News

California Legislature Passes Stricter UGC Rules for Adult Sites

September 15, 2026

SACRAMENTO, Cal. — A bill to impose tighter compliance standards for user-generated content (UGC) on adult websites has been approved by the California state legislature and now awaits the governor’s signature.

Should AB 1705 become law, it will establish a number of new requirements for websites that permit users to upload sexually explicit content. Site operators would have to require users to submit an email address, along with a statement certifying — under penalty of perjury — that each individual depicted in the content was not a minor at the time the content was created, consented to being depicted in the content, and consented to the content being uploaded to the website. Site operators would also have to verify each user’s email address before permitting uploading, and retain the statement and information for at least seven years.

Sites and uploaders would be subject to civil actions by depicted individuals for damages of up to $75,000 per violation, along with punitive damages and legal fees. Public prosecutors would also be able to bring civil actions, and seek penalties of $25,000 per violation along with other relief and fees.

Each day that adult content not conforming to the new regulations is displayed would constitute a separate violation of the law.

2257 vs. AB 1705

Industry attorney Corey Silverstein told XBIZ that AB 1705 is not simply a “California version” of 2257 regulations, but imposes significant new obligations for adult sites that permit users or creators to upload content.

“There is certainly some overlap with the compliance infrastructure that responsible adult operators already maintain under 18 U.S.C. § 2257 and existing consent/recordkeeping practices, but AB 1705 goes considerably further in several respects,” Silverstein cautioned. “Section 2257 is principally an age-verification and recordkeeping regime applicable to producers of sexually explicit material. AB 1705 creates an additional consent-and-upload certification regime and places affirmative obligations directly on operators of websites accepting sexually explicit user-generated content.”

Attorney Lawrence Walters told XBIZ that AB 1705 would impose a “distinct and significant” new set of obligations that go well beyond 2257, and that responsible platforms should not assume that the statute merely restates what 2257 already demands.

“AB 1705 is a platform-liability and pre-upload certification statute aimed at user-generated material, including questions of consent to distribution that 2257 does not address,” Walters explained. “Those are different issues, and they generate different operational, legal, and First Amendment concerns.”

For tube sites, clip platforms and other UGC-heavy operators, Walters said, the practical effect would be “a new pre-publication compliance layer that must be designed, staffed, documented and defended.”

Silverstein similarly foresees some potential work ahead for site operators doing business in California, should the bill become law.

“They will need to examine their upload workflows, performer consent documentation, uploader certifications, email verification, record-retention procedures and content moderation practices,” he said. “For some established platforms, this may mean modifying existing compliance systems. For smaller or less sophisticated user-generated-content sites, the burden could be considerably greater.”

What About Previously Uploaded Content?

As for whether the proposed law would apply retroactively to content already uploaded and being displayed, Silverstein noted that while the bill does not clearly require websites to go back and obtain a new AB 1705 certification for every piece of content uploaded before the law took effect, the broader obligations imposed on website operators are not limited to newly uploaded content. Previously uploaded content would still appear to be subject to the operator’s ongoing duty of “ordinary care” and “reasonable diligence” in making sure content does not violate the law.

“There is some ambiguity as to exactly what steps an operator must take with respect to legacy content, and I expect that issue could eventually become the subject of litigation or regulatory interpretation,” Silverstein said. “But I would not read the bill as creating a blanket exemption for content simply because it was uploaded before the law took effect, and I would not advise operators to assume that their existing content libraries are grandfathered.”

Walters sees the bill as likely to apply differently to existing content, as opposed to content uploaded after the effective date of Jan. 1, 2027. While the pre-upload certification statement and verified email provisions cannot logically be required for uploads occurring before the law becomes operative, he explained, the duty to ensure that content on a site does not violate the law has no cutoff date.

“The certification and email-verification rules do not appear to reach backward,” Walters said. “However, leaving previously uploaded files displayed after Jan. 1, 2027 appears to be within the display duty. There is no safe harbor for legacy catalogs, no ‘notice-and-takedown only’ defense written into the bill, and no phase-in for existing libraries. Combined with the daily-violation rule, the enrolled text is written to reach already-published material that remains on the platform after the law takes effect.

“How a court would treat that obligation as applied to a massive pre-2027 library — First Amendment, Section 230 and due-process arguments included — is a separate question from what the bill text itself covers,” Walters added. “‘Reasonable diligence’ is an inherently fact-intensive standard that will be litigated after the fact. The combination of high statutory damages and a private right of action will invite claims — some meritorious, many not — against operators who already invest heavily in keeping minors and nonconsensual material off their platforms.”

The bill is now on the desk of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto the legislation. Should he do neither, the bill will automatically become law.

WASHINGTON — For the second time in recent weeks, a Republican congressman has introduced legislation to bar U.S. courts from helping to enforce foreign laws restricting speech that would domestically be protected under the First Amendment, potentially including foreign age verification laws.

Introduced by Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio, the proposed Halting Overseas Mandates from Extraterritorially Reaching Onto National Territory (HOMEFRONT) Act of 2026 is similar in intent to the Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion (GRANITE) Act, which Davidson’s fellow Ohio representative Michael Rulli introduced last month. Both bills would prohibit domestic courts from recognizing or enforcing foreign judgments, fines, orders or demands issued by a foreign court or a foreign state, enforcing a “foreign censorship law.”

The GRANITE Act defines “foreign censorship law” as any law of a foreign state that “has the primary purpose or substantial effect of restricting or penalizing expression, expressive conduct, or expressive association; targets expression, expressive conduct, or expressive association based on its content, viewpoint, or speaker identity … and would conflict with the protections of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution if recognized in the United States.”

The HOMEFRONT Act similarly defines “foreign censorship law” as “a law of a foreign country that imposes liability for conduct that would be protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States if the conduct occurred in the United States,” but further specifies that this includes laws that impose restrictions related to online safety and “harmful” content.

Would Foreign AV Laws Be Classified as Censorship?

As XBIZ reported in August, when the GRANITE Act was introduced, such provisions raise the question of whether or not age verification laws, such as the AV provisions in the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and the U.K.’s Online Safety Act (OSA), would be classified as foreign censorship laws. If so, enactment of either bill could potentially protect U.S.-based adult sites from domestic enforcement of those laws, such as pursuing fines against U.S.-based sites. Foreign governments and agencies could still take domestic measures such as blocking U.S. sites within their own territory, however.

A press release from Davidson’s office specifically called out the OSA and U.K. media regulator Ofcom, stating, “The UK’s Online Safety Act, which entered into force last year, purports to give Ofcom jurisdiction over essentially any online service in the world, whether based in the UK or not.”

The release cites Ofcom’s issuance of 197 information requests to businesses with U.S. addresses as evidence that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act grants overbroad immunity from lawsuits to foreign governments, and quotes Davidson as saying, “Foreign governments have no business policing the speech of American citizens. Foreign regulators are using fines and legal threats to pressure American companies into censoring speech protected by the First Amendment.”

Importantly for adult sites, neither the GRANITE Act nor the HOMEFRONT Act expressly includes or excludes age verification laws when it comes to defining “foreign censorship.” Rulli’s and Davidson’s office have also not responded to queries about whether the bills are intended to include AV laws. As a result, U.S. companies could argue that AV laws like the OSA and DSA fit the bill’s definition of foreign censorship, but such a determination would most likely involve a domestic court applying the standard set in the pivotal case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton.

Ruling in that case, the Supreme Court declared that “the First Amendment leaves undisturbed States’ traditional power to prevent minors from accessing speech that is obscene from their perspective. That power includes the power to require proof of age before an individual can access such speech.” The court upheld the constitutionality of state AV laws so long as they only “incidentally” burden the protected speech of adults. Foreign laws found to fulfill that requirement could therefore be exempted from classification as censorship under the provisions in the GRANITE Act and the HOMEFRONT Act, but that would be up to reviewing courts to determine on a case-by-case basis.

Industry attorney Corey Silverstein told XBIZ, “The argument for HOMEFRONT protection becomes stronger where a foreign law reaches broader categories of lawful expression, employs an expansive definition of ‘harmful content,’ imposes particularly burdensome or privacy-invasive verification requirements, or otherwise restricts adult access more substantially than the Texas law upheld in Paxton. The analysis would therefore remain law-specific and fact-specific.”

Attorney Lawrence Walters observed, however, that most foreign regulatory frameworks that concern U.S. adult sites, like the OSA and DSA, are not written narrowly enough to ensure that they qualify as only incidentally burdening protected speech.

“They often rest on broader categories such as ‘harmful content,’ pornography definitions that reach constitutionally protected adult speech, extraterritorial information demands and compelled identity collection,” Walters said. “HOMEFRONT’s express inclusion of ‘online safety,’ ‘harmful content’ and ‘compelled disclosure of user information’ makes it easier to argue that those regimes are precisely what the bill is intended to cover.”

Similarities and Differences

While comparable in intent, the GRANITE Act and the HOMEFRONT Act contain different language. According to Walters, this makes the two bills “close cousins, not twins.”

“HOMEFRONT is the more aggressive and more explicit of the two on ‘online safety’-style regulation, including the kinds of extraterritorial AV and data-demand orders U.S. adult platforms have already received from foreign regulators,” Walters told XBIZ. “HOMEFRONT also goes further operationally, including barring U.S. government cooperation and extradition in covered cases.”

Silverstein also described the HOMEFRONT Act as going further than GRANITE in several respects.

“It places the burden on the party seeking enforcement, creates separate due-process and Section 230 defenses and authorizes injunctive relief, attorneys fees and $25,000 in statutory damages,” Silverstein noted, referring to HOMEFRONT Act provisions that would require a domestic court to affirm that a foreign court’s exercise of jurisdiction aligns with due-process requirements under the U.S. Constitution, and that would exempt interactive computer services by reaffirming Section 230 protections in cases involving foreign jurisdiction.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects interactive computer services, including adult platforms, from liability for user-uploaded content unless a site unlawfully promotes and facilitates prostitution or sex trafficking.

“Even if a foreign judgment survives HOMEFRONT’s First Amendment analysis, a domestic court could not enforce it against an interactive computer service unless the party seeking enforcement proves that the judgment would also be consistent with Section 230,” Silverstein explained.

Last year, an exemption for interactive computer services caused enforcement of an Ohio age verification law to hit a snag, when Pornhub asserted that the law does not apply to it because Pornhub qualifies as such a service. The Ohio legislature is currently weighing a bill that would exclude adult content providers from that exemption.

For sites that host user-generated adult content, Walters observed, the HOMEFRONT Act provides “significantly clearer protection” than GRANITE’s First Amendment definition alone.

“It still would not cover material the platform itself created, and it would not automatically invalidate every foreign age verification law after Paxton,” Walters said. “But it would make it much harder to use American courts to enforce extraterritorial publisher liability that Section 230 already forbids.”

Rulli and Davidson are not the only elected officials advocating for a federal law protecting U.S. companies from “foreign censorship.” Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri stated last year that he intended to introduce similar legislation. At the state level, Wyoming earlier this year weighed its own version of the GRANITE Act, which passed the state House but failed to advance in the state Senate.

Trump administration officials have also repeatedly characterized European content laws as an attack on free speech, going so far as to impose visa restrictions on EU figures the administration perceives as leading “efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.” This may indicate potential administration support, should either the GRANITE Act or the HOMEFRONT Act advance in the legislative process.

Both bills have been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.