New laws in the UK and US intended to stop children from accessing pornography and hold internet providers accountable for hosting child sexual abuse material are being framed as discriminatory by some LGBT news outlets and the ACLU.
On February 8, PinkNews published an article titled “Tory ‘porn-block’ ban could put LGBT+ users at risk,” outlining details on a political push in the UK to limit the ability for children to access pornographic websites and media.
The Online Safety Bill was recently revised to include a proposal that any site which hosts pornographic content have a legal duty to prevent children from accessing inappropriate content. According to a public announcement on the bill, this “could include adults using secure age verification technology to verify that they possess a credit card and are over 18 or having a third-party service confirm their age against government data.”
If the sites don’t implement proper verification, they may be fined up to 10 per cent of their total profits, or could even be fully blocked in the UK. Digital Minister Chris Philp said the bill was tweaked because it is “too easy for children to access pornography online.”
But the day following the announcement, PinkNews slammed the bill as putting LGBT+ people “at risk.” For comment, the outlet sourced Jason Domino, a “porn actor and sex worker rights activist.” Domino equates the bill to censorship, and seems to suggest that it is better to allow children to access pornography while “contextualising for children the fact that there is sex, there is reality, there is fantasy.”
Domino also states that the move to block children from accessing pornographic content lacks “pleasure-focused inclusivity.”
On Twitter, former barrister James Esses first alerted his following to the bizarre take from PinkNews, calling it “extraordinarily telling.”
Esses’ tweet quickly gained momentum, promoting discussion amongst those similarly confused by PinkNews‘ opposition. Replying, lesbian activist Eva Kurilova said “I understand privacy concerns online, but FFS this is to protect KIDS from PORN and it’s being spun as anti-LGBT. Lord give me strength.”
The UK isn’t the only nation introducing laws with the stated intention of limiting child access to pornographic content on the internet.
In the US, the EARN IT (Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies) Act has been proposed in Congress, part of which would remove legal indemnity from internet service providers who host child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and open them up to lawsuits for facilitating the hosting of such content.
In a February 2 article, Input Magazine painted the bill as harmful to the LGBT community. Similarly, the ACLU called the bill a “disaster … especially for the LGBTQ and Sex Worker communities.”
According to anti-porn education advocacy group Fight the New Drug, the average age of a child’s first exposure to porn is 11 years old.
Studies have suggested that boys frequently exposed to pornographic materials were 2-3 times more likely to perpetrate teen dating violence than their non-exposed counterparts. In 2017, a peer-reviewed study published in the journal of Trauma, Violence, and Abuse found that adolescent exposure to sexually explicit media was positively related to domestic and sexual violence “victimization, perpetration, and bystander nonintervention.”
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