Rep. Patsy Hazlewood
A bill unanimously passed in the Senate this week for more restrictions on pornography websites has advanced in the House.
Rep. Patsy Hazlewood, R-Signal Mountain, said the bill "is one step closer to becoming state law."
The act would take effect Jan. 1, 2025.
The Protect Tennessee Minors Act would require websites with adult content to enforce an age verification process to ensure only adults are viewing the content.
Rep. Hazlewood said, “The Internet is a dark place, and we all have a legitimate interest in preventing minors from accessing explicit materials. Exposure to pornography detrimental to a child’s mental health, well-being and brain development. This bill simply applies the same guardrails to the online world that we already have in the physical world.”
She said a national survey found that 73 percent of teens, ages 13 to 17, have admitted to watching pornography, and 54 percent said they first watched it before the age of 13.
The legislation would require owners of websites with adult content to install a commercially reasonable age verification process that matches a user’s photo to a valid form of identification issued in the United States. Stored data must not include any personal identifying information, and the active user must remain anonymous after access has been granted.
Search engines, Internet service providers and public interest broadcasts and publications are excluded from the requirement.
Under the proposed law, if owners fail to implement the age verification process or fail to retain at least seven years of the anonymous transactional data, they would face a Class C felony.
The Attorney General’s Office would oversee and enforce this law, if passed.
The Tennessee General Assembly joined several other states in 2017 recognizing pornography as a public health crisis in a joint resolution. Since then, states like Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas and several others have passed similar legislation requiring age verification on websites with substantial adult content, it was stated.