SEVILLE, Spain — Local Spanish politicians and activists are demanding anti-porn legislation to mirror current initiatives in France, Germany, Utah and even China.
The current flurry of activity targeting the adult industry in Spain is focused in Andalusia and among local bureaucrats on the regulatory council Consejo Audiovisual de Andalucía (CAA).
Much like in Germany, where an obscure local politician at the head of the State Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia has been responsible for starting most anti-porn initiatives, and the U.S., where religious activists in Utah have sparked a wave of copycat legislation in other states, local Andalusian authorities are currently busy holding meetings in search of a solution to restrict minors’ access to adult material in Spain.
Last month the CAA organized a conference to address the supposed threat to minors posed by internet pornography. Tech journalist Enrique Benítez, from the influential Prensa Ibérica media conglomerate, participated and afterward published an editorial in Prensa Ibérica’s flagship newspaper El Periodico de España, advocating for local laws to follow the lead of France and the U.K. in threatening to block adult websites unless they implement age verification.
In the editorial, Benítez touts Utah’s current attempt at banning access to adult sites: a deliberately vague age verification law that is currently being challenged by Free Speech Coalition on multiple constitutional grounds. He also praises Google’s collaboration with China to censor specific search language and muses about forcing the tech giant to do the same thing in Spain to block searches for sex-related keywords.
“Google made a proposal to enlist its search engine in the service of the Chinese government’s demands,” he writes. “Thus, searching ‘democracy’ or ‘Tiannanmen’ did not bring up the expected results.” The same thing, he notes, happened later with Russia and the word “war.”
“Why can they collaborate with authoritarian regimes and not do the same thing with established democracies that seek to protect their minor citizens?” he asks.
Deeming it “unfair” to expect families to monitor minors’ access to online content, Benítez proposed shifting the responsibility to online platforms. Unlike the U.S., Europe has nothing resembling Section 230 liability protections over user-generated content.
Last week, Andalusia’s CAA issued yet another porn-panic report, this time raising the alarm over supposed “detailed instructions” available on open platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram and Reddit, explaining how to gain access to OnlyFans content.