BISMARCK, N.D.—North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong, a Republican, signed a bill into law Thursday that requires adult entertainment platforms to verify users’ ages.
House Bill (HB) 1561Â will only be enforceable through private lawsuits. Adult platforms operating in North Dakota’s digital space will be required to verify the ages of individuals through “reasonable” age verification solutions. These solutions can include age checks, document checks, age estimation or human checks.
Such systems may also be dependent on public and private transactional data and credit card information to confirm that individuals are at least 18 years old.
Kelly’s adoption of HB 1561 was an indication that a narrower approach to age verification was preferred compared to other measures.
As AVN previously reported, the Free Speech Coalition initially supported a competing bill with similar functionality, Senate Bill (SB) 2380, due to the bill’s unique mention of device-based verification, which is supported as a compromise solution by several major stakeholders in the industry.
However, the bill was amended to remove device-based verification, and FSC withdrew support. The most recent action on SB 2380 was passed through the House of Representatives unanimously, sending the bill back to the Senate to reconcile differences. Despite being nearly identical to HB 1561, SB 2380 has stalled in the process.
HB 1561 and SB 2380 have different sponsors.
