Pornhub Returns? Adult Site Mulls Complying With Age-Verification Laws

Pornhub might return to over a dozen US states and comply with the local age verification laws it’s opposed for years.

A Pornhub attorney mentioned the possibility to Bloomberg, citing last month’s Supreme Court decision that upheld Texas’s age-verification law for adult sites. “Everyone’s reevaluating the new landscape after the Supreme Court opinion,” said Scott Cole of Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg LLP, adding that the site will decide the matter soon. 

For now, though, Pornhub isn’t confirming whether it might comply with age-verification laws in the US. “We are in the process of assessing the decision and are not commenting on any possible changes at this time,” the site tells PCMag. Pornhub issued a similar statement following the Supreme Court’s decision last month.

In the last few years, a number of US states have passed age-verification laws, which require people visiting adult sites to provide an approved form of ID to view porn. Pornhub’s parent company Aylo responded by blocking access in those states; it was up to 17 states at last count. Aylo argues that the laws are a privacy and security risks since the user needs to submit sensitive personal information, usually to a third party, in order to verify their identity and age. 

Instead, Pornhub has been advocating for age-verification systems that work on the user’s device, without needing to transmit the sensitive data over the internet. But currently, Texas’s law requires the porn provider or its third-party partner to perform the age check by scanning the user’s government ID or other transactional data. 

As a result, Pornhub had hoped that the Supreme Court would rule in its favor and invalidate Texas’s law as a violation of free speech. But after losing the case, Aylo is weighing whether to continue blocking access or relent and require age verification.

In 2023, Pornhub tried to comply with Louisiana’s age-verification law, but experienced an 80% drop in traffic, likely because users were simply visiting other unregulated adult sites. Consumers can also bypass age-verification requirements in the affected states by using a VPN that connects to a server in a state without an age-verification law.

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About Michael Kan

Senior Reporter

I’ve been working as a journalist for over 15 years—I got my start as a schools and cities reporter in Kansas City and joined PCMag in 2017.

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