Pornhub Is Pulling Out of Florida

At the dawn of the new year, Pornhub will leave Florida. Thanks to a harsh new age verification law that takes effect on January 1, the porn giant will no longer do business in the sunshine state. The law mirrors similar laws passed in other Republican led states where Pornhub has stopped doing business.

Users in Florida visiting Pornhub have been treated to a fun popup in recent days. “YOU WILL LOSE ACCESS TO PORNHUB IN 14 DAYS” reads the window that dominates the screen on the site when it’s accessed from an IP address in Florida. “Did you know that your government wants you to give your driver’s license before you can access PORNHUB? As crazy as it 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 says it's pulling out of Florida on January 1, when age verification law takes effect pic.twitter.com/dfaXKCiMEb

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As it repeatedly promised, the GOP is fighting pornography. In many states, it’s winning. In Oklahoma, Kentucky, Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Arkansas, Utah, Mississippi, Virginia, and Louisiana, a citizen who wants to access an adult website has to prove they’re 18 years old by showing a government ID.

Florida’s law is HB3. The law is broad. It requires a website that provides material that is “harmful to minors” to provide a means of “anonymous age verification” to its minors. What does it mean for material to be “harmful to minors?” According to the law any material that “the average person applying contemporary community standards would find, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.”

There’s a lot of wiggle room in that. Such ill-defined speech laws have long been used in America to suppress speech and attack people who say things people don’t like. HB3 also has a provision that’s meant to keep minors off of social media websites entirely. It’s an overreaching law that’s drawn the attention of the ACLU and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Pornhub’s response to these laws has been geoblocking the states where they’re passed. Florida will join the list on January 1. The company’s argument during all this has been that it doesn’t want minors on its site, but it thinks there are better and safer ways to verify a user’s age. “The best solution to make the internet safer, preserve user privacy, and prevent children from accessing adult content is performing age verification at the source: on the device,” Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, told the website Florida Politics.

The Free Speech Coalition, a trade group that represents pornography websites, has been fighting these laws in court. “These laws create a substantial burden on adults who want to access legal sites without fear of surveillance. Despite the claims of the proponents, HB3 is not the same as showing an ID at a liquor store. It is invasive and carries significant risk to privacy,” Alison Boden, Executive Director of Free Speech Coalition, said in a statement. “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.”

Louisiana was the first state to pass an ID law like this. When it happened last year, Pornhub complied. It said its traffic fell 80 percent in the state. “These people did not stop looking 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, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content. In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and children,” Aylo said in a statement.