AUSTIN, Texas – In lawsuits filed Tuesday and publicly announced yesterday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued Multi Media, LLC, and Hammy Media, the operators of Chaturbate and Xhamster, respectively, for allegedly violating HB 1181, a state law that “requires reasonable age verification measures to protect minors from being exposed to harmful obscene material,” as Paxton’s office put it in a statement issued yesterday.
The new lawsuits follow on the heels of a complaint Paxton filed against Aylo Global Entertainment, the operator of Pornhub, in late February.
“I will continue to aggressively enforce HB 1181,” Paxton said in the statement issued yesterday. “All pornography companies lacking proper age verification safeguards on their sites should consider themselves on notice, because they’re violating Texas law.”
Paxton also observed that “Pornhub has now disabled its website in Texas” – a reference to the fact Pornhub is currently blocking traffic from the state.
“Sites like Pornhub are on the run because Texas has a law that aims to prevent them from showing harmful, obscene material to children,” Paxton said. “In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children. If they don’t want to comply, they should leave Texas.”
The complaints filed against Multi Media and Hammy Media are very similar in their construction, claims and the relief the state seeks from the court. Both complaints begin by stating the defendant “publishes sexually explicit material online that is accessible and harmful to Texas children and adolescents,” and both seek to fine the defendant retroactively to the effective date of the law.
One notable difference in the complaints is how they describe the existing warning pages on the company’s websites.
The complaint against Multi Media states that “minors who visit Defendant’s website are either immediately presented with sexual material harmful to minors with no form of verification needed, or they are simply asked to complete the trivial step of clicking an “I AGREE” button, which ostensibly verifies the viewer is over the age of 18.”
“The age verification methods used by the Defendant on its chaturbate.com website cannot be said to verify anything at all, and they wholly fail to comply with the requirements of Chapter 129B,” the complaint asserts.
With respect to the Hammy Media warning page, the state asserts that despite the company’s “ongoing failure to implement the protections required by Texas law,” the site’s warning page message is indication Hammy “recognizes the law’s importance.”
“Although it proclaims that ‘anyone with a minor in their household’ should take steps to ‘block your minors from accessing inappropriate content,’ the Defendant—as the provider of the inappropriate content—takes no meaningful steps to protect Texas children from the sexual material harmful to minors it distributes,” the complaint adds.
In both cases, the state asks the court to issue a permanent injunction enjoining the companies from “further violating” the section of state law at issue and to impose penalties retroactive to the effective date of the statute, through the filing of the lawsuit. In Hammy Media’s case, the penalty sought by the state is up to $1,670,000, along with an additional $10,000 for every day after the filing of the lawsuit. In the Multi Media case, the state seeks up to $1,780,000, plus $10,000 for each day following the lawsuit.
It is unclear why the amount of the initial fine sought is different between the two cases, as the complaints appear to have been filed on the same day and both seek to make the fine retroactive to September 19, 2023.
One notable aspect of the Aylo lawsuit is not present in either the complaint against Multi Media or Hammy Media – any claims relating to the section of the new law which requires adult websites to publish “public health warnings.” This is unsurprising, given that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently reinstated the trial court’s injunction against enforcement of those provisions, as part of the Free Speech Coalition’s ongoing challenge to HB 1181.
Attorney Corey Silverstein of Silverstein Legal told YNOT that Paxton “seems to care less about the ongoing constitutional challenge to HB 1181 as evidenced by the fact that he authorized the filing of two more lawsuits against adult entertainment companies.”
“It’s unfortunate that two more adult businesses must face persecution for being adult entertainment providers, led by an individual that clearly is motivated by conservative right-wing ideologies,” Silverstein added. “Mr. Paxton can claim that Texas is motivated by ‘protecting minors’ but in my opinion, this is about Texas controlling what individuals can see and think in direct contravention of the First Amendment.”
Gavel image by Sora Shimazaki from Pexels
