Most people don’t visit Pornhub in pursuit of news on today’s politics. But as of yesterday, anyone attempting to access the site from a Utah-based IP address will be greeted by a video of adult performer Cherie DeVille, urging them to contact the state’s elected officials about its new age verification law.

The Online Pornography Viewing Age Requirements bill, which Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed into law in March, requires users to fork over their ID before accessing the site’s adult offerings—and it’s only the latest in a slew of new regulations billed as an effort to protect children from porn. In January, the passage of a Louisiana state law that makes porn sites liable for content deemed “harmful to minors” prompted Pornhub to begin to require age verification; in the months since, several copycat bills started moving through state legislatures—leading to this recent instance of public protest, originally reported by Vice.

“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,” DeVille says, explaining that mandating age verification without proper enforcement gives platforms the opportunity to choose whether or not to comply—ultimately driving traffic to sites with fewer safety measures in place. “Until a real solution is offered,” she says, “we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website.”

“For conservative groups, the potential threat posed to children has long served as a bargaining chip in the battle against sexual expression, which in turn increases all sorts of censorship—from obscenity laws to the annual discourse about kink at pride.”

DeVille, who also appeared in the recent Pornhub documentary Money Shot, is an outspoken advocate for an industry that has long been targeted. “The problem is that the war on Pornhub is a proxy war to take down the entire legal sex work industry,” she writes for Rolling Stone, explaining that, if Christian groups really cared about ending child porn, they’d go after Facebook, which hosts far more child sexual abuse material, with 20.3 million reported incidents in 2020 compared to Pornhub’s 13,229.

At the forefront of the war on porn are organizations like Exodus Cry, the conservative operation behind the viral #TraffickingHub campaign, which brought about massive reputational backlash for the supersite in 2020. While it’s billed as “a non-religious, non-partisan effort,” the organization—a fringe Evangelical group with ties to the Christian right, which claims to have been “prayed” into existence in a Missouri church—doesn’t just want to protect children and victims of sexual violence. Rather, Exodus Cry aims to abolish the commercial sex industry altogether. Similarly, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE)—formerly known as “Morality in Media”—positions itself as a defender of sex trafficking victims, but in fact lobbies against all forms of sexual expression, from same-sex marriage to sex education.

While geared toward children, these mandatory age verification bills don’t just affect the internet’s youngest users—they impact everyone, leading us further toward an internet where private data is collected and sold. “Age verification systems are surveillance systems,” writes the Electronic Frontier Foundation, adding that privacy organizations have been concerned about age verification laws for decades—including the previous federal law COPA, the Child Online Protection Act, which was struck down 20 years ago for its inadvertent limitations on the constitutional rights of adults. These laws also pose a danger to the tens of millions of US residents without a form of government-issued identification—often lower-income people who are already marginalized, and could be further endangered by being kicked off the internet.

“Whether put forth by state legislators or financial institutions like Mastercard, these policies—which claim to shield vulnerable people from exploitation—often take aim at sex itself, leaving sex workers caught in the crosshairs.”

Equally concerned are sex workers themselves, for whom age verification requirements create a litany of challenges. For instance, Mastercard, which was the target of conservative lobbyists during the #TraffickingHub campaign, has since rolled out a policy requiring porn performers to submit their IDs in order to upload adult content to sites like Pornhub and OnlyFans—despite the fact that the payment processor, like many financial institutions, has been known to flag and shut down the accounts of individuals determined to be involved in sex work. This means that, in order to upload adult content, you must submit your identification—but as a consequence, you’re more likely to be refused service by the same financial institutions that put such policies in place.

Whether put forth by state legislators or financial institutions like Mastercard, these policies—which claim to shield vulnerable people from exploitation—often take aim at sex itself, leaving sex workers caught in the crosshairs. For conservative groups, the potential threat posed to children has long served as a bargaining chip in the battle against sexual expression, which in turn increases all sorts of censorship—from obscenity laws to the annual discourse about kink at pride. Similarly, legislation aimed at making the internet safer for children often has the real-world impact of chipping away at everyone else’s right to privacy, free speech, and sexual expression.

Take, for instance, FOSTA-SESTA, the 2018 bills which repealed protections that had prevented online platforms from being held accountable for user-posted sexual content. Though framed as an effort to hold child traffickers accountable, FOSTA-SESTA’s actual impact was to incentivize websites to crack down on sexual speech of all kinds, lest they be held liable for anything problematic that slipped through the cracks. Many platforms chose to ban sexual content entirely—removing the ability for sex workers to advertise their services and vet clients online, while also making it harder to find and persecute actual instances of child trafficking. The reality is that “making the internet safe for children” often makes the real world more dangerous for sex workers—and for the Evangelical organizations that advocate for such changes, that’s exactly the point.