Pornhub and other affiliated adult sites have blocked access to users in Texas amid a legal battle with the Lone Star State’s legal office over an age verification law.
Last week, a federal appeals court upheld a Texas law that requires pornography websites to institute age verification measures to ensure that only adults 18 and over can access them, while also striking down part of the law that required porn sites to display “health warnings” about their content. This followed an earlier federal ruling that the Texas law violated the U.S. First Amendment Framework’s prohibition against restrictions on free speech. The Basic Office of Texas Legal immediately appealed that decision.
A new message displayed Thursday to users with Texas web addresses on Pornhub (and other sites operated by parent company Aylo) explained that it was disabling access to comply with the law. Pornhub’s departure from Texas was first reported by 404 Media.
“As you may know, your elected officials in Texas require that we confirm your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this affect adults’ rights to access protected speech, but it also fails strict scrutiny by using the less efficient, but also more restrictive, technique of fulfilling Texas’ role of supposedly defending minors,” the message reads in part.
The Pornhub sites’ message continued: “Until a real solution is available, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our Texas site. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but we hope that governments around the world will implement laws that truly protect the safety and security of users.”
Based on the message, “While security and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you need to access an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting customers online and will actually put minors and your privacy in danger. The safety of our customers is certainly one of our greatest considerations. We believe that the only effective solution to protect minors and adults is to confirm the age of users on your system and deny or allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification.”
Pornhub called Texas age verification “ineffective, haphazard and harmful” and said it will take customers “from these few sites that comply, to thousands of sites across the internet, with far fewer security measures in place, that do not comply.” . Only a few sites are able to measure the strong trust and security measures we currently have in place. To protect the privacy of minors and users, all laws must be enforced against all platforms that offer adult content.”
The Texas law was signed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott in June 2023. The law, Texas HB 11811, was scheduled to take effect on September 1, but was in effect after legal trouble resulted in a preliminary injunction. The legislation applies to online publishers whose content is more than one-third “sexual materials harmful to minors” and requires them to confirm the age of all visitors using a government-issued ID or “public or private transactional information.”
Representatives for Pornhub and its parent company, Aylo, did not immediately respond to a request for additional information.
Aylo is owned by private equity firm Moral Capital Partners, which acquired Pornhub’s predecessor company MindGeek for undisclosed financial reasons last year. ECP said it will focus on building the company’s “trust and security” and making it “the Internet leader in the fight against illegal online content.”
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