What To Expect from Missouri’s New Age Verification Laws

Missouri is the latest state to roll out new age verification laws aimed at keeping children off of adult sites. 

Governor Mike Kehoe signed the bill (a year in the making) into law last Thursday and while its proponents say the bill is a necessary step to make the internet a safer place for children, the bill’s critics say it’s a slippery slope that could lead to consequential data leaks or government overreach.

Last year, Missouri’s Attorney General Catherine Hanaway implemented new rules requiring adult websites to verify the age of the Missourians who access their website. This new law requires companies to use third party companies to process potentially sensitive data. The law says nothing as far as how the company gathers this information, whether through facial recognition software or user uploads of photo identification; but some adult sites are already forfeiting their audience. 

PornHub, one of the largest adult sites in the world, has restricted access to Missourians in response to this bill. This is exactly how PornHub (and its parent company Aylo) have handled nearly identical bills across 24 different states. Their thinking is, rather than be responsible for handling terabytes of their users’ most sensitive identifying information, they’ll suspend access to their site for all users in the state. 

While some might think of this as giving adult sites a sort of “digital bouncer”, like a bar might have, the authors of these age-restriction laws may be inadvertently pushing teens and adults alike into, shall we say, less legal parts of the internet. 

As an example, Louisiana is one of the only states that requires PornHub visitors to share their ID to access the site. PornHub is still accessible in Louisiana, but the site says its traffic has dropped dramatically (by about 80%), and this might not be such a good thing. A spokesperson told Mashable in a recent interview, “These people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content. In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and children.” 

Architects of Project 2025, the Republican agenda for President Trump’s second term, have even said the quiet part out loud. In a secret recording, one of Project 2025’s key authors, Russell Vought, expressed that the very same age-verification laws being passed today are to be used as a “back door” to eventually banning porn in the United States.

Needless to say, sites like PornHub are less than thrilled that yet another state is implementing such encroaching regulations. Aylo, the parent company of PornHub, released a statement saying, “First, to be clear, Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults. Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.”

For now, Missourians can still access OnlyFans, but they’re required to prove their age by submitting photo ID to a third party processor.