How Utah plans to turn the tide on porn

It is hard for Smith Alley to identify the exact moment things started to shift. But over the past five years it became undeniable: The United States reached a turning point against pornography.

Alley, age 22, is emblematic of a generational realization, he said. He was exposed to porn at 9 or 10. By 14, porn felt like “some sort of drug,” available for free on smartphones and school laptops 24/7.

The explicit images tapped into a still-developing part of his brain — then left his mental health in tatters. Alley even considered taking his own life. Despite his parents’ best efforts, porn was everywhere.

“The minute Facebook and Instagram know that you’re a young man, they’re already going to be feeding you in the algorithm more explicit content,” Alley told the Deseret News. “It was hard to get away from.”

With the help of his parents, Alley decided to jump “20 years into the past,” to a time before unlimited porn was just a click away, replacing his iPod Touch with a flip phone, and screen time with the outdoors.

As a high schooler, Alley became an anti-porn advocate. And that is when he began to notice the change. Prominent influencers like Joe Rogan and Theo Von were putting a spotlight on the harmful effects of porn.

And lawmakers also began catching up. Since 2022, 25 states, including Utah, have passed age verification laws making porn websites liable for letting minors access their content without any obstacles.

These laws were bolstered by a Supreme Court ruling last year that rejected the porn industry’s argument that age verification violated the First Amendment by requiring adults to share personal information.

In March, lawmakers made Utah just the second state in the country to impose a tax on porn businesses. They also added regulatory weight to Utah’s 2023 age verification law, which companies had not been following.

For years, Alley had helped parents implement parental controls only to discover workarounds because online corporations refused to take any measures to actively prevent minors from visiting their websites.

The new law represents the conclusion Alley and many parents have reached: While parents are the primary line of defense against pornography, they need a shift in culture and policy to stand a real chance at success.

Utah’s new anti-porn law

In 2023, Utah became one of the first states to require porn companies to verify the age of users. The law created a private right of action so a parent could claim damages if their child accessed a porn website.

PornHub — the eighth most-visited website in the world — shut down in Utah rather than comply with child-protection measures. Meanwhile, no lawsuits were filed under the new law as age verification remained in legal limbo.

But in June 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a similar Texas law. This emboldened the Utah Legislature during the 2026 session to crack down on porn websites with a “sin tax” and a state-led enforcement process.

“We have a responsibility as a state to, No. 1, protect our minors, but also to facilitate a path forward that they can have healthy relationships in their adulthood,” Utah Sen. Calvin Musselman told the Deseret News.

The new law, SB73, sponsored by Musselman, R-West Haven, will apply a 2% excise tax to online pornography. The tax follows the tobacco model by earmarking 90% of revenues to offset negative costs to society.

These revenues can only be used for mental health treatment, outreach and educational programs related to harmful online material for minors. The other 10% will be used to pay for enforcement measures.

SB73, which was signed into law on Thursday, also adds serious teeth to Utah’s age verification policy.

It tasks the Division of Consumer Protection with creating a list of websites whose content is at least one-third pornographic. The division will verify compliance with the new tax and age verification requirements.

The division will likely rely on artificial intelligence and the attorney general’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force to conduct this analysis, Department of Commerce director Margaret Busse told the Deseret News.

Based on proactive investigations and complaints from Utah consumers, the division will apply fines of up to $2,500 for each age verification violation, or up to $5,000 if the porn company has also violated a court order.

Regulators were given authority to create an age verification standard. If porn companies meet it, they won’t be liable for minors on their site. But a virtual private network, or VPN, will not be an excuse to let a minor through.

“The law is putting the onus on the company to figure this out,” Busse said. “The law simply says you can’t have minors on your platform. And so the companies are going to have to figure out the VPN problem.”

Porn’s impact on young people

Utah’s porn company crack down builds on a series of legislative findings.

Porn companies have resisted voluntarily implementing age verification processes, SB73 states, even though a wealth of research demonstrates a correlation between porn access and negative mental health outcomes.

Last year, a report on porn research by the Institute for Family Studies and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute found that any porn use is associated with higher levels of verbal and physical sexual aggression.

The accumulation of data supports that porn use harms mental health among minors, the report found. For example, multiple studies suggest that viewing sexually explicit material undermines positive self-esteem.

The review pointed to large-scale analyses showing that early engagement with porn is significantly associated with problematic porn use during adulthood. And any exposure increases the chances of compulsive porn use.

A systematic review published in 2024 found that consumption of pornography also correlates with permissive sexual attitudes, risky sexual behaviors, more sexual partners and negative attitudes toward women.

The BYU report noted that a 2015 study found that one-third of the 100 most popular pornographic videos depicted violence against women. More than 6% depicted clearly nonconsensual acts of sexual violence.

In September, Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, paid Utah $5 million to settle a lawsuit for permitting nonconsensual material and child sexual abuse material to be viewed millions of times on its websites.

As the prevalence of extreme porn content increases, the age of exposure is going down.

The BYU report found that more than 97% of boys and 78% of girls between 12 and 18 had viewed pornography. The systematic review found the median age for first intentional exposure was 13 for boys and 16 for girls.

One mother of three boys, ages 12, 16 and 18, said they were exposed to pornography at 6 and 8. The mother, a Bountiful resident who chose to remain anonymous, said parents need to wake up to the “public health crisis.”

A 2016 Spanish study found that 60% of boys and 11% of girls, ranging from 13 to 17, used the internet for sexual activities. But the same study found that 75% of parents believed their children had never been exposed at all.

“It is accessible everywhere,” the Bountiful mother said. “You try to protect and block them as much as you can but the platforms were designed for kids to find another way. And I think that’s what’s so aggravating.”

How to help parents

Another frustration shared by this anonymous mother, and two other Utah mothers interviewed by the Deseret News, is the ineffective safety measures of the technology handed out by public schools.

A 2023 technology inventory by Utah Education Network found that 70% of Utah K-12 schools give students a laptop or tablet computer. More than half these schools allow students to take the device home.

This makes it the state’s responsibility to help parents prevent exposure, according to the Bountiful mother, who said she was disappointed that she had to ask her local high school to remove YouTube from her son’s computer.

Another Utah mom, Brina Vance, said school-provided laptops have made parents’ jobs much more difficult. As a substitute teacher, Vance said she watched fourth graders use word documents to access porn during class.

Utah’s new law is long overdue, Vance said. Vance has four adolescent children and is getting a graduate degree in marriage and family therapy because she said sexually compulsive behaviors are “a family issue.”

In addition to destroying families, porn exploits those involved in its creation, according to Heber mom Brittany Homer. It also has a similar psychological effect as sexual abuse on children who view it, she said.

After receiving her degree in family life, Homer launched Project Stand, a nonprofit that works with parents, schools and local governments to develop guardrails to protect children from harmful online content.

“For parents to be able to do their job of protecting their kids, there’s got to be state policies in place,” Homer said. “If companies are intentionally creating products that are harmful to minors, parents can’t keep up with that.”

But Alley has committed to do his best.

Now married, Alley said he and his wife are already thinking about how to apply the lessons their generation learned the hard way, like waiting to introduce smartphones for his children until late in their teenage years.

Alley is “ecstatic” about the new law and said he is “proud to live in a state that is family-focused.” But these policy shifts must be accompanied by a cohort of parents who are willing to reverse the normalization of “iPad kids.”

“Parents across the country need to really reduce the amount of technology they have in their house,” Alley said. “I just don’t think kids should have that technology in their life. I think we’d be better off without it.”