Philippine government blocks Pornhub and other adult websites

The Philippine government has recently imposed a ban on accessing pornographic websites, attributing the block towards curbing child pornography.

As Inquirer.net reports, websites such as pornhub.com and xvideos.com are now blocked from internet users' access, whether from a PC or mobile device. If they attempt to access said websites, they will now be greeted by a message which states the following:

“This website has been ordered blocked under authority of the Philippine government pursuant to Republic Act 9775 or the Anti-Child Pornography Law"

This ban comes after adult website company Pornhub published its 2016 Year in Review, which found that the Philippines was the top country spending the most time on the site per-visit, beating South Africa and the United States. The country also ranks 14th among the top countries that visit Pornhub.

Back in 2014, the National Telecommunications Commission of the Philippines issued a memorandum to local internet service providers, ordering them to block access to pornographic websites in light of R.A. 9775. It is currently not known if this is part of that effort.

Philippine tech news website YugaTech conducted an investigation regarding why legitimate adult websites were marked blocked due to child pornography. Some of their findings were:

• The website does not need to have ALL child porn. A single page, photo or video that features child porn already qualifies the entire site to be blocked.
• Filtering is supposed to be the more logical approach but it is very hard or tedious to block specific content or pages than blocking the entire site or domain. And since these sites are not under the Philippine jurisdiction, there’s no other legal way but to just block them.
• Even if legit adult sites do not publish child porn, the users are the ones doing it which makes it hard for these porn sites to monitor and remove. Others may have an internal team to weed out these submissions but the sheer volume of them makes it much harder and costly.

It is still not known how wide the ban is. Also, it seems that the block depends upon your ISP. In our own testing, we found that some providers still permit access to the adult websites, without the said message being displayed.

Source: Inquirer.net, YugaTech