‘It isn’t just about porn’: What the US PornHub ‘ban’ is really about

Nearly one third of U.S. states — with a combined population of just over 104 millions people — are now unable to access PornHub, the world’s largest pornography site.

That is because all those states have passed laws requiring porn websites to verify that their users are over-18, such as by checking their driver’s licenses, or else be vulnerable to civil lawsuits.

The result is that online porn giant Aylo, which owns PornHub, RedTube, and YouPorn — has simply stopped operating in those states, arguing that it cannot comply with the laws without violating its users’ privacy.

Advocates say these laws are necessary to prevent children from accessing online porn, which they claim is distorting young people’s sexuality and normalizing sexual abuse.

Critics argue that they are ineffective, burdensome, and effectively ban reputable providers from operating at all — as well as potentially being a Trojan horse for crackdowns against sexual and gender freedom.

At the core of the debate is a genuinely thorny technical and legal question: how to verify someone’s age over the internet without exposing them to cyber theft or government surveillance.

Age verification providers are adamant that this is possible. But in practice, that question is overshadowed by America’s culture war — and by the rising tide of social conservatism that seeks to control and suppress sexuality itself.

“This is the canary in the coal mine. It isn’t just about porn,” digital rights advocate Evan Greer told the BBC.

‘Age verification systems are surveillance systems’

In July 2024, Donald Trump ally and Project 2025 contributor Russell Vought sat down in a five-star hotel room in Washington, DC to meet two men who’d represented themselves as relatives of a wealthy potential donor.

“We’d have a national ban on pornography if we could, right?” Vought allegedly said. “We’d have the porn companies being investigated for all manner of human rights abuses.”

But instead, he explained, “we’re doing it from the back door — starting with the kids.”

In fact, the two other men were undercover agents of a British environmentalist nonprofit, who then shared the video of their conversation with The Intercept.

By “back door”, Vought was referring to a new type of anti-pornography law that has attracted broad bipartisan support, even as they provoke numerous first amendment lawsuits.

This wave is the product of a strange alliance between Laurie Schlegel, a sex addiction therapist and freshman Republican state legislator in Louisiana, and Gail Dines, a British radical feminist who helped build bipartisan support for Schlegel’s bill.

“You can’t be 10 years old and go into Mr. Binky’s —that’s an adult bookstore in my district,” Schlegel told The Free Press in 2023. “This is public policy we’ve accepted across the board in brick-and-mortar stores, but we’ve just been giving a pass to the internet.”

Schlegel’s bill was passed almost unanimously by Louisiana’s state legislature, with the support of both parties. That pattern has repeated across the US.

Most of these laws are similar to Schlegel’s, which citizens to sue porn providers if they fail to implement “reasonable age verification methods”, either directly or through a third party provider.

The law isn’t very specific about what methods count as reasonable, but gives checking government IDs and checking “transactional data” (such as mortgage or employment records) as examples.

Schlegel’s law also requires age verifiers to delete all identifying information after access has been granted.

Yet porn sites and free speech activists say these laws are riddled with problems.

“Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years,” a spokesperson for Aylo told The Independent. “[But] any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy.”

Age checking methods that use government IDs also freeze out the sizable number of people who do not have one.

“Age verification systems are surveillance systems,” says the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Once information is shared to verify age, there’s no way for a website visitor to be certain that the data they’re handing over is not going to be retained and used by the website, or further shared or even sold.”

A 2022 report by France’s data regulator CNIL found that there was no solution on offer that simultaneously offered “sufficient reliability”, “complete coverage of the population”, and “respect... for privacy and security”.

Opponents also argue there are less intrusive ways to stop children from accessing adult content — such as stronger parental controls on devices. Given that, they argue, why should adults be required to expose their identity simply to access a legal and constitutionally protected art form?

Besides, most users will be able to find porn elsewhere, on websites that do not even try to comply. Porn companies that have tried to implement age checks say their users largely refuse to participate.

“To speak frankly, this is leading to the suppression of the most responsible sites in the industry in favour of those that often do not verify uploaders, do not moderate content, do not integrate age verification,” a spokesperson for porn site xHamster told the BBC.

‘This can be done in a privacy-preserving way’

Age verification providers and child protection advocates insist that it’s possible to check users’ age without creating some dodgy database of citizens’ masturbation habits.

“When the UK first tried to do this back in 2017, there was a very legitimate question about how this could technically be done,” Andy Burrows, head of a British child protection group called the Molly Rose Foundation, tells The Independent.

“We’ve now had the best part of a decade of the market developing solutions... and I think we can say with certainty that there are robust technical means to age assure at 18 in a privacy-preserving way.”

Take Yoti, a British company that works with adult sites and apps such as OnlyFans, as well as tobacco vendors, gaming companies, and social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.

“We’ve done over 700 million age checks over the last five six years, and all of those 700 million checks have been deleted immediately after we estimated the age,” chief executive Robin Tombs tells The Independent.

“No porn site gets to see anything [about the user] apart from an ‘over 18’ or an ‘under 18’ result. That’s not well explained by many privacy organizations, and by some adult sites who basically don’t want to see age verification come in.”

With this method, users take a photo of their face which is then analyzed by AI to estimate their age. Tombs says this involves no analysis of the user’s actual identity, and that all photos are deleted once the check is finished. Hence, neither Yoti nor the porn site ever needs to know who you are.

AI face estimation is not without drawbacks. Tombs admits that users at the borderline, who have only recently come of age, sometimes cannot use it, because they may still look to young for the AI to be confident that they really are over 18.

Another method, used in Germany, lets people show their ID card at a post office and get a unique ID to access adult sites. This could potentially be done without logging the person’s identity, but as CNIL points out such systems require much work to set up.

Burrows agrees that striking a good balance between safety and privacy requires a high degree of regulatory clarity and engagement — something few US age verification laws currently provide.

“We find ourselves being asked to justify some of the legislation coming from red states that isn’t being constructed or driven the way we would look to do it,” he says.

“Legislation should be drafted in a way that... there isn’t the potential for mission creep, which starts taking us into a more subjective measure of what is and isn’t harmful for children.”

Mission creep is exactly what opponents fear will happen. “The chilling effect here is the point,” Michael Stabile of the Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry trade group, told New York magazine, arguing that these laws are simply a way to shut down the porn industry in general.

Vought himself said as much in the undercover recording. “What happens is, the porn company then says we’re not gonna do business in your state. Which is of course entirely what we were after.”

Indeed, Project 2025 calls for porn to be outlawed entirely, with creators jailed and librarians who stock such material — its odd definition fo pornography including ““the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology” — be classed as sex offenders.

Given American conservatives’ sustained attempt to tar LGBT+ people in general as child abusers, it’s easy to see why some Americans wouldn’t trust these new laws.

All of which leaves us with yet another new front in the culture war, but not much in the way of actually effective age verification systems that are widely used and trusted. A cynic might suspect that that’s the point.