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Use of VPNs to bypass age checks on porn sites to be investigated by Australia’s eSafety watchdog
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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Just fuck all the way off with this shit. I know this is Australia, but in the US many states are requiring ID verification for most mainstream porn sites. Sure there are others that work, but it shouldn't even be a thing in the first place.
Perhaps worth noting that, IIRC, in Australia the law strictly prohibits these age verification processes from requiring ID.
I think the porn age-verification hooks off of the same law, passed a year or so earlier than the porn age-verification law, as the social media age-verification law. And I know that that law requires that they have some other means of verifying age. Some social media sites have simply used the age and/or content of the account to bypass the need for any verification that requires explicit user action. But for others, things like AI-based face age-detection have been used. They're allowed to offer ID verification as an option, but it cannot be their only means.
This is not meant as a defence of the law, btw. It's still crap. Just a clarification of one noteworthy difference between our law and the one in, say, Texas.
(Edit: just because it amuses me, I wish to clarify that by "our" I mean the whole of Australia; and by "Texas", I mean Texas, USA, and not Texas, Qld.)
I'm starting to see so much "get verified" bullshit on websites. All being marketed as something "exclusive" that unlocks more features.
For example, a online market place is pushing "get verified now" to reach more buyers.
I wonder if someone can start a lawsuit by stating ID are a direct constitutional violation to view porn, as it's protected speech.
Someone has. Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. Unfortunately, SCOTUS held 6–3 that they "only incidentally burdened the protected speech of adults", which meant that because they decided only intermediate scrutiny applied (as opposed to the more difficult burden of strict scrutiny, or the even weaker burden of rational basis), the law was ok.
???
Porn is protected speech?
I had a similar response at first, but I believe Zen is responding to Zahill's comparison to America. In America, yes. Their first amendment is very, very broad. Over time, various cases have held that "obscene" material can be banned, but they have increasingly narrowed the definition of obscene to the point that most of what we would call porn is now legally protected. Cases like Roth and Miller, earlier on. Leading up to, more recently, Ashcroft v ACLU which prohibited bans of online porn pretty much entirely.
(Disclaimer: this comment comes from some vaguely remembered YouTube videos from Legal Eagle, plus skimming the Wikipedia articles of the cases mentioned. I'm probably being overly broad...or overly narrow, in some way here.)
A bigger reason is that nobody should trust the government to define porn for the purpose of classifying porn as restricted speech, just because there are too many important edge cases, especially regarding health information.
In America, although I'm sure that's on the Republican shit-can list.
Well even back in 2004 when Ashcroft v ACLU was decided (and protected online porn as free speech), Justice Scalia said "no, porn should not in any way be protected", and three other justices said whatever restrictions on it were in the law being adjudicated were acceptable as a way to protect children. SCOTUS's more recent decisions regarding hard age-verification in cases like Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton has held that strict age-verification laws are allowed.