Report: Age verification laws have driven top porn site to shut down in multiple states
Pornhub website logo. / Kate Krav-Rude/Shutterstock Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 9, 2023 / 11:23 am (CNA).
Laws in multiple states that require age verification for users of pornography sites have led one of the world’s most prolific porn websites to stop streaming its graphic sexual videos in those states.
The states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, Utah, and Texas have all recently passed laws that require pornography websites to confirm that users are above 18 years of age before accessing the explicit streaming videos the sites offer.
The laws, which have passed bipartisan legislatures and have been signed by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike, have led Pornhub — the second-most popular pornography site and among the most popular websites in the world — to cease offering its videos in Mississippi, Utah, and Virginia, according to a report in Politico.
Visitors to the site in those states are greeted instead with a taped message from porn star Carolyn Paparozzi, aka Cherie DeVille, claiming that the age verification law “is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”
“The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns,” Paparozzi says in the video. “We believe that the best and most effective solution for protecting children and adults alike is to identify users by their device and allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that identification.”
Meanwhile, the Free Speech Coalition — a pornography trade association — has filed challenges to the laws in Utah and Louisiana. The website has complied with the law in Louisiana, with Politico reporting that, in that state, “traffic … has dropped 80%.”
The Free Speech Coalition says on its nationwide bill tracker that multiple other states have proposed similar laws; some have failed in state legislatures while several other states, including Minnesota and New Jersey, are actively considering such laws.
Pornhub has been the subject of significant criticism and investigation since its founding in 2007. Owned by the Canadian pornography conglomerate MindGeek, the website is alleged to have hosted footage of child sexual abuse, videos involving sex trafficking victims, gang rapes, and other sexual crimes.
A bombshell 2020 column by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof claimed the site was “infested with rape videos” and that 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.”
Kristof claimed to have viewed “recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls,” while one moderator told him that some videos feature depictions of “children only 8 to 12.”
The analytics website Similarweb estimates that Pornhub records well over 2 billion views monthly.
Record-high porn consumption around the world has raised concerns of rampant porn addiction especially among young men. Studies have indicated that porn consumption is contributing to higher divorce rates among married couples in the U.S.
Earlier this year CNA reported on a new online forum, SOS Porn Deliverance, which was recently launched under the patronage of the Italian computer programmer Blessed Carlo Acutis.
“We offer the opportunity for those affected by this scourge to chat confidentially with an e-missionary trained in this mission, which is first and foremost to listen with compassion and to bear witness to the love of God in our lives,” one of the initiative’s leaders told CNA.
