A bill introduced by Michigan lawmakers last week would ban pornography, ASMR, depictions of transgender people, and VPNs for anyone using the internet in the state.
House Bill 4938, called the “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act,” would prohibit distribution of “certain material on the internet that corrupts the public morals,” the bill states. It was introduced on September 11 by five Republican representatives: Josh Schriver, Joseph Pavlov, Matthew Maddock, James DeSana, and Jennifer Wortz.
The bill would forbid all “pornographic material,” which the lawmakers define as “content, digital, streamed, or otherwise distributed on the internet, the primary purpose of which is to sexually arouse or gratify, including videos, erotica, magazines, stories, manga, material generated by artificial intelligence, live feeds, or sound clips.”
The bill’s authors list out the specific things they consider pornographic material, including:
Vaginal or anal intercourseFellatio or cunnilingusMasturbationEjaculation or orgasmPenetration with sexual devicesGroup sexBondage, domination, or sadomasochism.Acts involving bodily fluids for sexual arousal.Erotic autonomous sensory meridian response content, moaning, or sensual voice content [ASMR]Animated, virtual, or sexual activity generated by artificial intelligenceDepictions of characters acting or resembling minors in sexual contexts.Any other pornographic material
The lawmakers also define any depiction or description of trans people as pornographic, and therefore, banned on platforms operating in the state, including anything “that includes a disconnection between biology and gender by individual of 1 biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be of the other biological sex by means of attire, cosmetology, or prosthetics, or as having a reproductive nature contrary to the individual’s biological sex.”
Platform operators that “knowingly distribute” any of the above content to anyone accessing it from Michigan would be guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment up to 20 years or a fine of up to $100,000, or both. If the platform hosts more than “100 pieces” of the above, that escalates to 25 years and $125,000. On top of being a felony, hosting that content would open platforms and internet service providers up to civil fines of up to $500,000 for “each violation.”
Sites would be required to change their terms of service to prohibit the above material, and implement moderation tools that use AI and human mods to find and remove pornographic content.
The bill would require internet service providers servicing Michigan to implement "mandatory filtering technology” and “actively monitor and block known circumvention tools,” which would include VPNs—the most popular workaround for people in states with age verification laws in place. It also would ban the promotion or sale of VPNs in Michigan.
404 MediaSamantha Cole
As Michigan local news outlet Fox 2 noted yesterday, Schriver has been talking about wanting to ban porn entirely in the state for a long time. Earlier this year, he said “shutting down the porn industry would be a crushing blow to the human trafficking industry.” Porn is legal and constitutionally protected by the First Amendment in the US, but many lawmakers in this country have been pushing to change that for years. It’s also basically impossible to pin down what content will “sexually arouse or gratify” every person who uses the internet; people are getting off to a billion different kinds of content that doesn’t even include bodily fluids or genitals.
Nearly 30 states have passed and enacted laws that require all visitors to porn sites, including adults, to verify their ages with a government ID or face scan to access porn. In some states, such as Wyoming and South Dakota, those laws extend to mainstream, non-porn platforms like Bluesky. Michigan lawmakers have introduced two age verification bills: one for device-based age verification and one that mimics the many laws that have passed in states across the country. Existing age verification laws—which are uniformly invasive of people’ privacy and ineffective at actually stopping children from viewing harmful content—typically have bipartisan support, but Michigan’s Democratic senate and its governor Gretchen Whitmer will ultimately decide whether the much more extreme, Republican-backed “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act” will become law.
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Fuckers stole my ASMR, can’t have shit in Detroit
