One of the largest creators of adult content online asked Governor Abigail Spanberger to end the Commonwealth’s age verification law this week. The letter comes after a scrape of state court data shows Virginia’s 2023 law remains unused by parents.
If you live in Virginia, or one of 29 other states, and you wanted to access pornography online, things changed three years ago. That’s when the Commonwealth's version of an age verification law kicked in, requiring would-be viewers to enter their personally identifying information into a third-party service to verify they’re old enough to view the content.
But that’s not technically all that Virginia’s law does — it also gives parents the right to file a lawsuit against a porn website if their child was harmed by viewing content there.
Southside Republican Senator Bill Stanley is the author of the law.
“What we’re trying to do is keep this out of the hands of children. I think that’s a responsible thing for Virginians to do,” Stanley told Radio IQ. “That’s why this is still good law.”
Stanley said it’s still a good law because, in the years since its passage, no parent has filed suit. Not one. But for supporters of the law, it’s less about its use and more about its impact.
“We’ve got a number of states passing this and you know what happens is a porn company says, we’re not going to do business in your state,' which is, of course, entirely what we’re after,” said President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought in a clandestine video recorded by the Intercept in 2024. “We're doing it in a back door, starting with the kids, but we’d have a national ban on pornography if we could.”
And it’s working here in the Commonwealth; Virginians still have to enter their private information to access porn. Unless they find another way… and they are.
Before the law went into effect, Virginia saw a spike in searches for VPNs, or virtual private networks, which allows a user to conceal their physical location while surfing the net. Similar spikes occurred in other states where such laws went into effect.
Mike Stabile is with the Free Speech Coalition, a trade group for adult content providers that seeks to create a “safe and regulated market.” He said, beyond the use of VPNs, there’s still plenty of pornography on the internet; it’s just being provided by those who aren’t afraid of age verification laws… or any laws really.
“Traffic to platforms that are legal, that are compliant, that take down pirated content, that take down revenge porn, that take down other illegal types of content, those platforms have lost traffic and what we’ve seen is traffic shift to platforms that are less responsible and overseas,” Stabile said in an interview with Radio IQ. “That seems to be parallel to minors as well. You’re not protecting minors any better. The Virginia law does not protect minors; what it does is it shifts where they go”
So, if the law was designed to protect kids, are the kids doing any better? According to Virginia’s annual School Survey of Climate and Working Conditions... maybe? The survey does not ask about kids online viewing habits, but comparing survey numbers shows thoughts of suicide are down from almost 13% in 2022 to about 8% in 2025. But students experiencing feelings of depression more than half the week are up from 12% to 13.5% over the same period.
And while Virginia’s law may yet to be tested in court, in other states where parents have been given the right to sue over child harm, it has. But it hasn’t gone like law authors would have hoped. A handful of cases were dismissed or sent to arbitration. And while the constitutionality of age verification laws themselves was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, you can still access porn without age verification in Texas, where the law was upheld.
Free Speech Coalition notes “a simple online search [in Texas] showed nine out of the top 10 search results for ‘free porn’ had no age verification at all.”
As for Virginia, according to an Axios Richmond report from late last year, only four of 57 adult sites on “toppornsites.com” asked for ages, with 65% called “wide open” by the outlet.
That brings us back to the letter, authored by Pornhub and sent to Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger and lawmakers in those 29 other states, asking them to “put into action policies that produce measurable improvements in child safety rather than legislation that grabs headlines.”
Spanberger’s office declined to comment on the letter.
But Pornhub points to law changes in the UK which required cellphone manufacturers, Apple’s iPhone in particular, to have an on-board age verification system — users verify their age on the device once and aren’t asked again.
Mike Stabile with the Free Speech Coalition says that system is working and he’d welcome something similar in the U.S.
“If we can find a solution that blocks minors from accessing adult sites, but doesn’t block adults, doesn’t have this default block 95% of users, we’re fine with it,” Stabile says.
And if the goal is healthy kids, Alexandria-based sex therapist Tamara Pincus suggests the Harvey Institute’s Six Principles of Sexual Health, which includes things like consent, honesty, shared values and mutual pleasure.
“It should feel like something you can tell people because it aligns with your values; you’re not doing anything you feel like is wrong,” Pincus told Radio IQ. “And if you’re not sure what is wrong, let's have a conversation about it.”
