On July 1, Mississippi and Virginia passed laws requiring adult websites to verify users’ ages, despite attempts by Pornhub to defy the law. Those efforts include blocking Pornhub from accessing users in these states and collecting users to help convince lawmakers that requiring ID to access adult content will only cause more harm to users in their states.
Pornhub Posted a lengthy statement on Twitter, explaining that the company believes US officials are acting to prevent children from accessing adult content, is “great”. “However, the way many elected officials have chosen to implement these laws is haphazard and dangerous.”
Pornhub is not alone in protesting these laws. Last month, the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) sued Louisiana over its age-verification law, with FSC Executive Director Alison Boden claiming that such laws now passed in seven states are unconstitutional.
“These laws give the state the power to harass and censor legitimate businesses,” Boden said in a blog post. “We support, of course, preventing minors from accessing adult content, but allowing the state to suppress certain speech by requiring invasive and burdensome systems that consumers refuse to engage with is simply state censorship.”
Just before the laws of Mississippi and Virginia went into effect, the FSC confirmed in another blog that it is “looking at potential challenges to these laws.”
Ars could not immediately reach Pornhub or the FSC for comment. [Update: FSC director of public affairs, Mike Stabile, told Ars that there will likely be an update later this week regarding FSC legal challenges in states passing age verification laws. Stabile said that “it’s important to understand that these laws are less about protecting minors, and more about restricting the open Internet. State-level regulations that primarily target adult sites are tremendously ineffective at keeping minors from accessing adult content.” Stabile said these regulations are also dangerous because they are “just the beginning of the speech the government is hoping to limit, which is why it’s so important to fight it now.”
“We’re in the midst of twin moral panics around sex and tech, and porn is where they overlap,” Stabile told Ars. He noted that “laws affect much more than adult sites” because of vague language that makes it so things like “a ‘description of a female nipple’ is enough to trigger liability” in some states for various other websites, including sex education resources. Stabile said that FSC advocates for device-based age verification that is “a far better option for keeping minors from accessing adult content.”]
In its Twitter statement, Pornhub claimed that a major problem with these laws is that states “don’t regulate enforcement.” This means big platforms like Pornhub are likely to comply voluntarily — otherwise risk fines of up to $1 million a year, the FSC estimated — while users who want to avoid age verification will simply migrate to lesser-known platforms that don’t require an ID . and often pose security and privacy risks to users.
Pornhub has said that instead of requiring platforms to ask for ID, lawmakers should require device-based age verification as “the only solution that makes the internet a safer place.”
Users bypass age verification
According to the FSC Tracker for Age Verification Laws, laws will be enacted in three more states in the near future. Arkansas is next, with the law taking effect on July 31, Texas on September 1, and Montana on January 1, 2024.
Until a better solution is found, it seems that Pornhub, which is currently the eighth most visited website in the US, will continue to block access for more and more US users. It seems to be Pornhub’s only real way to protest the laws and force lawmakers to consider their concerns about what Pornhub considers misleading age verification laws. In Utah, at least one legislator, Todd Weiler, told Ars he was shocked that Pornhub would take such a drastic step.
Pornhub has apologized to “loyal visitors” whose access is now blocked in more and more states, but many users have found that it’s quite easy to get around Pornhub’s age verification and blocking by using a VPN. This weekend, Google Trends data showed that “VPN” quickly became a popular search term for Internet users in Virginia.
The FSC seemed to support sites like Pornhub that chose to block access in these states rather than comply with age verification laws. Similar to Pornhub’s online campaign to rally users to push back against lawmakers, the FSC launched a website, Defend Online Privacy. It is a resource that provides landing pages to help websites like Pornhub easily redirect newly blocked users. Instead of loading Pornhub’s homepage, a Pornhub user would theoretically be redirected to a landing page designed to raise awareness among users in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, explaining how “why they are being blocked” and encouraging them “to contact lawmakers in that state to voice their displeasure with the law.”
The plan is to educate internet users, who can then influence local lawmakers like Weiler, who previously told Ars he didn’t think requiring ID to access adult content was “too much to ask.” To him, it seemed like he was requiring a cashier to ask for ID before selling anyone alcohol or cigarettes.
But New Orleans-based counsel for the FSC, Jeff Sandman, said in a blog post that there’s an obvious reason why this comparison isn’t appropriate, and that some lawmakers overlook it.
“The First Amendment protects our right to free access to legal content and ideas without government interference,” Sandman said. “We’re not only fighting for adult businesses, but also for the right of legal adults to use the internet without government oversight. Showing your ID at a cash register is just not the same as submitting it to a government database.”
In Louisiana, FSC lawyers have asked a judge to prevent the state from enforcing the law, and it seems likely that the FSC will make the same demands in Mississippi and Virginia.
