“No More Excuses”: Indiana Senators’ Sweeping New Bill Demands ID Checks For Adult Websites
On Wednesday, Senator Jim Banks of Indiana introduced a new piece of legislation aimed at keeping children off adult websites. It’s called the Safety and Age Filtering Enforcement (SAFE) for Kids Act, and it would force commercial pornography platforms to verify the ages of their users before letting them in.
The goal of the legislation is straightforward, according to the Republican senator.
“Kids should not be exposed to pornography with just a few clicks,” Banks said in a statement. “The SAFE for Kids Act helps parents protect their children and bring commonsense safeguards nationwide.”
The bill specifically targets websites where more than a third of the content is sexually explicit and considered harmful to minors. Under the proposed law, these companies would have to set up reliable age verification systems. This means they would need to ask for a government-issued ID or use other forms of public and private digital data to prove a user is at least 18 years old. News organizations are entirely exempt from the rules.
If companies ignore the mandate, they could face serious legal trouble. The bill gives the Federal Trade Commission the power to enforce the rules through consumer protection laws, and it authorizes the Department of Justice to investigate platforms that knowingly break the law. It also creates a private right of action, which essentially gives parents and legal guardians the right to sue websites that fail to keep kids out.
A broad coalition of organizations is already backing the effort, including the American Principles Project, the Institute for Family Studies, the National Decency Coalition, and Concerned Women for America.
Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage Action, strongly voiced his support for the legislation and called on Congress to act immediately.
“No more excuses. While Washington drags its feet, kids across the nation are being exposed to vile, pornographic images and ads with no meaningful safeguards to prevent it,” Roberts said. He noted that parents deserve laws that give them the power to protect their families, adding that the SAFE for Kids Act will “finally hold individuals and companies liable if they fail to implement meaningful safeguards.”
Chip Wyatt, the government relations director for Heritage Action, pointed to the statistics driving this push. He noted that nearly 80 percent of underage children have seen adult content online at some point.
“When nearly 80% of underage children have been exposed to adult content online, commonsense policies like the SAFE for Kids Act deserve strong support,” Wyatt said. “We urge lawmakers to come together and pass this bill, so families have the tools they need to keep their children safe.”
Research indicates that children are running into explicit material at younger ages than in previous generations. The average age for a first exposure is now around 12, and about 60 percent of those exposures happen completely by accident.
While this is a new push at the federal level, similar laws are already active across the country. More than 25 states have already enacted their own age verification requirements for pornography websites. The Supreme Court recently upheld these state-level laws in the case of Free Speech Coalition vs. Paxton, ruling that the government does have a valid interest in protecting children from finding sexual material on the internet. Now, lawmakers are looking to take those rules nationwide.