The Independent: Pornhub ban now covers more than a third of US states

[Celerity]

25. Or not....

The narrative is Utah leads the nation in pornography consumption. Data tell a different story

https://www.yahoo.com/news/narrative-utah-leads-nation-pornography-030000146.html

Wed, May 3, 2023 at 5:00 AM GMT+2

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While publications in the past have reported Utah as having the highest rate of pornography usage in the country, this narrative appears to be based on a single nearly 15-year-old study about “subscriptions” to a website that still remains anonymous.

For example, Pornhub’s own statistics from 2013 showed Utah ranked 40th in the U.S. in terms of page views. An article in Cyberpsychology said when controlled for broadband internet access, Utah ranks last based on Pornhub’s data.

As noted, the narrative of Utah residents consuming the most pornography emerged from the research report produced by then-Harvard Business professor Benjamin Edelman using data from 2008 or earlier. Edelman looked at zip codes from credit cards which an anonymous adult entertainment site gave him access to and said Utah had the most subscriptions out of any state in the country.

When Edelman published the research, he told the Deseret News, “one possibility is that Utah consumers find it difficult to obtain their desired adult entertainment through retail purchases. … As a result, Utah residents may be buying online (hence appearing in my dataset), whereas people elsewhere buy retail (hence not in my dataset).”

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