But how does one decide what constitutes a piece of content—or whether something is considered pornography or not?
“A lot of the time it’s a question that counts about ‘does the law work'” Alan Butler, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, previously told WIRED.
Kupper, who sponsored Arizona’s age-verification law, tells WIRED that he stuck with the one-third threshold because it had been upheld by the United States Supreme Court. He says he’s heard estimates that 15 to 25 percent of accounts on X at least contain pornography, but he’s not sure how accurate that is, and he doesn’t think it’s “feasible” to analyze such estimates across all websites. UX did not respond to questions about what percentage of the site it considers pornographic.
“I don’t think you should have a limit. It should be: Do you have pornographic images on your site? That’s right. I’m not saying you have to verify your age on every site, but for any pornographic material, you have to verify age,” said Kupper. Posts on X marked as “adult content age-restricted” can only be viewed by logged-in users over the age of 18, although X generally expects users who upload restricted content to mark it as self-revealing. WIRED was unable to find similar restrictions on pornographic links on Grok’s website.
Kupper says that in the Arizona case, people would need to file a complaint—for example, if their child was harmed by pornography on X—and the court would have to make X prove that less than one-third of the content was pornography.
Nebraska state senator Dave Murman, who spearheaded age-verification legislation there, tells WIRED that he’s not sure about Grok’s independent site but that “X doesn’t have at least 1/3 of its content that is sexually inappropriate or harmful to children.” However, when asked if the state was measuring that, he says it was that much—and he doesn’t know any situation that was measuring it.
“While I would love a system where all aspects of pornographic content are age-gated, passing legislation to do so without including other legal rights to social media expression seems unlikely,” he said. “While I don’t know if there is a legal solution to remove pornographic images from social media sites like X, I hope the company will take action.”
Pornhub, one of the biggest porn sites in the world, has banned itself in many states from age verification, arguing that too many sites do not comply and that people do not want to give their ID and personal information to a third-party site to have their age verified. It will again block it for new UK users next week due to the country’s age verification rules, which came into effect last July.
On Tuesday, Solomon Friedman, vice president of compliance at private equity firm Ethical Partners Capital (ECP), which owns Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, told WIRED that both the approach and scope of the age-verification rules are “seriously flawed.”
He said that Google Images, for example, “has thumbnails of every archived pornographic image on the Internet.” Friedman and Pornhub want Google, Apple, and Microsoft to implement device-based age verification so that people’s data can always be stored on their phones or laptops.
“That’s also a solution for adult content on non-sexual sites and forums. It can be used to filter out graphic tweets or posts on X or the graphic use of AI chat bots.”
WIRED reached out to Google, Microsoft, and Apple about whether they could turn on device-based age verification but has yet to hear back.
