Pornhub has disabled its site in Texas to object to a state law that requires the company to verify the age of users to prevent minors from accessing the site.
Texas residents who visit the site are met with a message from the company that criticizes the state’s elected officials who are requiring them to track the age of users.
The company said the newly passed law impinges on “the rights of adults to access protected speech” and fails to pass strict scrutiny by “employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.”
What kind of “small government” legislates morality?
They want to ban it nationwide
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
-A Promise to America", Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 5, Project 2025
as psychologically destructive as any crime.
…what? Just because something is a crime doesn’t make it “psychologically destructive.”
Remember, one of the defining traits of right-wing political movements is the redefining of words. When a Conservative says “small government” what they really mean is “a government that can enforce our morals and values, but is incapable of enforcing rights, regulations, or equality.”
I sure hope all porn sites follow Porn Hub’s lead. Just block Texas from viewing porn. Then I hope all broadband and cable TV operators follow suit as well, can’t have transexual cock on VOD or PPV. Let’s see how quickly Texas falls back in line. It won’t happen, but I can dream.
Yep, I do agree with that part of the statement. The only porn they’ll have access to will be completely unregulated and a haven for revenge porn and CP.
Pornhub themselves weren’t amazing on that front to begin with, but they made more of an effort than most to try and clean that up due to regulatory pressures.
The kind of sites who won’t bother complying with Texas’ age verification law because they already hosted all kinds of illegal shit are just going to explode in popularity further entrenching a depraved and violent subset of sexual abusers.
Anyway, I’m glad to see this sentiment echoed on Lemmy. Everywhere else it feels like people are thoughtlessly praising Pornhub and thinking this is a “big win.”
Yes. I don’t explicitly like that you have to be verified to post content but it’s very nice to have the default porn site to be much better protected.
I do wonder how this kind of thing will mesh with sites that arent for porn but do allow posting of it. Like reddit or for that manner any lemmy instance federated with one of the instances with nsfw subs
I’m in North Carolina and the porn has been blocked since New Year’s. The hentai websites are the only ones I have access to. (E621 is also blocked).
It’s not a NC thing, so I have to ask:
Are you at work or some common access?
Do you have a shared access at home, like parent/roommates/apartment/school?
Some other parental type control in force?
ISPs don’t care what you look at, they only get involved with copyright stuff because someone is hassling them to do something about it. Someone has filters at the local point to keep you from getting to places. VPN could help get past, depending on how the filters work. Interestingly I’ve gotten out with a VPN before when my ISP had my direct connection in suspension.
It’s not blocked at layer 4 or anything. The website simply geolocates you and denies application access for users geolocated to NC. VPN gets around it fine.
The bigger issue is that plenty of other sites still allow access… So it’s effectively punishing the rule followers.
How Dare They Block E621! Now I have to become an armchair warrior and get mad over something that doesn’t affect me in the slightest because I still have access! All while doing nothing about it!
In all honesty, fuck these types of people for blocking sites that try to a degree to try and stop illegal porn on their platforms.
I’m a woman in Texas and if this has anything positive to come out of it, I hope a lot of the men here who don’t care about women’s reproductive rights will finally wake up to the Christian Nationalism really taking hold here, realize it may impact them, and help to do something about it.
I’m with you, but I can’t imagine any other outcome than an increasingly large group of sexually-frustrated men taking this out on women / men / animals around them. Particularly as other porn sites follow suit.
What’s worse, I imagine this is either by design or a very welcome byproduct. In other words, one step closer to y’all qaeda.
Porn reduces the incident of rape. Combine that with the inability to access abortion. This is going to get worse. If vulnerable people have the ability to leave, they should.
This all sucks, but to be realistic it’s probably not going to change anything for anybody. Pornhub is not the only porn site, there are more options than any human being could ever make use of out there, and plenty of sites will not recognize the laws of TX.
What realistically will happen is the porn consumers will go “oh no Pornhub is down, I’ll have to go to another site” and within 5 minutes they’ll be masturbating with porn from an unblocked site. For all we know, they might even visit lemmynsfw communities, which all do not give a fuck about these laws.
My guess is rape rate will increase instead
https://slate.com/culture/2006/10/proof-that-internet-porn-prevents-rape.html
You keep commenting this, and yet your source doesn’t provide any evidence other than quotes…
I’m out at work but i believe its this
At least this’ll probably push more people to hate Republicans. Like, fucking with a man’s porn supply is just political suicide. At least I hope it is.
Maybe… I would have thought treating women like chattel would do it… But apparently not.
Chattel is a specific type of slavery:
In chattel slavery, the slave is legally rendered the personal property (chattel) of the slave owner.
Just tried it. Yep, no access. Just a long message lambasting Texas politicians.
I tried all the other regular sites, no issues.
They’re gonna need an industry wide cooperation to successfully combat this.
I tried it, got the block message, and then tried it with a Kansas City VPN just to see if it would work. It did.
I really liked the message though. Texas legislators are dumb af if they don’t think that this is going to push people to use websites without ID requirements and less stringent rules on content creation/safety.
I mean, they were dumb af before this, but they’re extra dumb now too.
Ironically, I just tried accessing PH with a VPN based in Dallas (I’m not in Texas) and got the normal site.
