ambitious bunch, and this graduation season, we want to take a minute to celebrate that.

But the grownups didn’t just sit on their hands all week.

They floated the idea of creating a federal school voucher program. They pulled back a nearly $38 million fine on a university. And they got into social media spats over diversity, equity and inclusion.

All that was just one week’s worth of news.

If you want to put your finger on the pulse of education, then click that button and subscribe to the Education Agenda!

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When you think about water, how often does cybersecurity come up?

Probably not as much as federal lawmakers would like. Right now, Arizona’s Sen. Ruben Gallego is trying to convince his colleagues to get on board with his idea for protecting the nation’s water supply from hackers.

It’s a big, tricky problem, which this week’s Water Agenda unpacks.

A few years ago, a Florida water-plant operator watched as the cursor on a computer began moving around the screen and opened the plant’s control system.

The unknown cyber intruder raised the water’s caustic lye additive levels from a harmless 100 parts per million to a skin-burning 11,100 parts per million. The staffer yanked the numbers back before the dangerous water entered the delivery system, officials reported in the aftermath.

Meanwhile, water officials met at the University of Arizona to talk about the future of the Colorado River, including a federal official who said her department is rethinking its River management proposal from last year, which Arizona officials really didn’t like.

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Elsewhere, streams are coming back to life, people aren’t paying their sewer bills, and much more.

Arizona is overflowing with water news, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a better source than the Water Agenda!

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If you’re worried about A.I. taking your job someday, well, you’re not wrong.

But it might not be as bad as you think. At least that’s what CEOs are saying, even the ones who think A.I. will replace them, too.

In this week’s edition of the A.I. Agenda, we dig into a new trend: companies asking for job applicants who aren’t human.

No one is more on board than ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. He takes the position that Agentic AI should replace a lot of the current “soul-crushing work.”

By automating repetitive tasks, ServiceNow aims to free employees for more strategic and creative roles.

“You have to realize the soul-crushing work that most people are stuck with on a day-to-day basis is not actually the work they ever dreamed of doing,” he noted.

In Arizona, officials are slowly grasping the importance of regulating A.I., and they’re pushing federal lawmakers to let states have at least some control.

Meanwhile, librarians are using A.I. as a translator, columnists don’t like deepfakes in courtrooms, and Big Tech is making big moves.

Staying on top of the ever-changing world of A.I. has never been easier. Just click that button and subscribe!

We told you earlier this week that Chandler Mayor Kevin Hartke may or may not have been serving as mayor illegally for the last eight years, depending on how you read the Chandler City Charter.

An election lawyer the city asked for an opinion said Hartke should never have been eligible to be mayor, since the Chandler Charter seems to say nobody can serve for more than eight years in city office. (Hartke was on the council for eight years before becoming mayor for eight years.)

And Hartke hasn’t even been the first mayor to probably violate the City Charter.

Well, yesterday, the Chandler City Council rushed to approve a charter change that would tinker with that wording to say the city lets politicians serve 16 years total — if evenly divided between the council and mayor’s office.

The call to the audience at yesterday’s meeting was pretty entertaining, as citizens called for Hartke and other members of the council to recuse themselves if the change would affect them.

But the best part was watching the politicians try to game out what amending the City Charter would do to their own political futures.

After hours of debate, the Council ultimately decided to postpone a decision until June 9, the last possible day to send whatever they come up with to a special election ballot.