Screen Act age verification and what creators should do
- MelRose Michaels
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Blog Post Written By: Melrose Michaels
On March 23, 2018, Craigslist deleted its entire personals section, and the bill everyone assumed had forced that decision would not be signed into law for another 19 days. No enforcement action was pending against them and nobody had ordered them to remove anything. They looked at their own categories, guessed which ones carried legal risk and deleted those ahead of a law that did not exist yet.
That sequence is the reason I spent this week addressing a federal age verification bill that did not even make it out of committee.
Everything I shared runs on the same idea, which is that the thing costing you money usually arrives before the law does and it arrives from a platform rather than a government.
We are going to start with the one sentence missing from that bill, because it decides whether this becomes a law about pay sites or a law about the entire internet. Then I will hand you the rule I use so that the next midnight group chat never costs you a working day again.
The sentence that is missing from the bill
On August 5, 2026, the Senate Commerce Committee voted fifteen yes and thirteen no on the Screen Act, and the bill still did not advance. That came down to how proxy votes count against physical attendance rather than anyone changing their position, and I explain that properly in this week's YouTube video. Nobody in that room changed their mind about age verification.
Almost every state age verification law we have lived through carries a threshold, usually written as one third. Texas applies its law when more than one third of what a site publishes is sexual material harmful to minors, and Louisiana and Indiana run on nearly the same math. That number is the only thing standing between a law about adult sites and a law about the internet, because it is why these rules landed on Pornhub and left Reddit and Netflix alone.
I break down all four provisions in the filed version, what the Electronic Frontier Foundation said about which mainstream platforms get pulled in, and the caveat that matters more than any of it. The committee voted on a substitute amendment that has never been published, which means nobody outside that room has read the current text, including me.
Why platforms move before laws do
I have lost multiple Instagram accounts in under twelve months, and every removal arrived with the same vague line about community standards. I stopped being surprised by it a while ago, and this week's newsletter is where I lay out what I think is actually driving it.
The pattern predates this bill by years and it has never needed a law to start. Banks have been closing accounts for adult creators doing entirely legal work without any law requiring them to, and SWR Data took that research to Congress. In August of 2025, Bluesky blocked the entire state of Mississippi rather than build age checks for one state law.
The enforcement almost never matches the panic that precedes it. The Government Accountability Office reviewed FOSTA in 2021 and found the Justice Department had brought exactly one case under its criminal provision, years after Craigslist removed a section nobody believed had anything to do with trafficking.
I also get into what I am changing inside my own business, including why living in the one state where a first offense is a felony shapes every irreversible decision I make. You can read the newsletter here, along with the three things I would do this week regardless.
A rule for deciding what deserves your panic
In August of 2021 I lost more than $10,000 inside the 72 hours between OnlyFans announcing a ban on explicit content and reversing it. I tell that whole story on the podcast this week, including the part almost nobody talks about, which is the week that came after.
What came out of it is a rule with two pieces. No irreversible moves on industry news until that news has held for at least three days. Then three questions to sort out what you are actually looking at, which are whether this is decided or somebody is suggesting it, who moves before you do, and whether you can undo it.
That third question is what makes the whole thing usable, because a large category of genuinely useful work carries no risk at all in the first hour. Pulling your traffic numbers, exporting a list and telling your audience where else to find you cost you nothing if the news turns out to be nothing.
There is exactly one kind of news where waiting three days is the most expensive thing you can possibly do, and I explain what to do instead on the podcast. It has everything to do with where your money physically sits.
What ties all three together
Congress is slow, public and scheduled, and platforms are none of those three things. The bill is worth watching, and the change that reaches your business first will be a policy shift inside an app you rely on for traffic. That is why the question to carry into the next headline is what the threshold says, and why the work worth doing this week has nothing to do with waiting for an answer.
Do this before you close this tab
Pull your last thirty days of new paying subscribers broken out by source, counting new paying people only rather than total followers. If one app is doing most of the heavy lifting, that is a business risk sitting in your accounts whether or not this bill ever becomes law.
P.S. Come grab the watch list inside CEO Society, which is free and lists the five specific places to check to know when this turns into something real. It takes about five minutes a month and replaces doom scrolling with a calendar reminder.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in the interview are those of the guest speaker and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of SexWorkCEO or MelRose Michaels. Anything said or written is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone else.
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