Pornhub Set Up a Mirror Site to Get Around India’s Porn Ban (Motherboard/ Vice)
Read the full article by Samantha Cole at Motherboard.Vice.com
India revived an order that blocks pornographic websites, but users are working around it.
As the Indian government moves to again censor pornographic websites, users are trying to work around the ban.
In 2015, the Indian government ordered the country’s internet service providers to block access to 857 websites that were found to host pornographic content, citing a threat to morality and decency. After uproar on social media from citizens, as well as confusion and resistance from ISPs themselves, India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT reversed the order less than one week later.
In early October 2018, India’s Uttarakhand High Court reinstated that ban—with a few adjustments. It reviewed the list of sites and removed 30 websites that were deemed adult but not pornographic (including CollegeHumor and 9Gag), and made it optional for ISPs to leave sites that are free of child pornography unblocked, according to NDTV.
To get around any ISP blocks that were implemented, Pornhub’s set up a mirror website—a copy that replicates an existing site—at Pornhub.net.
“We saw the news coming out of India and the commotion it was causing on social media (Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and wanted to be proactive about supplying our fans with our content,” Corey Price, VP at Pornhub, told me in an email. “We know how often Indians peruse our site and wanted to act swiftly.”
As of 2017, India was Pornhub’s third highest-trafficking country, according to the Pornhub blog.
“Unlike political bans, porn bans may have the opposite of the intended effect by pushing otherwise apolitical citizens into networks that bypass government blockades,” Hawkins said in an xHamster blog post about the UK’s Digital Economy Act of 2017, which requires ISPs to block adult websites unless customers opt out.
As we’ve seen similar adult content bans happen in China, Egypt and Iceland—and with laws like FOSTA/SESTA that target sexual speech in the US—blocking porn is often a misguided attempt at solving a much deeper cultural issue, such as violence against women, child pornography, or sex trafficking. Far-reaching, over-broad censorship against “adult” content only limits access to life-saving tools for sex workers, and creeps into sex education for teens.