Popular Porn Website Pornhub Disables Sites In Texas In Response to Age Verification Law
Jose Nino
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On March 14, 2024 popular pornography website, Pornhub, disabled its site in Texas over disagreements over a state law that mandates age verification to bar minors from accessing this site.
People who attempt to go to the site are now seeing a lengthy message from the porn company criticizing the legal change as “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous.” The company pushed for age verification by the makers of devices that allow individuals on the Internet, as opposed to individual websites.
“Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas,” the message stated.
In 2023, the Texas state legislature passed House Bill 1181, the age verification law. It mandates companies that propagate “sexual material harmful to minors” to confirm individuals visiting those sites are over 18 with an online system that verifies users’ government-issued identification or another commercially-used system that utilizes public or private data. The sites are not allowed to keep identifying information.
In February 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the company that owns Pornhub to ensure compliance with Texas’ age verification law and threatened to impose millions of dollars in civil penalties for noncompliance with law.
“Texas has a right to protect its children from the detrimental effects of pornographic content,” Paxton declared in a statement when he filed the lawsuit. “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.”
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in November 2024 issued a ruling upholding the law, which levies fines of up to $10,000 on a daily basis, an additional $10,000 daily if the company illegally keeps identifying information, and $250,000 if one or more children are exposed to lewd content owing to the violation.
Texas is in the right here. Degenerate content should not be readily available to minors. Moreover, entities that push such content should face some type of economic or social sanction. They’re wrecking the country’s social fabric and enabling some of the most depraved individuals to reap massive profits.
Red state governments need to continue turning up the heat and clamping down on these corruptions.
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