Pornhub blocks North Carolina and Montana as porn regulation spreads
Adult site owner Aylo protests age verification laws in two more states.
How is it these laws can get passed but our legislatures can’t do anything that’s actually important for society? 
It's so much worse than that. North Carolina House Bill 8 was created a year ago to add Computer Science to middle school and high school curriculums. Throughout it's 3 edits over the year, all 10 pages of the bill were about teaching kids computer science. Then, ONE WEEK before the bill was passed, a paragraph on the last page was added including the text requiring age verification for adult websites. https://www.ncleg.gov/BillLookup/2023/H8
At that point it was too late, and anyone against the bill would be called out for being against teaching kids computer science. The cowards writing these bills know that they would be shot down immediately if they were public about what they were doing, so they tack it on to a children's education bill and hope no one notices until it's too late.
Fucking Amy Galey. I hate that I have to be I around her and pretend that she’s the best thing since sliced bread. I wish people got to hear more about her talking at length about how great her family treated their slaves and less about her GOP silly season power moves.
the politicians were the naughty ones all along
I've always been confused about how they can legally be like "here's a hundred page bill about this great thing, but buried at the end is this horrible thing we went to push though but no one will see it".
Because they don't actually give a shit about society.
The legislators passing these laws are interested only in hurting people, getting bribes, and getting reelected so they can continue. Doing something important for society doesn't even factor into their decision making.
If you start fixing things, you'll have nothing to campaign on.
Republicans doing a real good job giving a peek into what voting Red will do for them this year
The children are saved and wont see porn ever /s
Voting red, not voting, or voting third party.
Sad part is people will still vote for them in droves
Christian taliban
Yeah bruh, I try to avoid porn. Personal decision. PERSONAL. Stay the fuck out of everyone’s goddamn lives. Fucking fascist republican swine.
its not facist to try to stop kids from accessing porn
But I bet you think it is fascist to pass laws which stop kids from getting shot at school?
Idiot
It is, though
It's not stopping anybody. If you are a horny enough 13 year old you'll find it on any platform. Speaking from experience YouTube, Instagram, Reddit (obviously lemmy as well) and in short the rest of them can be pretty easily used to access porn. It's not allowed on for example YouTube but it's still there or it manages to be technically allowed through being "educational content". Obviously we aren't talking about like Brazzers or whatever being directly uploaded but there's definitely naked people doing proactive things.
Once again, a vice is blamed for its own sake, “for the children”, instead of the thing people are running from, or the hole they are filling. It’s the Right’s version of virtue signaling.
Porn addiction is just an addiction, and removing porn will not remove addiction in people. Thirst can’t be cured by drying up the well. Saying nothing about the constitutionality of this, restricting potentially addictive content through nanny state ID systems is worthless… check history. South Korea plan was dropped, UK plans for the same thing were dropped. It's not only ineffective, as kids will always find a way through the cracks, but it also extremely difficult to implement and erodes the bedrock of privacy. We're not solving addiction, we're just building a surveillance state under the guise of protection. Solutions are in addressing the root causes of addiction and fostering resilience, not in this game of whack-a-mole that sacrifices our privacy.
I get wanting to keep porn away from children, but on the flipside I don't trust governments with a history of criminalizing homosexuality with my porn history. Looking up, it seems that these states even kept laws against sodomy in their books.
I had to look this up, and this is so nuts, but there are currently 12 states that stilll have sodomy laws as of late 2023: Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas.
I think a lot of people might not realize that sodomy is often legally defined as anything that is not PIV intercourse. So most foreplay and obviously any sex practiced by homosexual couples. I absolutely don't get why there isn't a stronger push to get rid of this and other dumb laws against offenses that are widely committed and/or are hard to enforce.
Well I guess this one kind of makes sense in this current state of political turmoil.
Exactly, additionally I don’t trust governments that consistently fail to understand artistic merit in sexually graphic art and sought to ban it to maintain free expression.
I see you Mr dildo haver.
or the hole they are filling.
Heh
You gotta pay the troll toll, if you wanna get into that boy's hole!
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
--Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
This isn't even about porn addiction, it's definitely a "think of the children!" scenario by the right-wing pearl clutchers. Meanwhile, there's tons of horrible shit on the Internet freely available that they don't seem to care about, along with nudity in movies. Also I love how that article claims that "residents will have to go to the deep dark corners of the internet to get their porn once pornhub is blocked" as if hundreds of other porn sites not owned by that company don't exist 🤣 The Internet and tech improvements are literally driven by porn consumption. IDK what the number is now, but like 5-10 years ago it was "40% of all internet traffic is porn related".
We’re not solving addiction, we’re just building a surveillance state under the guise of protection.
That's a feature of all of these types of schemes, not a bug.
It's literally virtue signalling.
Hey I agree with you but might want to use a different metaphor in the future. Drying the well won't stop thirst, but neither will anything else, except well, death I guess.
Classic big government nanny state move. That political party which claims to be against this sort of overreach must be upset over it, right?
Do they even claim that anymore? I can't remember the last time I've heard a conservative talk about small government in any way that even comes close to amounting to an actual philosophy.
The only time I hear something from the GOP is when they are "owning the libs" or licking trumps asshole. What the fuck do people think government is suppose to be doing? Neither of those things are remotely important.
VPN companies don't need much advertising these days. The customers will come by themselves!
Was about to say, did politicians now invest in VPN providers?
Plus, the hypocrisy of it all, since most scandals involving infidelity, abuse and other stuff comes from their side of the aisle (not that the other side is composed of saints, but still).
Pretty soon VPN's will be illegal too.
Imagine linking your porn watching to your government ID? It WILL leak, and you'll be embarrassed. 😳
More than that, even in non extremist communities, your social life will be destroyed.
It's real generous of these states to boost business for VPN companies like this
I think most people, by far, don't know how to use (or want to pay for) a VPN. What they'll do is use one of the other porn sites. There are probably dozens! And it will push sites to operate outside of US and ignore our dumb state laws.
At this point vpns are popular enough and have enough ads about them that most people will be able to look up 'free vpn' on the app store and download the first one that comes up. They're not difficult to use at all
Yeah how are they going to block sites outside of the US?
it's a Porn Tax
In Virginia, they are required to gather personal information and that’s weird. So its just not available here. But when you think of it, porn hub went to great lengths to minimize the problems with the industry. And these sort of regulations are doing the same thing that prohibition did. Push normal citizens into interacting with seedy elements, dangerous situations, and exploitation.
Yup. Most regulations of sex workers end up only hurting sex workers. They accomplish little else. That's arguably the end goal rather than a side effect.
"CP is bad!"
sends everyone to the dark web for their porn
Pornhub and its related companies aren't the only "normal" porn sites out there, there are thousands of sites not owned by the parent company. These are just the big names everyone knows. Blocking access to porn on a statewide basis is only really possible at the ISP level, and of course those are private companies not owned by the state (in most cases). Even then, a cheap VPN would be able to get around that.
It's akin to standing next to someone and telling them not to breathe your air.
I am sure that a VPN can obfuscate my location. But its a hassle that most people will not do. And you must not be in Virginia, because you would know that the ISP did not need to get involved. Use your vpn and spoof as in VA. You will see the companies comply with the order to remain legal. The reputable ones have a vested interest to stay legal, and can be reached via legal means. The ones that pedal revenge porn and other exploitation? Not so much. The amount of sites that are not reachable is very large, when your search would begin at the 4th page of a search engine query for porn, you are no longer in safe waters
So it's* just not available here.
It's ridiculous that elected officials can be so unbelievably fucking stupid.
What a fucking waste of tax dollars
North Carolina and Montana just flipped some folks from red to blue "for reasons..."
Those are now blue balls.
I almost want that on flags and tee-shirts.
At this point I'm not convinced people will abandon the Republicans. Especially if they get to vote for Trump. They'll just assume Trump will fix it by taking PornHub to court cause this is all PornHubs fault.
Well I guess it's back to the garbage bag of porn mags in the woods for North Carolina and Montana kids.
Seriously tho, who is this law stopping? When I was a kid I would traverse the entire city if it meant there was a chance I'd see a boob.
If I had to start torrenting porn I would probably develop a serious habit from having to curate my own library. I would also gain full access to videos I normally wouldn't bother with making everything even more involved.
The beauty of pornhub is you load it up, do some minor browsing, settle on something and forget all about it. Having to maintain a personal library would consume more of your time and you would develop even more intense prefrences.
Nah, curating is pretty easy! https://github.com/stashapp/stash
I didn't say it was difficult
6.8k stars for what looks like the jellyfin of porn.
Why is everyone acting like PornHub and the companies owned by the parent company are the only porn sites in existence? Literally just search for "porn sites" and you're done, or if you're looking for a specific model whose videos you found there just search for their name.
You bring up an interesting point. My theory is that this is no more than a hopeless election-year shenanigan.
THE WAR ON PORN ^sponsored ^by ^the ^war ^on ^drugs
I think it's fine that they are making it a bit harder for kids. Overexposure to this can cause issues in mental health and the brain. So yeha, this won't stop anybody for accessing porn if they really want it but it will prevent overexposure.
I mean I honestly think if they really wanted to "protect the children" they'd actually make COPPA enforcement a lot more strict (and also add in under 18 limitations), though I suspect that would be significantly harder.
There are a lot of places where you can get exposure to "bad" stuff as a child that are arguably more dangerous long term.
It won't though. See the war on drugs.
best of all, this strategy isn't going to decrease viewership, probably increase it. it's also going to increase the usage of vpn's.
VPNs will be their next target. This isn't an accident. They are setting up the framework for China like internet censorship laws, but they are going to take this way fucking farther than China ever has. They are building a system for state laws to establish interstate autocracy on the foundation of abortion and trans panic.
So it's bodily autonomy, identity, sexuality, privacy that's on the chopping block...
Seems like democracy is going to be pretty hollow without at least a little free expression.
It's likely just going to drive it off to the less centralized websites that won't block anyway because they are just so used to ignoring the requests. The only reason PornHub has to pay heed is because they try to go at it the "legal" route.
Hell, there's a shitload of porn on Reddit and Lemmy that isn't geofenced or age restricted.
This is just a silly waste of resources.
The most effective regulation here is from payment handlers.
Not sure what eventually became of this, but MasterCard shitcanned PornHub a few years ago. See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52543508
I also see a statement from 2022 reinforcing that decision. https://www.mastercard.com/news/press/2022/august/mastercard-statement-reinforcing-adult-content-standards/
I guess even that's not very effective since PornHub is obviously still in business. I wonder what their numbers looked like before and after.
Pornography access seems very close to people's heart in here but the claim "it won't decrease viewership, probably increase it" has zero chance of being true.
However insignificant it might be, any amount of faff will lower participation and there isn't a single person in the world thinking "I don't watch pornography or allow my children to watch pornography but now the gubbermint is involved we're going to do nothing else but watch smut".
There are so many shit takes in this thread that I have to assume they're from children upset about their pornography being cut off.
Maybe participation would be lowered, just not to the extent "they" hoped for. I have personal experience with this - we had some major social media sites blocked, and for a lot of people that was a final push to learn to avoid censorship, even if not in the best way (by sketchy free VPNs). So if you take away something very important, it might turn a person from someone who didn't go to blocked sites into someone who isn't bothered by blocking.
Its not about blocking it, its about making it criminal so they can eventually loop in certain people who partake in it.
I think one legislator even said so brazenly this is all about limiting access to LGBT people.
Lol I was just in Utah and on a home wifi there, pornhub was blocked (100% blocked, like you cannot access the site).
But if I switched to data, it was not blocked
Lol -- how's that working out for ya, Utah??
Lol -- how's that working out for ya, Utah??
Kinda perfectly. The lawmakers don't want to block porn; they want their constituents to think they are effective. The people that don't go to pornhub hear it's blocked (well that's nice) and the ones that go, find a work around (some people like it being hard). They hope the work around is innocuous enough to be forgotten by election day.
I hope they miscalculated. I don't see how blocking porn and weed is a winning strategy. I don't understand this country. Life could be fun. We have all the ingredients.
I don’t see how blocking porn and weed is a winning strategy. I don’t understand this country. Life could be fun. We have all the ingredients.
A not insignificant portion of our fellow citizens are looking at their own misery and deciding that the source of that misery are things you are doing in the privacy of your own home or are or not doing that you "should". This is much easier that actual self reflection and putting in the work to sort out what portion of that misery is self inflicted (and correctable with personal behavior changes!) or a systemic as a result of public policy which affects all of us to make changes in how our society treats one another.
We should wave banners describing how actually ineffective they are with instructions to get around this BS!
I don't see how blocking porn and weed is a winning strategy.
Then you're giving the people involved far more benefit of the doubt than they deserve. They're far-right extremists. It's not hollow rhetoric or exaggeration, they're here and they're passing laws.
If you disregard the excuses that come out of their mouths, this is perfectly aligned with the far-right ideology that has infested the Republican party.
Groups like the Proud Boys, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan and incessant fuckwits like Jordan Peterson all openly promote giving up jerking off and routinely make pseudoscientific claims about it increasing your testosterone, therefore making you more of a man.
They're also working hard to broaden the term "pornography" to include anything that acknowledges any sexuality other than "straight" and any form of gender expression that doesn't clearly broadcast what genitals you have. This allows them to attack teachers and authors that dare say anything that isn't right wing.
Weed is essentially the same story as it's always been. It was made illegal so police could target "undesirables" like black people, hippies, jazz musicians and women who wanted to be more than a source of hot meals and warm holes for a middle class husband.
Literally the only thing they changed was updating the left-wing stereotypes.
Hop off the wifi for banking and wanking.
Probably the IP not being assigned to the blocked geo location.
In only a couple of years girls aren't allowed to go to school anymore.
They already do home-schooling. A lot.
Here's one fine example: https://biblicalfembootcamp.com/2020/08/05/christians-should-homeschool/
Yikes! What a cringefest.
I hope those hosts provide a nice greeting page explaining which politicians are guilty of this, and how sneaky their underhand rider was abusing the legal system.
In other news: Reports of malware on home users' PCs spike in North Carolina and Montana.
"Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.[20]" — "A Promise to America", Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 5, Project 2025
How about fuck that guy?
I agree, but its not something to laugh off. If Roe v wade being canned taught us anything, it is that conservatives are always planning something worse than what they are telling people.
Right fucking here, they are telling people that they are going to criminalize pornography, full stop. That they are going to arrest and jail people even remotely involved in the porn industry, full stop. Imagine what they actually want to do.
Is their literally anything that I, a transgender woman, am not a direct cause or symptom of in those deranged and hateful people's minds?
Also, conservatives talking about misogny is sickeningly ironic.
I'd heard of project 2025, but had not read anything about it yet. Terrifying.
Meanwhile, the other sites are promoting trans anal piss porn, so that’s what I’m into now I guess, since that’s the only option.
Don't worry, yiff (furry porn) always makes it past safe search and content blockers, so you will have at least one other category. I'm sure that blocking mundane porn won't backfire at all :)
Yep, it’s only trans anal piss porn over here, no idea which bathroom to use and all the cities are on fire. Best stay in the red states until we give the all clear!
From my cold, dead, well-lubricated hands! Suddenly all this porn hoarding I’ve been doing all these years doesn’t seem so crazy after all. Well, maybe a little.
How many petabytes?
Hopefully no pedobytes.
So what are they gonna do? Figure out how to bill companies all over the world for not knowing their local bullshit and accommodating it? Fucking clowns.
North Carolina and Montana, why you so dumb?
As a NC resident, especially in IT, this is just dumb. Even the built-in VPN in Opera bypasses it. Any reasonably smart kid will figure it out. This is just theater.
You can add Arkansas to that comment
Nothing what my VPN can't handle..
BUT MAH FREEDOMS!!!
At least the yokels stuck it to the libs before they had all their extra-depraved porn taken away.
Hey! That porn's sneaking over the border and stealing their jobs!
Party of small gubermnt
I suspect that long term, if more states keep end up passing laws about this, it might drive people away from dedicated sites for this content and towards pages made for it on social media type platforms instead. These laws tend to stipulate that they apply only when a certain percentage of a website is adult content (for obvious reasons I imagine, if just one instance was enough to apply then they'd apply to basically any platform with user generated content, since people are inevitably going to try to post it), which leaves the very obvious work around of just mixing it into a site that also contains mostly other types of content.
Or stuff hosted outside the US.
Aylo (PornHub) is already a Canadian company. For a streaming site, though, you generally need servers hosted worldwide combined with a CDN with even more regional datacenters. Performance would take a noticeable dip.
Freedom!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/jfkxtqwAEGE?si=zLMhpUj6C_sRRH9N
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Laws and rules such as these really puts a light on how local politicians think technology works vs how it actually works.
I loved when I saw that Montanan was passing a law that banned TikTok. They didn't say how they were proposing on doing this since they don't own the cell providers, ISPs, Google or Apple, just "We're banning TikTok! We'll show those damn Commies!"
I give this 6 months before the list of visitors is released...
e621 is gone as well, so I bought a month of ProtonVPN, here's hoping that'll be enough.
This is the first time I've seen Pornhub block a place as opposed to the place blocking PH 😂🤣😂🤣
Yeah, you'd think it wasn't their job yo. That's on the legislators. Pornhub shouldn't have to adapt who can connect to them just because their website isn't built for Utah. 🤣
This is blatantly unconstitutional.
I’m curious about why. The one law that had been overturned so far was on the basis of government compelled speech, because in addition to age verification, the law required porn sites to have a paragraph talking about how porn makes baby Jesus cry. I’m not so sure ID requirements by themselves are going to have the same outcome.
Right to Privacy is the first thing to come to mind. It's worse in that this is not the federal or state government collecting data, it's a private enterprise. After that, there are frankly glaring Freedom of Speech infringements here, as the definition of obscene content is hand-waved. You can talk academically about making crystal meth on YouTube, but somehow specific content is restricted, not due to the protection of civilians, but due to individual tastes.
None of this falls under the purview of the government of the United States. I'm betting it's a rather damaging election year shenanigan.
Vpns and proxies to the rescue!
No. Stop your government right there, while you still can.
Or else you'll have the same shit we have here in Russia.
This feels like a co-ordinated attack on LGBT porn more than anything.
What gives you that idea? Religious conservatives dislike all porn (publicly, we all know most of them watch it privately), even the straight kind.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
404Media reported that residents in both North Carolina and Montana visiting Pornhub and other Aylo-owned sites like Redtube or Brazzers are now greeted by a video of performer Cherie DeVille, and a handful of paragraphs, telling them their states are now blocked.
Aylo began blocking access in the states last week, according to reporting from multiple outlets including The Fayetteville Observer and KRTV in Great Falls, Montana.
Despite the company’s safety claims, Aylo was recently fined $1.8 million by the federal government for allegedly willfully hosting videos of sex trafficking victims.
Louisiana, Utah, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Virginia have passed similar laws, prompting Pornhub to block access in those states as well.
Meanwhile, Texas passed its own identification law, currently under appeal in the Fifth Circuit, that also requires adult film sites to show unsubstantiated warnings about the health risks of watching porn.
Correction January 2nd, 2024, 5:23PM ET: A previous version of this article implied Pornhub currently used device identifiers for age verification; we’ve updated to reflect this has not been confirmed.
The original article contains 464 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I typically hate this sort of low effort comment, but I feel like the best response is: lol.
Good. Don't serve that irrational bullshit.
Conservative ideology is absolutely bonkers. Ban, ban, ban, ban. We'd still be living in mud huts if they had their way.
Pornhub is a horrible website profiting from rape and sexual traffic. Not the only one, but probably the biggest one. I wish the worst to this website and its owners.
Republicans missing what is the main problem again.
I see you fell for the religious puritan group's propaganda hit piece too
Just know that they don't give two flying fucks about sexual violence, that's just the mask they wear while they lobby to ban porn country-wide since advocating for that directly is no longer a winning position
You're delusional. Seek help.
O-rlly?
If there is any porn site out there that works hard to curb abuse, it's pornhub. They do this to the point that the site got shit to use, and users will likely walk away.
Can they be 100% correct? No they can't, nobody can. Anyone pretending that's possible is lying. Source: computer expert whose been in IT for over 30 years, currently working as CTO. You can't filter and moderate perfectly, but pornhub does a ducking good job at moderating fucking.
Just search for "Porn Hub sex traffic" and you will see many news articles claiming the opposite of what you are saying.
There is a clear distinction between fighting against this issue and not being 100% correct, and this: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/pornhub-s-parent-company-admits-it-profited-from-sex-trafficking/ar-AA1lUJaK
Porn addicted people quick to down vote me. Feel invited to down vote me, it exposes your denial. Shame votes are anonymous.
Lmao, must be nice up on thar high horse of yours. Biased belief in something that fits a preconceived belief is the cowards way out. Keep up that self-righteousness so people know to avoid you, coward.
I am being a pendant here but I feel I should share for those who value privacy:
Due to the way federation works, votes are not anonymous. Instance admins can view who votes. Since anyone can create their own instance, you should be aware that your votes are not anonymous, only difficult to view.
As someone who has struggled with addiction to lust and pornography from a very young age, I'm disappointed by some of the reactions I'm seeing here.
These laws have nothing to do with mental health and social responsibility, and everything to do with weaponizing sexuality as a means to control a population.
If, instead of demonizing and hiding porn from the light of day, we promoted healthier approaches and open ideas you'd probably have better access to dealing with your addictions.
Pornhub isn't the cause of your problems, it's just a convenient scape goat to blame for the result of puritanical bullying.
13 downvotes, zero replies. Interesting.
I do not care. I've seen and felt personally the effects of Pornography, and I will never back down against it.
To be clear, I do not believe the government should be allowed to censor media, or that the whatever American political party is behind a law.
All I know is that as long as children have access to pornography, I will fight to my dying breath against it.
Why? Simple. I do not want another human being to experience what I have.
So, downvote me all you like.
I wish everyone a pleasant day.
When someone has peanut allergy it's not a reason to ban peanuts.
