The porn website, which is based in Canada, said it plans to appeal the ruling.
PornHub has blocked its service in Texas as a state law barring websites from showing harmful, obscene material to children came into effect following review by an appeals court.
Sites that host pornographic content now face fines for serving obscene content to minors in Texas after the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals lifted an injunction on the effort by state lawmakers to ensure better protections from such content for youth.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in June last year signed into law a bill requiring companies offering “sexual material harmful to minors” to ensure that their content is only accessible to users over 18, meaning that all platforms must verify the true identity of its users or be liable.
A Montreal-based company, PornHub was established in 2004 and was the most visited porn website, until recently, as well as one of the most visited websites globally.
“PornHub has now disabled its website in Texas,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in an X, formerly Twitter, post on Thursday, citing the website’s response to the law coming into effect.
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“We recently secured a major victory against PornHub and other sites that sought to block this law from taking effect. In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children. If they don’t want to comply, good riddance.”
In a statement that appeared on PornHub’s website for users in Texas, the company responded to the court’s decision, saying “[W]e have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.”
It argued that the law didn’t offer minors a “real solution,” because people can arguably go to other less compliant and less safe websites to access similar content.
It called the bill “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous” because the government has no means to “enforce at scale,” which gives all pornographic platforms “the choice to comply or not, leaving thousands of platforms open and accessible.”
“As we’ve seen in other states, such bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the thousands of websites, with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply. Very few sites are able to compare to the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place,” the top-traffic porn site argued. “To protect minors and user privacy, any legislation must be enforced against all platforms offering adult content.”
The company said it could operate and be in compliance if the law allowed the use of device-based age verification solutions, which are not currently recognized by the legislation.
The law currently requires platforms to ensure that a user’s age is verified with either a government-issued ID or through third-party verification services that can’t keep personal identifying information, which PornHub described as the “least effective and yet also most restrictive” provisions for age verification.
First Amendment Challenge
The law had been scheduled to go into effect last September. But PornHub’s Canada-based parent company, Aylo (formerly MindGeek), sued Mr. Paxton in a first amendment challenge, attempting to block the proposed requirements for age verification and displaying health warnings on its pages.
The state ordered that a warning, to be attributed to the Texas Health and Human Services, had to be visible, saying that pornography is “proven to harm human brain development,” “is associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, impaired brain development, and other emotional and mental illnesses,” and may increase the “demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography.”
Appeal Expected
PornHub has said it will now appeal the decision, with supportive lawyers citing a more recent Supreme Court ruling, Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union 1997, which found that the 1996 Communications Decency Act preventing minors from accessing obscene materials were unconstitutional restrictions on free speech as they could impede the freedom of adults wanting to share or access such obscene content.
In its view, the bill shows how the adult entertainment industry has always been “the canary in the coal mine of free speech.”
There has been increasing scrutiny of sites like PornHub, most notably by individuals who have been victims of sexual exploitation. Many came forward to accuse Pornhub of profiting from videos created by their sexual abuse without their consent.
The report added that some videos garnered millions of views before being removed.
“Some survivors stated that even if their content was removed from PornHub, it was re‑uploaded shortly afterward,” it said.
Aylo previously failed in attempts to challenge similar laws that have been passed in at least five other states—Arkansas, Mississippi, Virginia, Louisiana, and Utah.
Andrew Chen, Naveen Athrappully, and Katabella Roberts contributed to this article.
Original News Source Link – Epoch Times
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