Pornhub Officially Blocks Users in Another State

Pornhub has blocked access to its website across Kansas in response to a new law that requires anyone seeking to access a website that has content deemed harmful to children on 25 percent or more of its web pages, including pornography, to first have their age verified by uploading a government approved ID.

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The legislation, which was signed into law by Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly after being approved by the Kansas Legislature in April, came into effect on June 27. However Aylo, Pornhub's parent company, told Newsweek that implementing the new law would put users personal data at risk, hence the state-wide block.

Pornhub is now preventing access to its website from 12 states across the Union in response to the passage of new age verification legislation that supporters claim is needed to protect children from adult content. In addition to Kansas the states of Idaho, Indiana and Kentucky were blocked in June while Nebraska is expected to be blocked when a new law takes effect on July 17.

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Texas became the eighth state which Pornhub blocked access to after an age verification law took effect on March 14, which followed similar moves in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah and Virginia according to USA Today.

In a statement provided to Newsweek Aylo said the company was preventing access to Pornhub in Kansas to protect prospective users' data in direct response to the passage of age verification legislation.

It said: "Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults.

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"Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws."

The new Kansas legislation requires age verification for any website which includes material deemed "harmful to minors" that "appears on 25% or more of the webpages viewed." For each violation of this law the website owner would be required to pay a fine of between $500 and $10,000, and could also be sued by the parents or guardians of minors accessing its material for "an amount not less than $50,000."

Newsweek contacted the office of Gov. Laura Kelly for comment on Thursday via telephone and voicemail message outside of usual office hours.

Aylo claimed that when an age verification law first took effect in Louisiana during 2023 traffic to Pornhub fell by around 80 percent before the block was imposed, which they suggested meant many people had "just migrated to darker corners of the internet" making the overall situation more dangerous for children.

The company said: "In Louisiana last year, Pornhub was one of the few sites to comply with the new law. Since then, our traffic in Louisiana dropped approximately 80 percent. 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."

"Instead of adult websites being required to undertake age verification Aylo argued this should take place directly on people's computers or smartphones using "an effective device-based age verification solution."

On March 15, the day after Pornhub blocked access to its website in Texas in response to new age verification legislation, demand for virtual private network (VPN) services allowing users to continue accessing the site by disguising their location increased by 234.8 percent according to an analysis by vpnMentor.