 So, if you live in Texas and you're in the mood for a little bit of adult content right now, if you know what I mean, this is what happens when you try to go to one of the largest adult websites in the country. You're hit with this message that reads, Dear user, as you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you to access our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas's stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors while safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission. Providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online and in fact will put minors and your privacy at risk. And guess what? They're absolutely correct. But Texas is not the first state to do this. In fact, they're the seventh state to implement age verification requirements for adult websites. And each time a state has done this, Peehub has responded the same way by basically saying, we're not going to offer content in these states. NBC News reports, Texas is the latest in a string of states, including Montana, North Carolina, Louisiana, Utah, Arkansas, Mississippi and Virginia, where ILO, this is the parent company of Peehub, has restricted access to its porn sites in response to age verification laws. They add, and it's not just Pornhub. The entire portfolio of adult content platforms owned by Pornhub's parent company ILO, including Brasers, UPorn and Men.com have also removed access to their content in Texas. Now, before we talk about the efficacy of this law, I first want us to understand how it got to this point to where ILO, Peehub's parent company, decided to pull out of Texas altogether, pun non-intended, by the way. So last year, Texas' age verification law took effect and it was immediately challenged, expectedly so. And while it was being challenged, sites like Peehub weren't requiring driver's licenses because there was that injunction in place until November of last year, which is when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decided to vacate the injunction. So ILO, at that point, still wasn't complying with this law. And as a result, Texas' Attorney General Ken Paxton decided to sue them. And he's now claiming that they owe Texas $10,000 for every single day they were in violation. And it's been 160 days. So that means that they're on the hook for $1.6 million. And Pornhub's response has been to just duck out entirely. So that's how we got to this point. But when it comes to the efficacy of these types of laws, I think that Pornhub is one of those things that falls under the category of this is the responsibility of the parents, right? Parents who don't want their kids to consume that kind of content. They've got to police that content. Police, what their kids are doing, pay better attention, implement parental controls. But rather than leaving it up to parents to police the activity of their own kids, states like Texas have taken it upon themselves to assume the role of nanny in an all out effort to stop minors from accessing porn. But the problem is that this isn't going to stop minors from accessing porn. Rather, it could push them towards more dangerous websites, more sketchy websites that don't actually follow the law and ask for age verification at all, which we'll get to in a moment. But it doesn't just fail to protect kids. It also punishes adults and unnecessarily puts their identities at risk. As Barry Collins of Forbes explains, these types of laws don't mandate how driver's licenses are supposed to be stored. And that information could instantly become a huge honeypot for cyber attackers who could use that type of a database to extort registered users, want your employer, your family, your neighbors to know that you've signed up for this porn site, pay us $200 or else. But that's just one hypothetical issue. Another problem with these types of laws is that they are very easy to get around. In fact, Variety reports that search inquiries for VPNs in Texas quadrupled after Pee Hub shut off access on March 14th. In other words, you can't keep porn from horny people. If there's a will, there's a way. Now VPNs are widely available and a minor could just as easily mask their IP address to access Pee as an adult could. So the law just isn't effective. It's useless and adults shouldn't be punished for consuming content. That's perfectly legal. But by now, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton should know how ineffective this law is because ironically in his victory speech on Twitter, he got a response that kind of demonstrates why this isn't going to be as effective as he thinks. So he wrote, Pornhub has now disabled its website in Texas. Sites like Pornhub are on the run because Texas has a law that aims to prevent them from showing harmful, obscene material to children. We recently secured a major victory against Pornhub and other sites that sought to block this law from taking effect in Texas. Companies cannot get away with showing porn to children if they don't want to comply. Good riddance, but he might have declared victory a little bit too early because as Steve Monticelli points out, one of the replies to this tweet came from a notorious sex spam bot with a pussy in bio message. Now, for those who don't know, there is no age verification requirements in Texas for Twitter. So it might ask you your age, but you don't have to input your driver's license to access Twitter in Texas. And Twitter doesn't just link you to pornographic websites. Mind you, there is actual porn posted directly to Twitter. And we know this because Texas lawmaker Ted Cruz accidentally liked porn while still logged into his public account back in 2017. I think it was incest porn, if I'm remembering correctly. But to make matters even funnier, other Texans who celebrated the end of Pee Hub in their state also learned that the war had not yet been won, even though they declared victory in this battle short term, because Steve Monticelli had even more examples in an article for the Daily Dot. He writes, Texas State Representative Nate Shatzlein, who has said he believes all pornography should be banned, also celebrated porn hub leaving Texas and received identically ironic responses. Boom. Proud to have fought all session to require online ID verification for pornography Shatzlein posted on X. Thank you, Ken Paxton, for defending our bill. We must end the sexualization of children. This is step one to taking down the predatory porn industry. Quote, pussy in bio, a bot wrote under Shatzlein's post. Texan right wing influencers, such as Sarah Fields, were put in a similar situation after reveling over the news that porn hub is no longer accessible in Texas without a VPN. Texas didn't ban porn hub. Fields wrote on X. We placed an age restriction on it. Porn hub wants your children so bad they got mad about it and left Texas link in bio. Another porn spam bot responded. Observers were highly amused by the porn bot spam on such posts. Puppy in bio one joked another pointed out that porn is readily available on X. Yeah. So I mean, this kind of feels like the porn equivalent of George W. Bush's mission accomplished speech with regard to the Iraq war because they thought they won. But they were reminded very quickly that you kind of didn't though. So what's the lesson here? The lesson is that this policy created under the pretense of protecting children from porn isn't actually going to protect children. It'll just needlessly punish adults and put their personal information at risk for doing something that they are illegally entitled to do. But I think that's the point, right? I don't think that this is about kids at all. I think they just want to ban porn for everyone. And I say this because they're admitting it. They're saying this is one step closer to our goal of completely banning porn, and it's because this gets them closer to the Christian theocracy that they've been yearning for for decades. So I mean, of course, they just want to ban for everyone. And it was never really about the kids. And whenever a politician says they want to protect kids, usually that's a sign that they don't want to protect kids. And they're using that as an excuse to cultivate sympathy for whatever they're trying to sell you. But it's usually bullshit. Now, rather than finding ways to improve your life meaningfully in Texas, politicians there are just like continuing to go on this moral crusade against porn. Which do you think if you're in Texas and you vote for Republicans, this is going to meaningfully improve your life at all? And we all know that these politicians who are against porn, they consume it themselves. Like, are we kidding ourselves? Of course they consume porn. I'm sure that Ken Paxton whacked one out to porn before he wrote that tweet. So they are unserious and people need to know that.