The pornographic website PornHub is adding Florida to its list of states to block starting next year. Gizmodo reported that Floridians who visited the porn website recently were greeted with a warning that says “You will lose access to PornHub in 14 days” thanks to a new state law that requires an ID to visit the website.
PornHub has already blocked a number of states from accessing its wealth of sexually explicit content because of new state laws that require visitors to provide a valid government ID to verify their age for access. Florida’s legislature passed its porn ID law and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law on March 25 as part of a series of regulations intended to protect minors from explicit materials. The adult entertainment trade association The Free Speech Coalition is fighting Florida’s law in federal court, according to The Florida Times-Union.
Florida will become the 13th state to institute an age verification law for adult websites. Florida follows Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, Mississippi, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky and Nebraska that all have ID verification laws on its books.
“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 [the state’s] stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors,” according to the official PornHub blog
The PornHub blog also states that the company is concerned about the safety and welfare of children but the idea of using identification creates more risks with users’ safety and privacy. The Louisiana law in particular has no state regulator overseeing the new laws’ implementation “which results in a flawed enforcement regime,” the PornHub blog states.
