Starting January 1, 2025, any websites offering adult content in Florida must use an age verification system or face fines under a new state law (HB 3), which imposes age verification requirements on porn sites and any other publishers of content considered "harmful to minors."
Rather than add an age verification requirement to its site, Pornhub's parent company, Aylo, tells New Times it will instead revoke Floridians' access to the porn site beginning New Year's Day.
Floridians who visit the website are currently greeted by a message entitled: "YOU WILL LOSE ACCESS TO PORNHUB IN 13 DAYS."
Screenshot via Pornhub
"Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide, including Florida, have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous," an Aylo spokesperson wrote in a statement. "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."
The statement adds, "Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws."
To that point, there will still be ways to access Pornhub (for example, using a good VPN).
In Lousiana, where Pornhub did comply with the state's new age-verification law, an Aylo spokesperson claims that people didn't stop searching for porn – but instead moved 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," the company says.
The company argues that the best solution here is to implement age verification on the devices themselves, or to use already available parental control features, which it says can "prevent children from accessing adult content without risking the disclosure of sensitive user data."
In protest of state age verification laws, Pornhub has revoked access to its site in more than a dozen states, including Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas.
Rep. Chase Tramont, a Port Orange Republican behind the new Florida law, told Florida Politics that the fact that Pornhub has chosen to pull out (lolz) of Florida says a lot about the company.
"The fact that they've chosen to shut down instead of complying to ensure that children aren't accessing their site tells us exactly who their real target audience is," Tramont said.
As of Tuesday (December 17), Floridians who visit the website are greeted by a message that reads: "YOU WILL LOSE ACCESS TO PORNHUB IN 13 DAYS."
"Did you know that your government wants you to give your driver's license before you can access PORNHUB?" the message asks. "You'll be required to prove you are 18 years or older, such as by uploading your government ID, for every adult content website you'd like to access."
It continues, "We don't want minors accessing our site and think preventing that from happening is a good thing. But putting everybody's privacy at risk won't achieve that."
