All of the sites in Aylo's network, including Pornhub, YouPorn, and Brazzers, are blocked in Texas, their homepages replaced with a message about the company's rejection of age verification laws.
Pornhub has blocked access to its site in Texas during an ongoing legal battle with the state.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed HB 1181 into law in June, which would require not only verification of age through government ID, but for all adult sites to display in large font a message claiming to be from Texas Health and Human Services about pseudoscientific “dangers” of porn.
Today, Pornhub and all of the sites in Aylo’s network are inaccessible if you’re visiting them in Texas.
there’s a message about the company’s objection to age verification legislation:
“Dear user, as you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website,” the message says. “Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk.”
Texas residents join users in Montana, North Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Utah, all states where age verification laws have passed and Pornhub has blocked access in response. Ohio faces the possibility of being next.
Critics of these laws have highlighted the privacy and security risks of handing over one’s ID to websites in order to view legal entertainment online. Adult industry advocates propose device-level controls, as the blocked sites’ messages mention.
In August, Pornhub and several other porn sites sued to block the Texas age verification law from going into effect, and a judge granted a stay.
But Paxton appealed to the court’s injunction with the Fifth Circuit, and the law went into effect.
@UrLogicFails I feel oddly mixed about PH's response to these bills. I share their opposition to these laws, but their proposed solution effectively requires locked-down device attestation ala the Chrome proposal from a few months ago, which would... also be very bad. I don't want a world where I can't control my own web browser any more than one where I need to dox myself to view porn.
Responsibility for access to adult content needs to fall to the parents of minors, not the companies. I'm so exhausted seeing parents responsibilities being shirked and placed onto other entities/people.
My son, 7, gets so upset with me and my wife because we are so unfair, because we don't let him do/watch/play things his friends do. He's 7, he doesn't need to be playing Call of Duty, he doesn't need to be watching inappropriate content, he doesn't need access to TikTok, and so on. I'm forcing my kid to be alienated from his friends because the other parents are allowing children to access things they should not be accessing.
I'm getting all worked up on my soap box, sorry. That wasn't necessary.
I've heard it referred to as the 'I-Pad generation', kids who are given unfettered access to a mobile device to placate them while Mom & Dad live their lives without all that obnoxious responsibility.
Reminds me of how my parents wouldn't let me watch pokémon after school because they wanted me to do my homework first: so I'd go to my room and take a nap for an hour and tell them I'd done it. Then I was well rested to get up again after they'd gone to sleep and watch adult swim or similar on cartoon network 😂.
I guess some restricted/supervised access to platforms thier friends are on might be a better approach than an all out ban, but idk I don't have kids lol
does this apply only to the internet?
e.g. are you against laws that prevent stores from selling tobacco to minors because it's their parents responsibility that they don't smoke?
Im not saying Texas' solution is a good idea, but also I feel it is at least weird this contradictory situation between the physical world and the internet
I get what you're saying, but it's not a black and white situation. Drugs and porn are not the same category. One will have life-changing effects, the other usually won't.
Plus, parents have the ability to mostly control a child's access to inappropriate content, as well as tobacco shops.
It applies in the real world and the Internet on a case by case basis depending on the inherent dangers of the content.
There are definitely some people that have gotten really fucked up ideas about sex from unexamined consumption of porn. Not that that means it shouldn't be available, but it's not like totally devoid of impact.
Honestly a little acid would probably do better things for your brain than excessive porn.
Your comparison won't work here. One involves someone physically walking into a place to purchase a physical good. The check is as simple as to look at a valid ID and comfirm that the person in front of you matches. Yes, fake IDs are a thing, but they're the exception and pretty hard to be convincing with.
Online this is significantly more difficult to handle without some heavy surveillance. How many times have you confirmed you read something when you didn't, or that you where allowed to access something when you where not? A simple checkbox isn't going to stop anyone from lying. For things like tobacco purchased over the internet there's at least the protection that short of fraud if someone had a credit card it can be validated that they're of age.
The law is performative at best. Even if you got every major US site to comply, new ones out of the reach of TX are all over the globe, not to mention avenues like BitTorrent.
My parents were like that. It came to a head in my teenage years. My mom was super overprotective. Never even got to see a musical I was in at a wrap party with other parents present because they wouldn't even budge on my curfew. I didn't have much of a relationship with them for years and went wild with all the freedom I never had soon after I graduated highschool. Drugs and everything else.
A parent should not be a friend, but be very careful in your approach. How I did not end up in jail or dead I have no idea. I was homeless living out of my car for a while. Edit to add, I graduated HS in the late '90s
As someone else mentioned about VPNs, by the time all this nonsense is over with, California is going to look like they have 200 million people there, if you look at web traffic.
Texas is getting more and more purple every year, and by God if they aren't doing everything possible to piss off anyone to the left of Mussollini. It would be maximum lols if they accidentally caused Texas to go blue for the first time in God knows how long.
Hey, way I see it this is just going to make a more computer literate generation who is comfortable with VPNs and generally bettering their odds that they will not be indoctrinated by, and eventually leave, the shit hole that is the American South.
The American South is a diverse and beautiful coalition of Black, Latino, and working-class white people being held hostage by right-wing extremists and their propaganda.
Fair, but I think it'd be way more fun if we drove away the right-wing nutjobs instead of letting them win. They don't deserve the natural beauty of the South.
Very true. I was talking to someone today about how the “emerald coast” could absolutely hang with some of the greatest tourist destinations in the world. Nothing like those white sand beaches.
