HOUSTON – Adult content creators are sounding the alarm after months of Texas being locked out of the world’s largest pornography website: PornHub.
The decision was made by PornHub’s parent company, Aylo, in response to the State of Texas’ decision to force websites to verify the age of visitors to their site.
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The ruling is known as Texas House Bill 1181. It boils down to restricting sexual material on the internet from minors. The method - verifying your age each time you visit.
“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,” reads a message on PornHub’s website.
Aylo, a Canadian-based company, owns several other large online pornographic websites, including Brazzers, RedTube and more.
After five months of blocking the second-largest state in the U.S., adult content creators are feeling the impacts of the law.
Gage Goulding: “How did this impact your job?”
Allie Eve Knox: “Several ways. So, we’re creators and so first of all, us being able to sell to a large audience is very important for us to continue our income.”
Belle Creed: “If I put a video out on Friday and the law went in and I’m used to selling a certain amount of like percentage of that video, and then it’s cut in half because half of my customers now can access the site.”
Knox is a Texas-based adult content creator. She’s backing PornHub’s fight against the State of Texas.
Creed also created adult content.
The argument isn’t over checking the age of visitors to adult websites - it’s about who should check the age.
Texas wants websites to verify the age of visitors.
PornHub wants the device the visitor is using to tell them how old the visitor is.
“The easiest answer is really to use a device-based filtering system,” Knox said. “If I’m going to give my child a device, I’m going to put a filter on it. And I’m not only going to just filter for adult content, I’m going to filter for things like violence or making purchases, those types of things.”
Both the state and PornHub won’t budge on their sides, leading to an ongoing legal battle in the nation’s highest court.
According to a brief filed in the U.S. Supreme Court by The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of the Free Speech Coalition against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the group argues the law is violating the First Amendment by “improperly burdening adults’ right to access sexual content online.”
Gage Goulding: “Do you believe that it’s free speech?”
Allie Eve Knox: “My God. Absolutely. They have to have adults telling other consenting adults that they can’t view this type of content. This is crazy.”
Gage Goulding: “And the concern is, is that you give a mouse a cookie and then they’ll ask for a glass of milk?”
Allie Eve Knox: “Yeah. So, these types of laws pass and it just leads to other poorly written laws, particularly against us.”
Adult content creators like Knox are stuck in the middle. Their paychecks also taking a hit as a result.
“We’ve been scarlet-lettered, right,” Knox said. “We can’t go back and be teachers, or be nurses. We can’t go back and make different decisions than we’ve already made. We don’t want to have to talk and know about legal things. We just want to sell our content on the Internet.”
The fight against the State of Texas is ongoing. In the meantime, Texas is still blocked from using PornHub entirely.