New California law lets actors ban people from finding out how old they are

Supporters argue that the legislation will be a useful protection against age discrimination in Hollywood, but opponents say that it is a challenge to free speech

Actor Danny Trejo attends the IMDb Yacht at San Diego Comic-Con (Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for IMDb)

Many websites will no longer be allowed to post the ages of actors, under a new California law.

The new legislation requires entertainment sites like IMDb, the world’s biggest database for actors and filmmakers, to remove information about an actor’s age if they don’t want it to be there. The move has been celebrated by the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union as a way of combatting age discrimination in casting – but criticised by others who say it is a limit on free speech.

Under the new law, which goes into effect at the beginning of next year, actors’ ages will still be visible on sites like IMDb. But if an actors wants it removed, those sites will have to do so within five days.

Amazon-owned IMDb was sued in a similar case in 2013, when an actor sued the site for revealing her age. But it won that case.

The actors’ union said that the fact that sites like IMDb show a performers age very plainly on their page means that anyone looking at will see their age – even if they try not to. As such, those sites – often used for casting – can entrench age discrimination even when the people viewing them don’t mean them to.

“Like all employees, performers deserve a fair opportunity to prove what they can do, and this bill will help them do just that,” said SAG-AFTRA president Gabrielle Carteris.

But others argued that introducing the law impacts free speech, since it stops websites from uploading certain public information.

“We are disappointed that AB 1687 was signed into law today,” said Internet Association spokesman Noah Theran. “We remain concerned with the bill and the precedent it will set of suppressing factual information on the internet.”

Even though such a law might normally be expected to be challenged on the fact that it violates the free speech protections in the US constitution, the way it is limited to those sites probably means that any appeals will probably fail, experts said.

The new law is known as AB-1687 and only applies to commercial websites, which are defined as those that display ads or receive money from subscribers. That means that the change won’t affect websites like Wikipedia, where the information is uploaded by the public, or news sites.