FTC’s Ferguson Promises Crack Down on Porn Sites After EU Action
The FTC is exploring statutory authorities for stopping pornography websites from illegally sharing content with children, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said Wednesday. The agency recently consulted EU enforcers and is also focused on new authorities under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), he said during an agency workshop.
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The European Commission on May 27 announced it’s investigating Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX and XVideos for violations of the Digital Services Act (DSA) related to minors (see 2505270014). Ferguson said he recently met with EC Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen and discussed ways to better protect children. “I’m glad to see we both have a strong focus on protecting kids, and I hope we can find ways to work together on this issue going forward,” he said.
Ferguson referenced President Donald Trump’s backing of the Take It Down Act, a new FTC-enforced law targeting non-consensual online imagery, including deepfakes (see 2505190057). Ferguson, who attended the law’s signing ceremony, said Congress should also pass privacy legislation giving parents more control over their kids’ digital lives.
Parents should be able to decide what apps their children use, read their private messages and erase their data from platforms, he said: “Presently, our laws give far more power to Silicon Valley than they do to parents to determine the online content that will be accessible to our nation’s children. We can and must do better.”
He highlighted some of the changes the agency codified when finalizing its COPPA rule (see 2504210025). The new rule requires additional parental opt-in consent before a platform or website can share a child’s personal information, Ferguson noted. Companies must identify the third parties with whom they’re sharing personal information, as well as the purposes of such disclosures, he said: Parents now have the “right to say no.”
The current legal landscape for age-verification isn’t working, said Ferguson. He argued websites should have to do more than just ask a user for their date of birth. “Everyone in this room knows that this method of age-verification provides little to no barrier of access for children under the age of 13 to online services.”
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., in separate remarks said she and the sponsors of the Kids Online Safety Act continue pushing for a House floor vote. KOSA overwhelmingly passed the Senate in 2024 but didn’t receive a House vote due to opposition from Republican leadership (see 2505140048). Blackburn spoke of the need to establish a duty of care to prevent specific threats to minors, including child sexual abuse material and content promoting the use of drugs and self-harm.
Louisiana Rep. Laurie Schlegel (R) in 2022 helped her state pass the country’s first age-verification law for porn sites. She noted during a panel discussion on Wednesday that her duty-of-care bill, HB-37, is partly modeled after KOSA.
The Louisiana Senate on Tuesday passed HB-37 unanimously (see 2506030063) and with House approval it would be sent to Gov. Jeff Landry (R).
Schlegel said the video game industry needs to be pulled into the conversation about social media regulation, given the lines of communication between children and adults on video game platforms. The Entertainment Software Association, at a hearing last week, testified from a neutral position on HB-37 (see 2505280065), thanking Schlegel for working through changes and “ensuring constitutionality of the bill.”