The Daily Signal (founded by the Heritage Foundation) published two pieces this week that, read together, outline something worth taking seriously: a legal and historical argument for using the obscenity law to go after adult content platforms. This isn’t new legislation or regulatory proposals still working their way through a committee. These pieces argue that existing law, existing courts, and a federal enforcement mechanism dormant since 2011 but never dismantled are enough to end porn as we know it. 

The first piece argued that general obscenity is already illegal under federal and state statutes, and has been since 1948. The real barrier to enforcement, the author argues, isn’t legal. It’s political will. The piece calls for reviving the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, a unit created under President George W. Bush in 2005 that secured convictions in every case it brought to conclusion before being quietly disbanded by the Obama administration in 2011. The proposed revival comes with a specific targeting strategy to go after high-value distributors and platforms, not just individual producers. 

The second piece, published the following day, supplied the historical scaffolding. The argument is that the founding fathers accepted broad government powers to regulate obscenity, and the internet era’s hands-off approach represents an aberration from American legal tradition rather than an expression of it. Read past the constitutional history and the practical implications is straightforward: the authors believe that the courts have been wrong, and with the increase of states like Iowa passing age verification laws and the potential for a federal age verification law, evidence is shifting their way. 

The Supreme Court ruling is doing a lot of work in conservative legal circles right now, and these op-eds point to it explicitly as a sign that courts may be warming to more content regulation. Age verification is the first domino. Obscenity enforcement, in this argument, is the next logical step. 

So how would that impact creators? 

Well, obscenity law in the United States operates under the Miller test, a three-part standard established by the Supreme Court in 1973. Material is legally obscene if it appeals to prurient interest, depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. All of those elements are evaluated against “community standards,” which vary wildly based on where your community is. What a jury in rural Alabama may consider patently offensive is likely very different than what a jury in New York City would consider patently offensive. The vagueness isn’t an accident. It’s the point, and it’s why reviving obscenity enforcement is so dangerous.  

A federal task force targeting platforms doesn’t need to win a single obscenity conviction to cause serious damage to the creator economy. It simply needs to make platforms nervous. And when platforms get nervous, they do what they always do. They restrict, demonetize, quietly change terms of service, and drop the creators most likely to attract scrutiny as a way to avoid any legal proceedings. 

This is the pattern that plays out every time legal or regulatory pressure is applied to adult content infrastructure. Payment processors get uncomfortable and threaten to pull out. Platforms change their policies overnight. Creators lose access and income while legal arguments play out in op-eds. Because infrastructure doesn’t wait for conviction, it responds to threat. 

And make no mistake, that’s exactly what these Daily Signal pieces are. They are explicitly calling for the revival of task forces, targeting these platforms, and using the recent Supreme Court ruling as cover. None of this is imminent, but the argument is being assembled in public, with legal citations and historical precedents that supporters will use to try to get their way. And if they do, creators have every reason to worry.