The folks who are interested in content like this will still search it out, but now they're more likely to end up on shadier sites instead. Pornhub (Aylo), as porn sites go, is legitimate and goes out of their way to remove problem content and follow laws and regulations. They are also based in Canada. I'm sure there are other sites that are much worse that will fill this vacuum.
The only thing PH doesn't seem keen on is compromising their users' privacy and serving as age-enforcer.
So this legislation seems to make things worse, not better. Sure, you can always say "well PH could just comply with the age-verification laws," but I applaud them for taking a stand on privacy, and also them saying "fine, if you don't like us here we'll leave." It's really a loss for exactly the states that are passing these laws. They'll just end up with people going to shadier sites.
What worries me most though, is that this will lead to people using VPNs more (which is fine), but then states making VPNs themselves illegal (they'll use terms like "tools to circumvent...") which is super bad.
I'll add that there's plenty of porn easily accessible on Reddit and Twitter and those websites haven't implemented any age verification measures yet. Chat apps like Discord and Telegram host a lot too.
My guess is if the lawmakers are successful in making porn websites comply with age verification then all social media websites will have to next.
> ... is legitimate and goes out of their way to remove problem content ...
This is blatantly not true. I know because I've reported a clearly illegal video on every avenue I could find (the report button, emailing support, etc..) and the video was only taken down when PornHub removed all videos expect the verified ones some years ago.
I didn't say that they remove every single piece of problem content, or that they remove every single thing a user flags. But I do believe that they go out of their way to do so. They make way too much money to do otherwise.
Also, they may (I hope) be a better company now than in the past, as your example seems to show (you indicate that they started requiring verification for uploaded videos). Maybe they grew up, or maybe they just realized that their revenue (or entire business) would be compromised unless they took serious, ongoing action.
In any case - Aylo/PH must certainly be better than many of the alternatives that are based in very permissive jurisdictions and just don't care. Those are the sites people in these Southern states are going to end up on now.
Yeah, no. They absolutely did not do everything in their capacity. The complete opposite is my anecdotal unsourced take.
I worked w/ a woman who used 1000s of sockpuppets of soldiers near military bases to try to wax out information about the aggression associated with their suggestion algorithms.
Pornhub is worse than YT when it comes to encouraging radicalism. She didn't even get to publish and she would receive dildos, fleshlights, and other horrific things. She left the country.
This isn’t a counterargument. Yes, mainstream US sites are not saints and have many serious issues. Also yes, they are least subject to US jurisdiction and can be held to some account. If these restrictions drive users to websites that are far, far worse then they will be doing more harm than good.
But whenever i've done so from alt accounts I get brigaded. I have literally paid people to edit comments to improve my tone and it makes no difference.
I'm just sharing a small, honest, account of lived experience. I come here for discussion. Not debate. certainly not argument. If i present myself incorrectly I try to act reflexively and openly.
Some people want to discount that and make everything fact based but sometimes sharing facts on the wrong forum just further reinforces injustice.
I do 20+ pushups, crunches, or burpees in between posts across the web. lol
Whenever I've hired a copy editor to help me deal with the line noise in my writing (sometimes a keyboard feels like a Ouija board to me) I've found they inject more errors (and more serious errors) than I do myself.
You seem to be having some communication misalignments. What ticked me off is the combativeness you displayed. Insisting hard on your side with words like “blatantly” and “Yeah, no”. Also doing burpees and pushups sounds interesting - are you overstimulated? Is that a form of stimming? Are you in the spectrum?
All aylo sites have a feature to take down content, it happens automatically and then content is sent for manual check. If it's a false report it's brought back online otherwise its permanently gone.
> So you're saying it was not true several years ago, but is true now?
IIRC, they only did anything because NYT op-ed writer basically went to war with them and shined a very bright light on all the shady stuff they were tolerating. That speaks to their true motivations.
This is troubling to me from a free speech perspective. I am no fan of porn -- and I definitely don't think children should have easy access to it -- but what worries me is the expansion of the definition of porn to suit political purposes. And more generally accepting this kind of censorship begins paving the road to more aggressive censorship elsewhere.
If you disagree with your neighbor, the goal should be able to learn to live with them in disagreement or persuade them over to your viewpoint without coercion or manipulation. Right now there are several movements across the political spectrum as well as the corporate sector to use the government to suppress speech they perceive as threatening. This should be troubling for all of us even when used for things that we might nominally view as good (such as preventing children from accessing porn).
> the expansion of the definition of porn to suit political purposes
How would that work? "Hate speech" for example is very easy to define broadly enough to ban basically any opinion those in power deem undesirable. But how would you do that with porn? Is the government going to somehow start classifying news articles criticizing particular political candidates as pornography? That seems like such a ridiculous stretch that it couldn't possibly work.
If there's any danger here, I think it's more the potential for collateral damage on human freedoms, like the right to online anonymity. (E.g. Widespread deployment of age verification systems requiring users to provide a government-issued ID.)
I think the OP might have meant "obscenity" that goes against "community standards" when he wrote "porn". I agree that defining crimechink and crimespeech as "porn" would be a stretch, but defining them as "obscenity" would be less so.
"Sex addiction counselor" sounds like the kind of person who thinks anyone who has ever looked at porn is a pervert if single and an adulterer if partnered, and makes persecuting those people her whole identity. Definitely not someone I'd trust to have a reasonable opinion crafting the laws that govern society.
The APA even removed sex addiction from the DSM-V, which isn't the end-all-be-all of what is or isn't a mental disorder, but is indicative of how science has broadly rejected the idea of sex addiction being a meaningful disorder.
Although the addiction model is controversial and not widely accepted, most professionals do acknowledge that psychological problems can drive maladaptive sexual behavior that causes significant personal and professional impairment. It’s important to stress that pornography use alone is not considered maladaptive, irrespective of local cultural norms that seek to restrict the sexual behavior of consenting adults.
AASECT (the largest professional body of sex therapists in the United States) has a definition of Out of Control Sexual Behavior, and Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder is retained by the ICD. Most consumers of pornography do not meet either definition, but it’s important to recognize that some do.
There are definitely sex negative counselors out there. Absolutely do not go to them.
But there do exist people who can't control a habit for almost any pleasurable thing. There are counselors who can help, and will also make clear that if you don't have a problem then you don't need their services.
Finding the right counselor for you can be difficult. But they are not all the same, and while any negative stereotype will have exemplars, they won't be universal.
(Right wing anti porn legislators, on the other hand, are all bad.)
Possibly, but the puritans of which you speak talked the way you do too. Puritans might be long gone, but people who do crazy assumption-piling to justify some hatred or other never will be.
Surely the title is misleading in that Pornhub is the entity blocking those states from accessing it, as they choose to not follow the new law. As-is it reads like the states are the ones blocking it, which they are not. They're simply asking for more than an "I promise I'm 18" button.
Oh yes, "simply" obey a law that would not respect the privacy of people, and given the current religious zealousness in the US, may expose customers to future danger.
I think some folks absolutely want to know what folks are watching what kind of porn.
Especially in rural areas, some of those wingnuts would like to go back to the days where you can lynch people you do not like.
Other than the wingnut faction pushing this legislation, I think some hope for a deterrent effect for minors as well as adults. They are wrong to expect any kind of deterrent effect of course.
How does age verification break privacy? I have to show ID to get into an adult "bookstore," to enter a bar, or purchase alcohol. I have to show ID to check into my hotel, get through airport security, drive my car, buy Pseudo. Are you saying there is absolutely no way to perform this action online in a way that respects privacy just the same as all of those operations? No way at all to do a verification that's immediately tossed in a privacy preserving way?
If so, then it sounds like maybe things that require age verification shouldn't be allowed to operate on the internet.
> Are you saying there is absolutely no way to perform this action online in a way that respects privacy just the same as all of those operations? No way at all to do a verification that's immediately tossed in a privacy preserving way?
There's ways yes but the bigger issue is that it's much harder to verify. When I show my ID to a cashier I can see whether they photocopy it or not. I can't verify websites and porn ones could be shady.
Not that I personally care that people know I watch porn. But maybe people do care.
One thing is to have someone visually checking on your ID you're an adult, another thing is to record your full name and IP address, along with the site you access, who knows on what insecure database and probably forever. When you leave a brick-and-mortar adult store, no one asks you what your name is, records it down next to your purchase, and sends it to state authorities.
These are two very different things.
This law is not only about Pornhub or porn, but about anything each state government consider "harmful". Porn is the excuse for blocking you from accessing, in a not-so-distant future, any topic your local government frames as harmful.
There are cryptographic tools (zero-knowledge proofs, for example) that can provide anonymous attestations for a user's age. The problem is that the infrastructure to support it isn't provided by the same government that's requiring it to exist.
And even if the private sector innovated here, there's no approval from the government to accept math nerd solutions as legally valid.
Which means you basically have to scan and upload your photo ID to these websites, or use a payment card, or something else that will stand up in court.
Do these cryptographic tools prevent the government entity providing them from knowing which websites verify your age? If not, then that's too much Uncle Sam watching over your shoulder as you watch your porn.
For a simple example, a JWT doesn't need to be done with shared secrets, and can instead use RSA private/public keys. The payload could contain just two fields like "issued" (to ensure the token isn't shared and reused) and "age" (what you want to share), you'd be able to decode the payload to see what's in it and know there's no identifying information, and the government site would provide the public key allowing anyone (like a porn site) to verify the JWT hasn't been tampered with without knowing who it was that got the JWT.
Yes, but the idea is they wouldn't know why or for what site. In the JWT version I'm imagining, the porn site would say "go to your government website, generate this token, then copy/paste it here". There's no connection between the porn site and government site, and if the public key was retrieved and cached earlier there isn't even a timing-based way to connect them.
(JWT in general is a bad solution, but let's ignore that for the sake of discussion.)
I think you're severely underestimating the efficacy of traffic analysis and correlation efforts.
PrivacyPass is a better starting point, IMHO. The Cwtch developers (Open Privacy) even implemented PrivPass over Ristretto255, which is objectively awesome.
Didn't find many details, so please excuse the questions.
So the user would get a number of signed tokens from the gov to prove age, then a token could be shared with a site that verifies age without connecting to gov, assuming it's already aware of the gov's public key?
What prevents the same token from being used by more than one person?
How can the site prove compliance with the law? Will they need to store the tokens for each user? Can the gov tie a stored token back to a particular person that that verified?
Yeah, I was assuming the JWT might not be the best, but my point was that it's a simple example that doesn't require someone to read a math-heavy page.
> I think you're severely underestimating the efficacy of traffic analysis and correlation efforts.
The porn site would have the public key already stored/cached, so there isn't any traffic to correlate. There's still an issue with the first request, but like I said, this is a simple example that's easy to understand without getting into anything math-heavy.
No. The output of the government site is an attestation of age. It's a bundle of bytes. The site doesn't know or care what you do with the attestation.
The commercial incentives around this are also terrible, given that the prevailing assumption is that a private third party will do the attestation as a for-profit service. It's practically guaranteed to add cost and liability for the porn vendor as well as risk of leaks, tracking, and data brokering for the consumer. It may as well have been designed to shut down free porn altogether.
And maybe it was, considering the history of porn regulation in the US. If you look at the requirements and contemporary rhetoric around 18 USC 2257 (yes, the thing that basically all legit porn sites with US operations have a disclaimer for), it was pretty blatantly intended to render the porn industry unable to operate. Porn producers were never actually intended to come into compliance, but rather presumed to be unable to (due to the ridiculous procedures and the supposed omnipresent use of underage, undocumented, and coerced performers).
> It may as well have been designed to shut down free porn altogether.
There was and is a fairly coordinated program of shopping this around to various legislative bodies (not only US states). It started maybe two years ago, I think. It didn't just catch on organically.
Some of it seems to be driven/funded by the AV companies, who presumably actually want the verification to happen. But a lot of the legwork and political contacts are provided by organizations that would definitely love to drive every porn site out of business. I doubt they expect to get all of them, or even all the free ones, but, sure, somebody like NCOSE knows that it's a major burden, and absolutely thinks that any damage to adults' access to porn is a positive feature.
It's not obvious that most of the legislators who vote for these things understand the implications at all.
So some of the people you could blame for this legislation definitely have such intentions, but probably not all of them.
> If you look at the requirements and contemporary rhetoric around 18 USC 2257 (yes, the thing that basically all legit porn sites with US operations have a disclaimer for), it was pretty blatantly intended to render the porn industry unable to operate.
Hmm. I'm ready to believe you, but 2257 doesn't seem totally infeasible to comply with in a VHS world. Dangerous to the performers, yes, because it requires tons of people to keep records of who they are and where they live, and those records are pretty much guaranteed to leak and be abused. An expensive nuisance, also yes. A chance to hound anybody who messes up out of business, and threaten them with prison, OK. Obnoxious overreach, sure. But totally impossible to comply with? I'm not sure about that. It actually seems easier than user AV.
The thing that always really got me about 2257 was that the claim was it was supposed to prevent another Traci Lords. They checked Traci Lords' ID. She showed ID. She had a real driver's license (based on a fake birth certificate, but it was the state that was supposed to check that, and anyway it was presumably a good fake). As far as I know, 2257 wouldn't even have slowed Traci Lords down.
> Hmm. I'm ready to believe you, but 2257 doesn't seem totally infeasible to comply with in a VHS world.
I'm not saying that it was supposed to be impossible to comply with per se, but rather that it was supposed to be impossible specifically for the porn industry as anti-porn crusaders imagined/alleged it to be at the time. There was a bunch of drug-war-like rhetoric about how porn had become more violent, exploitative, and outright criminal since 1970, when the previous government commission on the subject reported that porn wasn't an important social problem and should not be restricted for adults.
Which makes sense, and also sounds like applying monetary pressure, say losing access to multiple states in the US, would incentivize prioritizing some engineers into solving this. The reason it doesn't exist yet, is because we've collectively decided through indifference and inaction that an "I swear bro" button is fine in the virtual world, but not the physical, and have now learned that it's not enough.
there is a HUGE difference between presenting ID in the physical world and digital world. In the digital world, once I provide an ID it is there forever. and it will be used for who knows what by who knows who. the only way to compare the two would be if in the physical world we provided an ID and whoever requested it gets to keep it and of course no place like that exists, you flash the ID (not that much unlike “I am 18 I swear” button in a lot of places) and you move on
You didn't read the post you were replying to. That would be a "math nerd solution" that the states have not committed to accept, regardless of whether it actually works. Also, that sort of thing tends to require active cooperation from the entity issuing the IDs, which no state governments have committed to provide.
By the way, Pornhub actually has a preferred technical solution involving "device attestation". It's only marginally better than the snake oil the AV industry wants to use, and I don't like it, but they have said they'd stop objecting if something along those lines were standardized.
They just don't want to have to deal with a patchwork of mutually incompatible stuff (a) that's totally ineffective, (b) that leaves them either handling everybody's ID or dealing with questionable contractors to hold it, and/or (c) that leaves them having to convince the users to trust them or those questionable contractors with those ID images.
> require active cooperation from the entity issuing the IDs
It doesn't actually. Third party zero knowledge attestation works just fine. Think through the cryptosystem. It's possible for an authority to verify an ID for a given name and target site without revealing the former to the latter of the latter to the former
> No way at all to do a verification that's immediately tossed in a privacy preserving way?
Not if you want to be able to pass any kind of audit, no. Not unless the authority issuing the ID participates in a complicated cryptographic protocol. Which none of them do and which is definitely not standardized.
One of the early states passing these, I think it was Louisiana, actually did at least try to step up and deal with the privacy issue. They came up with a trusted-third-party thing. The third parties, who are private entities, have to pinky promise not to leak the data or keep them beyond certain limits. They are not audited. There are no actual penalties if they screw up. That's not acceptable assurance. There are also no limits on what they can charge, come to think of it, and it's not exactly going to be a large fluid market.
None of the other states even went that far. Nor did any of them try to come up with a shared standard.
There's definitely nothing out there that the user can verify as working, or that's certified by anybody the user should trust.
There are also the facts that--
1. All of the "age verification" protocols that the various activists are pushing and the various vendors are hawking are ineffective, in that any halfway motivated kid can easily figure out how to circumvent them, and
2. Kids just seeing porn isn't actually a big problem, especially if they've sought it out.
I've seen no auditing requirements on any bill, and in fact all that I've read make it illegal to retain information used for verification. Audits also aren't done in person; stings are. Why does auditing always come up with this topic?
It seems to me that these bills aren't prescriptive (they say you can use a "commercially reasonable" method). Most states are also moving to adopt the ISO mDL standard[0].
What? First, that has nothing to do with anything. Second, it's not true: most auditing has an in-person component, and many stings don't. Do you actually know what an audit is? Hint: a "pen test" isn't an audit and isn't much like an audit. Neither is a code review.
> Why does auditing always come up with this topic?
1. All security controls need to be audited.
2. There is a 100 percent chance that many of the organizations advocating for these laws, most of which would actually prefer for porn to be outlawed completely, will grab any chance they can to accuse sites of not complying. They'll either try to get sympathetic law enforcement agencies to take up those accusations, or, if they can find a legal avenue, they'll bring lawsuits themselves. They will undoubtedly find anecdotes of system failures, since any large-scale system will fail sometimes. They will claim that as evidence that the rules aren't being followed. Evidence, no matter how flimsy, has to be countered with other evidence, especially if you're in a "preponderance of the evidence" situation. It's pretty hard to show that what you're doing is reasonable or effective if you don't have at least a sample of records.
Do you know what an audit is? Have you ever worked somewhere with record keeping requirements? At a financial company I worked at, we recorded every customer interaction and every decision made for accounts (including "nothing to do now") along with the inputs to those decisions. Auditors would ask to see details of random accounts to show we were keeping those records and executing the correct logic. Your grocery store or liquor store aren't getting their shipments and sales audited for id checks. You can tell because they don't even always card you if you look old enough, or might accept being flashed an id. The way the law is enforced in person is that an underage person buys something they're not allowed to as part of a sting. You get in trouble for actually providing service to a minor. This is different from e.g. firearms dealers who do have to keep records.
Like I said, I've seen no laws requiring any audits or record keeping, and actually every law I've seen explicitly makes such records illegal. I don't see why the evidence that sites aren't doing their job wouldn't be the same as in person: the police have someone access the site without valid id, and the site didn't have a commercially reasonable system in place as a defense. If they're not doing their job, it will be easy for police to demonstrate it, and the site will actually be in the wrong.
That's not an "anecdote", just like selling cigarettes to a 16 year old without an id is not an "anecdote". That is breaking the law. It's on companies to follow the law every time.
Most if not all of those were met with complaints that we were on the slippery slope towards being a police state where the government forced its way into private matters.
Given that, your argument seems to be that since we are on the slippery slope, we might as well go further.
For what it's worth, I don't have to show ID to get into an adult bookstore, or enter a bar, or purchase alcohol, because I live in a place which doesn't require ids for people who are obviously old enough.
I've also stopped flying in part because I think airport security is oppressive and a facade, and I don't drive because I managed to find a place where I'm not forced to have a car to live. I hate the pseudoephedrine id law because I think the state should have no business in that matter, and like airport security it's a case of the government seeming to Doing Something even though it does nothing.
Last time I needed pseudoephedrine, I got a friend to buy it for me.
> Are you saying there is absolutely no way to perform this action online in a way that respects privacy just the same as all of those operations?
Correct. I can buy wine without an id because the store clerk can physically verify that I am of age without checking a piece of plastic or otherwise establishing my identity.
Once purchased I could of course give it to a local 16 year old, which would be illegal, but an id check wouldn't change things.
You'll have to have a camera check the user before each porn site visit, or at random checks, and deal with the false positives of a 16-year-old which looks 19 (or false negatives of a 21 year old who looks 17), and strict laws preventing any recording of that information, and somehow assure people that the laws will never change to collect more information - which is hard to believe given the slippery slope shown at airports and elsewhere.
> maybe things that require age verification shouldn't be allowed to operate on the internet.
How do you propose we do that? Block off all IP addresses at the national level for porn site servers hosted in other countries? Block DNS lookups for them? Prevent VPN use? Nix their ability to charge via Visa and MasterCard, or take payments via SWIFT?
I actually don’t think there’s a way to “toss” that information, no. In fact, if you don’t use any content blockers, and never clean your cookies - chances are the browser fingerprints and databasss already know your age with 90% certainty. Without any pictures of your documents flying around.
Pornhub is pretty tame compared to a lot of the stuff out there, which won't be blocked because it's hosted in Russia or wherever and won't comply. I don't think limiting access to mainstream porn sites is going to do anything positive wrt porn addiction, and it could drive people to much darker stuff.
a. the vast majority of people are neither addicted to porn nor lacking in ability to form relationships. if that has happened to some people they are a minority
b. pornhub has no monopoly over the internet porn industry. insofar as those men did get so addicted, that would have happened regardless of pornhub existing.
"a. the vast majority of people are neither addicted to porn nor lacking in ability to form relationships. if that has happened to some people they are a minority"
Dropping birth rates are just because kids are a burden these days. With both parents needing to work to pay for a house it's a huge hassle. I'm glad I never had any. My life is much freer now.
And we're not going to go extinct. Plenty of people want kids and have them. Maybe we'll reduce the population a bit which would be great. Less pollution, less pressure on the overloaded housing situation.
> Less pollution, less pressure on the overloaded housing situation.
Generally when one group shrinks in evolution, it doesn't reduce for long the total pressures on the environment. What usually happens is other groups grow into the new opportunities that have opened up.
> What usually happens is other groups grow into the new opportunities that have opened up.
Which is only a bad thing if you assume "other groups" are inherently worse. But if the current state is so bad people are openly cheering after a murder, perhaps there are more pressing issues - which likely also contribute to low birth rate.
I agree that porn addiction can be destructive. But the idea that you can somehow block porn is ludicrous. Work on the problem from some other angle. This is just puritanical politicians throwing their weight around.
> Work on the problem from some other angle. This is just puritanical politicians throwing their weight around.
Sure. But if I look at this objectively, I am not sure it is going to be solved from another angle by liberal societies any time soon. And religious societies, or at least those that are puritanical in this regards will get a significant and likely sustainable demographic advantage as a result. I think this speaks to the larger issues of why religion has persisted and why atheism has yet to be a sustainable endeavour, rather than a demographic sink. Truth doesn't actually matter, viability via demographic sustainability is how things are actually judged.
I don't think we should be attempting to force parenthood on children in order to solve birthrates. Maybe you should have to show proof of being a child to access porn? Might work.
Almost everyone watches porn and almost everyone has relationships. And if they don't it's not because they don't need sex. In fact sex is a less important part of relationships IMO. Being in an open relationship we both enjoy that with others too but we're not less special to each other. Those other people come and go and sex is a nice pleasure, but she's the one keeping me warm at night and comforting me when I'm sad. That matters a lot more to me.
Porn addiction does not exist in anything other than a possible symptom of some other mental health issue, but puritanical people like yourself and religious lobbyists like to pretend the degradation of society revolves around sexual liberty.
So you’ve to give up your privacy, share your deepest fantasies with some entity (private company or the state), risk future security breaches, and so on? Sure Pornhub may be blocking access to comply with the state law but it’s the state that is entirely at fault for exceeding its mandate and forcing its morals on the population, violating their free speech rights, and violating their right to privacy.
The phrasing doesn't necessarily imply that pornhub isn't the entity blocking it, but it does leave it for the reader to interpret according to their biases. Also, one might argue that the legislation in being overly onerous is in fact what is causing the block, and hence implying that the states themselves are blocking pornhub is at least partially correcy.
> They're simply asking for more than an "I promise I'm 18" button.
Interesting. I decided to read one of the bills and picked the one it was easiest to find. Here's the section of the text I think is germane:
> A "reasonable age-verification method" under this bill means the following means of establishing the age of the person attempting to view content harmful to minors, implemented in a manner not easily bypassed: (1) The matching of a photograph of the active user taken between the attempt to view and the viewing of content harmful to minors, using the device by which the attempt to view content harmful to minors is being made, to the photograph on a valid form of identification issued by a state of the United States; or (2) A commercially reasonable method relying on public or private transactional data to verify that the age of the person attempting to access the information is at least 18 or older.
Some might believe this is an "I promise I'm 18" button, but I think it might not meet the standard unless either the button then takes a photo and matches it against photo ID or links the user to credit card information or so on.
I'd say the discrepancy is so large between the idea of a promise button and this that the comment I'm replying to could reasonably be called misinformation.
"I'm not punching you in the face. You're punching yourself in the face by not doing the unreasonable thing I have no right to demand from you."
If a state makes a law that requires a site to track, log, and divulge their users for merely consuming content not even producing, that is thr state violating both the site, and the entirity of their own populace, and even indirectly everyone else in the world who would access that site, not the site violating anything or hurting themselves by "opting" to refuse to cooperate.
The state is the entity refusing to cooperate.
I continually fail to get why people pick the douchebag aggressor side of a problem to defend and excuse and rationalize.
All of these laws make tracking, logging, or divulging the provided information (outside of providing it to a vendor providing the service who has the same non-retention requirements) illegal.
This is an important distinction. The legislation requires customers identify themselves...not unlike being carded at a brick-and-mortar store. It's Pornhub that's refusing to take that step.
The difference is that someone in real life can see your ID without recording it.
The internet's history of anonymous-by-default and the taboo that people can still feel viewing pornography are both factors that make ID verification laws very touchy (also reasons free sites like PornHub are popular in the first place). Compound that with the perpetual security breaches that we've all been victims of in recent years, and you can see why these laws have strong opposition.
> Any “commercial entity” that publishes “material harmful to minors” online can be held liable—meaning, tens of thousands of dollars in fines and/or private lawsuits—if it doesn’t “perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material.”
Does that include the extremist-grooming neo-nazi hate factory which replaced Twitter?
What does everyone think are the odds of ISPs being forced by US southern states to implemet a "Great Wall of China"-like firewall at their regional edges to block VPNs that make this law easy to subvert?
(To be clear: I hate that this is even a realistic question.)
I read that access to porn consumption is inversely correlated with rape rates [1]. So it means that the rate of rapes will increase in those areas that fully ban porn. But I suspect sex in general will increase in those areas (see [2]), and maybe birthrates?, as porn consumption is likely inversely proportional to sex in general.
Well, if most people can’t suss out legitimate (keyword) porn is bought and paid for (as in production) that’s a larger problem.
Legitimate porn has some semblance of testing, paperwork, and a script/shot list. If you force people to fuck via whatever means and record adult content that’s just a crime - not porn
As porn has been a driver of technology adoption, like the internet, maybe we'll see a rise in porn manufacturing using AI on the PC (now there's a reason to buy an AI PC)?
Indeed, what stops kids from generating their own porn using these same tools? Do we need age verification on them too?
I agree. It’s as easy as that if you respect people having different values. But these laws come from a “my god told me that this is right” mindset and you can’t really argue with that.
if this is what people want, so be it. who cares!
"easy"? ISP can only apply the rules per-connection, so it's not great for parental control. It also can't enforce any filtering past the domain, so sex subreddits are still open. It also creates a list of people enabling sex sites. It would still be a problematic solution.
you can just make a law that websites are required to flag the html for pages that contain rated content so that isp and parents can filter whatever they want. all without infringung on people freedom.
i am sure smarter people than me can come up with an even better solution. this honestly just feel more like imposing religious values than anything else
same rules that apply to pornography should apply to any religious site too. no one under 18 should be subjected to lunacy of religious websites that exist and yet… :)
You ever notice how the parents who are loudest about "parental rights" are the ones who coerce and groom their children into religion before they're old enough to consent or even understand the metaphysical underpinnings of religious belief?
How are the parents going to watch porn then? If you think porn consumption isn't ubiquitous among all the anti-porn preachers I've got some statistics to sell to you
Porn is speech. And access to speech must be defended near absolutely (for example per US constitutional law) everywhere - at local or state levels, in public and private spaces, offline and online, etc. Today it’s puritanical governments forcing identity verification but tomorrow it could be an overly moralistic corporation controlling one of a few AI models.
A moralistic corporation controlling an AI model to say, further a religious goal, would be the free religious speech of the owners of that corporation (so long as they aren’t taking public funding)
I disagree in this situation, although I understand your logic. The surviving corporations with large foundational models will be the current big tech mostly. These large companies should be regulated like utilities or public agencies, because they’re that powerful and influential and don’t face real competition. The owners of such corporations - each have a right to speech as individuals, separate from a corporation.
I don't agree with puritanical laws like this, but I do believe that the quantity and quality of porn consumed in the US constitutes a non-trivial public mental health crisis, and I hope that this will drive into people the serious risks of taking your dopamine receptors for constant, convenient, quick rides that scratch an itch without providing the experience of genuinely connecting with another living, breathing human being that cares.
Real, vulnerable connection can provide meaning in a way that manufactured fast porn can never give, and I believe that connection can be an important aspect of self actualization towards a meaningful existence.
I'm not claiming that rare, conscious consumption of pornography can't be integrated into a healthy, fulfilled life, but that the way it's mindlessly consumed by so many is keeping us from that fulfilled life.
Why do you think porn is a replacement for a relationship? A relationship is about a lot more than just sex. And real sex is way better than masturbation. Even when I'm between relationships I need that too (and pay for it in those cases). Porn is just a minor passtime. A relationship affects every aspect of your life.
Ps: I see this got flagged but just wanted to clarify that I'm in Europe and this is legal where I live (unlike in most US states I believe).
I just think paying for it is a lot more fair than trying to get random girls in bed for a one night stand like a lot of guys do. I don't really court someone unless I have a serious interest in the person, not just their body.
But my point was that porn doesn't displace relationships and not even the need for real sex.
A relationship is hard to find, cultivate, and maintain. It's sort of analogous to a healthy diet. People choose junk food over healthy food options for convenience/cheap thrills even if there's obvious benefits to healthy diets, and people choose porn over genuine human connection.
I'm not a lawyer, but I did debate once and know that words are fungible.
Most of the anti-porn legislations that have passed only require distributors of "harmful" material (porn) to use age-verification technology via, amongst other methods, "commercially reasonable" identity providers.
"Commercially reasonable" isn't defined in these statutes.
Furthermore, there haven't been any follow-up legislations to implement state-level verification of these "commercially reasonable" identity providers.
Given this, what's to stop PornHub et. al. from doing something like what "social clubs" do/did in dry counties?
Social clubs check your ID (to comply with federal law) and then ask you to sign in. The signing in is notional; it doesn't mean anything.
In other words, something like:
- Porn site: "Sorry, $US_STATE requires you to verify your identity; go to this website to proceed"
- "Identity provider": "Enter name and age, then hit OK"
- "Identity provider" to porn site: "All clear; they hit OK"
- Porn site: "Thanks for verifying! Click the 'Remember, porn is bad, mmkay?' button to browse our collection"
If enough sites support said identity provider, then wouldn't they be the "commercially reasonable" choice?
(Of course, none of this matters if the majority-conservative US administration that gets sworn in this month decides to implement digital age verification for "harmful material" on a federal level. In that case, my earlier question of mini-"Great Firewall of China" in the US when that I posted here matters more.)
(Also, not every porn site complies with these laws, the oh-my-goodness-so-fucking-many porn sites out there aggregate from each other anyways, and I don't think this has been court-tested yet, so we don't know what actually happens to operators that tell these states to fuck off! Also, let's not forget that porn exists on social media and other commercial platforms, unless Texas wants to actually try blocking Microsoft Bing in the state)
XX " whats that in your pocket"
XY "uh, huh? oh THAT!, its a dongle"
XX ":) whats it do?"
XY "uh,oh well this one is a portable virtual private network"
XY "can I touch it?"
XX " not yet, wait!, I have to plug it in, and it has to boot"
XY "can I have one?"
XX "sure,np"
https://deals.newatlas.com/sales/deeper-connect-air-portable...
Note that some of these laws are only ostensibly about porn. For example, the Tennessee law blocks, in addition to what one might reasonably describe as porn, additionally blocks any material that:
> pander[s] to the prurient interest
(—[1], §1 (b)(5)(A)(i))
While a reasonable reader might find a normal level of intent under that phrasing, Tennessee has in the past has similar laws, using similar phraseology. For example, an east TN DA attempted to enforce similar language in the TN AEA[2], threatening enforcement of that act against a pride parade despite, a.) the parade stating they would comply with all applicable laws and b.) the law the DA was threatening to enforce had already been struck down as unconstitutional. (The DA admitted knowledge of this, as well, but claimed³ that the ruling on the unconsitutionality of the law didn't apply to him. The DA was later sued, and directly enjoined from interfering with the parade.)
(back to the "think of the children" act)
> When taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors;
(—[1], §1 (b)(5)(B), and it is less than clear to me whether (b)(5)(A) is "and" or "or", but "or" seems the more logical conclusion, and in particular, in the ambiguity, TN is a state that I would expect to argue "or".)
The TN legislature's arguments while passing the AEA showed the legislatures true (discriminatory) intent. I would not be shocked to find similar here, given the similarity in the language. That is, the (purposefully) vague nature of the law as written is that the bible "has" "serious […] value for minors" but anything LGBTQ would "not" "have" such value, and would surely "pander" to the "prurient interest".
> At a minimum, anonymized age-verification data must include architectural diagrams illustrating the technological assets and logical processes by which the reasonable age-verification method is accomplished and data demonstrating a volume of reasonable age-verification method executions consistent with the overall volume of visits to the website;
³The DA has some utterly braindead legal theory that the court's ruling that the law was unconstitutional doesn't apply to him — or most anyone — because the ruling's injunctive relief applied only to certain people. I'd quote it, but their argument is in a PDF that's a scan of a Word doc w/o OCRing[4] and I don't feel like re-typing it. The injunctive relief did, yes, but that was section II of the ruling, and section I, which struck the law down, is separate, and not restricted … "The Court therefore HOLDS and DECLARES that the Adult Entertainment Act is an UNCONSTITUTIONAL restriction on speech." … which is not restricted to just the parties, which would be utterly illogical.)
I see most of the comments here say that they don't completely agree with fully banning these websites. But as I strongly disagree with porn, I'm happy with that and I hope more states do that.
Well, let's also ban alcohol consumption since it's bad for you. Let's also ban all forms of violent media since that could potentially be bad for you when viewed in excess (similar to porn). It's a slippery slope. At what point do we just start monitoring people's thoughts when that tech comes available?
The problem is, the laws are very… stupid? No PornHub, but Twitter is fine because less than X% of revenue is coming from pornography. But it’s still the place for the adult content. Ask any young person about Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram funnels into Twitter solely for pornography.
These types of laws (good enough even if we can get rid of 50% of the problem!), I think, don’t work well when there’s physiological element to it (arousal in this scenario). People will actively seek out pornography and consume it. It has been going on for decades in the internet.
The funny thing is that the law doesn't ban porn outright, as I believe this is federally illegal. It "simply" "asks" porn providers to enforce stricter, privacy-violating age restriction laws. This difference is important, as porn in these states could "easily" come back if they figure out how to meet the letter of the law in a way that isn't "too invasive."
> Don’t like porn? Then don’t use it. Forcing your personal views on others by banning things you don’t agree with is bullshit.
Would you say alcohol is banned if a liquor store that was against carding customers would have to lock its doors to avoid violating laws about selling to minors?
I feel like young men retreat to porn because they can't find a partner. The percentage of men who would prefer porn over a partner is probably very minor.
I think the problem with men being single is that it's very hard to be in a space where it's acceptable to seek a partner. Due to various #metoo and similar actions most men have learned it's unacceptable to approach women in public spaces. Meanwhile the online dating websites are trying their hardest not to match people because people who find their match don't watch ads and pay for microtransactions (premium accounts, gifts, boosts).
I feel like the best solution to loneliness and to boost marriage (and thus birth) rates would be some form of non-commercial / government run dating website. Dating websites are slowly becoming a desert and most people who used them for a longer period of time will tell you how great they were before swiping era.
It’s regressive because banning a vice does not magically make harm from it disappear. The addiction issue needs to be addressed in a meaningful and direct way.
The other problem is that many advocates for a ban on pornography use this argument without actually caring about the issue they decry, otherwise they would have engaged in actual awareness or harm reduction campaigns. Instead, they choose to engage with this argument in bad faith because in actuality pornography just does not align with their morals.
I think an honest conversation about porn access and how much and what we want available as a society (especially to teenagers) is overdue. The internet completely firebombed the obscenity regulations for better or worse and we've just been ignoring the consequences, due to various reasons.
I'd rather have an honest conversation about teenagers having access to violent media, especially how violence is absolutely normalized in the US. Seeing a boob never killed anyone, but violence kills thousands every year in the US, including many children.
Porn consumption rates are inversely proportional to rapes [1] and likely sex in general (I'm extrapolating, but I think it is reasonable [2]?), which likely then impacts birthrates (again another extrapolation, but again I think reasonable.) So high porn consumption likely reduces birthrates. I wouldn't be surprised if there is literature to back that up.
Absolutely, it is sad that almost all human societies normalize violence while sex is a taboo. One explanation I have read is that violent societies wiped out non-violent societies and now we are stuck with it.
Only way to fight glorification of violence would be to be treat violence same way as how sex is treated and over centuries we may end up with more peaceful societies.
I've been making that argument since the late 90s, when, owning to the UK's age of consent being 16, I was allowed to perform acts I was not allowed to witness recordings of — but seeing someone getting outright murdered was (so long as you didn't see blood) in cartoons rated as "fine for kids of any age".
I encourage you to read more into the change of sexual behaviors in men who consume porn who are already in relationships and the effect this has on the women and overall relationship satisfaction.
Yeah, maybe seeing a boob never killed someone, but aggressive grabbing, intimidating a partner who doesn't seem "normal", and expecting rougher more extreme sex acts that women are not comfortable with are not harmless.
Oh if only there were a thing like sex education that could solve these problems. Though, I suppose dead kids don't have these issues either. I'd encourage you to reflect on the fact that your children now have active shooter drills and you consider that totally normal. Spoiler, that's not normal in most countries.
This is a straw-man attack. Porn produces a huge dopamine dump. Do some research on how dopamine works in the brain. Regular dopamine dumps can have a huge impact on quality of life leading to depression and building an addiction cycle.
Airplane is a PG movie where there are literally tities and the finale involves a blowjob joke.
We can certainly discuss 1980s vs 2020s and how the Overton window has shifted. Boobs weren't as big of a deal in our past.
80s were also quite violent in our movies/media as well. It seems like everything has been clamped down.
I was surprised to see the dick of the David Statue get messed up in the children's movie 'The Goonies' for example. Apparently dicks weren't a big deal either even into the 90s.
The Andromeda Strain from 1971 is rated G and features a naked woman in a bathtub early in the movie.
It's not something I'd really noticed before I had a similar conversation with someone regarding how movie ratings have changed over time vis a vis nudity.
That aside, it's a brilliant sci fi movie, and I'd recommend it to everyone here :)
It feels like honest conversation doesn't happen so much in the public space these days if an issue can be politicized. But what will be very interesting to track would be the rate of change of social vices in the next 15 years.
Historically, US pornography has been regulated on the basis of whether or not it is obscene, defined by various Supreme Court tests over the years.
If it is not obscene, it's afforded First Amendment protections and allowed.
If it is obscene, it can be regulated by various entities, should they choose to do so.
Since the mid-70s(?), the Miller test [0] has been used.
Parent is pointing out that the Internet effectively obliterated the technical ability of various government entities to impose restrictions of any sort on obscene material, and consequently there's been essentially no regulation of internationally-based pornographic content since the 90s.
Obscenity regulations are laws that censor the creation or distribution of creative works considered to be obscene, eg show a woman's ankle, or acknowledge that sex acts exist.
I would agree, though we might (or not:) vehemently disagree with the premises and conclusions.
I find Pornography in specific, and sex in general, is something people have very strong basic opinions about. In particular, a lot of people intersect religious morals into the picture, which can make conversations difficult at best, disingenuous more commonly :-(.
For example, my own basic approach is "what do you mean 'obscenity regulations'? What kind of silly thing is that amongst adults?". It then tends to get complicated due to numbers - often people promoting such regulations and laws upon other adults are hugely vehement about government over reach and regulation in other areas, so it ends up feeling like hipocrisy or "I want government to ban things I don't like and allow things I do like".
But this is hacker news! Nothing stops are from trying to have that honest conversation :-).
My honest opinion is that I come from a prudeish culture, and thank goodness teenagers today can have their key questions answered more openly and have access to things I had to sneak and feel guilty about. Access to porn is not in top ten things I worry about for my kids, but I am willing to listen otherwise :-).
I think the status quo post-internet world is better than the world pre-internet. I think good outweighs the bad, a lot of this though is from genuinely informative message boards and websites re: sexuality which you highlight. The hypothetical homosexual teenager in a small town that can now find like minded people and talk to them about their sexuality and make sense of it is a godsend.
I'm more thinking about the downsides of the erotic material being available 24/7 to every person in their pocket and inducing addictive behaviors. The teenage boys that have seen explicit pornography before ever even kissing a girl, and how that influences their expectations and behaviors while dating. The incels that don't even attempt to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex but instead indulge in auto-erotic gratification from consuming digital content (hikikomori), soon to be augmented by AI. These people are chasing dopamine hits instead of genuine human connection, something formally driven by lust/sexual desire for better or worse and it's going to have major cultural impacts.
I saw explicit pornography before ever kissing a girl. So did everybody I knew well enough to have known whether they had or not.
In the 1970s.
We did not have an Internet. No, the volume wasn't nearly as high, nor was the technical quality.
As for "expectations", non-porn media also have horrible expectations about gender and relationships. In fact, they have more of them and are able to convey them in more detail. And the fact is that today's teenaged boys are a lot more respectful toward their prospective-or-desired partners than my cohort was, porn or no porn.
Porn is a hyperstimulus, unrealistic and so reality seems bad in comparison.
This may be why teens these days are having fewer accidental pregnancies.
Those missing accidental teen pregnancies, according to a comment I saw on Hacker News recently and never checked the veracity of, are a big part of why fertility rates are now below replacement levels.
The dichotomy that won't be believed: Ban the "adult" content to force the teens to grow up before they need to; or let them be "corrupted" so that they can keep their innocence. (Scare quotes because I remember being a teenager, even if it was the 90s).
Honestly, I think the conversation needs to be more around identity/AuthN systems that can balance trust and privacy. It's not an easy problem to solve, even in "meat space", but I think problems like access to porn go away if proper identity is solved.
The only thing PH doesn't seem keen on is compromising their users' privacy and serving as age-enforcer.
So this legislation seems to make things worse, not better. Sure, you can always say "well PH could just comply with the age-verification laws," but I applaud them for taking a stand on privacy, and also them saying "fine, if you don't like us here we'll leave." It's really a loss for exactly the states that are passing these laws. They'll just end up with people going to shadier sites.
What worries me most though, is that this will lead to people using VPNs more (which is fine), but then states making VPNs themselves illegal (they'll use terms like "tools to circumvent...") which is super bad.