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Received as another win in the Sunshine State, the world’s most trafficked site for adult content’s response to a law designed to protect minors allegedly revealed “their real target audience.”

As with fights to ensure schools were keeping curriculum age-appropriate for Florida students, legislative efforts to preserve innocence took aim at the accessibility of pornographic content on the Internet. With HB 3 set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2025, in part requiring age verification for sites with pornographic material, the parent company of Pornhub announced, once again, they would rather ban all users.

“Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide, including Florida, have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous,” argued Aylo in an email reported by Florida Politics.

“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 company contended, suggesting a similar effort in Louisiana had led to an 80% decline in traffic on their site, but not of pornography overall.

“In practice,” the company said, “the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and children.”

Instead of complying with the law, a message for Floridians attempting to access the site asks them “Did you know that your government wants you to give your driver’s license before you can access PORNHUB?”

“As crazy as that sounds, it’s true,” Pornhub continued, promoting an alternative route that would require legislators to require age verification for devices instead.

“To be clear, 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,” Aylo suggested in the email.

Reacting to news that Pornhub would rather digitally take their ball and go home instead of cooperating with Florida law, state Rep. Chase Tramont (R) who spearheaded the effort for HB 3 said in a statement to Florida Politics, “The fact that they’ve chosen to shut down instead of complying to ensure that children aren’t accessing their site tells us exactly who their real target audience is.”

Likewise, state Rep. Fiona McFarland (R), daughter of former White House Deputy National Security Advisor KT McFarland, suggested, “If a company can’t abide by Florida laws, then they can’t do business here.”

The decision to block Floridians from their site made the Sunshine State the 13th to lose access to the pornographic website following Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.

Earlier in 2024, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton after a lower court agreed to uphold the Lone Star State’s age verification law that included a $10,000 fine per violation. Oral arguments in that case are scheduled to be held on Jan. 15, 2025.

Kevin Haggerty
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