• by Colin Kirkland , March 15, 2024

One of the biggest online porn sites, Pornhub, and its affiliated sites, have become inaccessible in the state of Texas after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Texas can begin enforcing age-verification regulations on porn sites.

Texas joins North Carolina, Virginia, Utah, Arkansas, Montana and Mississippi in the group of states losing access to the site.

In Texas, users who attempt to visit Pornhub and other adult entertainment sites owned by its parent company Aylo are now being met with a message that reads: “Dear users, as you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website.”

“Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas's stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors'," the statement from Pornhub says.

The law -- which requires visitors to pornography sites to prove their age with a copy of a government ID, was signed by Texas governor Greg Abbott last year, but was met by swift action by a group of porn sites including Pornhub when they filed a lawsuit to block the bill.

A judge sided with the porn sites, blocking immediate enforcement because the sites showed that they would “likely be violated if the statute takes effect” and “suffer irreparable harm.”

While the court struck down the law's requirement to “display health warnings about the effects of the consumption of pornography,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the judge's injunction and brought the bill to fruition.

In response, Aylo's vice president of brand community Alexzandra Kekesi called the Texas law “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous” in a statement to Axios.

“Not only will it not actually protect children, it will inevitably reduce content creators' ability to post and distribute legal adult content,” Kekesi said, adding that Aylo is reviewing its legal options and “will continue to appeal through all available judicial recourse to recognize that this law is unconstitutional.”

Advocacy groups have long agreed with Kekesi's perspective that website age checks have the ability to threaten data security and anonymity.

“Since age verification software requires users to hand over extremely sensitive information, it opens the door for the risk of data breaches,” Pornhub wrote on a blog post. “Whether or not your intentions are good, governments have historically struggled to secure this data.”

Despite the restricted access to users in states that have passed the age-verification law, adult actors living in these states can legally continue using Pornhub through their creator accounts, which already require identity verification to upload content to the site.

In the hours after Pornhub announced its decision to restrict access to the website to the entire state of Texas, search interest around virtual private networks (VPNs) in the state quadrupled, according to a CNN analysis of Google Trends data.

VPNs allow internet users to easily bypass the statewide block, suggesting to some that age-verification laws are ineffective as well as unconstitutional.

“Just like millions of people in countries like China, Russia and Turkey evade their government's draconian online censorship regimes using simple tools like VPNs, now we see Texans doing the same to get around their own state government's invasive rules,” said Evan Greer, director of digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, in a statement to CNN.