Legislation protecting Texas children from online pornography has been unanimously approved by a state Senate panel, moving the measure closer to becoming law.
On Monday night, the Senate State Affairs Committee voted in favor of advancing House Bill 1181 by State Rep. Matt Shaheen (R–Plano), which requires sites showing sexually explicit content to verify users are at least 18 years of age and makes manufacturers of devices used to view the sites activate porn-filtering technology.
Every committee member signed on as a co-sponsor of the bill, which now goes to the full Senate for a vote.
“I’ve never said this about any bill before: There isn’t a more important bill this session, from our perspective,” said Jamey Caruthers with the anti-child sex trafficking organization Street Grace, testifying in favor of HB 1181.
HB 1181 is one of the Texas GOP’s priority bills to Stop Sexualizing Texas Kids, and it has bipartisan support in both chambers, passing the House last week with a unanimous vote.
Caruthers and others described the highly addictive nature of porn, the lasting damage it does to young minds, and how online porn sites expose kids to sexual exploitation.
“Pornography is proven to be biologically addictive, and research shows that adolescents are more susceptible than adults to addictions and there are developmental effects on the brain,” explained State Sen. Angela Paxton (R–McKinney), the Senate sponsor of HB 1181.
Exposure to explicit content in childhood is linked to increases in the demand for child pornography, child exploitation, human trafficking, and prostitution. Children who use pornography are more prone to engage in risky sexual behaviors and are at risk of sexual victimization, which is associated with mental health disorders.
“We can’t protect kids from everything, but we’ll do everything we can to protect minors from this incredibly dangerous material,” she added.
HB 1181 requires commercial websites and social media platforms on which more than one-third of the content is “sexual material harmful to minors” to use “reasonable age verification methods” to restrict access to users who are 18 years of age or older.
Paxton presented a revised version of the bill, known as a committee substitute, that also incorporates language from legislation already passed by the Senate requiring device manufacturers to preset content filters to the active setting.
Texas mom Deborah Berry, who discovered in 2016 that her preteen daughter had been accessing Pornhub and other sites since the age of 10, testified in support of HB 1181.
“This was not just material she was viewing,” Berry told the panel. “She was taking pictures of herself. She was being groomed. At age 15, the biggest dream my daughter could dream for herself was to go to L.A. and work in the adult film industry.”
“My daughter has been digitally sex trafficked,” she said.
It does not matter how many protections I built around her. It doesn’t matter what neighborhood my family lived in. It didn’t matter that they attended private schools. What matters is that children have technology in their hands, and there are few protections to keep them safe.
They are living in a virtual Wild West.
“Why would anybody participate in helping predators steal the soul of a child?” Berry asked. “To do nothing would be complicit. That is not acceptable.”
Servando Esparza with TechNet, a technology industry advocacy group, testified against HB 1181’s filtering requirement as burdensome for device manufacturers.
Esparza’s testimony infuriated State Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R–Houston), who serves on the committee.
“It is a moral responsibility for your company and everybody else to start doing this now,” Bettencourt said.
We’re going to lose a generation of children to pornography if Big Tech doesn’t get off their ass and start working to help these families and keep these kids from being addicted for the rest of their life. Do you understand that?
You have to do it. Because there’s nobody else that can do it. … This is happening to millions of kids.
So, I don’t care if we have to have encrypted technology on text. I don’t care if we’re over-blocking websites. I don’t care at all, because we’ve got to protect under 18, and preteens have to be completely secure from this, because they can’t handle the information. It causes a lifetime of addiction.
“When you come into this body, I expect you to come up with a solution. No more equivocation,” Bettencourt added. “I’ve had enough. I do not want to lose a generation of young Americans to this type of addiction, because I can’t get them back. And that is your responsibility as an industry representative.”
Joe Proenza, representing the Virginia-based family values advocacy group American Principles Project, told the panel that age verification is “extremely easy” and noted that several states—including Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Utah, and Virginia—have already enacted legislation like HB 1181 to block children’s access to online porn.
Earlier this month, Pornhub blocked all Utah residents from accessing its XXX-rated site in response to that state’s age-verification law.
HB 1181 must now go back to the House, which can either concur on changes made by the Senate or send the bill to a conference committee to hash out an acceptable version of the legislation.
But time is running short for lawmakers to act.
The regular legislative session ends May 29.