What was claimed
Pornhub was blocked for users in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.
Our verdict
This was a rumour that appears to be untrue. Pornhub worked normally when other fact checkers used software to simulate a visit from Russia.
Pornhub isn’t blocked in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine
1 March 2022
Several posts on Facebook have claimed that the pornography-hosting website Pornhub has been blocked for users in Russia since the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
Some of these posts include a screenshot of a tweet from 25 February 2022, which received more than 20,000 retweets. It claimed that Russian users who attempted to access the site were instead shown “a message that told them that the content has been stopped along with a Ukranian flag and message of Ukranian support [sic].”
We can’t verify whether this was true at 4:56pm on 25 February, when the tweet was posted. The author of the tweet cited another Twitter user as his source for the claim, but this user appears not to exist.
Subsequently, at least three fact checkers—Logically, Butac and Snopes—have used a software tool called a VPN to simulate a visit to Pornhub from Russia. All three confirmed that it appeared to be working normally. Other Twitter users have also said this.
Pornhub has been blocked in Russia in the past, but we have not been able to find any evidence besides these posts on social media that it was blocked after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Full Fact contacted MindGeek, the company that owns Pornhub, to ask whether the website had been unavailable to users in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine. We have not yet received a response.
Photo by franco alva on Unsplash
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because Pornhub appears to be working normally in Russia, and we can find no evidence that it was shut down there since the invasion of Ukraine.