Pornhub to leave five more states over age-verification laws

jeffw@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 339 points –
Pornhub to leave five more states over age-verification laws
engadget.com
78

I had to travel to Austin for work a few weeks ago. Got off the plane, checked into the hotel, took a shower, decided to use mother nature’s melatonin to help with the jet lag… then, boom. Upload your driver’s license.

So I had visited some sites that were hosted outside US and didn’t give a fuck about Texas’ stupid laws.

These laws are not only authoritarian, they’re fucking useless.

I assume this is the "small government" party doing this?

(I'm not an American)

Republicans, which yeah. They like to talk about “small government” when it comes to billionaires and taxes, it really, that’s about it.

Yes. They want "small government" when the law affects them, but "law and order" when it punishes someone else who annoys them.

It's childishness we've come to be accustomed to, thanks to lead-brained 70-year-olds who are falling into legit cognitive decline... but still have the numbers to be a formidable opponent at the polls on election day.

Also, their dicks don't work anymore without a blue pill, so they may as well take away the consensual naked fun of Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z (18+) people right?

Small so it can sneak into all their citizen's lives.

Government so small it can fit in a uterus or male pee hole!

(I know the scientific name but pee hole is funniest.)

What's worse: Reputable sites that comply with U.S. laws (such as participants being 18+ and filming of their own free will) are effectively forced out, while questionable site carry on.

The likelyhood of seeing abuse victims or underage in Texas goes up, not down.

If they truly cared about protecting minors, they'd see the flaw in their law and rectify it. Of course, we all know (not through cynicism but cold repeated behavior) that political conservatives do not care about minors and care far more about punishing consenting adults.

This law is a step toward the latter.

You: (bring facts and logic)

TX Republicans: "A witch! They're a witch! Burn them!"

In any given situation, sites beholden to these laws are much less likely to be hosting CSAM

Edit: Literally why the fuck are all of you reading this wrong????

[X] DOUBT

Why? Do you not remember how PornHub requires verification to upload content now? They're also beholden to their payment processors.

Other way around:

Sites that COMPLY with laws and exit the state leave behind sites that do not comply.

The sites you CAN reach in Texas are more likely to have trafficking victims and underage participants -- because those sites clearly don't give a hoot about laws.

Texas drove away the wrong sites!

Yes that's literally what I said...

Sites beholden to these laws..

PornHub, sister sites, etc...

...are much less likely to be hosting CSAM.

Because of their moderation.

Obviously it's a big site and you can't get rid of it all, but the percentage is absolutely lower.

That's like saying a supermarket that's burning to the ground is experiencing a record low theft.

If you get downvoted once, everyone else has to downvote you too before they read your comment, it's the rule of lemmy.

Honestly, this feels like a canary in a coalmine. A coalmine that we've known to be on fire, but a canary nonetheless.

12 states total. That's like a quarter of the country.

2025 is gonna be a wild ride..

Ironically their leader pays porn stars to have sex with him which obviously is not a problem for their voters.

Just imagine how angry everyone is going to be when they can't masturbate the pain of Present Day away

Enjoy that freedom!

Never lost that backwards, repressed, puritanical, "we come to the new world to be more dogmatic" prude streak.

Banning porn nationwide is part of Project 2025's plan. defeatproject2025.org

Republicans plotting in the open to install an authoritarian theocracy? Sounds serious!

So when will democrats drop gun control considering this imminent threat?

Armed queers bash back.

SocialistRA.org

Conservatism / Religiosity is a plague that's been retarding our species since the dawn of man.

This is part one of the religious rights plan to go after porn sites and their patrons. Don’t give them your ID. If they get power, it will come back on you.

I don't think pornhub wants your ID.

I live in Texas and just tested the site to see if anyone has changed. It hasn't since they essentially shut down here.

It's a full page statement about Texas politicians.

There's no option to submit an ID even if a person wanted to do so.

But maybe I've misunderstood who "them" is in your comment.

It's not pornhub that wants your id, it's the facist states, so they can have a registry of who's not aligned with their puritanical ideals.

To add to this, the repugs are going to demand user access data next and identity confirmation stuffs.

They’ll see everyone’s porn habits. And have addresses for everyone watching anything except all the fucked up incest porn.

If they wanted to do that I'm sure they could get the data from ISPs already.

Age verification bills are just virtue signaling for politicians.

Not if you use a VPN. But now it wouldn't matter even if you were using a VPN because if you want any porn you'll need to submit a state-issued ID for "verification" purposes.

Im not sure ISP’s wouldn’t fight against turning that data over- and it would be hard to prove that it’s necessary for some kind of law enforcement access. (Unless they outright make porn illegal.) which would make it hard to acquire the necessary warrants (normally).

Whereas, it would be a relatively simple enforcement claim to say they need to see all that data to ensure PH’s identification compliance.

Funny thing is....do people think Pornhub is the only porn site on the internet or something? That if they make Pornhub shut down that all the porn will magically disappear? Fucking LOL. Sure, there's a good idea guys. It's not like there aren't a billion other porn sites on the internet that couldn't give a shit less about US age verification laws.

All this will do is drive people away from the most popular porn sites that at least have something in place even if it isn't very good and drive them to any number of other sites where they'll pick up all sorts of malware on their devices and probably finding even more of the porn-of-questionable-legality that these bills were meant to stifle in the first place.

Fire hot, water wet, teenagers are gonna find porn. It's embedded in their DNA. Don't believe me? Ask any teenager in the 80s about going into the woods to find a stash of porn magazines. We weren't told this shit. It's just like we...knew. Basic instinct. We somehow just knew there was porn in the woods and on scrambled cable TV channels at like 4 in the morning. Porn is eternal. And as long as it's out there, teenagers are going to find it.

Pornhub is just good about making news about them, raises their profile and perception as the main porn site.

It's not just pornhub. There are already a handful of others closing off service as well.

And for each one of those, two that don't give a shit about age verification will pop up to take it's place. Pornhub could close today and it would be replaced with hubofporn and pornohubs dot com by lunchtime, hosted in some country like the Isle of Man or something.

Also, porn sites can just white label their UX/content kinda like how there's a million pirate Bay proxies

I was setting up an 8mm projector to watch porn in 70s when I was still middle school aged. (Adults on screen)

they’ll pick up all sorts of malware on their devices

How so? Unless they are downloading sketchy things, there is no reason for them to get a virus with a reasonably up-to-date browser.

Creeping theocracy

More of a stampede than a creep these days.

Yes, I worry we're entering the exponential curve, with the new effort to put ten commandments in schools

And the growing LGBT hate. And the potential revival of the Comstock act. And the attempts at banning artificial insemination and contraception....

A blog post from Pornhub said that its latest locations for shutdowns are Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky and Nebraska. The site said it would end operations in those states in July 2024. The website closed in Texas last week, and has also blocked access to its site in Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia in response to similar state legislation.

XVideos will get more popular.

I just tested with my VPN and indeed xvideos doesn't give a shit if you're in Texas.

The A record for xvideos resolves to the Netherlands so that's probably why they don't give a shit.

They haven’t given a single shit for years in Utah.

It has a superior….. everything as well. I have NEVER got why people would use PornHub. Their website operates like a mobile website from 2009.

Though, morally and ethically I think they stand out from the rest.

So, I have a pretty alright VPN provider, but I've been looking for a self-hosted solution to allow me to say "Hey, if you're trying to hit www.domain.com, go through this VPN tunnel instead" but still run everything else straight through. Lots of options exist, I have one that would be perfect that we utilize at my company, but I haven't found a good solution that doesn't utilize enterprise level pricing.

Anyone got any tips on that front?

Tinyproxy

https://github.com/tinyproxy/tinyproxy/releases

Free Open source Upstream Http/s, socks4/5, direct redirection per site/URL/domain with regex. Can set default upstream proxy for everything else.

Invisible proxy Reverse proxy

Command line / simple text config

It's in your distros repo

It's available in termux.

It works.

You can use foxyproxy (browser extension) with SOCKS5 proxies to ssh tunnels to various hosts based on the URL pattern. Maybe too kludgey for your use case.

Yeah, I've seen that one, but I'm looking for something at the router level or something I can run on linux and just have everything run through. I have CLI-based options that are super janky... I'm probably just being too picky.

I think it needs to be on the client app (web browser) before it gets sent thru the VPN. Your router won't be able to read the http header to see what the URL is (to decide which VPN to use).

I know it's doable in general because I've done it in an enterprise environment, just seems to be a real pain in the ass at the consumer level which is not surprising, it's a weird use case.

Where I work we have a system that kind of combines a proxy and a solution that approximates the same functionality as a VPN, and it's all in one cohesive package. I know my first stop will have to be some sort of proxy, but my ideal is basically just a friendlier UI to manage it and for whatever proxy or proxy-like solution to include tunneling options out of the box.

It's a complicated ask, but I feel like it's becoming more useful. Supposedly, Squid can do it with a few extra pieces and that might end up being the solution.

Get a cheap vps. Set up wire guard. Set up routes that pass through wire guard. In this case porn hubs IP's go through the vps. Be aware that some vps providers IP blocks are often blocked by cloudflare and other similar services. So it pays to check out the IP rep of the vps provider before you choose.

Porn hub needs to rebrand and give YouTube some competition

I know this is a joke, but that would require them to put actual effort into their shit ass slow ui that's had the same stupid bugs for the past 15 years and still doesn't have a search function that gives you what you fucking searched for.