For the past two years, Pornhub has been slowly losing its battle to keep pornography available to children. Pornhub — which has been credibly and repeatedly linked to widespread abuse, trafficking, sexual assault, and nonconsensual pornography — is one of...
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For the past two years, Pornhub has been slowly losing its battle to keep pornography available to children. Pornhub — which has been credibly and repeatedly linked to widespread abuse, trafficking, sexual assault, and nonconsensual pornography — is one of the most-visited websites on the internet. The website has been quick to protest the passage of bipartisan age-verification laws by state legislatures seeking to prevent minors from accessing inappropriate content. Pornhub would rather block access in a state with age-verification laws than cooperate. If kids can’t watch porn, their logic goes, then no one can.
Following the recent passage of bipartisan age-verification laws in five new states, Pornhub will prevent web access in more than one-fifth of the nation. Pornhub ended access in Kentucky on June 10 and will cut off access in Indiana, Idaho, and Kansas on June 28. The porn industry titan will also cut off access in Nebraska on July 17. Pornhub has already withdrawn from Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, Virginia, and Texas following similar age-verification legislation. By the end of July, Pornhub will have withdrawn from states that are home to approximately 23 percent of the total U.S. population.
The battle to protect children from pornography began in Louisiana in 2022 with the passage of the state’s age-verification law. Louisiana was the first state to require online pornography websites to verify users’ ages, which it accomplished in partnership with the third-party service LA Wallet. Pornhub lost its legal challenge against the new law. Though the pornography company did not block web access in Louisiana, Pornhub stated that “traffic to Pornhub dropped by approximately 80 percent in Louisiana” with the implementation of age verification.
Other states soon followed Louisiana’s example. Rather than contract with a third-party company for age verification, however, subsequent states required online visitors to Pornhub to provide an image of a government-issued ID. Citing privacy concerns and First Amendment violations, Pornhub challenged the legislation and eventually blocked online access from states that would require age verification. (RELATED: Musk Allows Porn on X. It’s Time to Fight Back.)
Pornhub’s concerns about privacy are one-sided. Though the company wants to protect its loyal customers, the website has long turned a blind eye to the rampant abuse, trafficking, and nonconsensual content on its website. In 2020, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about the website’s continual exploitation of minors and vulnerable individuals in a piece called “The Children of Pornhub.”
“Its site is infested with rape videos,” Kristof writes. “It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags.” A number of the subjects he interviewed had sexual videos nonconsensually posted on Pornhub as teenagers. The site didn’t care about the origins of the content. Kristof identified “a recurring theme among survivors: An assault eventually ends, but Pornhub renders the suffering interminable.”
Some critics of the age-verification laws have argued that the laws don’t prevent pornography access so much as divert it from Pornhub to other websites. There’s some truth to their criticism. The unanimous bipartisan passage of age-verification of an age-verification law in Utah sparked a surge in Google searches for “virtual private networks” (VPNs), which disguise the computer user’s location and circumvent location-specific blocks.
In the aftermath of Pornhub’s decision to block Texas users from its site, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, a senior editor at the libertarian magazine Reason, expressed skepticism about the strategy of age verification:
Pornhub makes a good point, and one that prohibitionists of all sorts are wont to ignore. Banning (or putting up major barriers to) products that people want doesn’t stop people from wanting and accessing those products. It simply bars people from accessing them in the safest and most transparent way possible.
But there’s nothing “safe” about viewing pornography, which has been linked to serious negative outcomes for the children and adults who engage with it. And the age-verification frameworks in states like Texas are explicitly aimed at transparency. If someone wants to access pornography, they need to first verify their age and identity — it doesn’t get more transparent than that.
Libertarians may be loathe to admit it, but banning products — especially products that rely on addiction to produce repeat customers — isn’t an exercise in futility. The free market isn’t capable of self-correction when it’s filled with companies like Pornhub, which view human beings as capital to be bought and sold at the lowest possible cost.
And, besides, Pornhub keeps saying the quiet part out loud by banning access to its website in states that pass age-verification laws: If they can’t sell porn to kids, they aren’t actually interested in selling porn at all.
Mary Frances Myler is a contributing editor at The American Spectator. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022.
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