JACKSON, Miss.―Starting on July 1, 2025, the state of Mississippi will begin enforcing a brand new civil tort adopted this year that is attached to an existing age verification law that could potentially prove costly to major adult platforms.
House Bill (HB) 599, signed into law on April 10 by Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, outlines a private right of action for citizens to sue adult businesses of all types that publish online content they consider to be "obscene." Penalties include up to $500,000 in "noneconomic damages" to victims harmed by viewing this "obscenity."
Furthermore, HB 599 permits so-called "punitive damages," which are fines imposed for publishing "especially reckless or malicious content."
First Amendment attorney Corey Silverstein, for one, thinks that House Bill 599 could be a significant and censorial overreach.
"This is pure speech suppression; end of story," Silverstein told AVN. "Mississippi wants to control what type of content people can view online, and they make it clear that basically all pornography should be considered obscene and thus not entitled to First Amendment protection."
The way Mississippi is doing this is by installing a "bounty law," or a law that relies on motivated private parties to enforce the law through private enforcement actions that are issued by the state judicial system or in a federal court if the potential complaints involve companies that operate in different U.S. states or other countries.
Utah is one of the most prominent cases of "bounty" age verification laws, designed to immunize the state from enforcing the law, thereby making it harder to challenge such restrictions as state-sponsored censorship of forms of expression they deem obscene but are otherwise lawful.
Kansas has a similar law. A controversial far-right anti-pornography lobbying group sued the parent companies of several adult platforms in a federal district court on behalf of a Jane Doe mother and her child in a set of lawsuits announced two weeks ago.
"Unfortunately, this dangerous trend continues across the United States," Silverstein added. "It’s imperative that people remember that the First Amendment was written without footnotes or exceptions contrary to what lawmakers like this invoice as their world, where the narrative is controlled to what they deem appropriate."
Mississippi implemented its initial age verification measure targeting adult platforms in 2023.
