UPDATE (12:10 p.m. 7.30.23): Pornhub officially announced via its Twitter page Friday morning that it has blocked access to its site in both Virginia and Mississippi, where age verification laws are set to simultaneously go into effect tomorrow, July 1. The site's full statement appears below:
MONTREAL—A spokesperson for MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub, has confirmed to AVN that the site have blocked all IP addresses in the state of Virginia. This makes Virginia the second state, after Utah, to be geo-blocked due to recently enacted laws requiring age verification to access adult material and other age-restricted content online, including pornography, adult video games and more.
The MindGeek spokesperson confirmed a Thursday evening report by the Virginia Mercury indicating that Pornhub is no longer accessible to users in the state without the use of a VPN or proxy to circumvent the geo-block. The same spokesperson said that an official statement is due to be released on Friday, June 30.
The story of the Utah geo-block went viral when the Salt Lake Tribune reported that logging onto Pornhub resulted in a landing page that featured porn star Cherie DeVille in a rare clothed, safe-for-work video spilling the beans as to why consenting adults from the state’s population of over 3.3 million people could no longer watch the site's content. A similar message can be found when logging on from a Virginia IP address.
Pornhub warned other states with age verification laws, including Virginia, that geo-blocking could come if state officials and the lawmakers responsible for adopting these laws refused to consider device-based age verification rather than methods that require government identification cards, credit card numbers or other types of personal data, which pose security risks that could be exploited by hackers.
“The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns,” reads the statement published to online users from Virginia devices. “We believe that the best and most effective solution for protecting children and adults alike is to identify users by their device and allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that identification. Until a real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Virginia.”
Adult industry trade group the Free Speech Coalition has sued the states of Utah and Louisiana in federal district courts on claims that these laws violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
The group said that it is considering litigation in Virginia’s courts, including states with similar laws.
