Pornhub is protesting this law and others by blocking the site.
Pornhub blocked all users in Arkansas after the state’s new age verification law went into effect on Tuesday. The law requires porn sites to verify that users are at least 18 years old. Pornhub argued that requiring ID verification actually harms users’ privacy and puts children at risk. MindGeek, Pornhub’s operator, has decided to block access from states with similar age verification laws. After complying with a similar law in Louisiana, Pornhub traffic dropped by 80%, so they decided blocking access entirely was preferable to implementing age verification.
States they have blocked for similar laws: Virginia, Utah, Mississippi.
In Louisiana the first state to do this they tried to comply and their traffic decreased by 80%.
For extra linguistic amusement, they also mention the state of Virginia, etymologically descending from “virgin” from Latin “virgo”, which descended from “virga”, which happens to also have been an euphemism for “penis” in Latin, from where it descended into the French “verge” keeping the meaning, and from there to the English “verge”, where initially did also mean “penis”, but lost the meaning over time.
So, when reading about PornHub in Virginia on TheVerge… you can smile twice, or more 😉
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For extra linguistic amusement, they also mention the state of Virginia, etymologically descending from “virgin” from Latin “virgo”, which descended from “virga”, which happens to also have been an euphemism for “penis” in Latin, from where it descended into the French “verge” keeping the meaning, and from there to the English “verge”, where initially did also mean “penis”, but lost the meaning over time.
So, when reading about PornHub in Virginia on TheVerge… you can smile twice, or more 😉
Thank you for making the article ~20% cooler
Thank you for linguistic enlightenment, and for the extra smiles.