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The panic over porn has spread through the South, with Pornhub's parent company Aylo cutting off access to its sites in states that have instituted age-verification requirements: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.
These laws are positioned as protecting minors, though we're not seeing the same enthusiasm for legislation to close a loophole allowing videos featuring children. That’s because the ultimate aim of the age-verification laws is not to promote the welfare of children but to criminalize access to anything pertaining to sexuality or gender that conservatives find objectionable.
The Pornhub bans are part and parcel of a movement seeking to return to a time when obscenity laws were thinly veiled curbs on LGBTQ+ rights. As Aylo notes: "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 company has instead backed device-level age verification.)
The Ultimate Goal: Banning Porn Everywhere
With these laws, children are (non-voting) pawns used to justify discriminatory measures, from Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law to Target being successfully cowed via social media to hide or remove Pride merchandise from its stores.
The conservative Heritage Foundation states that one of its objectives is to ban pornography in the United States—not just for minors, but for everyone. Yet it repeatedly tries to bring the focus to children and LGBTQ+ issues when it makes its arguments for the eradication of porn.
In its Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which is part of Project 2025, Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts writes that "children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.” He adds that "educators and public librarians who purvey [pornography] should be classed as registered sex offenders."
Educators and librarians are not distributing porn to children as part of their jobs—unless you think the children’s picture book And Tango Makes Three, which is based on the true story of two male penguins raising a chick at the Central Park Zoo, falls into that category. That's what Heritage-backed Moms for Liberty did when it got the book banned in many schools.
Having had success in striking down LGBTQ+ rights in schools and communities by using children as a wedge issue, conservatives are now trying to do the same with online porn.
The Battle for Silicon Valley
In lining up a list of enemies in the porn wars, Heritage President Roberts argues that tech companies that "facilitate [pornography’s] spread should be shuttered.”
Despite Pornhub almost being the generic name for online porn, it is now essentially out of the market in one-third of the United States unless you use a VPN. The bans—and Project 2025 in particular—are of concern, as Pornhub VP of Brand and Community Alex Kekesi expressed in a November interview with Germany's Netzpolitik.org.
Top tech executives have been incredibly deferential to President-elect Donald Trump. While they have espoused progressive values and expressed distaste for his policies in the past, the return of his administration has them instead seeking to protect their share prices. It could leave Pornhub by itself on the frontlines of the newly reignited culture wars.