New Year’s Day has come and gone, which means Pornhub is now blocked in 16 U.S. states.
The site blocked itself from almost all of the American South, as 404 Media put it, as a response to age-verification laws. These are state requirements to submit ID to access websites where over a third of the content hosted is explicit. Louisiana started the trend of passing age-verification bills two years ago; others have followed suit. As of January 1, such laws in Florida and South Carolina have gone into effect.
While Pornhub is not blocked in Louisiana, it is blocked in 16 states, a Pornhub representative confirmed to Mashable:
In Louisiana, where users must submit ID to view Pornhub, the site has seen traffic decline around 80 percent, Aylo (Pornhub’s parent company) told Mashable.
“These people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content. In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and children,” Aylo stated.
Mashable After Dark
In a statement to Mashable, Aylo continued:
First, to be clear, Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults.
Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.
Industry experts say age-verification laws don’t work because they are easily circumvented with VPNs. They also raise concerns about privacy protection and safety, since websites will now have to host (even more of) people’s personal information. It will be harder to be anonymous online, which experts warn is dangerous to free speech. Adult industry experts Mashable spoke to in an explainer on age-verification laws advocated for device-level filters, as did Aylo in its statement.
Some in the adult industry worry about what Trump’s second presidential term will bring due to the conservative policy outline Project 2025 and its measure to ban porn. One of Project 2025’s authors, Russell Vought, was caught on a secret recording stating that age-verification laws are the “back door” to a broader porn ban.
Tennessee’s age-verification law, which was supposed to be enacted on January 1, has been blocked following a preliminary injunction by the adult industry trade organization the Free Speech Coalition. Because of this, Pornhub hasn’t blocked Tennessee.
The Free Speech Coalition has also challenged age-verification laws in other states, including Florida, Indiana, and Texas. In the latter, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a Texas district court initially blocked the law, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld it. The Supreme Court will hear the case on January 15, deciding whether Texas’s age-verification law violates the First Amendment.
