JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Newly appointed Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway announced Friday that the state’s recently approved age verification regulation for adult websites will go into effect on Nov. 30.
The regulation applies to commercial websites and platforms where one-third or more of the content is pornographic or sexually explicit. Civil penalties for noncompliance can run as high as $10,000 per day.
“This rule is a milestone in our effort to protect Missouri children from the devastating harms of online pornography,” Hanaway said in a statement. “We are holding powerful corporations accountable, respecting women and victims of human trafficking, and helping ensure that minors are shielded from dangerous, sexually explicit material.”
The process of reaching that milestone has been anything but straightforward, including two separate bills in the state House, an end run around the legislature by the former state attorney general through the use of a consumer protection statute, a four-month delay because of a missed publishing deadline, a new attorney general being abruptly appointed and, at one point, a version of the rule that was rejected because it would have relied on technology that doesn’t yet exist.
Originally, two bills were introduced in the Missouri House of Representatives: HB 691 and HB 236, the latter of which received initial approval by the legislature in March. In April, however, then-Attorney General Andrew Bailey took the unprecedented step of bypassing the legislature and implementing his own age verification rule, invoking his office’s authority under the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act (MMPA), a consumer protection statute. First Amendment attorneys widely saw this move as unconstitutional.
The rule, 15 CSR 60-17.010, was described by the AG’s office as “the most robust age-verification standard in the country,” and Bailey touted its signature feature, what he referred to as dual-layer age verification.
“Missouri is leading the way by going beyond surface-level protections, implementing a two-layer verification process that ensures minors are kept out — and adult privacy is respected,” he said in an April statement.
As it turned out, dual-layer age verification, which involves a user having to verify their age on both the platform and on their device to gain access to an adult website, does not actually exist in a commercially viable form.
Undaunted, Bailey reworked his proposed rule, and eventually published 15 CSR 60-18.010 through 15 CSR 60-18.070 in mid-May. At the time, the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) estimated that, based on the state’s rulemaking timeline, the law could likely take effect on August 30.
However, as FSC later noted, Missouri has a particularly byzantine and opaque rulemaking process, and the final rules were not published in time to make the August 30 benchmark. Bailey’s rule would have to wait.
Then, after putting significant work into unilaterally bypassing his own state’s legislature and pushing hard for months for a restrictive age verification rule of his own, Bailey jumped ship before it could be finalized.
Less than one year after Bailey won his first election for the post last November — he was originally appointed by then-Governor Mike Parson in 2023 — U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed him as co-deputy director of the FBI. He resigned his position as Missouri AG this past Monday and moved to Washington. Hanaway was appointed to the vacant position by Gov. Mike Kehoe, and was sworn in on the day Bailey left.
The new AG wasted no time in finalizing the rule’s implementation date, announcing it three days after taking office.
The AG office’s statement justified the swift enactment of the law by dubiously claiming, without citing any actual studies, that research says that porn is violent and degrading, and that it can “warp young minds, fuel sexual exploitation, undermine healthy relationships, and contribute to human trafficking.”
It also, again without citation, alluded to long-debunked theories about porn’s supposed neurological effects causing a form of addiction.
“Faced with these realities, the Attorney General’s Office acted decisively, promulgating this rule to give parents real tools to shield Missouri children and to make clear that pornography distributors and the tech platforms hosting them will no longer operate without guardrails,” the statement reads.
Added Hanaway, “If these companies want to profit off explicit material in Missouri, they will not get a free pass. They must prove their users are adults or they will be shut out of our state.”
