Confirmed. I’m not sure if I’ve ever visited pornhub before, so I can’t confirm it wasn’t already like this. Also, the American flag icon at the top of the message isn’t particularly comforting with this kind of online monitoring that feels so foreign…

The message:

Dear user,

As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to 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. Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving millions of platforms open and accessible. As we’ve seen in other states, such bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the millions of websites, with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply. Very few sites are able to compare to the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place. To protect minors and user privacy, any legislation must be enforced against all platforms offering adult content. Unfortunately, the Texas law for age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Not only will it not actually protect children, but it will also inevitably reduce content creators’ ability to post and distribute legal adult content and directly impact their ability to share the artistic messages they want to convey with it. The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users’ age on their device and to either deny or allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification. We call on all adult sites to comply with the law. Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users. We encourage you to: Learn more about device-based age verification* solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy. Contact your representatives and demand device-based verification solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy. *Device-Based Age Verification refers to any approach to age verification where the personal information that is used to verify the user’s age is either shared in-person at an authorized retailer, inputted locally into the user’s device, or stored on a network controlled by the device manufacturer or the supplier of the device’s operating system. Whether through pre-installed content blocking and filtering software, the disabling of web-browsing permissions, or other means, the user will then be prevented from accessing age-restricted content over the internet unless they are age-verified. To come to fruition, such an approach requires the cooperation of manufacturers and operating-system providers.

Texas representative: Dear colleagues, we need to remove the age verification law for all websites! It is very important! Or so I’ve heard.

Texas representative 2: I concur with my esteemed colleague. The age verification, for all websites, is very detrimental to the freedom of information. This is what I’m told.

Various representatives: hear, hear. At least that’s what my friend told me.

What I want to understand is how conservatives reconcile this bullshit with their history of ignoring age-of-consent laws, and their recent push to force children into the workforce, often in the more dangerous industries.

Do they want to protect children or not? Maybe they now define fetuses as children, and anyone not inside a womb is considered an adult?

It’s probably not even worth the effort to ponder such mysteries.