It turns out your mom can sue porn sites if you use them. At least, if you are underage.
That’s exactly what one Kansas mom is doing, going after a dozen porn sites for violating the state’s new age assurance law. The new Kansas’s law that recently went into effect says that, if someone can access an explicit site without being prompted for age verification, they can report it to the attorney general, “who may seek a monetary penalty from the commercial entity (the website).” This includes private actions by parents or guardians.
These kinds of age-verification laws vary by state but typically require some type of proof of age to enter an explicit site — and not just a “yes or no” pop-up. Those kinds of “verifications” are strictly on the honor system and don’t stop kids from accessing them. These new laws require sites to actually verify age with a government ID or facial recognition scan. Nearly a third of the states in the U.S. have enacted age verification on porn sites in the last few years.
Kansas’s law is no different, requiring any site with over 25 percent of its content deemed “harmful to minors” (as defined in Kansas, nudity and other sexual content) to age-verify visitors with a commercially available database or “any other commercially reasonable method of age and identity verification.” That particular phrase “harmful to minors” isn’t new. It comes from the 1968 Supreme Court case Ginsberg v. New York, which concluded that content that isn’t obscene (and is therefore protected by the First Amendment) can still be “harmful to minors.”
Lawmakers and those advocating for these laws are hoping to stop minors from viewing online porn with these more rigorous age-verification systems, but they don’t seem to be working as intended. And one reason is that some sites aren’t complying, which is the case in Kansas.
According to several complaints filed earlier this month against adult sites Chaturbate.com, Jerkmate.com, Techpump (owner of Superporn.com), and Titan Websites (owner of Hentaicity.com), the Kansas mother at the heart of this lawsuit found her 14-year-old child called “Q.R.” on all these sites after Kansas enacted its age-verification law in July 2024.
According to one of the complaints: “On August 12, 2024, Q.R. found Jane Doe’s [friend of mother’s] old laptop in her closet. She had stored the device there a couple of years ago after purchasing a new laptop and had since forgotten about it. Unfortunately for Q.R., it was still in working condition.”
“Q.R., using his mother’s old laptop, had unfettered access to the internet and began searching for hardcore pornography,” says the court. The fourteen-year-old “was able to access chaturbate.com on thirty different instances” which his mom claims has led to “pain, suffering, disability, disfigurement, and mental anguish; psychological injury; past and future love of enjoyment and pleasure of living.”
Q.R.’s mother isn’t the only one in this lawsuit. Anti-porn group National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), which advocates for age-verification laws and calls them “vital” to protecting children, did as well.
“Kansas law requires pornography companies to implement reasonable age-verification methods, and the companies named in these lawsuits failed to do so, resulting in Q.R.’s access to material that is harmful to minors,” NCOSE senior vice president and director of its law center, Dani Pinter, said in the group’s press release.
While these laws claim to protect children, a preliminary study out of NYU suggests that age verification doesn’t work. Not only are some companies simply refusing to comply, minors can use other means like VPNs to pretend to be in a location outside the jurisdiction. And many free speech advocates warn that age verification can also degrade internet security and privacy.
The Supreme Court heard Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a case about the constitutionality of Texas’s age-verification law recently and will issue a decision soon — and that decision could have an impact on other laws like the ones in Kansas.