CV NEWS FEED // Pornhub is ceasing its business operations in several states, citing recent anti-porn laws.
A giant in the so-called “sex industry,” the pornography site is the 13th-most visited website of any kind on the internet, receiving more traffic than the likes of tiktok.com, netflix.com, and reddit.com.
Politico termed Pornhub “the YouTube of pornography” and reported that “In 2019, the last year Pornhub released its data, the site was visited 42 billion times, or 115 million times each day.”
Until recently, most attempts by lawmakers to prevent children from accessing porn sites have proven unfruitful. However, with the advent of age-verification laws, the smut industry is starting to retreat.
Age-verification laws “are creating havoc in a porn industry that many had considered all but impossible to actually regulate,” according to Politico.
As of August 8, 2023, these laws are on the books in seven states: Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia, and Texas. The laws require people who wish to access porn on the internet to prove they are adults, usually by providing images of government-issued IDs.
Pornhub has altogether ceased providing its “services” in three of the seven states that passed age-verification laws: Mississippi, Utah, and Virginia. According to Politico:
Users in these states who attempt to visit the site are greeted with a safe-for-work video of [a porn star], clothed, explaining the site’s decision to pull out of the state.
As the video instructs, some angry porn users have called their legislators, but that has not dimmed the joy of lawmakers. According to Utah state Sen. Todd Weiler, the chief sponsor of Utah’s bill, many of his colleagues are celebrating the improbable and unexpected retreat of the pornography behemoth. Weiler said his colleagues “think it’s hilarious” and have been “high-fiving” each other in boyish triumph.
Weiler was not the only state lawmaker to poke fun at Pornhub’s sudden retreat. In June, after the website decided to leave her state, Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas, D-VA, tweeted, “Is anyone else’s Pornhub not working?”
Lucas was part of a majority of Democratic state senators to join all Republicans in voting for the Virginia law, which passed in February by an overwhelming majority of 37-3. The only senators to vote against it were John Edwards, Mamie Locke, and Chap Petersen, all Democrats.
The near-universal popularity of age-verification laws caused Politico to dub them “perhaps the most bipartisan policy in the country.” Indeed, their passage was fully unanimous in two of the seven states with them: Arkansas and Utah.
In mid-2022, Louisiana became the first state in the country to enact such a law. HB 142 passed 36-0 in the state Senate and 96-1 in the state House. The bipartisan bill, which had co-sponsors from both parties, was signed into law by Gov. John Bel Edwards, D-LA.
HB 142 was sponsored by Rep. Laurie Schlegel, R-LA, who is a sex addiction therapist by trade and is, therefore, more than familiar with the harmful effects of the porn industry.
As Politico stated, Schlegel was inspired to propose the nation’s first-ever age verification law after reading a story about singer Billie Eilish describing her childhood porn addiction on “The Howard Stern Show.”
“I started watching porn when I was like 11,” Eilish had told Stern. “I think it really destroyed my brain, and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”
The only member of the Lousiana legislature to vote against HB 142 was Rep. Mandie Landry, D-LA, who has been described as “the most progressive lawmaker” in the state.
Landry was also the only member of the entire legislature to vote against HB 77, another bill sponsored by Schlegel and signed by Edwards this June, which expanded upon the original law to cover more pornographic content.
After refusing to vote for either of the laws, Landry attempted to justify her decision by saying that minors could just use a VPN to access porn.
On her campaign website, Landry writes about having given pro bono legal representation to an abortion facility, as well as “minors seeking permission from the court to have an abortion.” She also identifies herself as an advocate for “trans youth.”
Pornhub has been extensively linked to both child and adult sex trafficking in the past.
In early 2020, anti-trafficking activist Laila Mickelwait and her non-profit group Exodus Cry launched the ongoing “Traffickinghub” campaign, whose stated “single purpose” is “shutting down Pornhub and holding its executives accountable for enabling, distributing and profiting from rape, child abuse, sex trafficking and criminal image based sexual abuse.”
At the time Mickelwait penned an op-ed in the Washington Examiner titled “Time to shut Pornhub down.”
“In the last few months, there have been several shocking cases of sex trafficking and child rape films that were hosted on Pornhub,” she wrote:
A 15-year-old girl who had been missing for a year was finally found after her mother was tipped off that her daughter was being featured in videos on the site — 58 such videos of her rape and sexual abuse were discovered on Pornhub.
A few months later, this young girl’s story was one of many discussed in “The Children of Pornhub,” an exposé by journalist Nicholas Kristof published in The New York Times. Pornhub’s site “is infested with rape videos,” Kristof wrote:
It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.
In addition, Mickelwait’s work was featured in a 2022 New Yorker article titled, “The Fight to Hold Pornhub Accountable.”
Exodus Cry reported that after Kristof’s exposé Pornhub “quickly deleted 80% of their content overnight,” amounting to roughly 10 million videos.
