Pornhub shut itself down in Utah because it refuses to verify the age of users to protect children.

The Utah Senate recently unanimously passed a child protection bill (Utah SB 287) requiring pornography sites like Pornhub and xHamster to use age verification systems before allowing access to their sites. Pornhub refuses to comply with the new legislation that would keep children off the site and has chosen instead to shut itself down in the state in "protest." Regardless of the reason, Pornhub shutting its crime scene website down anywhere is a huge win for the #Traffickinghub movement.

While sites like xHamster quickly began to comply with Utah’s age verification requirement, Pornhub refuses to abide by the law even though children as young as eight years old are being impacted by access to the content.

In a message on their website, Pornhub misleadingly suggested that providing identification to verify age would "put children at risk." The real reason they do not want to comply with the law was uncovered in an admission by a veteran Senior Manager at Pornhub, where she confessed that age verification “devastates traffic” to the site and hurts their bottom line. You see, the site’s exploitative business model was built on unrestricted access and unrestricted uploads - which inherently includes access to children and uploads of victims.

Days ago, Virginia also signed into law an equivalent requirement for porn sites to verify the age of users to protect children. A similar law passed in Louisiana and went into effect in January. Many other U.S. states have introduced comparable bills and countries like France are taking similar concrete steps. 

Pornhub shut down its crime scene in Utah - let’s hope they shut down in Virginia, Louisiana, and everywhere!

It is critical that we not only support common sense laws to keep children from being exploited in front of the screen but also press hard for legislation that will protect children from being abused behind the cameras and again when the abuse is uploaded online. That means we must pass laws that demand reliable, third-party, age, and consent verification for every individual in every video on user-generated porn sites.

Thank you for what you have already done to aid in this fight!

Let’s keep fighting together.

Until justice prevails,

At the Justice Defense Fund (JDF), we empower survivors of sex trafficking, child sexual abuse material (previously known as “child pornography”) and criminal image-based sexual abuse to pursue justice through strategic litigation and advocacy support. We also lead public pressure campaigns and advocate for the adoption of laws and policies that prevent sexual abuse and provide recourse to victims.