Pornhub, one of the world’s most popular pornography websites, suspended access in Texas on Thursday after a federal appeals court overturned a lower court’s ruling to uphold the state’s age-verification law last week.
Pornhub sued Texas last year after the state legislature passed HB 1181 requiring age verification and health warnings on adult sites to protect minors from accessing the content. The company argues that the law infringes on adults’ rights to what it views as free speech protected by the First Amendment.
On March 7, a judge on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed Texas to keep the age-verification component of the law, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1968 decision, Ginsberg v. New York, that prevented the sale of obscene magazines to minors. The judge, however, concluded that the law’s health warnings amount to unconstitutionally compelled speech. Still, the decision reversed a U.S. district court judge’s ruling that the entire law was unconstitutional and poorly defined.
As a result, Pornhub pulled out of Texas. When Texan users try logging on to the site, a statement can be seen denouncing the age-verification mandate.
“As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you to access our website,” the Pornhub message states. “Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.”
“Unfortunately the Texas law for age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous,” it adds. “Not only will it not actually protect children, it will inevitably reduce content creators’ ability to post and distribute legal adult content and directly impact their ability to share the artistic messages they want to convey with it.”
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton celebrated the recent ruling and Pornhub’s subsequent suspension of its services in protest of the law.
“PornHub has now disabled its website in Texas,” he wrote on X. “Sites like PornHub are on the run because Texas has a law that aims to prevent them from showing harmful, obscene material to children. We recently secured a major victory against PornHub and other sites that sought to block this law from taking effect. In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children. If they don’t want to comply, good riddance.”
The move comes after Paxton filed a lawsuit against Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, late last month for failing to follow the newly enacted age-verification law. The lawsuit alleges Aylo’s websites either did not display age-verification pop-ups while loading or simply asked users to click “enter” when asked if they were over 18 years old.
Paxton is asking the court to fine Aylo $1.6 million for not complying with the law from when it took effect in September to the date of the lawsuit’s filing in February.
Pornhub also blocked access to users in North Carolina, Virginia, Utah, Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, and Louisiana after those states passed age-verification laws.