Pornhub restricts Mississippi And Virginia access to their website because of laws in those states that require the service to verify the users’ ages.
The firm claims that it is blocking users as a form of protest against the unfair execution of these new laws. The company further claims that websites that enforce the new rules will lose visitors to “irresponsible platforms” that “don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content.”
According to the firm, traffic to Pornhub decreased by almost 80 percent after it started mandating age verification in the state of Louisiana early this year. After going through that ordeal, the company made the decision to start taking its websites offline rather than implementing an age restriction. In May, it began restricting access to users in the state of Utah because of a similar regulation. According to Techdirt, the blackout is also affecting other websites owned and run by the same person that owns Pornhub, such as RedTube.
Pornhub restricts Mississippi And Virginia as a method of preventing children from gaining access to pornographic material, age verification laws are rapidly being proposed and implemented across the United States, particularly in regions of the country that are more conservative. According to the Free Speech Coalition, a trade group representing the adult entertainment business, similar laws have been passed in the states of Texas, Montana, and Arkansas. Legislation has been submitted in several additional states, but it has not been successful in passing.
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Adult websites are often required to verify the ages of its visitors in a manner that is more stringent than simply having the visitors check a box indicating that they are over the age of 18. This is because the laws mandate this. Checking identification cards issued by the government is one example of this.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken a stance against laws that require users to verify their age and has argued that such laws constitute “surveillance systems” that threaten users’ right to privacy regardless of who uses them. “Once information is shared to verify age, there’s no way for a website visitor to be certain that the data they’re handing over is not going to be retained and used by the website, or further shared or even sold,” the organization said in March. “There’s no way for a website visitor to be certain that the data they’re handing over is not going to be retained and used by the website.”
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