Around mid-March, Pornhub blocked its service in Texas in response to a lawsuit from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Back in 2023, the site sued Paxton to try to stop the enforcement of House Bill 1181. The law requires websites that host explicit content to display health warnings on their pages and put age-verification measures in place for users to access it.
"We just want to make sure that young children aren't accessing inappropriate material," HB 1181 author State Rep. Matt Shaheen (R-Plano) said.
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University of Texas at Dallas Assistant Professor Pengfei Zhang explained that usually, a site would need what's called "informed consent" where users would enter what their age is and have access to explicit sites.
"That's the simplest version," Zhang said. "But now it seems [that] to legislators around the state… are not satisfied with that simple practice."
However, people argue that the Texas law and the actions of disabling sites can violate First Amendment rights. It also brought up the conversation of obscenity.
"You know, sometimes people confuse obscenity and pornography, but they're not the same thing," said Tom Leatherbury, director of the First Amendment Clinic at SMU Deadman School of Law. "Not all pornography is obscene."
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