As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.
Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
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I’m not against proper age verifications as such, it would be like carding people in a store or a bar. But I just haven’t seen an implementation of it that isn’t prone to being a privacy nightmare and surveillance state shit.
I know there’s some systems that generate a token that verify that you are 18 and you give that to the site, so neither side directly meet so to say. The site knows only that you have a valid token for being 18 and the app or service you use to generate the token knows just that you wanted to token for something. I think Spain was figuring out a system like that.
ITT: People who don’t realize the advanced nature of fingerprinting that makes VPNs nearly useless in an authoritarian environment
Does DNS and having a privacy focused browser work?
I would like to dispute the primary supposition here that pornography is harmful. The use of pornography is nearly universal, and most of the harms that it supposedly causes are symptoms of other issues, or are invented to impose control of sexuality. The ability to reach out with the power of the law to impose religious edicts or project sexual hangups is one of the most esoteric, yet effective, forms of political control available other than violence. If you can control the way that people express their sexuality, you can probably also control their views through the monetization and restriction of sex.
Sexuality and privacy are human rights, and the creation of and access to pornography is protected by the first and fourth amendments under which so-called “age verification” is an unnecessary and excessive burden. If the idea is to prevent access to children, ask yourself why now all adults must now have their access prevented or interrupted.
Furthermore, it is not the state’s role to control childhood sexual development, and the idea that porn is harmful to minors is debatable at best and dubious at worst. Access to objectionable material is solely at the discretion of parents. The fact that they cannot effectively manage this is a symptom of another problem.
When Meta shows teenage girls makeup ads after they delete their selfies, or streaming apps are flooded with violent movies that are easily accessible to minors, this is acceptable. But when I want to watch porn it’s now my job to “protect minors” by compromising my privacy and security?
The real “danger” here is the availability of ideas that do not align with state power.
Feels like half the country wants to outlaw gay marriage and reimplement sodomy laws, so we’re not exactly coming at this issue from a great place right now.
I think i agree for the most part.
These energies would be better spent ensuring that porn stars aren’t being exploited and have access to appropriate support.
But in other news, VPNs are now really popular for some reason.
I wouldn’t put it past these lawmakers to be investors in VPN companies, so they can make money off of these laws.
Children browsing the ugliest part of the dark web in 3… 2… 1…
This is good.
It gives smaller porn sites a chance to compete with the big dogs because regulators can’t go after all of them.
Amusingly, as part of similar laws in the UK the regulator decided to make a public shame list of non-compliant websites.
Essentially if you don’t want to follow the government’s writ that you must send your ID to a shady offshore ID firm, they’ve kindly provided a list of websites that won’t ask for it!
With this on top of trying to claim extraterritorial powers against 4chan in the US (fucking lol), I’m starting to think a key check on tyranny in the UK is the incompetence of its public institutions.
Fortunately lawmakers think all internet porn is on PornHub and that you find it by going to w-w-w dot yahoo dot com and typing “sex video” or “naked ladies” in the search thing.
The only porn they have experience with are polaroid photos that they got from a friend who knows a guy who makes tasteful art for clients with “particular tastes.”
You can still hold up a picture of Norman Reedus to bypass age checks right?
If this doesnt make people stop using those sites, nothing will. :)
And yeah, like others have said, its of course a system that will be used to control people and remove semi-anonymity from the web.
The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent. This is an easy first step due to the longstanding controversy surrounding pornography.
It’s all about control.
The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent.
in 7 days, that’s what australia will have.
I hope to Darwin social media ends up requiring ID. I believe it would do wonders for democratic discourse. It was only last week, a number of large US right-wing accounts were revealed to be driven from outside the US. Is it healthy for democracies that so many people pay heed to foreign actors?
If you write an op-ed for a newspaper, the newspaper need to identify you as there is an editor who is responsible for what gets written in the paper. This ensures there’s someone who can stand to account for any libellous statements.
With social media we immediately reneged on this and allowed them to wash their hands; “we are just a channel” is a pretty bleak statement to make when the discourse on social media destroys the lives of minorities, encourages suicide, undermines our democracy with AI and troll farm bots.
And we can do this is a privacy preserving way - of course the social media companies feeds the opposite narrative because they don’t want to implicated in the piles of shit they shovel on top of our democracy.
If social media was required to ensure they could tie an account to a real person, which they needn’t reveal unless forced to by a court order, we would know that we were engaging with a real opinion, not something coughed up by a Putin-run AI bot or a Chinese troll farm.
The system required isn’t that complex.
A social media
- a social media company is opening a new account.
- it sends the person opening the account to any of the multitude of ways we can already verify identity online.
- the person is identified and issued an identity token, which gets sent to the social media company.
- the social media company says “great, this person is real and we can, if required by a court order, work with the identity company to reveal who this person is is”. Right now, all the social media company has is a token.
- the account is opened.
In a system likes this, the identity company doesn’t know who the person is; that sits with the social media company.
Nor does the identity service know which account is actually posting for this real person, all they know is they verified someone as part of an account opening process.
Social media should be treated like the press - make them accountable for what gets posted and allow them to place this accountability on a real person by labelling posts “op-eds” if, and only if, they know who is doing the posting.
We are letting large, anonymous money-men ruin our democracy behind the veil of “free discourse”. It’s not free to the many people who gets harmed by it.
I’m not going to give up my privacy over your fear of foreign bogeymen.
Bogeymen are imaginary. Political troll farms are real.
It’s all fun and games until the government decides that it really doesn’t like dissenting opinions. We’ve already seen serious erosion of 1A rights in the U.S.
It would be one thing to have this in a world with benevolent leadership. But that isn’t the world we are living in.
That’s the point.
You, as a common citizen, should not have to. But the moment you feel like to share your thought or opinion, you should be identifiable and made responsible for it.
The current social media outlets shield behind the argument they act solely as channels while at the same time fostering and allowing for “anonymous” groups or individuals to spout whatever views they want, often views that deter from advancing social and civilizational progress. Hence the current state of the world, with authoritarianism on a rise and hight like there wasn’t in nearly 70 years.
When the internet was made of individual websites, the person behind it was automatically made responsible for whatever they put on it. That was fair and reasonable.
Pushes like this, is assigning suspition/guilt before any wrong doing.
I will grant the overall facilitated acess to pornography is damaging the kids. There are already enough studies showing how the early access to porn is related to bad interpersonal relations on social, emotional and sexual level.
But this does not imply you should be identifying yourself to access adult content or anything on the web. Just impose curation. If it’s available to the public, you’re responsible for it.
Old school “dirty” books and magazines stores had controlled access and the really hardcore stuff was well out of reach of who should not get to it. Free porn is nice but there are things available that should be behind pay walls or at least registry, with identity verification.
Never thought I would live to see this day. Utterly pathetic. I remember even 20 years ago online censorship was extremely taboo.
Making it easy for normies to get online was a massive blunder.
Making it easy for normies to get online was a massive blunder.
Finally we’re starting to connect the dots.
Once the Disney-crowd enters the picture, it’s all over.
Blame folks like Jobs and Gates for this and all other tech giants who made technology extremely user friendly instead of educating the masses how to actually understand and use your computer safely. Now they are just sheeps.
Their problem is that they served private interests by making sure most computer users are beholden to a company instead of the community.
People might disagree with this, but Gates was way worse than Jobs. The entire windows ecosystem never should have existed.
Sure but one of those has been dead for over a decade and the other hasn’t been been active in the industry for even longer. There are more useful people to blame.
No it doesn’t. Mullvad costs less than 6 dollars per month: https://mullvad.net/en/pricing
Private Internet Access is less than $3/month.
Try reading it instead. Go old school. And while you’re at it, write yourself and share it. Bring back the times of hand to hand banned knowledge sharing.
But now seriously: that is completely stupid.
As anyone considered the amount of money that “industry” generates. Considering the US is so economy driven and concerned with jobs, maybe that argument can raise concerns.
🤔 I’m not sure that lawmakers really understand what they’re up against. If most VPN locations all eventually require government ID for porn, then some people will likely seek porn from places/networks that are… Less legitimate.
you mean more obscure, there are non-PH affiliate sites, most of them have the pre- sanatized PH content as well.
The death of freedoms by the day.
They can applaud because they have both hands free
those aren’t claps you’re hearing. might just be the half that can still watch porn…
I wouldn’t care if 1% of the population watched it. The truth is that enough of the population watches it that it is a useful tool to track and dox the population. People in power don’t care who you fuck or don’t fuck, they care how they can use who you fuck against you.
plus republicans are probably one of the largest audience for porn
