In 4 US states, a VPN will now be required to access porn sites. Or turn to those who break the law.
With Virginia and Mississippi, that now makes four US states that have passed laws requiring Pornhub and its competitors to verify the age of their visitors a little more seriously. This rule is very restrictive and, in practice, divides site traffic by five. To protest against it, Pornhub and its subsidiaries preferred to simply cut off access in the states concerned.
Conservative offensive in the United States
For several years, conservative values have been on the rise in the United States. Among the rollbacks on the rights that seemed acquired, we find in the first line those concerning issues of gender, sexual identity and sexuality in general. In this context, and with the Supreme Court on their side, the governors of several Republican states are attacking porn sites.
It is thus Louisiana which opened the ball last January by adopting a law which imposed a real control of the age of the visitors of the porn sites. This involves asking them for an official identity document. A similar law was then passed in May in Utah before the turn of Mississippi and Virginia. In France too, similar measures could well be adopted.
Pornhub only really tried to comply in the first case, that of Louisiana. Unsurprisingly, traffic to the site in that state dropped by 80%, prompting the company to discontinue services there. This position was then the same in the three other States concerned.
Does the porn strike have a chance of tipping the scales?
On this subject, Pornhub is clear, it is not technical impossibilities that lead to these interruptions of service, but many protests. The platform believes that the adoption of these laws does not diminish porn consumption in the states concerned. This simply moves to other sites. less responsible », « who break the law, don’t take user safety seriously, and most often don’t even moderate content “. If Pornhub is not necessarily an expert in respect of the law, difficult to prove him wrong here.
This protest began before the law came into force in the last two states. In previous weeks, visitors to the platform who were located there were greeted with a pop-up asking them to contact their elected representatives to convince them to reconsider their decision. It didn’t work, and it’s hard to imagine how things could change. It does indeed seem rather unlikely to see Republican or even Democratic politicians openly positioning themselves as defenders of the porn industry.
Harmful for the various Pornhub sites, it is however not certain that this law has had an effect on the consumption of similar sites by young people. Many sites fell through the cracks.
Source : The Verge
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