As of Tuesday, many Utahns navigating to Pornhub were met with a notice that they can’t enter the website, and a video of adult performer Cherie DeVille gently explaining that thanks to their elected officials—specifically Republican Senator Todd Weiler and governor Spencer Cox—they are now completely banned from using the site.
All of the sites under the same ownership as Pornhub (formerly Mindgeek, now Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners), including Brazzers, Redtube, Youporn, and several others, have also pulled out of Utah, with a message: “Please contact your representatives before it is too late and demand device-based verification solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy.”
Videos by VICE
Beyond the ECP-owned sites, others are putting content behind strict age gates. For example, if you live in Utah, are not using a VPN to make it seem like you do not live in Utah, and would like to watch porn on xHamster, you must now submit to a lengthy, time-consuming process that involves either using third-party facial analysis technology that estimates one’s age, or by uploading government-issued identification, both through the digital identity company Yoti.
To find out what it would take to go from navigating to xHamster for the first time after this change to seeing porn, Motherboard tested each method.
The facial analysis method involved about six steps if it went perfectly the first time, but sometimes it failed and needed to be redone, or required extra permissions from the browser. One of these steps requires clicking a box that specifically allows xHamster to have access to your webcam, which is likely to be a fraught decision for anyone who is about to jerk off.
The digital ID method is even more cumbersome. As a first-time user of Yoti, we did not have a seamless experience and identified 52 simple steps between deciding to use this method and being able to access porn. People who have used Yoti before or who don’t have various timeouts or document-scanning errors are likely to have significantly fewer steps.
In our case, the steps included downloading the Yoti app on a mobile phone, signing up for an account, scanning a QR code on the xHamster site, giving consent for Yoti to scan our face, entering a date of birth, agreeing to several pages of terms and conditions, a privacy policy, and acknowledgement of how Yoti may use personal data for research purposes, getting a verification code via text, creating a 5-digit pin, scanning and uploading a selfie, scanning a government-issued ID, and waiting for Yoti to review it. In this case, we uploaded our U.S. Passport to Yoti, tried to allow our iPhone to detect the details of our passport, eventually had to scan it manually, then waited several minutes for the app to verify it. Due to “higher demand than usual,” the app said, this would take longer than usual. How long is “usual,” the app did not say, but ultimately processing took about five minutes. Once it finished, we had to go back to the xHamster site to scan the QR code again because the original one had timed out. We then had to register an account on xHamster and were asked what our kinks were and what types of porn we wanted to see.
With either method, if they don’t make an xHamster account, users will scan their faces for Yoti every time they want to watch porn.
Yoti explains that it encrypts your data and that, once registered, it simply sends information to the website that explains that the person is older than 18 (and not their face, birthdate, or other information). The app also explains, however, that it will be easier to use the app if you allow it to share your data with other partners, and that doing so will help you “avoid Yoti ads.”
“With your permission, we’d like to understand how you came to download Yoti. We’d also like to learn more about how well our marketing campaigns are working,” the disclosure says. “To do this, we share anonymous data with our ad partners—but we’ll never sell or share your personal details with them … If you choose to allow tracking, you won’t see Yoti ads in the future.”
If more laws pass in more states that make adult websites—vaguely defined by many of the bills as anything with a high percentage of adult content, which would include sites like Twitter, Onlyfans, or anywhere that the material is meant primarily for adults—liable for not implementing these age-gates to bar children from accessing them, this cumbersome process won’t stay unique to Utah and will spread beyond just xHamster. People living in eight other states where similar laws are moving through the legislative process—Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Montana, California, Florida, Iowa, and Kansas—are likely to have similar experiences trying to access porn online, if their respective bills pass into law.
For adults living in these states, jumping through hoops to access legal content online is a burden. And for politicians pushing these laws, it could mean serious backlash once the laws go into effect and start interfering with their constituent’s masturbation habits. Weiler, the senator who championed the Utah bill, tweeted his hate mail that already started rolling in on Tuesday. “You Republicans claim that you’re for small government, but this bill is clear evidence to the contrary,” one person wrote to the Utah Senate contact form. “Maybe if you picked up a book once and a while your state would be able to do productive things like figuring out why Mormon leaders like to touch kids,” another wrote. (In 2022, documents revealed that a Utah lawmaker and prominent attorney for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints advised a bishop to ignore years of child sex abuse in his own church.)
According to data from the Free Speech Coalition, an adult performer advocacy group that’s tracking the progress of these laws, Arkansas and Mississippi’s age verification laws were both recently signed by their governors and will go into effect in July. Similar bills in Kentucky, South Dakota, and West Virginia failed to pass before the end of the legislative session.
Legislators in several more states, including New Jersey, South Carolina, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Alabama, have introduced bills that aim to make website operators, device manufacturers, and internet service providers liable for “material harmful to minors,” either by civil liability, private lawsuits, or government investigations.
In January, after Louisiana’s age verification law passed, Pornhub and other sites under the ECP umbrella started requiring age verification through government-issued ID.
Professionals working in the adult industry support safety measures that keep children off porn sites, and have often been pioneers of such technology. But age-verification laws that violate adult users’ privacy, while not even being effective at keeping kids away from mature content, is something many are raising an alarm about. “In order to achieve tangible outcomes and safeguard the interests of young people, it is imperative to regulate not just individual websites but the industry as a whole,” Alex Hawkins, vice president of xHamster, told Wired in March. “Ensuring global standards uniformity is of vital importance, as applying varying regulations to each country or state would prove extremely difficult to implement and maintain.”
Many argue that the device-level age restrictions that DeVille speaks about in her Pornhub ban video would be a more effective solution than forcing adults into convoluted, potentially invasive facial analysis just to jerk off. Parental controls, like the ones built into many laptops and phones today, would be harder to circumvent than a VPN. It’s very easy to download a VPN and select another, more permissive state or country’s server to browse from; something many Utah residents have figured out in the last day. In the 24 hours after the ban, searches for virtual private networks spiked in Utah, presumably as people scrambled to try to get around the ban.
Jason Koebler contributed reporting to this piece.
Correction 5/4/23: A previous version of this story incorrectly referred to Yoti’s age estimation technology as facial recognition.
