UPDATE: Jan. 16,??? ???? ?????? ???? ??? ????? 2025, 11:22 a.m. EST This piece has been updated to reflect that Tennessee's age-verification law is now in effect.
New Year's Day has come and gone, which means Pornhub is now blocked in 17 U.S. states.
The site blocked itself from almost all of the American South, as 404 Media put it, as a response to age-verification laws. These are state requirements to submit ID to access websites where over a third of the content hosted is explicit. Louisiana started the trend of passing age-verification bills two years ago; others have followed suit. As of Jan. 1, 2025, such laws in Florida and South Carolina have been enacted. Tennessee's law was supposed to be enacted the same day but was blocked — until a couple of weeks later when a panel of appeals judges allowed it to take effect.
SEE ALSO: How to access porn for freeWhile Pornhub is not blocked in Louisiana, it is blocked in these 17 states, a Pornhub representative confirmed to Mashable:
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Alabama
Arkansas
Florida
Idaho
Indiana
Kansas
Kentucky
Mississippi
Montana
Nebraska
North Carolina
Oklahoma
South Carolina
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Virginia
In Louisiana, where users must submit ID to view Pornhub, the site has seen traffic decline by around 80 per cent, Aylo (Pornhub's parent company) told Mashable.
"These people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don't ask users to verify age, that don't follow the law, that don't take user safety seriously, and that often don't even moderate content. In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and children," Aylo stated.
In a statement to Mashable, Aylo continued:
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First, 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.
Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. 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.
Industry experts say age-verification laws don't work because they are easily circumvented with VPNs. They also raise concerns about privacy protection and safety since websites now have to host (even more of) people's personal information. It will be harder to be anonymous online, which experts warn is dangerous to free speech. Adult industry experts Mashable spoke to in an explainer on age-verification laws advocated for device-level filters, as did Aylo in its statement.
SEE ALSO: What the Supreme Court hearing about age verification could mean for youSome in the adult industry worry about what Trump's second presidential term will bring due to the conservative policy outline Project 2025 and its measure to ban porn. One of Project 2025's authors, Russell Vought, was caught on a secret recording stating that age-verification laws are the "back door" to a broader porn ban.
The Free Speech Coalition has also challenged age-verification laws in other states, including Florida, Indiana, and Texas. In the latter, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a Texas district court initially blocked the law, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld it. The Supreme Court will hear the case on Jan. 15 and decide whether Texas's age-verification law violates the First Amendment.