Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton continues to battle online pornography companies with his latest effort targeting two operators for violating House Bill (HB) 1181.
Multi Media LLC, which owns pornography website Chaturbate, is alleged by Paxton to have not complied with the required age verification on their site.
Hammy Media, which owns xHamster and other pornography websites, is also alleged to have not implemented the required age verification measures.
HB 1181 requires a website that intentionally publishes “sexual material harmful to minors” to verify the user’s identity through digital identification or a third-party verification system that uses government-issued identification. Websites found in violation of the law will be subject to fines and penalties.
“I will continue to aggressively enforce HB 1181. All pornography companies lacking proper age verification safeguards on their sites should consider themselves on notice, because they’re violating Texas law,” Paxton said in a press release.
Paxton lists the penalties that can be imposed if websites are found in violation of HB 1181, which includes up to $10,000 per day and an additional $10,000 if the company is illegally retaining identification information. Additionally, a company can be fined up to $250,000 if a child who is not properly age-verified is exposed to pornographic material on the site.
In February the attorney general sued Aylo Global Entertainment and Aylo USA, the parent company of Pornhub, after he alleged they were operating in “continuing violation of Texas law.” Following his lawsuit, Pornhub issued a lengthy statement on its landing page and blocked access to Texas users.
Searches for a virtual private network (VPN) rose 1,500 percent in the days following the Pornhub announcement. VPNs encrypt a user's data, hiding their Internet Protocol (ID) address and swapping it for the IP address of the VPN server that the connection is running through. A VPN can thus be used to bypass firewalls and unblock geographically restricted online content.
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