Porn Websites to Cut Off Access to Millions of Users After Law Takes Effect in Few Short Days
It’s a small victory in a very large war.
Starting Monday, a new North Carolina law will require websites displaying pornography to verify their users’ ages.
Pornhub, a Canadian video-sharing website that digital data site Similarweb listed as the 11th most-visited website in the world and the No. 1 adult website in the U.S. for traffic, rather than comply with the new law, has opted to prevent users in North Carolina from accessing the site.
P*rnhub just shut down in North Carolina because they don’t want to abide by the new age verification law to ensure children don’t witness their sex trafficking crime scene website.#Traffickinghub pic.twitter.com/oui7m4FMvf
— Laila Mickelwait (@LailaMickelwait) December 29, 2023
A video now on the site attempted to explain the company’s position, according to the Raleigh News & Observer.
“As you may know, your elected officials in North Carolina are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website,” porn performer Cherie DeVille said in the video, according to the outlet
“While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission,” she claimed, “giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”
DeVille was born in North Carolina in 1978, but it was unknown whether that was why she was chosen to be the face of Pornhub for this video.
The law, which passed overwhelmingly in the state’s General Assembly and was signed by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, requires websites to verify that users in the state are “over the age of 18 through a commercially available database or ‘another commercially reasonable method for age and identity verification,'” the News & Observer reported, quoting the language in the bill.
In the video, DeVille claimed that the law allows for no “proper enforcement,” which according to her logic — or, more properly, the logic of her employers at Pornhub, probably — means that websites can choose to comply or not.
Parents or guardians of minors who gain access to a porn site in North Carolina can sue the site under the new law — which seems to me to be fairly effective enforcement. Which is probably why Pornhub, which has faced significant legal trouble over the past several years, doesn’t consider it “proper.”
“Until a real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in North Carolina,” she said.
Well, actually, shutting down in the state is a very a real solution. It’s probably, in fact, a better solution than the bill was even aimed at achieving.
The moonbats at the News & Observer — and trust me, I’ve lived in North Carolina for over 30 years, and they are absolutely moonbats, a word I almost never use — tried to make it sound as if there were some sort of opposition to this law beyond Pornhub’s, but all they could come up with was “hundreds” of Reddit users who “lamented the decision, with a few stating it represented governmental intrusion.”
Reddit has 430 million monthly active users, so the fact that the News & Observer found a few hundred who were tearing their garments and sitting in ashes means very little. (For that matter, I’d be willing to be that a statistically significant number of them were News & Observer employees, and most of the rest paid subscribers.)
For comparison, there are 4,400 members of a Reddit community of proponents of various flat earth theories. The News & Observer could only find a number of users equal to 5 or 10 percent of those who disliked this law. Forgive me if I consider that quite a stretch for anyone claiming to engage in responsible journalism.
The News & Observer reported that “[s]everal major porn websites” were preventing users in the state from accessing their content, but listed none beyond Pornhub.
Like I said, a small victory in a large war. But small large, victories are better than defeats, and any victory at all against a giant international evil like pornography is worth celebrating.
The fact that it happened in the state where I happen to now live just makes it a little bit sweeter, at least for me.
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