Last week, several Republican representatives in Michigan introduced a bill that would ban porn — and a host of other content online.
The Anticorruption of Public Morals Act, House Bill 4938, is primarily sponsored by Rep. Josh Schriver and includes fellow Republican representatives Joseph Pavlov, Matthew Maddock, James DeSana, Joseph Fox, and Jennifer Wortz.
The Anticorruption of Public Morals Act would prohibit sharing, distributing, selling, or hosting “certain material” on the internet. The bill’s list includes pornography in the form of videos, erotica, magazines, stories, manga, AI-generated material, live feeds, and sound clips, but doesn’t stop there.
“Prohibited material” described in the bill includes visual (real, animated, or digitally created), written, and audio depictions and descriptions of many sex acts, including intercourse, oral sex, ejaculation, BDSM, group sex, penetration with sex toys, as well as erotic autonomous sensory meridian response content — better known as ASMR — and moaning and “sensual voice content.”
Audio erotica, sex toy reviews, and your favorite ASMR YouTube channel could all be banned in Michigan should this bill be passed into law.
The act also bans depictions and descriptions of “a disconnection between biology and gender by an individual of 1 biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be of the other biological sex.”
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This means that online content about and by trans people would be banned in Michigan.
“The bill would completely erase trans people online, equating them with porn,” Mike Stabile, director of public policy at adult industry trade organization, the Free Speech Coalition, posted on Bluesky.
This means that online content about and by trans people would be banned in the state of Michigan.
“Prohibited material” excluded from the act includes peer-reviewed academic content and scientific or medical research.
Failure to comply could result in a fine up to $100,000 and/or up to 20 years in prison for people or entities that run online platforms. If more than 100 pieces of “prohibited material” are found, the punishment increases to a fine up to $125,000 and/or up to 25 years in prison.
The bill also compels internet service providers to block “circumvention tools” — aka VPNs — and prohibits the promotion of sales of those tools.
This isn’t the first bill of its kind. Back in January, Republican Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers introduced a bill to criminalize porn and imprison its creators. (There hasn’t seemed to be much movement on that bill since, though.) Then, in May, Republicans introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, which experts told Mashable would basically ban porn.
Project 2025, the blueprint for President Trump’s second term, calls for an outright porn ban. These bills are happening in conjunction with state age-verification laws, which require proof of age (like a facial scan or government ID) to view explicit content. Software like VPNs can evade these laws, which could likely be the reason why the Michigan bill seeks to prohibit those, as well.
As experts told Mashable last month, similar age assurance requirements are starting to be required for non-explicit content as well, and have the capacity to change the internet as we know it.
