On May 18, 2026, Indiana Senator Jim Banks (R) sent a formal letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche urging the Department of Justice to re-establish the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force — a Bush-era enforcement unit dismantled in 2011 during Eric Holder's tenure as Attorney General — and to "prosecute illegal content to the maximum extent permitted by law." The letter was first reported by WBIW and Newsmax on May 19, and it represents the most direct congressional push for federal-level adult-content obscenity prosecution in over a decade.

Why It Matters

A revived federal Obscenity Prosecution Task Force would represent a fundamentally different enforcement regime than the FTC's TAKE IT DOWN Act civil penalties. Federal obscenity prosecutions under § 1460–1470 carry criminal penalties up to 5 years per count, are brought against publishers and distributors (not just hosting platforms), and are tested against community-standards juries rather than $53,088-per-violation civil-penalty calculations. The legal threshold for "obscene" content (the *Miller* test) is significantly broader than the TAKE IT DOWN Act's nonconsensual-intimate-imagery definition, and would touch the entire mainstream adult-content economy — OnlyFans, Aylo properties, Fansly, LoyalFans, MindGeek alumni studios — rather than just the deepfake/NCII subset. For sex-tech platforms operating in connected-device categories (Lovense, Kiiroo, OhMiBod) that integrate with adult-content distribution, the obscenity statute reach would extend through tip-activated device-content sync to the device manufacturers themselves under federal "distribution" liability theories. This is the first congressional signal that the federal floor on adult-content enforcement may shift meaningfully in 2026.

Banks' letter centers its case on OnlyFans. The senator cites the platform's 4 million creators and 370 million users, and asserts that "American spending on OnlyFans exceeds spending on the New York Times and ChatGPT combined." The letter alleges that OnlyFans "has been exposed for allowing minors to sell explicit videos and for featuring child sex abuse content" — a framing that ties Banks' obscenity-enforcement push to the broader CSAM/age-verification regulatory cycle currently culminating in the TAKE IT DOWN Act's May 19 enforcement deadline and the Aylo/Pornhub state-level geo-blocking litigation.

The Obscenity Prosecution Task Force was established under President George W. Bush in 2005, when then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales created the unit to prioritize federal obscenity prosecutions under 18 U.S.C. § 1460–1470. Under Holder, the Task Force was folded into the DOJ's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section in 2011 — a move Banks characterizes as "a mistake." Practically speaking, federal obscenity prosecutions of consenting-adult content largely ceased after 2011, in part because federal courts had increasingly narrowed the Miller v. California community-standards test for online content, and in part because DOJ enforcement priorities shifted toward CSAM and trafficking cases instead.

Whether Acting AG Blanche acts on the letter is the operational question. The Banks request fits cleanly into the current administration's stated emphasis on enforcing federal criminal statutes against adult-content platforms, and the timing — 24 hours after the TAKE IT DOWN Act enforcement deadline — is unlikely to be coincidence. Industry compliance counsel are likely to read the letter as the opening signal of a broader DOJ enforcement posture aimed at content categories that fall outside the TAKE IT DOWN Act's narrower nonconsensual-intimate-imagery scope.

Sources

Update — 2026-05-21

Initial entry — story first created.