Leaf&Core

Pornhub Leaves Texas: What You Can Do

Danielle from Leaf and Core
Reading Time: 5 minutes.

Screenshot of text on Pornhub's website for Texan users. Text reads: " 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. 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. Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving hundreds of thousands of websites open and accessible. As we've seen in other states, such bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the hundreds of thousands of websites with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply. Very few sites are able to compare to the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place. To protect minors and user privacy, any legislation must be enforced against all platforms offering adult content. Unfortunately, the Texas law for age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Not only will it not actually protect children, but it will also inevitably reduce content creators’ ability to post and distribute legal adult content and directly impact their ability to share the artistic messages they want to convey with it. The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users’ age on their device and to either deny or allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification. We call on all adult sites to comply with the law. Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users. We encourage you to: Learn more about device-based age verification* solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy. Contact your representatives and demand device-based verification solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy. *Device-Based Age Verification refers to any approach to age verification where the personal information that is used to verify the user’s age is either shared in-person at an authorized retailer, inputted locally into the user’s device, or stored on a network controlled by the device manufacturer or the supplier of the device’s operating system. Whether through pre-installed content blocking and filtering software, the disabling of web-browsing permissions, or other means, the user will then be prevented from accessing age-restricted content over the internet unless they are age-verified. To come to fruition, such an approach requires the cooperation of manufacturers and operating-system providers."You’re not going to hear me defend Pornhub. The website knowingly—or should have known—that they were hosting porn created by sex traffickers. Women came forward, telling Pornhub that GirlsDoPorn forced them to produce the videos Pornhub was hosting on their website, asking them to remove the videos they were forced to make. Pornhub didn’t do a damn thing. When GirlsDoPorn finally went down, with the producer getting a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, the women who Pornhub ignored went for the company, who agreed to a $1.8 million settlement for the damage they did to those women.

But that’s not why Pornhub had to remove itself from Texas. No, Texas—as we know—does not care one iota about women. What Texas does care about is pretending they care about “the children.” Not children of poverty, or trans children (or any other LGBTQ children), or immigrant children. No, not those children, the make-believe magical fantasy children they care so much about. The “perfect” children who are having their lives upended because The Internet is for Porn (language warning if you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade).

Texas says porn websites will now need age-verification systems that will require uploading a personal ID. Asking citizens to send their personal identifiable information (PII) to a third party they may not trust, and likely doesn’t have the security to protect such information, is ignorant. It opens your citizens to data leaks and breaches of an incredibly intimate variety. Porn websites would have to suddenly jump to the standards matching those of government institutions to protect your data. They aren’t going to do that. Rather than leak your data, most are withdrawing from states that push such unsafe measures.

Pornhub Pulls Out

This week, Pornhub, and the other porn websites under Aylo, including Redtube, Brazzers, and YouPorn, all blocked users in Texas and added the text from the image at the top of this story. The reasoning is an age verification law. Texas, like a few other U.S. states, has stipulated that porn websites collect age verification information by verifying IDs of those accessing pornographic websites.

“In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children. If they don’t want to comply, good riddance.”

– Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Twitter

Texas’ law, like all of the others, does not handle this properly. They require porn websites to do image verification on licenses. The process they’d have to do for this would be an enormous violation of people’s privacy. On top of that, it would include placing this PII in the hands of a company that is not prepared to handle that information. This would make them easy hacking targets. Considering these accounts—and watch histories—could then be attached to a real identity, it would become prime material for blackmail. The end result is a policy that looks like it wants to help children, while putting them and other citizens in danger.

Wait, I think that’s actually the Texas state motto!

Private Browsing

There’s a way to safely do this, and no state has implemented it properly, instead putting the difficult ask of securing private information on porn companies. First, the only verification for these websites needs to be done by a state-controlled facility. They would create a verification hash that would tell a website only your verified age. From there, you’d input that hash in to a website like Pornhub while signing up for an account. They would send the hash to the state agency, which would simply tell Pornhub if the user was over 18. No one keeps logs of these transactions. From there, the user is verified, and as long as they have their account, Pornhub only knows they’re 18 or older, and the state doesn’t know why you requested an age verification token or where you used it. It’s a separation of data that protects privacy and ensures no one under 18 can sign up for a service. Privacy and age verification: everyone wins!

This method would prevent children from using porn websites, but it would carry a cost for states. Many already have online identity verification services, so the technology would not take long to make. It’s also an incredibly simple system. But it would still require investment. These politicians don’t actually want to help children (if they did, they’d stop persecuting them). They just want to look like they’re tough. They want the benefits of looking like they’re helping children, without actually doing anything. The law will be delayed in courts, likely fall to a first amendment complaint eventually, and lying politicians can claim they tried their best, it was those “darn liberals” (also known as: the constitution) who got in the way.

Meanwhile, VPN searches have spiked in Texas. People need a VPN to protect their privacy as well as evade censorship. Usually the latter is only necessary in countries with an extreme authoritarian government, but who would ever describe Texas like that?

“Just like millions of people in countries like China, Russia and Turkey evade their government’s draconian online censorship regimes using simple tools like VPNs, now we see Texans doing the same to get around their own state government’s invasive rules.”

– Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future

Pornhub’s Non-solution Proposition

Pornhub has a different solution, and it’s almost as ridiculous as the suggestions brought forth by Texas and other conservative-ran states. They want a “device-based” verification system. This would entail registering your device as your own and verifying it when you buy it. Then, that could track your age on any website. Of course, that means everyone can track your age and any other personal data that becomes part of that verification system. Advertisers are going to love that. On top of that, it only works for single-user devices, such as your phone. It won’t work as well for multi-user devices, like tablets and computers. It also may not work for devices you already own. Pornhub also suggests using your network to verify this, which would mean all of your traffic contains personal data.

There’s no precedence for this anywhere. Nowhere is doing anything like this. That means such a system would require government, manufacturer, and retailer support, all at the same time. That would take years to implement and roll out, even if they agreed on everything. Basically? Only a fool would think it’s a real solution, and Pornhub’s likely hoping you don’t think about it too much.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say they’re suggesting this device-based solution to ensure that nothing ever gets done. I’d assume that they know this process would never work, and even if everyone agreed, they’d have years to fight it or influence the policy. If I didn’t know better, I’d assume their real goal is to ensure no age verification ever goes into place because much of their market are children under 18 who, upon going through puberty, have a heightened interest in Pornhub’s services. I’d even say they want to profit from underage users.

You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d say that.

Perhaps they just didn’t think of the privacy-protecting hashed solution I suggested. Sure, it’s simple, and wouldn’t take much effort to implement, but maybe they just didn’t think to suggest it. Surely they would suggest an easy solution that protects privacy and blocks users under 18 years old.

The Real Best Solution

I don’t want kids getting access to this material. The truth is, porn as it is now is made almost exclusively for the male gaze, sets unrealistic expectations, and could be harmful for children who can’t get that context. It could shape their views on women and sex for years. But no tech-based solution is going to work right. They will have their flaws. The best thing to do is to just not make these kinds of laws and rely on parents to watch what their kids do online and accurately address their children’s questions and concerns in an open and accepting, non-judgemental environment. Meanwhile, schools need to provide meaningful, detailed, and age-appropriate sex education to students that teaches them relevant information about sex, gender, and relationships.

Of course, that’s the very suggestion of sexual health professionals and the very thing Texas wants to ban. It’s almost as though no one cares if kids are confused about sex. Some people profit from it, others win votes based on fake support for kids. It seems neither side has children’s best interests at heart.

Restoring Access to Websites

As for how you get past something like this? Just use a VPN, like anyone in China, Turkey, Russia, or another authoritarian nation. You may want to check out either Proton VPN or Mozilla VPN. Both are by companies that seek to protect consumer privacy and can allow you to bypass censorship from draconian, authoritarian countries.

Like the United States.

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