NORFOLK, Va. — Pornhub sent a letter this week to elected officials in Virginia and more than 20 other states that have passed online age-verification laws in recent years arguing that these laws are ineffective and urging them to put forward “real solutions” to the issue of minors accessing adult content: requiring parental controls on devices by default.

Virginia passed a bill in May 2023 similar to those passed across the country requiring users to provide government identification to prove they’re above the age of 18 before viewing pornography. In response, Pornhub blocked users with IP addresses based in states where those laws were passed, including Virginia.

Pornhub’s letter was sent Tuesday to Gov. Abigail Spanberger, Attorney General Jay Jones, and the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Bill Stanley Jr., R-Bedford County. Attempts to reach those three Thursday were unsuccessful.

In the letter, Pornhub calls age-verification laws “performative, ineffective, and unenforceable,” adding that they put users’ personal data at risk while causing non-compliant sites to grow in popularity.

“If you truly intend to protect minors online, you must acknowledge the facts and introduce a real solution,” the letter reads. “You have the power and the responsibility to mandate operating system providers like Apple, Microsoft and Google to render all mobile phones, tablets and computers child safe by enabling parental controls at the source and by default.”

The letter goes on to describe that Apple has shown it can do this reliably in its response to the United Kingdom’s 2023 Online Safety Act, which went into effect last summer. Apple updated its iOS to prevent access to porn sites from the device, including from a VPN, which Pornhub said in the letter resulted in UK children “benefitting from the strongest level of protection from age-inappropriate content online.”

Pornhub sent a letter to Apple, Microsoft and Google last winter asking them to make device-level parental controls the universal standard.

Mike Stabile, director of public policy for the Free Speech Coalition, said in an email that there’s been a “massive shift in traffic away from legal, compliant sites to pirate sites and sites that don’t conform to US law” since age-verification laws went into effect.

“While there are ways to prevent minors from accessing adult content, the laws passed in Virginia and elsewhere have been fundamentally flawed and ineffective,” Stabile said. “Two years later, adult content in Virginia is still widely and easily accessible without verification through social media and non-compliant sites outside the country. The vast majority of adult consumers have refused to comply. They simply find workarounds for the restrictions, either using VPNs or Google to find sites outside the US.”

Axios Richmond reported last year that 65% of the 57 top porn sites listed on a porn website aggregator were still fully accessible for Virginia users, and only four were asking for government ID.

Before signing Virginia’s age-verification law in spring 2023, former Gov. Glenn Youngkin told The Pilot in an interview, “I believe that children should be protected from pornography and I want to make sure that we do that.”

Navigating to Pornhub’s website in Virginia following the law’s passage brought users to a written statement from the company opposing the legislation, accompanied by a video featuring porn actress Cherie Deville reading it. Currently, the site allows Virginia users to watch content like podcasts and other nonporn videos on the site, but users are prompted to make an account before viewing any porn videos.

Users in Virginia are not currently able to make an account.

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