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CV NEWS FEED // Pornhub has ceased offering its explicit website in the state of Texas, citing the Lone Star State’s passage of a law that protects children from viewing online pornography.
The Houston Chronicle reported Thursday that visitors who attempt to access Pornhub’s site from Texas “are now greeted with a long message from the company railing against the legal change as ‘ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous.’”
“The company calls for age verification by the makers of devices that let people on the internet, instead of individual websites,” the Chronicle added.
Pornhub wrote in its message to users: “As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you to access our website.”
The pornography behemoth continued:
Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.
“[P]roviding identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk,” Pornhub claimed.
“Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving thousands of platforms open and accessible,” it went on.
Pornhub purported that “very few sites are able to compare the robust Trust and Safety measures” it has in place. “Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas.”
Pornhub’s decision to block its site in Texas came nine months after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed HB 1181, the state’s bipartisan age-verification law.
Pornhub previously disabled its website in the states of Mississippi, Utah, and Virginia after they passed similar laws.
The Houston Chronicle noted that HB 1181
requires companies that distribute “sexual material harmful to minors” to confirm visitors are over 18 with an online system that verifies users’ government-issued identification or another commercially available system that uses public or private data. The sites are not permitted to retain identifying information.
>> ANTI-PORN LAWS ARE WORKING, CAUSING PORNHUB TO FLEE SEVERAL STATES <<
The legislation notably passed both houses of the legislature by a near-unanimous margin – similar to age-verification laws in other states.
In fact, Rep. LuLu Flores, D-TX, was the only legislator to vote against the bill’s final version.
The Hill indicated Thursday that Pornhub’s announcement “follows the news that [Republican] Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton … was suing Aylo, the pornography giant that owns Pornhub, for not following the newly enacted age verification law.”
“Paxton’s lawsuit is looking to have Aylo pay up to $1,600,000, from mid-September of last year to the date of the filing of the lawsuit and an additional $10,000 each day since filing,” The Hill stated.
Later that day, Paxton wrote on X that “[s]ites like PornHub are on the run because Texas has a law that aims to prevent them from showing harmful, obscene material to children.”
The attorney general continued:
We recently secured a major victory against PornHub and other sites that sought to block this law from taking effect. In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children.
“If they don’t want to comply, good riddance,” he added.
Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that contrary to the claims of pornography’s proponents, laws like Texas’ HB 1181 “[do] not violate the First Amendment.”
“[T]he age-verification requirement is rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in preventing minors’ access to pornography,” the court elaborated in their decision.
In a press release, Paxton’s office reacted to the ruling stating that the attorney general “has secured an important victory over a host of pornography companies, including Pornhub.”
Paxtons’s wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, was one of the bill’s sponsors. “My bill created an age verification requirement for online pornography websites in Texas to protect minors from accessing their harmful content,” she wrote Thursday. “After insistent fighting against it, the pornography industry is being forced to comply with the law.”
CatholicVote reported last year:
A giant in the so-called “sex industry,” [Pornhub] 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.”
