MONTREAL — Aylo has blocked access to Pornhub in Texas as of Thursday morning, following the decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upholding the state’s controversial age verification law.
The company posted a message explaining its decision, which can be read by those attempting to reach the platform in Texas.
“As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website,” the statement reads in part. “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.
“While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk.”
Aylo’s VP for Brand and Community Alexzandra Kekesi told XBIZ that by blocking access in Texas, the company is complying with HB 1181. Aylo is also calling on all adult sites to comply as well.
Kekesi, however, described HB 1181 as “ineffective, haphazard and dangerous.”
“Not only will it not actually protect children, but it will also 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,” Kekesi added, pointing out that content creators are unfairly targeted by the law, making them lose out on the revenue that would have come from millions of users in Texas who are no longer able to access the platform.
Moreover, she noted, experience has demonstrated that unless the law is consistently enforced, users “will simply access noncompliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.”
“This is not speculation,” Kekesi affirmed. “We have seen how this scenario plays out in the United States.”
The Aylo VP also repeated the company’s commitment to a device-based solution for adequate, safer age-verification.
Providing identification every time someone wants to visit an adult platform, she explained, is not an effective solution for protecting users online, as it will put minors and privacy at risk.
“We believe that the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users’ age on their device and to either deny or allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification,” Kekesi added. “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.”
As XBIZ reported, rather than the device-level verification Kekesi proposes, HB 1181 places the burden of verifying each user’s age on companies distributing “harmful” and “obscene” material on the internet, with a fine of $10,000 per violation. Attorney General Ken Paxton began enforcing the law in February, bringing a $1.6 million lawsuit against Aylo, the company that owns PornHub.
In August 2023, the Free Speech Coalition filed a legal challenge in Texas over HB 1181. Joining the FSC as co-plaintiffs were an array of adult platforms and workers, including MG Premium LTD; MG Freesites LTD (now Aylo companies); Webgroup Czech Republic, A.S.; NKL Associates, S.R.O.; Sonesta Technologies, S.R.O.; Sonesta Media, S.R.O.; Yellow Production S.R.O.; Paper Street Media, LLC; Neptune Media, LLC; Mediame SRL; Midus Holdings, INC.; and Jane Doe, an adult content creator.