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Pornhub cries liberté after France enforces age-limit regulations
The Observer
|June 08, 2025
French visitors to the pornography website Pornhub were greeted with an unusual sight on Wednesday: not a collection of X-rated videos but a mocked up image of Eugène Delacroix's 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People.
Next to the picture was a statement of defiance more fitting to the 21st century. "Freedom has no off button," it read in English.
The second surprise was that there was no getting past Marianne to Pornhub's usual fare. The site's owner, Aylo, had preemptively blocked access to its porn empire, which includes the video-sharing platforms YouPorn, Redtube and Tube8 too.
Aylo, formerly MindGeek, was responding to a French law passed in 2024 mandating that pornography sites implement strict age-verification systems to prevent minors accessing adult content. More urgently, it was acting against a Friday deadline prescribed by the legislation. Since then all pornography users in France must verify their age using a credit card or government ID.
This story is from the June 08, 2025 edition of The Observer.
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