OAN’s Abril Elfi
12:25 PM – Friday, March 15, 2024
If you’re a porn addict and live in the state of Texas, this may be a good time to find a new hobby.
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Pornhub and other affiliated pornographic websites have blocked access to users in Texas in the midst of a legal dispute with the attorney general of Texas regarding an age-verification law.
“Texas has a right to protect its children from the detrimental effects of pornographic content,” Paxton said. “I look forward to holding any company accountable that violates our age verification laws intended to prevent minors from being exposed to harmful, obscene material on the internet,” Texas AG Ken Paxton said.
A Texas law mandating age-verification procedures for pornographic websites to guarantee that only adults 18 and older can access them was upheld by a federal appeals court last week.
However, a portion of the law mandating that porn sites post “health warnings” about the content was overturned. This followed a federal judge’s earlier decision that the Texas law was unconstitutional under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which forbids restrictions on free speech.
Nevertheless, the decision was promptly appealed by the Texas Attorney General’s Office.
A new notice on Pornhub on Thursday explained that it was blocking access in order to comply with the law for users with internet addresses in Texas.
“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,” the message reads in part. “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 we hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users. 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.”
Pornhub claimed that the Texas age-verification law will drive users “from those few websites that comply to the thousands of websites with far fewer safety measures in place that do not comply,” calling the law “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous.”
They also stated that any laws pertaining to the provision of adult content on platforms must be enforced against them in order to safeguard minors and user privacy.
If Pornhub’s parent company did not follow the law, it could face millions of dollars in civil penalties.
Governor Greg Abbott (R-Texas) signed the legislation in June 2023. Texas H.B. 11811, the bill, was supposed to take effect on September 1st, but it was put on hold when the Free Speech Coalition, a group that includes Pornhub’s parent company, filed a lawsuit.
The lawsuit resulted in a preliminary injunction that stopped the legislation’s enforcement.
Online publishers who have more than one-third of their content classified as “sexual material harmful to minors” are subject to the law, which mandates that they use “public or private transactional data” or government-issued identification to confirm the age of every visitor.
Pornhub and the company’s network of other sites are also blocked or restricted in at least seven other U.S. states, including Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia, and Utah.
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