South Dakota lawmakers find consensus on porn age verification

Task force recommends legislation that mirrors bill killed by Senate committee earlier this year

(Austin Goss/The Dakota Scout)

PIERRE — A work group of the Legislature will throw its support behind a bill requiring pornography websites to verify the age of their users after all.

A unanimous vote by the Legislature’s Artificial Intelligence and Regulation of Internet Access by Minors committee Wednesday morning comes after months of contentious back-and-forth about what — if any — legislation should be supported to protect kids from “harmful content” on the internet.

The group of 15 lawmakers landed on supporting a single bill, Rep. Bethany Soye’s proposal modeled after a similar bill defeated in the Senate last session. The Sioux Falls Republican got almost everything she wanted in her proposal, too. Two amendments were made to the proposed legislation, a “friendly” amendment that struck language that would have allowed the state to classify violations of the age verification as deceptive trade practices, and another that changed what qualifies as a covered platform in hopes of keeping social media sites, for example, from being caught in the net with pornography sites.

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