Justin Bamberg, D-Bamberg, was the lone South Carolina legislator to vote against an age-verification bill for adult entertainment websites during the legislative session. A number of popular adult entertainment websites have begun restricting access to South Carolina users after a law called the Child Online Safety Act takes effect.
It requires sites to verify users' ages. The law sponsored by state Rep. Travis Moore, R-Spartanburg, went into effect Jan.
The Child Online Safety Act was designed to restrict minors' access to pornographic content online by requiring purveyors of adult entertainment to use "commercially reasonable" methods of using public or private transactional data to verify users' ages. The bill is a nearly identical copy of Louisiana's Act , a bill sponsored by Christian family counselor and conservative state Rep.
Laurie Schlegel in that has since become a template for 17 similar state anti-obscenity laws passed primarily across the South. Methods for verifying ages include everything from so-called "digitized identification cards" to independent, third-party age-verification services used by businesses or government agencies to verify users were above the age of Any website that fails to vet the ages of users who were eventually able to access adult content could be found criminally liable and sued for damages, per the S.
The bill easily passed through the Legislature. In the House, only Rep. Justin Bamberg, D-Bamberg, voted against the bill in a vote , while the legislation passed unanimously in the Senate.
