When I call for a ban on Pornhub, I am not here to be the pornography police.
Alabama’s government has taken the wrong steps in breaking with Pornhub, while Pornhub has wrongfully poised itself as a beacon of personal privacy and freedom of expression.
Though pornography has been the battleground for legal arguments about morality, religion and censorship, Alabama’s “Porn ID Law” was made on a false pretense of only serving to protect child safety. While I disagree with the steps that have led to the Pornhub ban — I feel that they could represent the first step into unconstitutional governmental surveillance — the site should be banned nationally because it enables and monetizes sexual abuse.
On Oct. 1, millions of Alabama residents were left high and dry as they opened Pornhub to be greeted by a disappointing message.
“As you may know, your elected officials in Alabama are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website,” the message said. “While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”
Alabamians have become the latest residents in a group of 19 states whose inhabitants Pornhub has banned from legally accessing its website because of new Porn ID laws. Alabama’s law, HB164, was passed in April in the name of protecting children and took effect on Oct. 1. It requires sites like Pornhub to make visitors upload photos of their government IDs in order to verify that the visitors are over 18, and then log those visitors into a public state-wide database. HB164 also requires porn retailers to display on their home pages hotlines to addiction services as well as information about the correlations between porn consumption and human trafficking.
These methods may have worked to prevent underage users from visiting Pornhub if they were ever put into place. Instead, Pornhub revoked Alabama access to its service for fear of government surveillance. The Republican lawmakers who pushed HB164 had gotten more than what they had asked for: a complete ban on Pornhub.
Concerns about the surveillance possibilities of HB164 are legitimate. Project 2025, a far-right bible of democratic annihilation, calls for a full ban on pornography in its foreword and threatens jail time for those who manufacture and spread it. Project 2025 has direct ties with president-elect Trump. Members of Trump’s cabinet like Russell Vought have authored parts of the document, giving it legal legitimacy. It is highly unlikely to say HB164 was written purely with the intentions of protecting children.
However, opponents to the law shouldn’t misconstrue the scenario by casting Pornhub as the innocent victim of censorship.
Pornhub is the biggest provider of pornography in the world. In 2019 it reported 42 billion views per year, averaging out to over 100 million views per day. An estimated 30% of visitors to its site are under 18 years old. Minors are also a popular viewing category on Pornhub, with categories like “teen” and “barely legal” amassing hundreds of millions of hits a year. Despite the fact that the actors should be over 18, Pornhub plays into and capitalizes from pedophilic tendencies when children and youth are treated like sex symbols. Concerningly, in the digital age it is impossible to stop children from accessing porn when it is available at the click of a button.
Pornhub is currently being sued by 256 victims of sex trafficking, both women and girls, who claim that Pornhub knew videos of them online were nonconsensual and illegal, but kept them up because it made money. By the end of 2024, 91% of all content on Pornhub had been deleted because of a series of legal battles between Pornhub and its victims. Pornhub has admitted that its content producers do not need to provide names or ages of the people involved in their pornography, creating a loophole that enables rapists to profit off of videos of their crime.
There are two major problems with Pornhub. One is the obvious: its abuse and exploitation of people who were uploaded nonconsensually and its financial support of the trafficking industry and sexual violence that disproportionately affects women. The other problem is less concrete, and involves what porn does to people’s minds — especially young people.
A 2019 study from Springer Nature found that teenage girls exposed to violent pornography at a young age are 1.5 times more likely to commit sexual assault than their peers who did not view violent porn. Likewise, boys exposed to violent pornography at a young age are two to three times more likely to commit rape and sexual abuse.
It is easy to be exposed to violent pornography. As of November 2023, Pornhub was the fourth-most visited site on the internet worldwide. It’s free, it requires no age verification and it’s popular.
Pornhub has done more harm than good. From knowingly profiting off of rape to partnering with known moguls of sexual predation like Michael Pratt to popularizing images of women beaten and assaulted, the site cannot be trusted to police itself.
Alabama’s legal system is not doing everything it can to help underage victims of sexual abuse. In April, Kay Ivey signed the Sound of Freedom Act, which gives an automatic sentence of life in prison to anyone found guilty of first-degree human trafficking a minor. Alabama is tough on criminals, but it does not extend that same concern towards victims. Child marriage, defined as marrying someone younger than 18 to someone older than 18, is fully legal in Alabama once the child is 16 years old. Alabama has the fourth-most child marriages in the United States.
The CDC reported a quarter of all Alabama women will face severe intimate partner violence, and the state consistently ranks in the top five for amount of domestic violence. Alabama has achieved only two of the six pillars of rape kit reform. This is a state that is willing to punish perpetrators but not put the same amount of energy towards supporting victims.
It’s not that Alabama residents shouldn’t have access to Pornhub, but rather that Pornhub should not have the right to access Alabama residents. Pornography is not inherently good or bad in its nature, but Pornhub’s business model encourages the monetization of sexual assault and its easily available range of violent pornography has terrifying effects on the future sexual habits of children. Pornography is an issue surrounded with strong morals and beliefs, but morals and beliefs should not affect the law around pornography consumption. Pornhub does not represent all pornography, and the conversation about Pornhub isn’t about the evil or goodness of porn. It is about safety, mental health and sexual exploitation.
Pornhub has proven that it does not act with people’s best intentions at heart, but neither does HB164, which is half sympathy, half surveillance. Pornhub should be banned in Alabama not because Alabama is threatening residents with a database, but because gratification and greed cannot be more important than safety and justice.
