VICE
Visitors to Pornhub’s homepage from Virginia, Arkansas, and Mississippi are now met with a call to contact their representatives, following laws recently passed in those states that would require users to submit government ID before visiting adult sites.
Sites in Mindgeek’s network, including Pornhub, YouPorn, Redtube, Brazzers, Men.com, Sean Cody, Trans Angels and Nutaku, started showing a popup on Wednesday that features a video of adult performer and member of the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee Cherie DeVille explaining the new laws, and an option to click through to “take action” by signing a letter to urge their representatives to reconsider these laws.
“While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for age verification, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk,” DeVille says in the video. She continues:
“The best and most effective solution for protecting children and adults alike is to verify users’ age at the device level and allow or block access to age-restricted materials and websites accordingly. Many devices already offer free and easy-to-use parental control features that can prevent kids from accessing adult content without risking the disclosure of your sensitive data.”
The laws — Virginia SB 1515, Mississippi SB 2346, and Arkansas SB 66 — are copycats of a law passed in Louisiana in January that makes porn sites liable for content that’s “harmful to minors,” and punishes site owners if they don’t doesn’t install age verification technology. For Pornhub viewers in Louisiana, this means submitting to an age check using their driver’s license or other government-issued ID. Privacy experts have called these kinds of laws a “time bomb” for identity theft.
In May, Pornhub blocked anyone visiting the site from a Utah-based IP address from viewing the site, in response to age verification laws in that state. Other sites have implemented verification checks for Utahns, but the steps involved in getting to the porn can be convoluted and cumbersome, as Motherboard tested last month.
Mandating age verification without enforcement means many less regulated sites, such as ones based abroad and without responsive trust and safety staff or procedures, means that illegal or harmful content will be pushed further underground where it’s harder to moderate. Adult industry activists suggest that device-side content filters and parental controls—like the features that come with every iPhone, for example—are a safer solution that doesn’t infringe on consumers’ rights.
