Almost the entire US South is now being blocked by Pornhub

It’s getting harder to access popular adult sites in the US South.

On Wednesday, Pornhub’s owner, Aylo, kicked off the new year by blocking two more states that implemented age verification laws requiring ID to access porn, Florida and South Carolina. According to 404 Media, these states are now among 16 states where Aylo sites, including Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn, cannot be accessed. Tennessee also risked being blocked, but a court preliminarily blocked its age-verification law from taking effect.

The other blocked states are Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. Mapping it out, 404 Media noted that the Aylo blackout spans nearly the entire US South, with Georgia’s age verification law set to take effect in July and likely to trigger another block that would almost complete the blackout.

When users in any of the blocked states attempt to access sites like Pornhub, they see a message from adult performer Cherie Deville informing them that access is blocked for their own safety.

Aylo has long argued that age verification laws intended to protect kids from accessing adult content are flawed. Rather than keeping kids away from adult materials, these laws actually serve to restrict adult activity online, Aylo argues.

Aylo also says that requiring ID simply drives adult users to riskier adult sites that won’t comply with laws or moderate content wrongfully uploaded without performers’ consent, as Pornhub and other Aylo sites claim to do. And requiring adult sites to store personal information about each user also poses privacy risks, Aylo warned in a statement to 404 Media.

“First, to be clear, Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults,” Aylo said. “Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide, including Florida, have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.”