Proponents of age verification laws love to tout how their efforts are to protect the children. Yet, ulterior motives keep popping up.
When it comes to efforts to censor the internet, straight up trying to push a law that censors the internet is inherently going to be controversial. So, for the pro censorship movement, cover stories have to be created. This might include ‘stopping harmful content’ or ‘putting a stop to “woke” material’ among other things. These stories that they make up are very frequently the fig leaf to cover up the fact that the government wants to better and more effectively control speech on the internet to further promote a political ideology while suppressing those that dare oppose them regardless of legitimacy.
Age verification laws around the world are no different. Supporters of such laws often tout this as an effort to prevent underage children from viewing pornographic material. They will often roll out talking points such as how pornography is destroying the minds of children or how pornography is just exploitation (some of it is, some of it isn’t). This while blanket accusing web services of criminal activity in the process. Yet, this is frequently a cover story to try and end run around free speech constitutional protections.
For instance, some, at least in the US, have since admitted that age verification laws are actually a clever way of suppressing LGBTQ+ content by labelling everything as “explicit”. For others, it’s about imposing their own personal beliefs on others and using the power of government to accomplish this. As a result, it has become clear in recent months that age verification laws have little to do with “protecting the children” and far more about government control.
Another recent confession from Age Verification law supporters further confirms that supporters are just trying to ban pornography entirely rather than just trying to “protect the children”. From TechDirt:
It’s never about the children. Supporters of age verification laws, book bans, drag show bans, and abortion bans always claim they’re doing these things to protect children. But it’s always just about themselves. They want to impose their morality on other adults. That’s all there is to it.
The slew of age verification laws introduced in recent years are being shot down by courts almost as swiftly as they’re enacted. And for good reason. Age verification laws are unconstitutional. And they’re certainly not being enacted to prevent children from accessing porn.
Of course, none of the people pushing this kind of legislation will ever openly admit their reasons for doing so. But they will admit it to people they think are like-minded. All it takes is a tiny bit of subterfuge to tease these admissions out of activist groups that want to control what content adults have access to — something that’s barely hidden by their “for the children” facade.
As Shawn Musgrave reports for The Intercept, a couple of people managed to coax this admission out of a former Trump official simply by pretending they were there to give his pet project a bunch of cash.
“I actually never talk about our porn agenda,” said Russell Vought, a former top Trump administration official, in late July. Vought was chatting with two men he thought were potential donors to his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America.
For the last three years, Vought and the CRA have been pushing laws that require porn websites to verify their visitors are not minors, on the argument that children need to be protected from smut. Dozens of states have enacted or considered these “age verification laws,” many of them modeled on the CRA’s proposals.
[…]
But in a wide-ranging, covertly recorded conversation with two undercover operatives — a paid actor and a reporter for the British journalism nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting — Vought let them in on a thinly veiled secret: These age verification laws are a pretext for restricting access to porn more broadly.
“Thinly veiled” is right. While it’s somewhat amusing Vought was taken in so easily and was immediately willing to say the quiet part loud when he thought cash was on the line, he’s made his antipathy towards porn exceedingly clear. As Musgrave notes in his article, Vought’s contribution to Project 2025 — a right-wing masturbatory fantasy masquerading as policy proposals should Trump take office again — almost immediately veers into the sort of territory normally only explored by dictators and autocrats who relied heavily on domestic surveillance, forced labor camps, and torture to rein in those who disagreed with their moral stances.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
Perhaps the most surprising part of this paragraph (and, indeed, a lot of Vought’s contribution to Project 2025) is that it isn’t written in all caps with a “follow me on xTwitter” link attached. These are not the words of a hinged person. They are the opposite — the ravings of a man in desperate need of a competent re-hinging service.
This is ultimately one of the most true faces of the real motivations behind Age Verification laws we’ve seen yet. When you remove the talking points and the fig leaf cover stories, you eventually get to the ugly truth behind those pushing such laws. A number of them could care less about children. All some of them care about is imposing their views on morality on everyone else. If you don’t share their views on morality, they will throw you in jail and throw away the key or shut down your place of business for daring to challenge their views on morality. Free speech, for them, is merely an obstacle to achieve these goals.
What is so telling is that some are no longer even bothering to hide these motivations. Instead, they are starting to very publicly spell out what they are really up to.
One aspect that hits closer to home is the fact that Age Verification laws are very close to passing. As soon as parliament resumes, the clock resumes on the pushing of the nearly passed bill (Bill S-210). While the hope is that it will be shot down in the courts should this terrible law pass because it is blatantly unconstitutional, the fact remains that what remains of free speech rights in Canada is becoming increasingly precarious.
