All states Pornhub is banned from February 2026

The pornographic tube site Pornhub is now blocked in 23 US states.

This is due to age verification rules. These laws vary by state, but generally require visitors to a site with more than a third of the content to submit a government ID or other form of age verification. Louisiana was the first state to enact the bill a few years ago, and now others have followed suit. In June, the Supreme Court struck down Texas’ age-verification law as constitutional, setting a precedent for such bills that come before and after.

According to some preliminary research, age verification will not work to prevent children from porn sites. This is due to software such as VPNs that allow someone to appear to be in a different location, and due to non-compliant websites. (Florida’s attorney general is suing foreign-based sex sites for not implementing age verification.) However, these laws continue to be passed — and even on obscure websites, experts told Mashable.

While Pornhub is not banned in Louisiana, it is blocked in these states, a representative for Pornhub confirmed to Mashable:

• Alabama

• In Arizona

• Arkansas

• In Florida

• Georgia

• Idaho

• In Indiana

• Kansas

• in Kentucky

• Mississippi

• Missouri

• Montana

• Nebraska

• North Carolina

• North Dakota

• In Oklahoma

• South Carolina

• South Dakota

• Tennessee

• Texas

• Utah

• Virginia

• Wyoming

Pornhub is not banned in Ohio despite the state’s age-verification law, because of a clause that says establishing age-verification methods doesn’t apply to an interactive computer service provider (Aylo sees himself as one).

In Louisiana, where users must submit an ID to view Pornhub, the site has seen traffic drop by as much as 80 percent, Aylo (Pornhub’s parent company) told Mashable.

“These people didn’t stop looking for pornography. They just moved to the dark corners of the Internet that don’t ask users to verify their age, don’t follow the law, don’t take the user’s safety seriously, and usually don’t even moderate content. In fact, the rules just made the Internet more dangerous for adults and children,” said Aylo when asked to comment in January.

In a statement sent to Mashable, Aylo went on to say:

First, to be clear, Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any legislation regarding this should preserve user safety and privacy, and should effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults.

Unfortunately, the way many states around the world have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, impractical and dangerous. Any laws that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information puts user safety at risk. Furthermore, as experience has shown, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other ways to circumvent these rules.

Industry experts say that, in addition to being ineffective for their intended purposes, age verification laws also raise concerns about privacy protection and security as websites now have to handle (even more) people’s personal information. It will be difficult to remain anonymous online, which experts warn is a threat to free speech. Adult industry experts Mashable spoke to explained the age-verification rules that encourage device-level filters, as did Aylo in his statement.

Some in the adult industry worry about what a second term of Trump’s presidency will bring because of the conservative policy framework of Project 2025 and its measures to ban porn. One of the authors of Project 2025, Russell Vought, was caught on a secret recording saying that age verification laws are a “back door” to a broader ban on sex.