Pornhub will be blocked in over 25% of US states from July 1: Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky and Nebraska added to the growing list
Pornhub has announced that the site is set to be blocked in five further US states in summer 2024, due to new age verification rules, having already been blocked in a plethora of states over the past few years.
Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, announced that from July 1 the site will be blocked in Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky and Nebraska, which will take the current number of blocked states to 13 – just over 25% of the whole of the US. Aylo had already blocked Pornhub and other porn sites it owns, such as RedTube and YouPorn, in various states to avoid the risk of falling foul of recently-implemented age verification laws.
Those states include Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana. When users attempt to access Pornhub in a blocked state, they are faced with a video message from porn actor Cherie DeVille (pictured below), discussing the block.
US lawmakers have been toughening up age verification laws in states across the country, demanding that online platforms enforce robust checks to stop minors accessing porn. Aylo has been resisting implementing deeper age checks involving government identification, saying that the onus should be on verification through devices rather than platforms.
Announcing the forthcoming five-state block, Aylo said that making porn websites and platforms responsible for age verification processes was “not a privacy-by-design approach”.
The company claimed that “by assigning this responsibility to the platform(s) visited by a user, this means submitting private information many times to adult sites all over the internet, while normalizing disclosure of PII [personal identifiable information] across the internet.”
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If Aylo carries on this way, the company is quickly going to run out of US states in which it ‘officially’ allows its porn sites to be accessed. However, Pornhub and the other Aylo porn sites can still easily be visited from within the ‘block’ states if users use a virtual proxy network (VPN), that makes their device operate as if it is being used in a different location.
Aylo could, theoretically, simply use robust third-party age verification software requiring submission of government ID for its sites. However, the company said that this would potentially raise the risk of data breaches.
The company said: “It also creates an opportunity for criminals to exploit and extort people through phishing attempts or fake AV processes, an unfortunate and all too common practice.”
Aylo also claimed that with US authorities focusing on hugely successful porn sites such as Pornhub for age verification crackdowns, users were simply turning to smaller, less well-regulated and ‘ethical’ sites for their porn needs. After a series of lawsuits from women who featured in content on Pornhub, plus reports of Pornhub allegedly formerly hosting content featuring minors, Aylo, formerly MindGeek, attempted to rebrand itself as an ethics-first operation.
Instead of attempting to overhaul its age verification processes for users in the US, Aylo has made something of a hardcore call-out to its supporters and creators. Alongside the announcement of the five-state block, the company asked people to post about “poorly designed” age verification laws on social media, and complain about the laws to local government officials.
Aylo claimed that “the only viable solution that will make the internet safer, preserve user privacy, and stands to prevent children from accessing material harmful to minors is performing age verification at the source: on the device itself.”
