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Pornhub Sues Texas Over Age Verification Law
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Age verification for pornography has something like a 70% approval rating. It’s not a religious extremism issue, it’s a “normies don’t want or care about their freedoms issue”.
I think there's a lot of vague support for keeping porn away from children that evaporates in the context of the actual issue at hand where porn sites are being mandated to collect and store the IDs of every visitor.
The concept is not terrible, the implementation is. Passing this law with no secure way of proving identity is where it’s clearly just a Christo-fascist power move.
I think a law verifying your age over the internet inherently breaks the idea of a free internet, of which we are already seeing degradation of by Google and DRM/web integrity anyways.
I don't see how it doesn't violate free speech. Imagine needing the government's permission to talk to someone?
Edit: forgot a word
I agree. Even internet security protocols are at risk, and the dinosaurs responsible for writing laws don’t understand basic encryption let alone the idea that it is 100% a needed concept in a free, fair, and just society.
There are already age limitations that are constitutional. You can’t run for office, buy alcohol, drive a car etc.
That's not speech. You can age limit things, but not on speech. Beyond that, the limitations on speech have to meet certain conditions where it's in the publics best interest and doesn't put too much burden on the public.
And fuck sending your driver's license to random shady porn sites
I think there is a lot more to this that a secure way or protecting children.
It's the base idea that I have to prove who I am online at all. That I cannot lie. Lieing should be a fundamental right. Not identifying yourself should be a fundamental right. Giving a false name should be a fundamental right.
The way the US is going, with anti-LGBT laws popping up all over the place, I have less trust for the government collecting that information than the sketchy porn sites themselves.
You’re not wrong.
The only implementation I would support is one where the asking website doesn't know your ID, and the verifying website doesn't know what you're trying to visit. Essentially just asking for a one-time use token that verified your age, and providing that token to the website you're trying to visit.
Edit for a bit more detail: User authenticates to ID website, which provides them a token with age verification (true/false) and a short (10 minute?) TTL. This token is encrypted by the ID website. User then provides this token to the asking website (eg: pornhub). Pornhub then sends the token back to the ID website to decrypt it. All pornhub knows about you is whether or not you're of age, and the verifying website never knows what the token is for.
There would be too much value in tracking that token for such a scheme to stay secure. Governments or shady corporations or illegal black markets or all of the above would be all over keeping tabs on what sites are visited by which tokens and matching them to identities.
The whole point is that the token itself doesn't have any personal info attached to it, only a yes/no and expiry time.
I'll even one up my original suggestion - it uses standard public/private key encryption, where the government issues a simple json token with a yes/no Boolean and a TTL. The public key that can decrypt the tokens is public. Pornhub then decrypts the token and verifies the boolean and expiry date, all without talking to the government at all.
ISPs already have, and do sell that data.
The concept is fine, but even the best known implementation is impossible without putting an unacceptable level of trust in one group.
This should be parental controls - make websites declare a rating, then let the owners lock down devices
Nothing is going to be absolute, but we have to prioritize freedom or soon our Internet will look like China's. They've already been talking about banning vpns and kosa would make you tie ID to anywhere you can post - all social media is considered possible adult content by default
I like this idea. Have the W3C create a rating system that sites self-select, and then work with Microsoft, Apple, etc to adhere to those ratings in their parental-control systems. I also approve of Apple's idea of CSAM or explicit image scanning on devices where it blurs it out for minors. All of which can be controlled by parents, not governments.
"Are you over 18: Yes/No"
Think nobody is arguing against that. I'd rather not give 1000 different private companies my government ID who get hacked all the time. The same people passing these laws had nude magazines growing up too.
It's kinda tragic too. I do agree with the sentiment behind age verification, it is in the kids' best interest that they not be using porn at that age. But there's really no way to effectively enforce this without violating basic rights. There is no good solution. Given that dilemma, all we can do is try to better prepare parents to deal with this in their home.
Is it really that bad if kids see a bit of porn? Like really? I grew up before the internet, but even in my day porn mags and VHS tapes got passed around when I was a teenager. Kids are always going to be curious.
Even so on the internet there are much worse things than porn that are harmful for the development of children. There are various groups of questionable morality like incels, or other mysogynistic groups, alt right stuff like neonazis, christofascists, climate deniers, ... If I had children, I would be much more concerned about them falling into one of those ideological traps than them seeing some titties. Hell, even TikTok is probably more harmful for giving them a dopamine addiction and an increasingly short attention span.
So to me, it seems a bit weird to single out porn. It feels like a convenient scapegoat for parents who don't want to spend time raising their kids and paying attention to what they are looking at on the internet.
I don't have kids either, but my siblings and friends do, and kids today aren't just seeing a little porn. It's not like Playboys in the woods or a single 2 MB image downloaded for hours on dial-up. It's pretty violent sexual activities in video, like strangling or surprise anal sex. Even twenty years ago, my first sexual partners had moves they picked up from porn, but they weren't violent. Talking to young women today, the moves their partners are picking up and have been normalized by porn tend to be violent. Like, I never had a friend in college tell me that her boyfriend slapped her during sex and called her a dirty whore while she cried, but that seems to be a pretty common experience today.
The issue is that even older teens don't have the life experience to contextualize what they see in porn and separate it from how you act in real life. If you're into slapping people, that's fine, but you've got to talk to your partner about it before you do to. If you're getting your sex education from porn, then you don't get the people skills part that's important for successful relationships in real life.
This study touches on a lot of what I'm mentioning here, and they found a correlation between violence in teen relationships and porn viewing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6751001/
So, yeah. I don't know what the solution is. I don't think it's sending a copy of your ID to a porn site, which seems incredibly risky for other reasons. I think sex and relationship education would help a lot, but that only connects with the kids who listen. Obviously there's a parenting component there, but I don't know how many parents are mentally health enough to have those conversations honestly. 🙃 Probably not the ones who wrote this bill.
I don't really know what the answer is either, but you're right. The extremes we see in porn today are very concerning. The things you listed shouldn't be in main stream porn and need consent and open conversation outside of sex before adults who understand what they are doing actually do them. I find it crazy that it's made its way into mainstream videos and blame the idea of things having to be ever crazier, ever more extreme to get attention.
But blocking teenagers off from porn, or trying to, won't help anything. I think we need to be open, honest, and have real sex education. I also think these things are why some sex ed now includes actually how to have sex rather than the physical components. But that serves to give the prudish more ammo of how sex education is porn itself even when meant to be purely educational and combat these extremes people are seeing. There's so much nuance to the issue that I think a lot of people get bogged down on one part or on their own preconceptions.
At what age? 6? Sure.
16? 13? Less likely that it's "in their best interest", because they're now dealing with those physical and psychological changes that are very much in line with the content of porn.
Just like TV, movies, video games, books, and other forms of fantasy / entertainment, parents need to be involved, have earnest communication with, and provide education for, their kids about the porn they will be consuming.
But "porn is icky", so they won't.
How is it in their best interest not to consume porn?
I would have guessed that's where the religious oppression was targeted, whatwith being overly obsessed about peoples' sexualities.
Indeed, it's often stated but seldom justified. Religion is far more dangerous than boobs on a screen, we need to protect kids from sexual abuse in church instead
The simple "Are you over 18? Yes/No" prompt worked just fine. If a kid lies and presses yes, who fucking cares lol. They're not seeing it on accident at that point. We need to stop this puritan society, kids are going to explore this stuff. They always have and they always will.
70% approval rating but what's the base? If it only surveyed 10 people and 7 say yes, it is 70% but means nothing.
Genuinely curious where you're getting these numbers. I can't seem to find any formal public opinion polls on the enacted or proposed bills
There was a Politico article about this last week:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/08/age-law-online-porn-00110148
Here’s a Pew survey suggesting that the majority of Americans consider porn harmful:
Note that trends in this space are getting more conservative, rather than less. This tracks with my experience with Gen Z.
Admittedly, I have not seen any polling about specific legislation. It hasn’t been long since these bills were passed, and I don’t know if it’s a priority for pollsters. But if nothing else, just look through the thread. Lemmy leans way further left that the general public, and even here most people’s problems with it are about execution rather than intent.
A lot of Gen-Z, of Gen-Y and Millennials are re-adopting 1950's prudishness. That has the potential to really be horrible for a generation or two before the repression sparks another sexual revolution.
We call them Puriteens for a reason.
Edit: oh, something that really changes how these stats are viewed. The poll was conducted solely by phone.
I do think it's worth noting that they specifically polled swing states. It's a bit different imo to address political stances in specifically swing states and to use that to judge the beliefs of society overall. I think it's also worth noting exactly how they phrased the questions. These answers also make me think that these aren't really swing states at all. I'm appalled by them.
Women’s Sports: 56 percent supported (33 percent opposed) laws to protect women’s sports at the K-12 and collegiate levels.
Sex Changes for Minors: 56 percent supported (31 percent opposed) laws banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and physical sex change surgeries for children.
Sexual Topics in Schools: 60 percent supported (34 percent opposed) laws banning instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade.
Parental Notification: 59 percent supported (30 percent opposed) laws requiring schools to notify parents if their child identifies in class as transgender.
Age Verification for Porn: 77 percent supported (15 percent opposed) laws requiring age verification for accessing online pornography. Reining in Big Tech: 50 percent supported (36 percent opposed) laws preventing censorship of political speech by Big Tech.
https://americanprinciplesproject.org/media/new-app-poll-swing-state-voters-strongly-oppose-transgender-agenda/
I have a source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1365965/us-adults-support-online-age-verification-by-gender/
68% of people either Strongly or Somewhat support verification mechanisms for online content.