Here, Hold My Lube: Pornhub Blocks Virginia and Mississippi
from the why-should-I-bother-anymore dept
Mandatory age verification rules are entering force in Mississippi and Virginia. Mississippi has a population of barely 3 million people. Virginia has a population of over 8.6 million people. Like Utah (population over 3 million) back in May, one of the world’s most popular adult tube websites chose to block IP addresses from both of these states as a protest against age verification laws that may threaten data privacy and security.
That’s roughly 15 million people — many of whom are minors, but the vast majority of whom are legally-aged adults who likely use the internet for a variety of purposes, including watching porn or viewing erotic materials on sites like the one site I refer to. The website you ask? It’s pretty obvious it’s Pornhub — owned by MindGeek.
While not the largest tube site in the world, Pornhub still brings in billions of visits every year, making it one of the most trafficked web properties in the world — on par with sites like Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook.
Pornhub published a scathing rebuke through its official Twitter account to point out why a VPN will now be needed for users who wish to access popular sites in the Pornhub network like Brazzers, Mofos, RedTube, PornMD, and ModelHub. All of these sites are blocked.
These laws, Pornhub explained in the statement, are also not equitably enforced. This means that some sites, like the Pornhub network, will comply with these laws while others will ultimately choose not to. “We already saw how this scenario played out,” reads Pornhub’s press statement, referring to the Louisiana age verification law that entered force in January 2023.
In this case, Pornhub adopted a measure that used the Louisiana state digital driver’s license application as a tool to verify age for people over 18 who want to access the site. But the result ended up being a loss of 80 percent of Pornhub’s Louisiana traffic.
“These people did not stop looking for porn,” says the site. “They just migrated to other corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take your safety seriously, and that often don’t moderate content.” These are fighting words from a site that is trying, despite recently being accused of illegally collecting data and violating GDPR regulations.
I’ve personally spoken with individuals of power — leaders in Pornhub’s corporate leadership and ownership group (Ethical Capital Partners) — who are legitimately and openly concerned over the clearly inconsistent implementation of age verification laws in the United States. Laws that have been adopted in several states offer very little in the way of clarifying age verification codes. Pornhub, and other major players in the online adult entertainment industry, have long been supportive of age verification measures to prevent minors from viewing age-restricted materials.
The laws that are dominating the state-by-state legal patchwork that is characteristic of the United States are impotent. For starters, Pornhub expressed early on when blocking entire states from their site that a viable option for age verification is device-based verification, rather than collecting government ID cards and credit card numbers. Porn star Cherie DeVille gave this spiel in a video first published to Utahns before the age verification law there entered force. As I explained previously, the Utah case featured DeVille in a video explaining that local laws no longer incentivize Pornhub to allow site access in particular jurisdictions. This resulted in users raging against the elected officials who adopted the law and spurred a federal lawsuit brought by members of the adult entertainment industry. Now, as I reported for AVN the other day, Cherie is back telling users in Mississippi and Virginia how it is.
Age verification won’t work if there is no form of equal enforcement and the proposed compliance strategies add even more undue burdens, like increased information security costs and a bloat of sensitive personal data that is ripe for the taking by hackers.
These age verification laws have absolutely no point at this moment in time, either. States that have adopted these laws are controlled by elected politicians who are influenced by groups who wish for types of expression that are otherwise protected by the First Amendment to be stifled. And all this in the name of protecting kids, showing a shameful belief among a select few elites that they know what’s best for the nation’s children, consenting adults, and entire digital industries.
Michael McGrady covers the tech side of the online porn business. He is a contributing editor at AVN.com.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, adult content, age verification, geoblock, mississippi, virginia
Companies: mindgeek, pornhub
Comments on “Here, Hold My Lube: Pornhub Blocks Virginia and Mississippi ”
“Now”? Had people generally been accessing pornography via their own IP addresses previously? I’m guessing these sites contain advertisements, and who the fuck knows where that data might be going. It seems like the type of thing that’s likely to, at the very least, lead to embarrasing ad-targeting elsewhere.
(No paid service is needed, by the way. I just booted up TAILS in a virtual machine, and its default Tor Browser configuration had no trouble loading Pornhub.)
Re: re: I just booted up TAILS in a virtual machine, and its default Tor Browser configuration had no trouble loading Pornhub
Could you contemplate getting over yourself for a second?
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Not without any further explanation. If you’re suggesting that we should still be opposed to terrible laws, I agree, but what’s wrong with taking a few minutes to download software that bypasses this problem (and the larger problem of online user tracking in general)? Downloading Tor Browser isn’t harder than downloading any other browser—and if people couldn’t do that, the market share of Microsoft Edge would be way higher that 14%.
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Btw
adverts on adult sites are no different than any other sites.
If you block adds and cookies and history you don’t get embarrassing advertising.
AND
If you have wide open cookies and tracking and history, you don’t get embarrassing advertising.
Part of targeting in advertising means visiting a porn site is unlikely to change your overall advertising very much, unless you visit them 24/7.
What’s embarrassing is in the eye of the user (grow up anyway).
And you’re still likely to come across strange “embarrassing” advertisements no matter what you do or don’t visit.
Considering my email is full of online casinos (never used), penis pills (not interested in modifying myself) and tampons (I don’t have a slit)…
Along with offers from fake CVS and lottery winnings?
You’re worrying about a non-winnable issue.
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@sabroni;
Always remember, the internet routes around damage.
Although sometimes it needs a little human help.
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Others don’t care about being open and honest with interests.,
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“Honest” is a strange phrase to use in relation to unintentionally giving data to faceless corporations. Anyway, you may be atypical here, because a lot of people consider data relating to sexuality to be some of the most sensitive data there is. Hence the specific laws against “revenge porn” and “sextortion”, the research about sites leaking data to Google and Facebook, the publicity around dating site breaches, etc.
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Atypical, yes. I don’t really care if anyone knows that on occasion I will visit a porn site. Nor why. While my interest is generally 60s and 70s erotic “-“ films (like erotic-thriller), I don’t deny watching other more, sexual, content. Straight, gay, bi, whatever. So what. I’m human. [the hosting of full movies is questionable but I depend on the site operator to decide if it is legal, if it’s posted, I assume it’s legal]
People worried about being “outed” are morally brainwashed. Sex is a normal part of life and humans are one of the few species that have a problem being watched. Or caught watching.
Re: VPN
The problem with using VPN, Tor and the like to access streaming video is that streaming video is hugely bandwidth-intensive. Route the entire output of PornHamster through Tor and odds are that the Tor network will break under the load. There are a finite number of nodes, many of which are run by volunteers, and abusing a free resource usually means losing it – much like anon.penet.fi was killed in the early days by abusing it to route huge file attachments. It was one site run by one small local provider and the infrastructure has its limits.
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Set up your own private VPN for your personal use
I do that when I take road trips to Mexico so I can still listen to my iHeartRadio and YouTube music playlists when I driving down there.
Your own private server outside the affected area is the way to go.
With your own private VPN for your own use you not be on any VPN/proxy ban liats as they will never know you are on a VPN
That is also good if I want to watch Netflix while I.am.down there and Netflix will never be the wiser
Blue-balling entire states is certainly one way to get people riled up and protesting absurd laws passed by puritanical politicians playing to prudes terrified of the naked body.
Can’t see it, don’t have a Twitter account.
With Twitter now requiring sign-ins in order to view any tweets at all, Twitter is rapidly becoming a less-viable announcement venue.
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Bloody hell every time you think that man can’t be more of an idiot… ‘You can only view tweets if you have an account and are signed in’ sounds like a great way to tank casual visitors and new users alike.
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According to the Top Twit himself, it’s apparently a temporary measure to stop some sort of data scraping. But I don’t buy that explanation for a hot minute. This is the second time since he’s bought the site that Twitter has tried to block people who weren’t logged in from viewing Twitter content (including user profiles). I think he wants to make it permanent, but the backlash he gets each time he tries to do it makes him look for an excuse (e.g., “it was just a glitch”) to back out of the plan.
What makes this worse is how today’s “temporary measure” is fucking up all sorts of things. Twitter embeds in Discord—even though bots like Nano and proxies like fxtwitter and vxtwitter—are all malfunctioning, and Nitter instances are wholly useless so long as this measure stays in place. This isn’t making anyone happy, and it’s yet another reason for people to be looking for a new social media service. (I wonder: When will Bluesky start its beta?)
Re: Re: Re: Ah the desperate flailing of an idiot who doesn't know what he's doing...
And it somehow got even dumber, now there are hard caps in place even for those with accounts only allowing them to see a set amount of tweets per day depending on whether they are ‘verified’ or not.
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I’m sure those still buying ad-space on Twitter are going to leap with joy when their ads reach a smaller audience…
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If by smaller you mean 0 then yes, the professional victims will jump for joy when they can’t even harass their victims.
Re: Re: Re:2
There’s a rumor going around that the restrictions come from the fact that since Twitter didn’t pay Google on time, Google restricted the amount of data that Twitter can use.
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That can’t be it, everyone knows Elon is fanatical about paying his bills…
Re: Re: Re:2
And those limits are ridiculously low:
Musk has claimed that the limits will be increased “soon” to:
I don’t use Twitter much, so I haven’t hit any limits, but apparently it’s incredibly easy to hit the limits fast for “unverified” accounts, and even the higher limit for “verified” Twitter Blue subscribers gets hit pretty quickly. The increase isn’t going to help much, since it’s still pitifully low amounts of views. Subscribers ought to be royally pissed off, since they’re paying money, but I’m sure all of Musk’s fans will just keep on cheering them while he’s pissing on them.
It’s also notable that when they were first implemented, it caused Twitter to DDoS itself. The site and app had been coding assuming there would always be tweets to load, and any failure to do so was due to network issues. So it’d keep firing off several requests per second trying to load tweets. They did manage to fix that, but it shows how sudden Musk made the decision and how little he understands the site.
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It’s a 33% increase for “unverified” existing accounts also. I mistakenly calculated it jumping to 900.
Heaven forfend that some competitor might get, for free, all the data that Twitter got for free.
Twitter links are dead
Just an FYI that twitter now no longer allows public non-member access to tweets, so linking out to them is a bummer for those of us who have cut the bird. I’m not sure what that means for you as an author but thought you should know.
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… of course I didn’t bother to read the other comments first. Can’t delete this post either.
I got into a ‘discussion’ last night with a rightie freind & some gomer jumped in & made it stupid.
(Yes I have friends that are righties, we have discussions, we do that rare agree to disagree thing when we’re both convinced ours is the correct side. Their viewpoints often contain the bits not reported in the media or in soundbites.)
Anyways Gomer was trying to convince me that the only reason MindGeek did this was because they wanted to make sure they could still show porn to kids because, as he later illuminated me to, porn is just like crack.
His basis was an article by a woman selling her addiction services, when challenged he provided more including things from churches.
My friend bowed out early because he’s smart enough to know I was going to crush Gomer.
Pron causes dopamine!!
– So does sugar, so does nicotine.
We need glucose to live but not in excess! (includes 2 images of huge toddlers)
– If only they had parents.
Parents can’t monitor their children 24/7!
– If an adult can’t figure out how to control the internet for their 8 yr old they should cancel the internet & jitterbug makes a nice nonsmart phone.
Kids need access to the open internet & pron shoudl just be on the onion out of sight!!!
– You give you kids rules about gun safety & expect them to follow them but you have no faith in their ability to follow your rules about pron… o_O
I pointed out not all adults have credit cards, and some kids do.
Another gomer tried to say but its attached the the parents account… which just shows them an adults name when verifying genius.
I covered how there isn’t a system in place, how its an invasion of privacy & a data leak nightmare waiting to happen all because your kids will follow the rule to not touch the gun, but not the one that says don’t look at porn?
Gomer got bored and wandered off back to his doublewide shortly after I suggested we should ban beef because a baby might choke on steak.
The world is awash in sexual imagery, most str8 people don’t even notice it, but its everywhere. Get the girl, be the man, blah blah blah….
Perhaps telling your child not to look at porn, checking on them to verify, and punishing them when they break the rule seems like to much effort compared to forcing the entire country to do way more than the parents are willing to do to protect their kids even if its not going to work & result in being a bigger clusterfuck but at least no one forced you to raise your kids.
They don’t want your kid watching porn, they aren’t targeting your kids, kids are curious by nature.
And well I’ve watched enough daytime DNA shows to understand how horribly lacking sex education of any sort is taught by parents.
Maybe its not a world problem, but a you’re a shitty parent problem & you should pur more effort into it rather than demand everyone else jump through hoops so you can have the illusion your child won’t learn about secks until you’re ready to have the talk with them when they are 35.
VPN anyone?
Just use a VPN to bypass that.
There is no law in America that makes bypassing geofilters by using Tor, proxy or VPN
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censorship of this type legal.
Problem solved.
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Except that laws promoting censorship of pornography—with respect to children and even adults—have been found legal in the USA. I’m not even sure what can be done about that. The First Amendment is already written in the most absolute terms possible, and courts still restrict speech in all kinds of ways (pornography, fraud, perjury, copyright, etc.).
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You are, of course, correct.
I started to dig into it with fraud and perjury, then said to myself, “Self”, I said, “Don’t be any more stupid than you have to be, good as I am at it.”
I started to list my concerns, then realized I was starting a young book, so I’ll leave off. Right to Repair, moribund works and marks, F/RAND and submarine patents. IP seems to attract every smoke dancer and bindlestiff for thousands of miles, trying to slash off a gob for themselves, even after the slashing isn’t good any more. Likely I’m not being fair and letting a few incidences from my (soured) past color my thoughts.
Re: I really hope a VPN company is sponsoring you...
So eager to yet again hype VPN’s and how there’s no law against them that you completely missed that that was already mentioned in the article I see.
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Actually I encourage setting up your own private VPN if you can
This way your IP address will not be detected as VPN or proxu by software that blacklists them
If you want to totally bypass proxy/vpn detevrion that is the way to go especially when traveling
It you have an ISP with a static address that allows servers you can make it look like you are coming from your home computer
That is good when traveling abroad and still want to access websites that only allow us users
I break no laws when doing this on road trips to Mexico as there are no laws in Mexico or the United States that makes it a crime to do so
They could use your voter registration to verify age. But then you have to be registered to vote. We can’t have that now, can we.
It's a damn shame....
It’s a damn shame and a scathing indictment of those states (and I would say of the US in general) that a pornography website takes a better stance on the privacy and safety of their users than the states do of their constituents.
They fell for it
This is exactly what the laws are supposed to do. Block access. Pornhub fell for it.
When you block a state, the prudes win.
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Not quite, by doing it this way they are the ones shaping the narrative rather than letting the state do it.
Had they tried to comply then the new demands for user personal information would have driven off a huge chunk of users and those users almost certainly would have blamed the site for it even if they were essentially doing it at gunpoint.
When the inevitable hack happened and all the personal information of those that did provide it was leaked(because bloody hell do I struggle to think of a more attractive trove of blackmail material for black-hats) the site would absolutely be the one blamed for not securing the information well enough, getting all the blame from users and non-users alike.
On the other hand by shutting down like this and most importantly doing so with a public message explaining why they dump all the blame on the puritanical pinhead politicians, making clear that while they support the stated goal(less kids accessing porn) the way it’s being implemented is useless at best and they’re shutting down rather than putting their users at risk by trying to comply. In this way while there will certainly be plenty of blue-balled users almost all of their anger and aggravation is going to be aimed at the politicians rather than the site, placing it exactly where it belongs and garnering some good will for the site in the process.
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I’ve posted in the past about how to do this without impacting adults, and without requiring PII from anyone.
Thing is, it’s not about stopping porn. It’s about power. So while the solution is cheap, easily implemented, low effort, it will never be adopted because it circumvents their will to control.
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Regardless of the reason, they still did what the politicians wanted. Blocked porn in the state. It was never about kids; always about porn itself.
As for a data breach, see above comment.
People really need to get past their fear of sex.
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Of course it wasn’t about the kids but with the law in place they didn’t have an option to just ignore it, they were either shutting down in those states or attempting to comply and screwing over their users so the best they could do was use the lies about why the law was passed and turn it on the politicians who passed it by properly putting the blame on them.
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Personally, I think it will likely at some point turn factual reporting into “scurrilous, scandalous, titillating works” and thus fall under the porn laws. I’m trying to remember which country did that before…
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Everytime politicians want to take rights away, it’s always about the Children or Terrorists.
Sounds like Lavabit all over again, only without the NSL’s……
Utah…who cares, they are just puritan people in the middle of the west. Virginia is 1/2 of the most populated, most politically active areas of the country (DC, Virginia, and Maryland). The dweebs in Richmond have just angered the next most high tech area of the country, next to California, and the most politically motivated ones, especially in Northern Virginia, by blocking their porn. Even Repuglicans love their porn.
Heads will roll now.
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Fun fact: more Mormons live in Boise, Id than in the entire state of Utah. Make of that what you will.
What about the rights of the unborn spermatazoa? Seems to me that the idiocy shouldn’t end with abortion. Wouldn’t male masturbation equal MASS MURDER? Married folks should also be restricted to porn featuring their spouse. Doesn’t THAT sound like fun?
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That is just a really dumb argument.
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I read Nimrod’s post as sarcasm.
But Poe’s law needs to be complied with, so I understand your confusion.
It's a dumb law
I think it’s a dumb law. We all know “The Internet is Porn”!!!
Like there is Public TV that anyone can pick up with an Antenna and watch programs OTA. There are rules. But if you PAY for cable TV, those rules go out the window. You are paying to get access to those cable channels, where you can say those words and have nudity.
Well You can’t get onto the Internet without paying for it. I guess you could say you can get on it for free from a Pupblic Library, but they do run blocking software on their computers from what I hear.
So you are paying to get onto the Internet just like paying to get cable TV. So you no longer have those rules because it’s not public. Even Wifi hotspots, you have rules to follow and then agree to them before getting access.
Once you have access that you paid for, we shouldn’t have to get age verified. Parents should be supervizing their kids and install softwre on their devices. There are parental controls on all kinds of these things days.