US Sex Sells News

VPN company reports a massive rise in VPN demand on 1st of January 2025 when a new Florida censorship law requiring age/ID verification for access to porn came into force. VPN-pushing vpnMentor documented a rather incredible 1150% spike in Floridians wanting to use a VPN to hide their location.

The major porn website Pornhub decided to self ban access from any IP address based in Florida. So even those viewers willing to stupidly hand over ID data to a porn site would be blocked, leaving a VPN as the main way of continuing to access Pornhub.

A vpnMentor spokesperson explained to the tech news site The Register:

To measure the impact of VPN demand the research team compiles data from a variety of sources. The team uses internal tools to assess changes in terms of search volume, web traffic, and clicks related to VPN services in general. We work with different metrics which we analyze, and we evaluate the searches or impressions that transform into downloads.

In March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Online Protection for Minors act, aka House Bill 3 , into law. The legislation requires websites to verify visitors' ages, and for those hosting a substantial portion of material harmful to minors, such as Pornhub, to block access to anyone under 18 in an effort to prevent kids and teens from peeping on any pornographic videos.  HB3 allows fines of up to $50,000 for websites that don't comply with the regulations.

And so in response, Pornhub's parent company Aylo decided to yank the site from Florida users as it had already done in other states with similar laws, including Kentucky, Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, North Carolina, Montana, Mississippi, Virginia, Arkansas, and Utah. Pornhub explained:

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.

A group of Florida-based strip clubs and adult entertainment venues is preparing to sue their state government for recently adopting a law that requires all performers to be at least 21 years old. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the age discrimination law as House Bill (HB) 7063.

The bill enters force on July 1, 2024, so litigation is expected to be filed in the coming weeks. Bloomberg Law senior correspondent Chris Marr reports that attorneys in Fort Lauderdale are preparing to represent club owners and other venues to challenge the statewide law. HB 7063 broadly applies to strip clubs, burlesque shows, adult bookstores and other establishments considered legal adult entertainment under Florida obscenity statutes.

Angelina Spencer-Crisp, a public affairs professional who manages trade groups representing adult entertainment clubs nationwide and locally in Florida, told AVN that HB 7063 is a coordinated effort to limit freedoms for adults. She said:

They pass these laws ... saying that [human trafficking in clubs] is rampant. And, you see all these taglines in the news saying there is a correlation between strip clubs and trafficking. Am I telling you that it never happens? No, I am not saying that. But what I am saying is that based on the government's own data, it is less than 1 percent.

A new Washington state law will make it illegal to share fake pornography that appears to depict real people having sex. Advancements in artificial intelligence have made it easy to use a single photograph to impose someone's features on realistic-looking deepfake porn. The new Washington law, which Gov. Jay Inslee signed last week, will make it a gross misdemeanor to knowingly share fabricated intimate images of people without their consent.

People can be prosecuted if they share deepfake porn of unconsenting adults more than once. 

The trouble is that such images and videos are already widely available on the internet and it seems horribly disproportionate to persecute people for passing on interesting snippets they come across.