The pornography industry often makes headlines related to human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, or social media regulations, but this time it’s in the news for running political ads. With less than a month to go before the presidential election, a coalition of pornography producers, distributors, and “performers” is running ads online, encouraging porn users to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

The $100,000 “Hands Off My Porn” campaign claims that former President Donald Trump will ban pornography if elected again. The claim is based on policy recommendations in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Trump has repeatedly disavowed.

Senior Trump campaign adviser Danielle Alvarez responded, “Since the Fall of 2023, President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term.”

Project 2025 authors and “Trump allies” are labeled “weirdos” in the ads, which claim that Trump will imprison porn producers. Holly Randall, a porn producer and “director” involved in the ad campaign, claimed that the pornography coalition has not coordinated with the Harris campaign or the Democratic Party but intends to increase their advertising budget.

Despite Randall’s protests, Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow at the Family Research Council, observed that the Harris campaign must at least be aware of the advertising venture.

“It is now legal for outside groups to coordinate expenditures with presidential campaigns,” Kilgannon noted. She continued, “While the fact of the porn expenditures themselves is shocking, the messaging around Project 2025 and the targeting of swing states would lead one to believe that these ads are coordinated with the [Democratic National Committee] and the Harris campaign.”

She continued, “Is this all the sitting vice president of the United States has to offer those who use pornography—empty threats that porn will be banned if she loses? Does she hope to distract the young men in this demographic from the very real prospect that in a Harris-Walz administration, they will be drafted for military service and shipped overseas to die on foreign soil?”

Kilgannon concluded, “It would be better to promise lower taxes, lower prices, and more jobs, but since Harris-Walz is not credible on those topics, it’s not surprising that the expert fearmongers at DNC would supplement their dire abortion messaging to women with porn-based ads for men.”

The ads will reportedly run in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. However, the claim that a second Trump administration would outlaw pornography may be at least partially undermined by the fact that over a third of U.S. states—including North Carolina and Georgia—have enacted age verification laws to prevent minors from accessing online porn, and pornography behemoth PornHub has outright stopped operating in many of those states.

When Utah passed age verification laws last year, PornHub’s parent company—then called MindGeek, now called Aylo—blocked access in Utah to PornHub and a number of other pornographic websites it owned.

PornHub has also shut down in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. When internet users visit the site, they are now met with a message criticizing the states’ laws barring minors from accessing pornography and urging porn users to contact their state representatives to complain.

The ad campaign comes in the wake of Harris’ recent appearance on “Call Her Daddy,” a sex podcast known for its vulgar and explicit language.

Child protection and anti-trafficking advocates have observed in the past that pornography creates a heightened demand for human trafficking, including child trafficking.

PornHub and its parent company even admitted in federal court last year that the companies profit from illegal sex trafficking: PornHub hosted videos from a sex trafficking pornography production company and profited from those videos. According to court documents, PornHub and Aylo either knew or should have known that the profits they were receiving were from human trafficking.

There are a number of allegations that PornHub and other major pornography distributors knowingly host and profit from human trafficking and videos depicting rape, pedophilia, bestiality, and other aberrant content.

Originally published by The Washington Stand