>> As you may know, your elected officials have required us to verify your age before
granting you access to our website.
While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission,
giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most
effective solution for protecting our users and, in fact,
will put children and your privacy at risk.
In addition, mandating age verification without proper enforcement gives
platforms the opportunity to choose whether or not to comply.
As we've seen in other states,
this just drives traffic to sites with far fewer safety measures in place.
>> If you live in Utah and you want to get a little frisky, potentially with
a partner, maybe with yourself, while watching pornhub, you'll be greeted
by adult actor Sherry Deville saying exactly what you just saw in that video.
Because there is this ongoing spat between pornhub and
state lawmakers in Utah who want to implement age verification laws.
Now, pornhub has blocked everyone in the state of Utah from accessing its
content due to the state legislature passing these new age verification laws.
I want to give you a few more details on that, and
then I want to hear your thoughts, Jake.
So Utah governor Spencer Cox signed SB 287.
It's the online pornography viewing age requirements,
and that signed into law went into effect on May 2.
And here's what the text states.
A commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or
distributes material harmful to minors on the Internet from a website that
contains a substantial portion of such material shall be held liable if
the entity fails to perform reasonable age verification methods to
verify the age of an individual attempting to access the material.
Now, companies that don't comply will be held liable, and
they could be sued if a minor managed to access their content.
The law also requires social media companies to verify all
Utah users' ages starting March 1 of 2024 and
also block accounts of users who don't supply age verification.
So it's interesting how pornhub is responding to this.
I don't know how I feel about it because I do think that there should be some
mechanism of verifying the age of people who are trying to access that content.
>> Yeah, so, no, this is a near impossible situation.
What I was going to start with is, look, I get the concept behind age verification,
because do you really want tiny little kids watching porn?
No, you don't.
I hope almost all parents don't, depending on the age, obviously, but
certainly under 13, etc.
And for a lot of parents, it's 18.
But that's parenting.
That's up to you guys how you want to do that, right?
So the devil's in the details here, though.
Number one, when you say to a porn site, you have to put in your ID first.
It's easy to say, if you're under 18 or over 18, click here.
Well, everybody clicks there.
Who cares, right?
That doesn't really prove anything.
But if you have to put in any kind of identifying information,
nobody's going to go to that site.
>> No, I disagree.
>> Okay, yeah, I might be wrong.
>> Maybe with porn.
Maybe that is the case, you're right, I didn't think about that.
Because I don't see the stigma in people watching porn.
But I get what you're saying.
>> Look, imagine you're a regular dude, okay?
And now that company has exactly who you are and all the different porn
that you've watched, how long you watched it, etc, etc.
>> Yeah, that'd be bad, I guess.
>> Nobody wants that.
>> Nobody wants that, no.
>> And so they're not going to do it if they're kids or if they're adults.
So that's going to totally tank their business.
So it's basically saying you can't have this company.
>> But what's really interesting is that Pornhub is already complying with other
age verification requirements in other states like Louisiana.
>> But it depends on how you structure it, right?
If you structure it as click here.
Yeah, okay, we could live with that.
If you say, okay, give me, I'm making up examples here now.
Give me a photocopy of your driver's license and upload it to the site.
Ain't nobody going to do that, okay?
So it depends on how you structure it,
which is actually going to get to the main point.
>> Okay, let me get to that caveat, though, of the Louisiana law.
Okay, this is what we know.
Let's go to graphic four here.
Louisiana has a state-created digital wallet that Pornhub
uses to check users digital driver's licenses.
Utah has no such verification tool, and maybe that's the issue here, right?
Like, if they create a similar mechanism like this digital wallet, it could work.
And pornhub is already complying with that law in Louisiana.
>> I'll tell you why it works.
Because in Louisiana, they don't know that Pornhub is getting their ID
because they have some rando digital wallet somewhere, and
Pornhub is accessing it through the systems that they've set up.
But Bob, when he's going to pornhub, when he clicks, Yeah, sure, I accept.
Doesn't know that they're going to find out all of his personal information
disaster.
>> Disaster. >> Okay,
that's my guess as to why it works in Louisiana and doesn't in Utah.
>> Okay, then I'm- >> But in Utah, when you say,
Bob, give me your driver's license, he's like, no way, no way.
>> Yeah, you know what?
I changed my mind.
I'm against the age verification.
>> Yeah, now I'm going to give you one more reason why you should be against it.
Even though we all get it, we don't want,
especially under 13-year-olds watching porn.
>> I also don't want state surveillance of our online activities that
are completely harmless and none of their business.
>> 100%, and by the way, you don't know who in the home is watching what.
All of this is disgusting, okay?
Was it Bob, or was it Bob's son or Bob's daughter or Bob's wife or
Bob's friend who was over?
My God, all of this is such an unbelievable invasion of our privacy.
Okay, so, now but the last point pretty much knocks it out, because,
guys, what happens is if you get the so called legitimate sites to do all these
things that are going to basically shut down their business in that state.
Well, it's not like people aren't going to go to get porn online.
They're going to, and you know what they're going to do?
They're going to go to companies that are based in Bermuda, Bahamas,
Cayman Islands, okay?
I know it.
I lived it with Internet gambling.
Internet gambling, America said, well, Sheldon Adelson has bribed all of us.
You will have no Internet gambling.
Okay, so what happened?
They set it up in the Caribbean, right.
And then what do we do?
We went to it, because people like me were gambling addicts, right?
And we're like, I got to bet on that game.
But this is, now I'm talking about a long time ago, when I was in Miami,
20 years ago, and I could see that their games were rigged.
You play blackjack on there, and
I don't want to get into a long conversation about it.
Bottom line is, I thought for sure it was rigged.
Why?
Because they're based in Rando Country that has no regulations, so
of course they could rig the game.
What difference does it make?
So reasonable regulations protects consumers.
These regulations that don't make sense actually leads to the consumer being
less protected, not more protected.
>> Yeah, that's right.
And that is definitely a concern that was outlined in the reporting here.
I think that we need to accept that the Internet has,
I don't know, destroyed your control and power.
>> Yeah. >> In a lot of ways, right?
>> That's exactly right.
And for parents, it's so challenging.
So I'm not here to judge any parent at all, but we have to do parenting.
We don't have a choice because you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
You can't put all of the sites all across the world on the Internet back
into a bottle.
And no, there's no more porn, and
you got to drive to the Ramada Inn to try to get it from a vending machine.
Okay, that's pretty specific, but you get my point.
Yes, they had them in vending machines.
Okay, but guys, this is why also all the other Republican laws banning drag
queens from reading books in front of kids and attacking trans people,
LGBTQ people, just don't say their names in school, etc.
None of that makes any sense because if you cared about the children and
their purity, what are you talking about?
The Internet has donkey sex, right?
The Internet has every kind of sex you can imagine.
You don't need any drag queens or anything.
By the way, if you wanted that, that's also on the Internet, right, and
any kid can access it at any time.
In America, we have nonstop, nonsensical debates,
debates that don't make any sense and no one's even trying to make sense.
Why? Because we got to do identity politics and
we got to hate each other so that the people in power can continue to rob us.
And this is just another example of it.