Pornhub Is Offline in Texas: A Win for Age Verification Laws
On March 14th, Texas residents discovered that Pornhub was completely inaccessible in the state. Attempting to visit the website, Texans were met with a wall of text reading, in part:
“Your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website… we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas.”
This is the result of HB 1181, a 2023 state bill that requires porn sites to use “reasonable age verification methods” to ensure that individuals attempting to access the content are not minors. The user’s state is detected based on their IP address.
Pornhub is already complying with a similar bill in Louisiana through the use of AllPassTrust, a third-party identity verification site that connects to a state-wide digital driver’s license service.
The majority of children are exposed to porn by age 13 with lasting and dangerous consequences on both the individual and society.
At WoLF, we advocate for the abolition of porn and the entire commercial sexual exploitation industry. We also recognize that the scale of the problem with porn is overwhelming and, therefore, support multiple efforts to reduce access to porn and limit the further expansion of an industry of violence against women. WoLF has testified in support of similar age-restriction laws in Alaska and California.
About HB 1181
It is already illegal under federal law to distribute porn to minors (under the age of 16), but internet porn sites often skirt around these laws with a simple checkbox on their website, asking viewers to confirm they are at least 18. Unlike with other age-restricted substances like tobacco, alcohol, or firearms, there is no actual identity verification requirement in place to prevent minors from accessing this material.
HB 1181 passed the Texas legislature in May of 2023 and was supposed to go into effect in September. It requires commercial websites where more than one-third of the content is “sexual material harmful to minors” to use digital age verification methods. It allows the site to choose the means of verification.
The bill has strict user privacy requirements and imposes a $10,000 fine per day for violating the age verification requirements and an additional fine of up to $250,000 if minors are exposed to porn because of their lack of compliance.
Pornhub immediately sued the state to stop the bill and initially gained an injunction to block the law. Last week, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the injunction and upheld the age verification component of the law, meaning PornHub will need to comply with the law for the duration of the lawsuit.
“H.B. 1181 easily surmounts plaintiffs’ constitutional challenge... The record is replete with examples of the sort of damage that access to pornography does to children.”
(pg. 23 of decision)
With the injunction on age verification vacated, the case now goes back to the District Court.
Harm Reduction and Hitting Pornographers Where It Hurts
In an ideal world, porn would be seen in the law for what it is: filmed proof of a crime. Whether that crime is sexual assault, rape, trafficking, or prostitution; it is undeniably a form of commercial sexual exploitation. It is WoLF’s mission to abolish violence against women and girls, and we consider porn a major part of that.
Porn is one of the most insidious threats facing women today. The impacts of this 97-billion-dollar industry on the psyches of men and boys, and bodies of women and girls, can not be overstated. It promotes misogyny, sexual violence, and dangerous and escalating sexual behaviors that men inflict on women and girls.
“Pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity—the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he’s got her.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women
Today, children are accessing porn at astoundingly young ages, with 15% of minors viewing porn at age 10 or younger. Over half of minors have watched violent porn such as rape, choking, bondage, or sadomasochism, content that results in violent attitudes and behaviors among boys, and self-loathing and anxiety among girls. Porn can affect the brain like a drug, becoming addictive and requiring increasingly extreme content to continue to reach a high.
In an ideal world, porn would not exist.
This is why we support many different kinds of efforts to reduce the spread of porn in society. Age verification laws not only prevent minors from accessing porn, but according to porn advocates, “it drags down the earning potential of publishers and adds costs to users who create content.”
The reality is that Pornhub does not want age verification laws because it hurts their bottom line. It’s highly doubtful they truly care about free speech or protecting children beyond the impact of such things on their wallet. They are a business built on the backs of women (literally), and they only care about making money. Anything that can slow their meteoric rise to power and influence is a win.
Learn More about WoLF’s Stance On Commercial Sexual Exploitation
Women are not products to be bought and sold. Policies that legalize or fully decriminalize prostitution normalize sexual violence, fail to protect victims, and fail to hold pimps and punters accountable for their systematic exploitation of female people. The Equality Model (previously called The Nordic Model) criminalizes the buying of people’s bodies while also protecting victims and providing resources for victims who want to leave “the life.”
