Conservative lawmakers want porn taxes. Critics say they’re unconstitutional.
SOURCE:Ars Technica|BY:
Jason Parham, WIRED.com
Half the country has enacted age-verification laws to prevent minors from viewing porn.
data privacy concerns
Half the country has enacted age-verification laws to prevent minors from viewing porn.
As age-verification laws continue to dismantle the adult industry—and determine the future of free speech on the internet—a Utah lawmaker proposed a bill this week that would enforce a tax on porn sites that operate within the state.
Introduced by state senator Calvin Musselman, a Republican, the bill would impose a 7 percent tax on total receipts “from sales, distributions, memberships, subscriptions, performances, and content amounting to material harmful to minors that is produced, sold, filmed, generated, or otherwise based” in Utah. If passed, the bill would go into effect in May and would also require adult sites to pay a $500 annual fee to the State Tax Commission. Per the legislation, the money made from the tax will be used by Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services to provide more mental health support for teens.
Musselman did not respond to a request for comment.
A new age of American conservatism commands the political arena, and more US lawmakers are calling for additional restrictions on adult content. In September, Alabama became the first state to impose a porn tax on adult entertainment companies (10 percent) following the passage of age-verification mandates, which require users to upload an ID or other personal documentation to verify that they are not a minor before viewing sexually explicit content. Pennsylvania lawmakers are also eyeing a bill that would tax consumers an additional 10 percent on “subscriptions to and one-time purchases from online adult content platforms,” despite already requiring them to pay a 6 percent sales and use tax for the purchase of digital products, two state senators wrote in a memo in October. Other states have flirted with the idea of a porn tax in the past. In 2019, Arizona state senator Gail Griffin, a Republican, proposed taxing adult content distributors to help fund the border wall, a key priority during Donald Trump’s first presidential term. So far, 25 US states have passed a form of age verification.
Although efforts to criminalize participants in the sex work industry have been ongoing for years—with new regulations unfolding at a moment of heightened online surveillance and censorship—targeted taxes have failed to gain widespread approval because the legality of such laws is up for debate.
“This kind of porn tax is blatantly unconstitutional,” says Evelyn Douek, an associate professor of law at Stanford Law School. “It singles out a particular type of protected speech for disfavored treatment, purely because the legislature doesn’t like it—that’s exactly what the First Amendment is designed to protect against. Utah may not like porn, but as the Supreme Court affirmed only last year, adults have a fully protected right to access it.”
Utah, Alabama, and Pennsylvania are among the 16 states that have adopted resolutions declaring porn a public health crisis. “We realize this is a bold assertion not everyone will agree on, but it’s the full-fledged truth,” Utah governor Gary Herbert tweeted in 2016 after signing the resolution. One of Utah’s earliest statewide responses to the proliferation of adult content happened in 2001, when it became the first state to create an office for sexually explicit issues by hiring an obscenity and pornography complaints ombudsman. The position—dubbed the “porn czar”—was terminated in 2017.
“Age restriction is a very complex subject that brings with it data privacy concerns and the potential for uneven and inconsistent application for different digital platforms,” Alex Kekesi, vice president of brand and community at Pornhub, told WIRED in a previous conversation. In November, the company urged Google, Microsoft, and Apple to enact device-based verification in their app stores and across their operating systems. “We have seen several states and countries try to impose platform-level age verification requirements, and they have all failed to adequately protect children.” To comply with the new age gate mandates, Pornhub has currently blocked access to users in 23 states.
Critics argue that age verification has never been about protecting children but rather scrubbing porn from the internet. A video leaked in 2024 by the Centre for Climate Reporting showed Russell Vought, a Trump ally and Project 2025 coauthor, calling age verification laws a “back door” tactic to a federal porn ban.
Sites like OnlyFans and Pornhub have brought platform-dependent sex work into the mainstream, but they have also made it easier to police adult entertainers and consumers. As more states begin to implement added tariffs on sex work, creators will bear the brunt of the new laws more than anyone.
The skewed ideology of cultural conservatism that is taking shape under Trump 2.0 wants to punish sexual expression, says Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the adult industry in the US. “When we talk about free speech, we generally mean the freedom to speak, the ability to speak freely without government interference. But in this case, free also means not having to pay for the right to do so. A government tax on speech limits that right to those who can afford it.”
According to company policy, OnlyFans complies with all tax requirements in the jurisdictions in which it operates. Creators are responsible for their own tax affairs. Pornhub, which is currently blocked in Utah and Alabama, did not respond to a request for comment.
Douek notes that following the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold age-verification laws in Texas, states can legally regulate minors’ access to sexually explicit material, “but a porn tax does nothing to limit minors’ access to this speech—it simply makes it more expensive to provide this content to adults.” A 2022 report from Common Sense Media, a youth advocacy nonprofit, found that 73 percent of teens age 13 to 17 have watched adult content online. Today, young people regularly access NSFW content via social media, on platforms like X and Snap. Last year, a survey by the UK’s Office of the Children’s Commissioner reported that 59 percent of minors are being exposed to porn by accident, primarily via social media, up from 38 percent in 2023.
In Alabama, as would be the case with Utah, revenue raised by the tax is being used for behavioral health services, including prevention, treatment, and recovery support for young people.
Alabama state representative Ben Robbins, the bill’s Republican sponsor, said in an interview last year that adult content was “a driver in causing mental health issues” in the state. It’s a common argument among lawmakers pushing for a nationwide porn ban. Some scientific studies suggest that adolescent exposure to porn increases rates of depression, low self-esteem, and normalized violence, but health professionals have never reached a consensus on the matter.
With lawmakers working to reframe the issue around underage harm, Stabile says it’s critical to remember that adult content isn’t different from any other kind of protected speech, noting that content-specific taxes on speech have repeatedly been struck down by the courts as unconstitutional censorship.
“What if a state decided that Covid misinformation was straining state health resources and taxed newsletters who promoted it? What if the federal government decided to require a costly license to start a podcast? What if a state decided to tax a certain newspaper it didn’t like?” he says. “Porn isn’t some magical category of speech separate from movies, streaming services, or other forms of entertainment. Adult businesses already pay taxes on the income they earn, just as every other business does. Taxing them because of imagined harms is not only dangerous to our industry, it sets a dangerous precedent for government power.”
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