The new year brings a new reality for much of the US South: It's tougher to access porn online. As Ars Technica reports, two more states—Florida and South Carolina—enacted laws requiring age verification to see explicit sites. They join 14 other states where such laws already have gone into effect over the last two years, mostly in the South, per Mashable:
- 16 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia now have the laws.
- Tennessee: Its law was supposed to go into effect on Jan. 1, but a court has temporarily blocked it.
- Georgia: Its law is scheduled to take effect in July.
As 404 Media explains, the laws vary from state to state, but all impose heavy fines on sites found to be out of compliance. As a result, Aylo—the company behind sites such as Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn—blocks direct access and tells would-be viewers how they must verify their age (it can differ from state to state). Aylo, for its part, says it backs the idea of age verification but calls the states' efforts "ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous," in part because they require sites to collect sensitive personal information.
When Louisiana began requiring viewers to submit ID, Aylo's traffic plummeted. But "these people did not stop looking for porn," the company tells Mashable. "They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don't ask users to verify age, that don't follow the law, that don't take user safety seriously, and that often don't even moderate content." (More Pornhub stories.)
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