A slew of conservative states have recently passed age verification laws for websites and, in response, Pornhub has gotten in the habit of shutting off service in those states rather than acquiescing to local regulations. The company has already shut off service in six states, including Texas, Utah, Mississippi, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia. Florida could be next. Or maybe not.
The Sunshine State recently passed HB 3, a law that prohibits children aged 14 or younger from using social media without parental consent. The law also stipulates that “pornographic or sexually explicit websites” will need to “use age verification to prevent minors from accessing sites that are inappropriate for children.” Pornhub and its parent company, Aylo, have repeatedly criticized these kinds of requirements, claiming that they are ineffective and do not respect users’ privacy. (Whether Pornhub really cares about user privacy is a hanging question; last year the platform was accused of breaking the GDPR—the landmark European privacy law—by illegally harvesting user data).
Will Pornhub pull out of Florida? It would make sense to think so, but the digital smut platform has given equivocating statements about whether it plans to shut down service in the state.
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Courtney Milan writes books about carriages, corsets, and smartwatches. Her books have received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist. She is a New York Times and a USA Today Bestseller.
Courtney pens a weekly newsletter about tea, books, and basically anything and everything else.
Before she started writing romance, Courtney got a graduate degree in theoretical physical chemistry from UC Berkeley. After that, just to shake things up, she went to law school at the University of Michigan and graduated summa cum laude. Then she did a handful of clerkships. She was a law professor for a while. She now writes full-time.
Courtney is represented by Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency.