What Adult Platforms Need to Know
The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will consider the Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net Act, commonly known as the SCREEN Act, during an executive session scheduled for August 5, 2026. The bill, S. 737, would establish a federal age-verification mandate for online platforms that regularly make adult content available for profit.
The SCREEN Act is only one of several online-safety bills on the committee’s agenda, but it is the proposal with the most direct and immediate significance for the adult entertainment industry. Committee approval would send the bill to the full Senate for further consideration. It would not, by itself, make the bill law.
Who Would Be Covered?
The bill would apply to an “interactive computer service” that:
- engages in interstate or foreign commerce, or purposefully avails itself of any portion of the U.S. market; and
- regularly creates, hosts, or makes available visual content that is harmful to minors, whether supplied by the platform, a user, or another content provider, with the objective of earning a profit.
A platform could be covered even if it does not directly profit from the adult content and even if adult content is not its principal business. The definition therefore plainly reaches dedicated adult websites and creator platforms, but it could also reach mixed-content platforms that regularly host qualifying adult material. Unlike many state age-verification laws, the SCREEN Act does not contain a “one-third,” “substantial portion,” or similar content threshold.
Foreign operators would not necessarily fall outside the bill. A non-U.S. platform could be covered if it purposefully serves the United States or any portion of the U.S. market.
What Would the Bill Require?
Beginning one year after enactment, a covered platform would be required to use a “technology verification measure” to verify users’ ages and prevent minors from accessing content that is harmful to minors. A user’s simple confirmation that the user is an adult would not be sufficient.
The bill does not prescribe a closed list of acceptable methods. Instead, it generally permits the platform to select technology that determines whether it is more likely than not that a user is a minor and prevents minors from obtaining access. This could encompass government identification, transactional-data verification, facial age estimation, reusable age credentials, or other technological methods, depending on future Federal Trade Commission guidance.
Several provisions deserve particular attention:
Platform-wide gating. The introduced language is not clearly limited to placing an age gate immediately before specific adult content. It states that a covered platform must ensure that its users are not minors, and the defined verification measure must prevent minors from accessing “any content” on the platform. This language could be interpreted as requiring covered services to exclude minors from the platform altogether.
Nationwide application. The platform must apply the verification measure to U.S. users. The bill expressly includes users connecting through known virtual private network or proxy IP addresses unless the platform determines, using available technology, that the user is outside the United States.
Public disclosure. A covered platform would have to publicly disclose the verification process it uses to comply with the Act. The bill does not explain how much technical or vendor information must be disclosed.
Third-party vendors. A platform could outsource age verification, but using a vendor would not relieve the platform of its statutory obligations or liability.
Data security and retention. Platforms would have to maintain reasonable security for age-verification data and protect it against unauthorized access. That data could be retained only for as long as reasonably necessary to perform verification or minimally necessary to demonstrate compliance. The bill would not require platforms to provide personally identifiable user data to the FTC.
FTC Audits and Enforcement
The SCREEN Act would place primary enforcement authority with the FTC. A violation would be treated as a violation of an FTC rule defining an unfair or deceptive act or practice, making the FTC Act’s investigative, injunctive, and civil-enforcement mechanisms available.
The FTC would also be required to:
- issue compliance guidance within 180 days after enactment;
- conduct regular audits of covered platforms;
- publish the terms and procedures governing those audits; and
- specify the documents and other evidence platforms must maintain to demonstrate compliance.
The introduced bill does not create an express private right of action, authorize state attorneys general to enforce the federal statute, or expressly preempt state age-verification laws. As a result, the SCREEN Act appears likely to add a federal compliance layer without eliminating the existing state-by-state framework.
The Constitutional Landscape After Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton
The bill comes before the committee after the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, 606 U.S. 461 (2025). The Court upheld Texas’s age-verification requirement under intermediate scrutiny, concluding that requiring proof of age only incidentally burdens adults’ access to constitutionally protected material. The Court also held that intermediate scrutiny does not require the government to select the least restrictive means of protecting minors.
That decision substantially improves the constitutional environment for online age-verification laws. It does not, however, resolve every potential challenge to the SCREEN Act.
The Texas statute considered in Paxton applied only to websites on which more than one-third of the content was sexual material harmful to minors and permitted specified verification methods, including government identification and transactional data. The SCREEN Act contains no comparable content-percentage threshold, may extend to mixed-content platforms, and could be interpreted to require platform-wide exclusion of minors.
Those distinctions may become important in any future challenge involving adequate tailoring, overbreadth, vagueness, privacy, or the burden imposed on platforms that are not primarily adult-content businesses. Paxton makes a categorical attack on age verification more difficult, but it does not provide automatic constitutional approval for every verification mandate Congress might enact.
What Adult Businesses Should Do Now
The SCREEN Act creates no current compliance obligation. Its consideration by the Senate Commerce Committee nevertheless makes federal age-verification legislation materially more likely than it was when the bill was introduced.
Adult websites, creator platforms, and other potentially covered services should begin evaluating whether their existing systems could support:
- nationwide age verification for U.S. traffic;
- detection and treatment of VPN and proxy traffic;
- platform-wide gating if required by the final legislation;
- strict minimization, security, and deletion controls for verification data;
- vendor contracts that address security, audit cooperation, regulatory changes, indemnification, and data retention; and
- documentation sufficient to withstand recurring FTC compliance audits.
Businesses should also avoid assuming that compliance with the SCREEN Act would replace state-law obligations. Unless the legislation is amended to include preemption, covered platforms would still need to comply with state-specific verification methods, privacy restrictions, enforcement mechanisms, and content thresholds.
Next Steps
The August 5 committee markup will provide the first meaningful indication of whether the SCREEN Act has sufficient support to advance in the Senate and whether lawmakers intend to narrow, expand, or otherwise revise the introduced bill.
Silverstein Legal will continue monitoring the SCREEN Act, proposed amendments, and related federal and state age-verification developments.
Photo credit: Katherine Welles / Shutterstock.com
This article does not constitute legal advice and is provided for your information only and should not be relied upon in lieu of consultation with legal advisors in your own jurisdiction. It may not be current as the laws in this area change frequently. Transmission of the information contained in this article is not intended to create, and the receipt does not constitute, an attorney-client relationship between sender and receiver.
About Silverstein Legal
Founded in 2006 by adult entertainment lawyer Corey D. Silverstein, Silverstein Legal is a boutique law firm that caters to the needs of anyone working in the adult entertainment industry. Silverstein Legal’s clients include hosting companies, affiliate programs, content producers, processors, designers, developers, and website operators.
Related Articles
