Pornhub has announced it will leave Florida by January 1, when the state’s age verification law restricting minors from accessing the sexually explicit website takes effect.
The top pornography site published a pop-up message on Tuesday that states Florida users will lose access to Pornhub in the next 14 days. The move came in response to Florida’s broad H.B. 3 which requires “anonymous age verification” for all users, who must provide government-issued identification before accessing the site.
“Did you know that your government wants you to give your driver’s license before you can access PORNHUB?” the message reads. “As crazy as it sounds, it’s true. 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.”
Pornhub agrees with Florida that minors shouldn’t be accessing the site, but it draws the line over privacy concerns. It argues the solution is device-based age verification in which users set their device settings to age 18 and up. The company will no longer be serving the state in protest of the new law.
Florida passed legislation earlier this year that requires anonymous and standard age verification for “online access to materials harmful to minors,” such as porn. If an adult site fails to comply with the law, they could be fined up to $50,000 per violation in addition to attorney fees and court costs.
Florida is one of 16 Republican-led states that have enforced age verification on adult sites this year. Pornhub has largely blocked users from the states where these laws have been passed, doing so in Texas this spring.
The age verification law in Florida is currently being challenged in a federal lawsuit filed by the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the adult entertainment industry, and other concerned plaintiffs.
“Despite the claims of the proponents, HB3 is not the same as showing an ID at a liquor store. It is invasive and carries significant risk to privacy,” Free Speech Coalition executive director Alison Boden said of Florida’s law. “This law and others like it have effectively become state censorship, creating a massive chilling effect for those who speak about, or engage with, issues of sex or sexuality.”
After Louisiana became the first state to pass such a law, Pornhub complied with the new law but its business suffered as a result. The site’s traffic has since fallen by about 80 percent in Louisiana.
“These people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated 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,” Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, said in a statement.
“The safety of our users is our number one concern. We will always comply with the law, but we hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.”
Florida attorney general Ashley Moody’s office did not respond to a request for comment on Pornhub’s decision to leave the state.