The site also complained about the states “not regulating the enforcement of these laws” which means “responsible platforms will follow the law, irresponsible platforms won’t.”
Pornhub posted a statement on Twitter recently where it explained its decision. Here's the statement that the company termed as a "difficult decision":
If you haven't heard, elected officials around the United States have started to introduce laws aimed at preventing children from accessing material harmful to minors online.
This is great. We've supported this for years. 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.
Unfortunately, the way many elected officials have chosen to implement these laws is haphazard and dangerous. Here's the problem:
A number of states, including Virginia and Mississippi effective July 1, are requiring mandatory age verification of users, but they are not regulating the enforcement of these laws. So that means adult platforms can choose whether or not to comply. Responsible platforms will follow the law. Irresponsible platforms won't.
We already saw how this scenario plays out. When a similar law was enacted in Louisiana in January, Pornhub was one of the few sites to comply. Since then, our traffic in Louisiana dropped approximately 80 percent. These people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to other 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.
We have made the difficult decision to fully block our site in Virginia and Mississippi, as we have also recently done in Utah. We are sorry to let our loyal visitors in these states down but have opted to comply with the newly effective law in this way because it is ineffective and worse, will put both user privacy and children at risk