PornHub Set To Block All Floridians From Accessing Their Site On January 1st

Florida Politics - No one in Florida will be able to access Pornhub, the most trafficked pornography website worldwide, as of Jan. 1.

Officials with Aylo, the parent company to the pornography site, confirmed it will deny access for all users in the state. An email from the company made clear the restriction will happen in protest of new age verification requirements imposed by a state law (HB 3) going into effect in 2025.

In short, in an effort to prevent minors from accessing porn on the internet, Florida passed a law stating that porn sites must verify user's ages by requiring them to provide a photo ID. Sites that don't abide by this are subject to a $50,000 fine. In response, PornHub is cutting off Florida entirely. And Florida is far from the first state to be cut off by PornHub.

Florida Today - Pornhub, one of the largest and most-visited adult websites, has made a habit of blocking states that have passed new adult-site ID requirements. Texas was blocked earlier this year, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky and Nebraska were blocked in July, and Oklahoma was shut out last month, joining millions of disappointed residents.

It's a good ol' fashioned Mexican stand-off. Florida makes a rule, and instead of abiding by it, PornHub takes their ball and goes home. No porn for you, Florida. As morally despicable as SO MUCH of PornHub's content is, PornHub can't in good conscious ask their users to upload a copy of their photo ID to their porn website. Ironically, enough, as massive of a company as PornHub has become, giving PornHub your personal information is probably a lot safer than giving your information to other websites that people might not think twice about. 

But in the end, they're still a porn site. PornHub is self aware enough to know how it looks for them to ask people for their state ID's. More importantly, they know that nobody is going to give it to them. PornHub played along with Louisiana's age verification laws, and traffic to their site in Louisiana dropped 80%.

Florida Politics - We have seen how this scenario plays out in the United States. In Louisiana last year, Pornhub was one of the few sites to comply with the new law,” Aylo’s email reads. “Since then, our traffic in Louisiana dropped approximately 80%. 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.”

I'm just not sure how states can really think they're going to prevent kids from accessing porn on the internet. In today's world, I'd imagine most children are fully capable of downloading a VPN to circumvent any sort of state based restrictions Ron Desantis may have put on their iPad by the age of 6. And to try to enforce a statewide age verification law like that and apply it to porn is doing age verification on impossible level difficulty. 

Say there was a video game that Florida didn't want their kids to access. But kids could still access the game if they took certain steps, or accessed it through a shady website that might make their parents computer burst into flames. The hassle of going through those steps, or the threat of getting in trouble might be enough to prevent kids from going through with it. But if you think blocking a horny teenager's access to safe & reliable porn sites is going to make them say, "Aw damn.. guess I'm not beating it today. I'll go upstairs and pray away my boner instead". That's crazy talk. In the heat of a boner, a horny teenager will put the safety of his entire family in grave danger to access an uncensored pair of tits on the internet. No threat of a computer virus is going to stop them. All Florida is doing is punishing parents by putting their home computers at risk of whatever vicious porn viruses come with their child visiting xsluts.afghanistan.

It's really a moment in porn history. I'm not sure how it will ever be resolved. Somebody is going to have to blink eventually. Or come up with a reliable way to verify age that doesn't require uploading a real I.D. Or maybe Florida really does find a way to block all children from accessing porn on the internet. But what happens then? Kids start dealing porn at school? Is that any better? They're going to find a way. You're not going to stop it, Florida. And even if they did, I shudder to think what the hallways of a Florida high school would look like if it were full of pent-up porn deprived teenagers. You gotta let them get that shit out of their system.