Jamie F
Aylo has disabled access to all its porn sites, which include Pornhub, RedTube and YouPorn, in Texas, due to the state’s introduction of age verification rules for online porn.
Announcing the block in a message on its sites, seen when users attempt to access them in Texas, the company said that users providing identification every time they want to access online porn was “not an effective solution” to keeping minors from accessing porn.
The block was made by Aylo following Texas introducing age verification rules, which require such ID measures, in June 2023. This month (February 2024) Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Aylo for allegedly allowing its sites to breach this law.
Announcing the Texas block, Pornhub said: “While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing 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.”
Aylo had already recently blocked Pornhub and its sister sites in US states including Montana, North Carolina, Louisiana, Utah, Mississippi and Virginia, due to similar age verification rules being introduced. Home to around 30 million people, Texas is the second-largest state in the US in terms of population, so this latest move has garnered more media attention than the other state blocks.
It is still possible to access the Aylo sites in Texas and the other states it is officially blocked in, by using a virtual proxy network (VPN) service. When Pornhub was blocked in Utah in 2023, the state saw a huge spike in the use of VPNs.
The Texas block is a significant marker point in the general crackdown on online porn taking place in the US. A 2020 New York Times expose alleged that illegal content including some involving minors was available on Pornhub, contributing to something of a reckoning in the industry.
MindGeek, the Canadian company behind Pornhub, rebranded to Aylo in March 2023, calling itself an “ethics-first” company following a purge of hundreds of thousands of videos from the site. The company has faced multiple civil lawsuits from women who claim they were exploited by appearing on the site.
In its message announcing the Texas block Pornhub said: “As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. 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.”
It continued: “Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.”
Meanwhile, in Florida…
Meanwhile, Florida has passed a new bill entitled Online Protection For Minors that includes porn age verification rules.
The bill will require porn sites to implement age verification processes to ensure that only those aged over 18 can access them. The bill also changes the law so children under the age of 16 cannot open social media accounts, although they can do so when aged 14 and 15 if their parents give consent.
The new Florida bill, CS/CS/HB 3, will come into effect on July 1, 2024. It will require online porn sites to have the ages of users verified by an independent third-party not affiliated with the site, and for such third parties to not retain user information once their age is verified.
Republican House Speaker Paul Renner said: “This is something that I believe will save the current generation and generations to come if we’re successful.”
In January 2024 a draft of the bill cited the US singer Billie Eilish as motivation for its creation.
It read: “The personal story of pop singer Billie Eilish inspired the law in Louisiana which blocks access to pornography for minors. Eilish reported that she watched a lot of porn when about 11 years old. Ellish believes that the pornography had a drastic effect on her brain and feels:
“incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn”
Some critics of the US porn age verification crackdown have said that it is currently not logistically possible to implement processes tough enough for some of the new tougher bills.
They have also claimed that tougher age and consent verification rules introduced for porn performers have made it difficult for marginalized sex workers to earn a living.
In the wider world, many other countries are considering whether to introduce new age verification rules around access to adult content.
France and Germany are steaming ahead with age verification measures, and the UK’s Online Safety Bill is designed to make it tougher for minors to access online porn (among a raft of other unrelated measures). Others, such as Australia, have rejected such measures for the time-being. Instead, it’s planning an industry-based code to educate parents about how to prevent their children accessing porn, including the use of filtering software.
