Tallahassee Pornography will be harder for Floridians to access online after the first of the year, as one of the leading sites of the genre will stop allowing access to web surfers from Florida after a new law designed to protect minors in the Sunshine State takes effect on January 1, 2025.
HB-3, as the law is known by requires adult sites to verify the age of users of sites that provide “online access to materials harmful to minors.” The penalty for violating the law can be up to $50,000 per violation per user — a number that can add up very quickly.
Photo: State of Florida
Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed HB-1, the first attempt by Florida’s legislature to clamp down on minors accessing pornographic materials, saying “”the [Florida] Legislature is about to produce a different, superior bill.” DeSantis added “Protecting children from harms associated with social media is important, as is supporting parents’ rights and maintaining the ability of adults to engage in anonymous speech. I anticipate the new bill will recognize these priorities and will be signed into law soon.” That bill was HB-3, and was signed by the governor on March 25, 2024 and goes into effect on January `1, 2025.
In response, Pornhub told political website Florida Politics in an email about its plans:
“Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide, including Florida, have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard and dangerous,” reads an email from Aylo. “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. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.”
Additionally Pornhub has added the following greeting to Florida users recently:
Owned by Canadian entertainment conglomerate Aylo, Pornhub is the 16th-most-visited website in the world and the most-visited adult website. User registration is optional, making the site a literal free-for-all cornucopia of fleshy films where little is left to the imagination. To gain access, any users, minors included, only have to click a checkbox where a user attests to their legal age.
The site has experienced controversies in past such as a 2020 exposé by the New York Times that found repeated instances of non-consensual performances in videos posted there, along with other evidence of sex-trafficking victims being coerced or forced into performing sex acts in front of the camera. In addition to Pornhub, Aylo also operates Aylo’s three largest pornographic sites, RedTube and YouPorn and along with PornHub those sites have collectively had at least one billion visitors combined annually since 2019.
“After a 15-year-old girl went missing in Florida, her mother found her on Pornhub — in 58 sex videos. Sexual assaults on a 14-year-old California girl were posted on Pornhub and were reported to the authorities not by the company but by a classmate who saw the videos. In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them.”
New York Times, The Children of Pornhub, December 4, 2020
After January 1, 2025, Aylo’s content will no longer be available to Floridians.
