Warning that appears if you search one of 28,000 banned search terms on Pornhub as popular category is banned
The pornography industry is in freefall around the world, with more countries adding major sites to banned lists, and others coming down hard on X-rated content with new laws and regulations.
Amid concerns about the depiction of pornography online and what we could be exposing minors to, or how it could influence their sexual habits, 2025 has seen sweeping changes.
Alongside a climbing total of 25 US states demanding new age verification before accessing adult materials, we've seen Pornhub claim it's haemorrhaging users following a brief block in France, the United Kingdom introducing its own third-party verification, and Italy being the latest to threaten its 59 million residents with a ban.
Pornhub has shared its own concerns about how people will still attempt to access these materials online, and as well as accusations that they're being pushed toward sites that don't have the same safeguards in place, there's also been a spike in VPN usage to circumvent the new rules in the first place.
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Elsewhere, the UK looks set to add further restrictions, as 'choking' pornography will be reclassified on the same level as content involving minors and terrorism.
To avoid facing a $23.5 million fine or 10% of its global revenue, Pornhub will have to remove any content involving strangulation. This should be easier than you'd think, with Pornhub already having an apparent database of more than 28,000 banned terms. This extends to multiple languages and millions of keyword combinations, with the Internet Watch Foundation explaining how it launched a first-of-its-kind chatbot via Pornhub.
Anyone searching for terms like those involving 'children' or 'underage' is hit with a warning that signposts them to Stop It Now! UK and Ireland, where they will receive help and support to address their behaviour.
Before this, a 2020 expose from Vice revealed that while terms like 'deepfake' and 'non-consensual' would yield no results, videos involving this content could still be found on the site.
In 2022, the IWF confirmed: "Whenever someone visiting the Pornhub site appears to search for sexual images of children, it will prompt a message pop-up informing them that no results exist, and warning them that they have attempted to search for potentially abusive and illegal imagery."
The UK-based international non-profit was founded to find and remove images and videos of child sexual abuse from the web. Proving why this kind of innovation is needed, the IWF claimed that in the first 30 days since the project was launched in March 2022, 173,904 search attempts were potentially related to sexual imagery involving minors.
A February 2025 report maintains that while the term 'strangulation' is banned from many sites, 'choke' is a common term that's widely used.
With Pornhub's database of 28,000 words being unavailable, we'll likely never know what's on the list.
While some think that making porn a 'priority offence' under the Online Safety Act is a bit extreme, Minister for Victims and Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls, Alex Davies-Jones, has defended the decision. Explaining why strangulation porn is never safe, Davies Jones reiterated: "It takes 150 seconds for a death to occur if you are strangling someone and they are unconscious, it's extremely dangerous.
"What we are seeing is the normalisation of strangulation and choking in pornography, which is online and having a real world, offline consequence."