Republished on January 3 with data on the ‘surge’ in Google searches for workarounds in Florida, following Pornhub’s decision to block access from the state on January 1.
The U.S. clampdown on unrestricted online pornography escalated as 2025 began, with those in Florida losing access to the world’s most popular adult site on Jan. 1. Pornhub has campaigned against the requirement for age verification through government-issued ID, and along with other sites has demonstrated its strength of feeling by shutting down access from within the state rather than requesting ID.
Pornhub told its users that “the safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the best and most effective solution for protecting children and adults alike is to identify users by their device and allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that identification. Until a real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Florida.”
Putting the politics aside, the raft of U.S. states that have jumped on this age verification bandwagon has triggered the kind of rush to VPNs normally only seen in war-torn, autocratic or heavily censored markets—Iran, Russia, China and North Korea, rather than Florida, Texas and South Carolina. VPNMentor told me they “detected a surge of 1150% in VPN demand [in Florida] in the first few hours” after the new law came into effect on January 1, which they describe as “staggering.” The team also reported “a noteworthy 51% spike in demand for VPN services in [Florida] on December 19, 2024, the day after Aylo released their statement of geo-blocking Florida IP addresses to access their website.”
This follows similar surges in other states: “Pornhub’s banning of Utah-based users caused a 967% spike in VPN demand… and last year, the passing of adult-site-related age restriction laws in Texas caused a surge in demand of 234% in the state.”
Per TechDirt on Monday, “nearly 139 million U.S. residents live in states with age verification laws on the books that specifically target adult entertainment platforms.” Banning access to content—whether completely or absent personally identifiable information—is a privacy minefield. As EFF warned again last week, “mandatory age verification tools are surveillance systems that threaten everyone’s rights to speech and privacy, and introduce more harm than they seek to combat.”
VPNs enable users to mask their locations—pretending to be somewhere they’re not, by routing their web traffic via a server in that different place. With a click or a tap, a user stops presenting as being in Florida and is suddenly transported to New York or Boston—or even Singapore or London. As Cybernews says, “a VPN is the most reliable method to bypass these restrictions,” while Gizmodo reports that “Adults in Florida will use a VPN starting January 1st.”
As reported by 404Media, “Pornhub Is now blocked in almost all of the U.S. south… Almost two years ago, Louisiana passed a law that started a wave that’s since spread across the entire U.S. south, and has changed the way people there can access adult content. Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina join the list of 17 states that can’t access some of the most popular porn sites on the internet, because of regressive laws that claim to protect children but restrict adults’ use of the internet, instead.”
But before you download and install a VPN promising to make these restrictions vanish, you need to be careful—you might be taking a very serious risk with your data and your device. And that risk is especially acute for those using mobile devices—iPhones, iPads and Androids, which are plagued with cheap and nasty VPNs that might help mask your location but at a considerable, hidden cost. As reported by CBS News, “approximately 97% of traffic to Pornhub.com came from mobile devices.”
Most U.S. citizens have little if any need for a VPN. Web traffic is secure and the risk of public Wi-Fi is largely overblown—as long as you’re not sending sensitive, unencrypted content. There’s little need to beware you’re betraying your location by way of your IP address or the identity of the websites you are visiting. At least not for most users. But with 3 billion monthly visits to Pornhub’s website from the U.S., the new restrictions suddenly change everything.
Source: FORBES
