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.
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