Jody Serrano
Editor in chiefEditor in Chief at Xataka On. Before joining Webedia, I was a tech reporter at Gizmodo and The Messenger. While I've covered all sorts of things related to technology, I'm specialized in writing about social media, Internet culture, Twitch, and streamers.
It all started with an old laptop that was stowed away in a closet. The laptop, while forgotten, still worked, and a 14-year-old boy in Kansas used it to access porn sites dozens of times in 2024.
There’s just one problem. State law says these kinds of sites are required to have age verification measures in place. Now, the boy and his mother are suing the porn sites, arguing that he should have never been able to view content that is harmful to minors.
Four lawsuits. The Kansas mom and her teenage son—identified only as “Jane Doe” and “Q.R.”—filed lawsuits against Chaturbate.com, Jerkmate.com, Techpump Solutions (Superporn.com), and Titan Websites (Hentai City) in U.S. district court last week. Local outlet KEKE reported that Q.R. had accessed adult content 118 times over the span of two months on these sites.
Jane Doe is being represented by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), an anti-porn group, which joined the lawsuits as co-counsel. In a press release, NCOSE says that Jane Doe has been “vigilant in monitoring Q.R.’s devices to prevent his exposure to harmful material during this important developmental stage of his life.”
According to the lawsuits, one of which was obtained by 404Media, Jane Doe and her son are seeking at least $75,000 in damages from each company for violating the state’s age verification law.
The amount reflects the “actual damages resulting from Q.R.’s access to material that is harmful to minors, including but not limited to past medical expenses, future medical expenses, past and future lost services and disability, past and future pain, suffering, and disability.”
Kansas’ age verification law. Kansas’ age verification law, which was approved last year, is one of the strictest in the country. Unlike similar laws in other states, the Kansas law says that sites where adult content represents 1/4 of total content can be held liable if they don't take measures to ensure that minors can't access their sites. The law essentially lumps other sites, such as X, together with porn sites even if distributing porn is not their main mission.
Sites can be fined $10,000 for each violation of the law. In addition, parents can sue for damages of at least $50,000.
The minimum adult content threshold is not the only concerning aspect of the law, though. One of its key phrases is “harmful to minors,” which the law describes as content that includes “acts of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse or physical contact with a person’s clothed or unclothed genitals or pubic area or buttocks or with a human female’s breast.”
The definition alarmed activists, who argued that it could age gate access to content about LGBTQ people. Other critics said the law is so broad that it may possibly enable censorship.
Minors and porn. State across the U.S. have been engaged in a fierce debate over the issue of minors and porn in recent years. To date, more than 20 states have passed age verification laws, though dozens more are considering them.
Critics of these laws say they’re an attack on free speech and a privacy nightmare, while advocates say they’re needed to keep children safe online. The NCOSE, for instance, claims that child exposure to porn negatively affects them in school and is linked to mental health problems.
Although Jane Doe tried to restrict her son’s access to the porn sites, NCOSE representatives say it’s not enough unless the companies also take restrictive measures.
“[U]nless these online platforms actually install age verification, this [boy] … what's happened to him and what's happened to hundreds of thousands of others is just going to continue and get worse,” Benjamin Bull, NCOSE’s general counsel, told Fox News.
Impact. According to NCOSE, these are the first lawsuits that challenge alleged violators of an age verification law, but they might not be the last.
Bull told KAKE that he hopes the lawsuits will “open the floodgates” and inspires similar challenges in other states.
Image | charlesdeluvio
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