Rather than deal with child safety laws, the adult website PornHub is blocking content to states that have passed laws requiring age verification to watch pornography.
The site blocked residents of Virginia after its age verification law took effect on July 1.
Now, residents of Mississippi and Utah are also blocked due to similar laws in their states that also took effect that day, according to The Washington Times.
The laws differ slightly from state to state, but the concept is the same — anyone who wants to get on a porn site has to prove they are at least 18 years old. The way to do that is to submit personal data, such as a government identification document or driver’s license.
“It’s part of our job as society — and maybe a subset of my job as a lawmaker — to try to protect children,” said Republican state Sen. Todd Weiler of Utah, a sponsor of his state’s law, according to the Associated Press.
“I’m not gonna blame all of society’s ills on pornography, but I don’t think it’s helpful when a kid is forming their impressions of sex and gender to have all of this filth and lewd depictions on their mind,” he said.
Louisiana enacted a similar law at the start of the year. Pornhub required gawkers from that state to use the LA Wallet app, a digital wallet for Louisiana driver’s licenses, according to TechCrunch.
“Since then, our traffic in Louisiana dropped approximately 80 percent,” Pornhub said in a statement. “Those people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to other corners of the internet that don’t verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content.”
Should more states copy these anti-porn laws?
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Pornhub wants devices to verify age.
“Many devices already offer free and easy-to-use parental control features that can prevent children from accessing adult content without risking the disclosure of sensitive user data,” Pornhub wrote.
TechCrunch noted that “parents may not be savvy enough to prevent children from bypassing these features.”
Republican state Sen. Nicole Akins Boyd of Mississippi said parents were the driving force behind her state’s law.
“I was approached by a number of individuals last year, probably about this time, that were concerned about the exposure that children have to pornography, a number of psychologists, a number of parents, and quite frankly, a number of individuals who had had porn addiction in there, and they got addicted as a child,” Akins Boyd said, according to WLBT.
“The sad thing about this is the average age of exposure in the U.S. is around 12 years of age. Exposure to pornography for children leads to increased violence, mental health issues, addiction issues, and risky sexual behavior. So we need to do something to limit their exposure,” she said.
According to the Christian website Focus On the Family, a study spanning 1995 through 2015 found that 64 percent of people aged 13 to 24 viewed pornography at least weekly, and 49 percent of young people first viewed pornography before age 13.
Focus On the Family also said 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls younger than 18 admitted to having seen pornography at least once, and children between the ages of 12 to 17 make up the largest group of internet porn users.
“What we’ve had is the unfettered wild, wild west ability of these pornography sites, such as YouPorn and Pornhub, to have someone who accesses their site without restriction to age,” said Virginia Republican state Sen. Bill Stanley, who sponsored his state’s law, according to the Virginia Mercury.
Stanley called childhood exposure to pornography an “epidemic.”
