Few online companies are as exuberantly, passionately interested in spreading their data around as PornHub. Through its (surprisingly not NSFW) Insights blog, the streaming platform regularly releases charts and graphs demonstrating all sorts of trends in its users, everything from the search terms that trend on U.S. election days, to the effects of the Oscars on porn consumption, to—and if we’re being honest, this one is our favorite—a list of the most-frequently-misspelled porn search terms in the United States, by state. (Shout-out to everybody in Nevada who’s super into MIFLs.)
The sheer number of PornHub maps that have been officially distributed over the years means that it’s fairly easy for a fake to get into the mix—even when the fake contends, as one that went viral earlier tonight did, that the people of Kentucky have a very special relationship with The King Of Queens.
Which is to say: Actor Kevin James is trending on Twitter tonight (currently sitting at No. 24 on the topics list) after people became convinced that he’s as popular in Louisville as “Goth hospitals” are in Oklahoma. All of this on account of an apparently fake PornHub map that’s being passed around, spreading the disinformation that people in Florida are constantly searching for boat-based pornography.
The provenance of the map—“droopy balls” and all—has since been claimed by Twitter user @SortaBad, who tweeted out the original image back in February of 2019. That tracks with a reverse Google Images search of the map, which shows that it trends on one of those “the internet forgets, then remembers again” cycles that often keep viral gullibility going for years, being discussed previously in 2019, and then late 2020, as people continue to be fascinated by the hypothetical genre of Kevin James porn.
For what it’s worth, PornHub did release a map of the most relatively popular search terms by state back in 2017, which tragically lacks any mention of any of the cast members of Here Comes The Boom.