As you've all noticed, you're now greeted with an age-verification screen when you come to Voenix Rising and it's because of this (from AZ Central with my own obvious commentary added):
Arizona's Katie Hobbs signs bill requiring ID on porn sites
Arizona will soon become the latest state to require age verification when visiting websites with adult content.
Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, signed a bill on May 13 requiring websites and social media platforms that are more than a third pornography to verify their users are at least 18 years old. The companies operating the websites must require identification or use an age verification system.
The bill was sponsored by Rep. Nick Kupper, a Republican (because of course he is) from Surprise.
Hey Nick, how about making your search history public? What? Yeah, I didn't think so.
"Arizona families have had enough," Kupper said in a statement. "Hardcore pornography has been just one click away from kids for too long, and the companies behind it have looked the other way while cashing in. This law forces them to take responsibility and keeps minors off their platforms." (He said without a trace of irony because how does he know hardcore pornography is one click away?)
Hobbs' signature comes a year after she vetoed a similar measure over concerns that it violated First Amendment rights. A spokesperson for the governor did not answer a question about why Hobbs signed this year's bill.
This year's tweaked measure prohibits companies that do age verification from keeping personal information or sharing it with government entities. It allows parents and guardians to sue websites for not complying with the law, levying fines of $10,000 per day it does not verify a user's age or up to $250,000 if a minor accesses pornography on the site.
The measure goes into effect 90 days after the Legislature finishes its work for the year, which is likely not until late June.
At the Arizona Capitol, Republican lawmakers backed the measure arguing it was a commonsense way to protect children from harmful online material, and gave parents more control over their children's activities. Many Democrats and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona opposed it, contending it violated free speech and privacy rights, and was merely part of a conservative effort to eradicate pornography entirely. Good luck with that.
There were also questions of effectiveness. Sen. Analise Ortiz, a Phoenix Democrat, opposed the bill noting during testimony on May 6 that she easily found ways around internet blockers in middle school while trying to access the website MySpace.
Arizona joins more than 20 states that have enacted similar laws after 2022, though not all are in effect, according to the Free Speech Coalition, which represents the adult entertainment industry. More than a dozen states considered such bills this year, according to the coalition.
Now I don't know about any of my you, but I certainly can't afford $10,000 a day for being in violation after the end of June.
I considered several courses of action. Going through and plucking out all the nekkid menz and leaving everything else intact would be a Herculean task. "Ain't nobody got time for that!"
And then again the age old question raises its head: what is pornography? Does it require penetration? Does it include simple photos of shirtless guys? Am I safe if I just crop out all the penises?
The other alternative I briefly considered was even more dramatic and unacceptable: simply wipe the site and start fresh. Admittedly that's something I've considered on more than one occasion for various other reasons—not the least of which is worrying about running out of my allotted storage space on the server. But sorting my latest crop of downloads this morning I realized I could not continue to bring you porn-dogs your daily dose of male flesh.
So the final alternative—and not really knowing what the specific requirements would be with this bit of legislative billshit—would be to implement some sort of age verification checkpoint. I looked at all the free plugins available to WordPress and grabbed the one that looked the easiest to get up and running. (Sorry, I'm not paying anyone to trample my readers' first amendment rights.)
The format (or in fact the entire plugin) may change over the coming weeks as I look into this further. If Arizona's bill requires proof of age—as in submitting driver's licenses or whatever—then the site will be wiped and rebuilt from scratch sans nekkid menz, because I will never require that from any of my readers.
I'm trying to make this process as unobtrusive as possible (such as requiring that you verify only once every 90 days), and it will obviously require a bit more tweaking as I learn the actual requirements of the new law.
Just wanted to bring you up to speed on what's happening.
