Missouri and Kansas didn’t vote for age verification — and it can’t stop porn | Opinion
Society has many reasons to keep kids’ eyes off pornography. Obviously. But Missouri and Kansas’ new age verification policies won’t do a thing to achieve that goal — and they come with very real risks to your personal privacy and freedom.
On Monday, Republican Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway implemented a rule requiring adult websites to prove that visitors are 18 or older. (It coincided with the start of legal online sports gambling in the state. Make of that what you will, irony-wise.) Kansas did something similar in April 2024, going the legislative route to pass Senate Bill 394 for roughly the same purpose. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly didn’t sign the law, but allowed it to go into effect despite her understandable concerns about whether it’s workable and constitutional.
As a result, popular Canadian pornography company Aylo has added both states to the list that it no longer serves, bringing the total to 23. So now, Missouri and Kansas residents are blocked from visiting YouPorn, RedTube, Pornhub and Brazzers.
Except they aren’t. A simple piece of software called a virtual private network or VPN easily allows anyone to spoof their electronic device’s location as being anywhere in the world. There’s one built right into the popular Opera browser. AG Hanaway knows they’re an easy way around Missouri’s rule, as she warned parents on Facebook Thursday. Set your VPN to a state or country with no age restrictions, and the internet works like it used to.
VPNs have legitimate uses, such as protecting your data on public Wi-Fi networks. But let’s be honest: They’re more commonly used to get around regional restrictions on streaming services, to fool parents and employers, or for online piracy. And believe me — your kids know how to use them.
Adult content floods X, Bluesky, Reddit
The much bigger issue is that the internet is simply way too vast to police in any meaningful way — and to call pornography ubiquitous on it is an understatement. Really, who cares about Pornhub? It’s impossible to count how many other sites host adult content, not to mention apps and social networks. Elon Musk’s X formally allows it, as do Bluesky and online communities like Reddit. A constellation of membership-based sites such as OnlyFans and Patreon allow and even encourage adult content. Many of them claim to accept users 18 and older only. We have to take their word.
It’s naive to think these controls can be effective anyway. Meta tries to keep adult content off Facebook and Instagram, but users get around those rules all the time. But much more important, the internet is still the Wild West, and always will be unless world governments come together to clamp down on it. There are uncountable numbers of shadowy operators with huge databases of porn videos they don’t own the rights to. They create new sites quickly for maximum traffic. When one of the studios whose work they’ve stolen comes after them, they simply delete the site and recreate a virtually identical one under a different name and URL. There’s no way to get ahead of the cat-and-mouse.
Then let’s talk about how age verification would even work. Kansas’ law is maddeningly vague, mandating that sites use “a commercially available database that is regularly used by businesses or governmental entities” or “any other commercially reasonable method of age and identity verification.” Missouri’s rule is more detailed — and more troubling, requiring users to upload their government-issued personal identification to the adult site’s operators, or use other intrusive means.
That’s right: Missouri wants you to give your most personal information to pornographers. Have you ever tried to get a live representative from Amazon to talk to you? How do you like the odds of troubleshooting your account privacy with the people behind God knows what dot com?
And a VPN doesn’t automatically protect you, either. You have to put your trust in the company behind it, because VPNs see everything you surf. So your privacy is always at the mercy of one disgruntled employee with keys to the user logs. No matter the form it takes, online censorship is surveillance, period.
Project 2025’s ‘back door’ to ban
And by the way, did you vote for this? No, you didn’t. Although there’s some bipartisan support for age verification rules in both Jefferson City and Topeka, it’s an indisputable fact that they’re part of the far-right Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 road map to ban pornography completely.
While I’m mostly opposed in principle to journalists making secret recordings, there are times when they’re a valid tool to reveal deception. Such was the case in 2024, when reporters with the British Centre for Climate Reporting posed as potential conservative donors in a meeting with Project 2025 author Russell Vought. He’s now serving as the mightily powerful director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, where he’s quietly carrying out many of Donald Trump’s least popular policies. The journalists published video and audio of a conversation where Vought laid out his actual agenda:
“We’re doing it from the back door,” he said. “We’d have a national ban on pornography if we could, right? … We’ve got a number of states that are passing this, and then you know what happens is the porn company says, ‘We’re not going to do business in your state’ — which, of course, is entirely what we were after.”
So what we have in both Missouri and Kansas is an intrinsically dishonest campaign, with an irretrievably flawed approach. There are better ways to keep kids from seeing things they shouldn’t, such as device-based age verification, which allows guardians to child-proof phones, tablets and computers — somewhat. But even that technology relies on reputable pornographers to make their sites work with the gadgets, and there will always be dishonest players.
Before the days of connected computers and smartphones, every teenage boy knew whose older brother had dirty magazines or stag films stashed away in their backpacks or the attic. The internet just supercharged that. And we can never expect filth purveyors to act responsibly. Parents, this is your new reality. You simply have to acknowledge the cold, hard facts about the messy and entirely unavoidable consequences of letting your kids carry the internet around in their back pockets all day.
This story was originally published December 7, 2025 at 5:08 AM.
