Pornhub cuts off more US users in ongoing protest over age-verification laws

On July 1, laws requiring adult websites to verify user ages took effect in Mississippi and Virginia, despite efforts by Pornhub to push back against the legislation. Those efforts include Pornhub blocking access to users in these states and rallying users to help persuade lawmakers that requiring ID to access adult content will only create more harm for users in their states.

Pornhub posted a long statement on Twitter, explaining that the company thinks US officials 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 isn't the only one protesting these laws. Last month, the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) sued Louisiana over its age-verification law, with FSC Executive Director Alison Boden alleging that these kinds of laws now passed in seven states are unconstitutional.

“These laws give the state the power to harass and censor legal businesses,” Boden said in a blog. “We, of course, support keeping 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 Mississippi and Virginia laws took 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 alleged that a major problem with these laws is that states "are not regulating enforcement." This means that major platforms like Pornhub will likely comply with the laws voluntarily—or else risk fines of up to $1 million annually, the FSC estimated—while users seeking to avoid age verification will simply migrate over to seedier platforms that don't require ID and often pose security and privacy risks to users.

Pornhub has said that rather than requiring platforms to ask for ID, lawmakers should require device-based age verification as "the only solution that makes the Internet safer."

Users skirting age verification

According to the FSC's age verification law tracker, laws in three more states are scheduled to take effect in the near future. Arkansas will be next, with its law taking effect on July 31, Texas on September 1, and Montana on January 1, 2024.

Until a better solution is found, Pornhub—which SimilarWeb currently ranks as the eighth most-visited website in the US—seems likely to continue blocking access to 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 over what Pornhub views as misguided age-verification laws. In Utah, at least one lawmaker, Todd Weiler, told Ars that he was shocked that Pornhub would take such a drastic step.

Pornhub has apologized to "loyal visitors" whose access has now been blocked in increasingly more states, but many users have found that it's pretty easy to skirt age verification and Pornhub's block by using a VPN. This weekend, Google Trends data showed that "VPN" quickly became a top search term for Virginia Internet users.

The FSC seemed to back sites like Pornhub choosing to block access in these states rather than complying 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's a resource providing 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 for users in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, explaining "why they’re being blocked" and encouraging them "to contact the legislators in that state to express their displeasure with the law."

The plan is to inform Internet users, who can then influence local lawmakers like Weiler, who previously told Ars that he didn't think requiring ID to access adult content was "too much to ask." To him, it seemed just like requiring a cashier to ask for ID before selling anyone alcohol or cigarettes.

But the FSC's New Orleans-based counsel Jeff Sandman said in a blog post that there's an obvious reason why this comparison is not appropriate, and some lawmakers are overlooking it.

“The First Amendment protects our right to freely access legal content and ideas without government interference,” Sandman said. “We’re fighting not only for adult businesses but for the right of legal adults to use the Internet without government surveillance. Showing your ID in a checkout lane is simply not the same as submitting it to a government database.”

In Louisiana, FSC lawyers have asked a judge to block the state from enforcing its law, and it seems likely that the FSC will make the same demands in Mississippi and Virginia.