Pornhub to block Florida users on January 1 to protest war on porn

Florida will start 2025 as a Pornhub-free territory. Starting January 1, residents of the southern state will lose access to the most visited pornography website in the world. The reason? Pornhub’s protest against a law (HB3) passed this year by Governor Ron DeSantis, which seeks to regulate the use and consumption of content on social media and websites by minors under 18 years of age. On the same day that the law goes into effect, Pornhub will implement its restriction. Now, anyone who enters its page from Florida will find a message with the days left for the user before losing access.

“Did you know that your government wants you to give your driver’s license before you can access PORNHUB?” the warning says. “As crazy as that sounds, it’s true. You’ll be required to prove you are 18 years or older such as by uploading your government ID for every adult content website you’d like to access.”

Pornhub also suggests reading an editorial by its marketing director, Alexzandra Kekesi, and showing a three-minute educational video on YouTube, explaining the advantages of device-based age verification to protect minors online. In the editorial, Kekesi argues that Pornhub is on board with creating a safer internet and preventing minors from accessing age-inappropriate content, but that the way various bills on the issue are designed in the United States (Florida’s is not the first) “will achieve exactly the opposite” and make online browsing more dangerous for adults and children.

For this executive, implementing the legislation in a random manner allows platforms to choose whether or not to comply with it, resulting in traffic migrating from responsible platforms that choose to comply with it to illegal or non-compliant sites that do not ask visitors to verify their age, do not moderate content and “do not take user safety seriously.” Kekesi says that, in practice, the legislation will unintentionally lead to a less secure Internet with serious additional risks to privacy.

While HB3 does not mention the word pornography in any of its 20 pages, it does refer to “material harmful to minors,” which it defines as material that “appeals to the prurient interest,” that depicts or describes, in a patently offensive manner, sexual conduct, and that lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. The majority of the text, however, insists on prohibiting direct access by minors under 14 or 15 years of age to create accounts, upload, and consume content on social networks, unless their parents or guardians authorize it. The age of 18 is specified for “harmful material.” In addition, it warns that commercial entities that do not comply with this provision could face civil fines of up to $50,000.

In response, the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association that advocates for the interests of the adult entertainment industry in the United States, filed a challenge to the law this week in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida — specifically against the state’s age verification mandate. “These laws create a substantial burden on adults who want to access legal sites without fear of surveillance,” said Alison Boden, Executive Director of the Free Speech Coalition, in a statement posted on its website.

“Despite advocates’ claims, HB3 is not the same as showing ID at a liquor store. It is invasive and carries significant risk to privacy. This law and others like it have effectively become state censorship, creating a massive chilling effect for those who speak about, or engage with, issues of sex or sexuality” she added.

The Free Speech Coalition reported that it has taken the same action against similar laws in Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, Utah, Indiana, and Montana and that the Texas case (Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton) will be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States in January 2025.

Aylo, the pornographic conglomerate that operates the website, told Axios Tampa Bay that in Louisiana, after the state passed a law similar to Florida’s, traffic dropped by about 80%, yet those people didn’t stop searching for porn. “They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law ... and that often don’t even moderate content.” Meanwhile, Florida Representative Chase Tramont, a Republican who sponsored the age verification bill, told Florida Politics that the site’s decision to shut down rather than comply “tells us exactly who their real target audience is.”

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