Ohio's New Porn Age Verification Law: Big Brother Dressed Up as Child Protection

Starting September 29th, Ohio joins 24 other states requiring age verification for adult websites. This law, buried in our 3,156-page state budget, is a perfect example of performative politics that fails to address real problems while creating new ones.

This law doesn't protect children. Any tech-savvy kid knows how to use a VPN to bypass geographic restrictions. Meanwhile, the real dangers kids face online - predators on social media, cyberbullying, exposure to violence - go unaddressed. We're creating a false sense of security while ignoring actual threats.

The hypocrisy is stunning. Major platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and Reddit - where pornographic content is readily accessible - get a pass. Cable and streaming providers? Exempt. But smaller platforms like Bluesky that compete with Big Tech? They're in the crosshairs. This isn't about protecting kids; it's about picking winners and losers.

"Small government" Republicans just mandated that Ohioans hand over their driver's licenses or other sensitive personal data to access legal content. They're creating a permanent record of what adults view in private. In an era of constant data breaches - including multiple recent hacks of Ohio government systems - we're now required to trust our most personal browsing habits to verification systems that will inevitably be compromised.

The same party that rails against government overreach just created a surveillance infrastructure that would make authoritarians proud. They claim the data will be deleted immediately after verification, but we've heard that promise before.

If we actually cared about protecting children online, we'd focus on digital literacy education, better parental tools, and holding social media companies accountable for the harm they cause. Instead, we get this - security theater that invades privacy, creates new risks, and does nothing to address the real problems.

Ohio Republicans have shown us once again that "small government" is just a slogan they use when convenient. When it comes to controlling what you do in your own home, Big Brother is alive and well in Ohio.