Porn has become an unlikely battleground issue in this presidential election. Republicans, by and large, want to ban it. Democrats don’t and they’re running ad campaigns in key states targeting young men to remind them of that fact.
Banning porn isn’t hypothetical. It’s happening right now. As of November 1, Oklahomans can’t access Pornhub, one of the largest and most popular pornography websites on the internet. Oklahoma didn’t ban the site out right, it just made it almost impossible for its parent company to do business in the state.
On Friday, Oklahoma Senate Bill 1959 entered into force in the state. SB 1959 means that any porn site doing business in the state needs to verify the age of its users through a third-party platform. What, exactly, does that mean? Oklahoma wants the sites to see a driver’s license or other form of ID before users log on.
Rather than comply, Aylo—the parent company of Pornhub—has geoblocked its site in Oklahoma. If you’re logging into the site from an Oklahoma IP address, it won’t let you in. It’s done the same thing in Kentucky, Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Arkansas, Utah, Mississippi, Virginia, and Louisiana.
Aylo has been consistent in its messaging about this. In multiple statements over the past few years it’s said it wants to keep kids off its site and supports some form of age verification but the current run of laws are a violation of privacy. “In Louisiana last year, Pornhub was one of the few sites to comply with the new law,” Aylo told Spectrum 1 News after it pulled out of Kentucky. “Since then, our traffic in Louisiana dropped approximately 80%. These people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to darker 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.”
“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,” Aylo told the Oklahoman. “Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.”
Two different PACs have made porn an issue this election cycle. Polls and research show that young men are breaking for Trump in a big way. They’re also the demographic most likely to look at a porn site.
The Progress Action Fund has put out an ad in which an old white dude suddenly appears in the room of a young guy who’s beating off. He snatches the phone out of the young guy’s hands and tells him he’s not allowed to do that. He’s the young man’s republican congressman and, now that he’s won the election, he’s gonna ban porn. “You can’t tell me what to do! Get out of my bedroom, you creep!”
“I’m just gonna watch and make sure you don’t finish…illegally,” the GOP congressman says.
The Progress Action Fund has said it spent $2.5 million to get the ad in front of swing state voters in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and North Carolina. “The Republican Party is led by weird old men who are committed to invading our bedrooms,” Joe Jacobson, the founder of Progress Action Fund, said in a statement announcing the ad buy.
Another group, FTW PAC, is spending less money and getting more visceral. FTW PAC told NPR that it’s only raised $100,000 but that the ads they’re buying are super cheap. It’s a five second static image with Trump and J.D. Vance. The text reads “Trump’s Project 2025 will ban porn. Enjoy it while you can.” Then the ad tells watchers to “Google Trump porn ban.”
The ads are running before porn videos online in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. “These ads are like real cheap and it’s like weirdly relevant to this campaign,” Wally Nowinski, co-founder of FTW PAC, told NPR. He said the ads have only run the last few weeks of October and had already been viewed around 5 million times.
The ads are not running on Pornhub. Aylo doesn’t allow political advertisements on the site.
Would Trump actually ban porn? Project 2025, which Trump has attempted to distance himself from, is clear on the issue. “Pornography should be outlawed,” Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, writes in the forward. “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”
How much of Project 2025 will come to pass in a Trump administration is in question, but we don’t have to look to a hypothetical future to see how the GOP’s long running battle against pornography would play out. Simply look to Oklahoma, Texas, or any of the other states where Republican led legislatures are fighting against people’s right to watch porn.
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