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Comment by twiclo | Hacker News Reader

I'm certain that we're going to see plenty of comments about how this is terrible for privacy and it's an attack of free speech but we've had limits on porn forever. People didn't consider it a privacy violation if they were carded for buying a pornographic magazine and I'm certain everyone here would not suggest children should be allowed to purchase such magazines. Why should it be any different online?

Yes it's scary what companies could do with this sensitive information and we should try our best to legislate against abuse of these details. It's possible. Bars have the ability to collect thousands of people's driver's license information and we haven't seen much of a security risk there.

The fact of the matter is porn is accessible to children within seconds and for the last 30 years we have done virtually nothing to try to prevent it. We know that porn is harmful, especially to children, and we have done NOTHING to try to prevent it.

I'm okay with adults being inconvenienced if it means we can protect children. That's a standard we've had in America for generations.

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Bars and other places that sell alcohol generally don't keep your ID on file though, that's the big privacy issue. If you go to an adult store and want to buy porn, they look at your picture to make sure it's you, and check the D.O.B. Then they pretty much forget you were there.

"Protect the children" is the perfect cover for so many terribly invasive laws. I personally won't sacrifice my privacy to "protect children", and neither should you, because these children will eventually grow up to be adults who would presumably enjoy a right to privacy.

> The fact of the matter is porn is accessible to children within seconds and for the last 30 years we have done virtually nothing to try to prevent it. We know that porn is harmful, especially to children, and we have done NOTHING to try to prevent it.

The government isn't a parent and shouldn't act like one. Parents and schools can take advantage of any one of the many services which provide content filtering for kids. Once they're old enough the get around those blockers and access things anyway, there isn't anything you or the government will be able to do to stop them from accessing content. See: torrenting movies and TV, sharing plans for 3d printed weapons, child porn still being a massive problem despite being very illegal pretty much globally.

At some point you don't get carded, because people can tell based on appearance. Not always, of course, and if they can't be sure, they'll card to be on the safe side, but... there are real world limits of how much carding people will do. I do not get carded any more for drinks - I did 30 years ago, but don't now.

I agree that "Think of the children" is a really annoying talking point but it doesn't make it a _wrong_ talking point. It's often used to push reactionary policy quickly without giving anyone time to think about the repercussions. I'm on HN, I'm a massive advocate for privacy. I self host every single thing I can and use a pinephone.

That said the privacy argument is still not enough for me here. Bars have the ability to store this information they just choose not to. Pornhub also has the ability to choose not to store it. The privacy concerns are worth the risks

Pornography is a dangerous terrible thing. If exposed to it as a child it will likely impact you for the rest of your life.

> Pornography is a dangerous terrible thing. If exposed to it as a child it will likely impact you for the rest of your life

Addiction to pornography is a dangerous, terrible thing. The main thing that makes pornography dangerous to youngsters is the vacuum of cultural context around sex in America. In cultures with a healthier relationship with sex, porn competes with wholesome constructs, and takes its place as entertainment versus instruction.

> Pornography is a dangerous terrible thing. If exposed to it as a child it will likely impact you for the rest of your life.

Tell me you are an american without telling me you are an american...

I'm in the southeast US and only seem to see this viewpoint expressed by those who had highly religious upbringings. I'm curious what the rough equivalent of this moralizing would be in your area, wherever you may be.

> Pornography is a dangerous terrible thing. If exposed to it as a child it will likely impact you for the rest of your life.

I'm going to reiterate all of the other posters' requests for some evidence of this, because your whole position hinges on this one point that you are simply taking for granted.

> Bars have the ability to store this information they just choose not to.

I can watch and verify that the bar doesn't store it, unless the bouncer is memorizing info. I cannot verify that PornHub doesn't store more than they say they do.

A lot of bars nowadays (at least in both Seattle and Vancouver for the past decade or so) will scan your ID to verify you’re not blacklisted, and share lists around.

They are definitely keeping records on banned people and I wouldn’t be surprised if they stored all scanned records for easy blacklisting post-issue.

>Pornography is a dangerous terrible thing

No- it isn't.

You can’t expect parents in this day and age to have the ability to protect their children from this material where smartphones are owned by almost everyone with unlimited internet access. When something becomes a wide societal problem then using the arm of the state can become a valid option to mitigate the issue. This is not about parenting grown-ups, this is about helping parents fix something that they can’t fix themselves at an individual level.

If a grown-up really wants to watch porn, they can use a VPN. It’s not hard, no ID is needed. By adding a hurdle for children to access this material we can protect them from getting harmed by it at a young age. I think setting up a VPN is a small price to pay for if it means increasing the average age of exposure to porn.

We can't expect a grown-up to set up content filters on a child's devices because it's too complicated, but we _can_ expect them to setup a VPN on their own device, and also determine what a trusted VPN provider/application looks like? The group of people who _can_ use a VPN yet _can't_ set up parental controls doesn't exist.

There's even a super nice support article on how to do it all, from Apple: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201304

And if you're talking about kids using other devices which a parent doesn't have control over: well, supervise your kids, build a good relationship with them, ask what they're doing with their friends and try to make sure their parents are on the same page.

The amount of pearl-clutching like this in this thread is shocking. The entire world doesn't need to be a plush-lined playpen for children.

How would you supervise your kid when he's at school but you're at work? How could you prevent a classmate showing him porn?

Back when I was a kid I had no way to access extreme porn. Porn mags were quite tame compared to modern porn sites where pretty much anything goes.

You don’t prevent it, simple. Adding invasive privacy measures that apply to all adults won’t stop the kid who wants to find porn and show it to other kids on his phone. We found ways around the content blockers at school all the time.

Extreme porn can be found too easily. It wasn't like that when I was a kid. There were no ways around it. We simply could not even think of all the disgusting fetishes that are only a few clicks away nowadays.

The LA state law does state that:

> Any commercial entity or third party that performs the required age verification shall not retain any identifying information of the individual after access has been granted to the material.

and

> A commercial entity that is found to have knowingly retained identifying information of the individual after access has been granted to the individual shall be liable to the individual for damages resulting from retaining the identifying information, including court costs and reasonable attorney fees as ordered by the court.

but I agree this is different from being carded at a bar where you can see that they're just checking your ID and handing it back to you. In the case of a porn site, you're left to just trust that they are deleting the records.

“The government isn't a parent and shouldn't act like one”

Then I guess the government has no right to mandate the use of car seats, investigate child abuse, or regulate school lunches.

> car seats

If we're talking about setting safety standards for car seats, fine. I also wouldn't really care if the mandated use of car seats was just a recommendation. My kids would still go in a car seat until they're big enough, and I don't particularly care if other people are too careless with their kids to use car seats.

> investigate child abuse

Falls under crime, and could also be perpetrated by the parents themselves. Of course some impartial entity should be doing the investigation.

> regulate school lunches

I would say the government shouldn't be regulating school lunches beyond the normal health standards applied to all food service places. School food got substantially worse in my school district after Michelle Obama's involvement. Many foods which were completely fine were not allowed anymore, yet pizza could be considered a vegetable because it had tomato sauce on it. Maybe this improved the food in some areas, but it definitely made it worse in my area.

I'm frankly sick and tired of the "what about the children" argument especially in this context.

In America violence and weapons are pushed onto "the children" daily. American military make video games to teach warfare tactics to "the children" and desensitize them to gruesome acts of killing. "The children" can bring bullet proof backpacks to school, and learn how to use weapons at a young age.

But god forbid they learn about or see a sex act, which by the way quite literally is what ensures the continuation of the human species. That would be awful.

> In America violence and weapons are pushed onto "the children" daily.

A double-negative is not a positive.

> But god forbid they learn about or see a sex act, which by the way quite literally is what ensures the continuation of the human species.

Sex, which ensures the continuation of the human species, is not the same as watching porn. No porn is needed for human-beings to know what to do.

Come on! You know this argument is bullshit.

Saying "what about issue Y" (gun violence) says nothing about issue X (pornography harming children). We ought to oppose evil wherever we see it, not ignore evil because we see a greater evil elsewhere.

> We know that porn is harmful

A lot of assumptions and unquestioned biases in that little statement.

But I think the bigger point here is the debate about how much and which parenting roles we want government to take on.

I’d argue that religion is far more harmful, especially to children. Teaching magical thinking, false promises of afterlife, and hatred for outgroups can warp peoples’s whole lives.

> That’s a standard we’ve had in America for generations

That isn’t a particularly strong argument, given the other standards we’ve had for generations, like treatment of women and minorities, the inequalities of the justice and financial systems, the corruption and nepotism in our politics. The insane idea that 5 year olds play highly violent video games daily but will somehow be ruined by seeing boobs (or even fucking) is just. . . Wow.

> A lot of assumptions and unquestioned biases in that little statement.

You're assuming that they have not questioned and looked into things, as it turns out there is good evidence against pornography being healthy.

> I’d argue that religion is far more harmful, especially to children. Teaching magical thinking, false promises of afterlife, and hatred for outgroups can warp peoples’s whole lives.

I will offer a few points for consideration.

1. You assume, and if I was uncharitable I'd say that this is an "unquestioned bias" though I have no reason to believe that to be the case, that all religion is false, this is extremely contested. I've known atheists who would even contest this unqualified statement since they'd argue that even if they deny the ultimate reality of religious claims that the goods taught by religions and the bonds formed are positive goods which outweigh the perceived negatives.

2. I do not see, even granting that all religion is false or even evil, the case that pornography, which regularly promotes incest, abusive behavior, is the result of trafficking and rank with abuse, is worse than the typical religious expression in western countries which would promote charity and discourage evils.

> as it turns out there is good evidence against pornography being healthy

Please cite it if you have it, because discussions on this topic are riddled with garbage "evidence" peddled by fringe activist organizations that lack any genuine expertise in the relevant fields.

> false promises of afterlife

I wouldn't say "promises of afterlife" are false, they're unknowable. Saying there's potentially an afterlife is a non-falsifiable statement; there's no test for it we could actually do to confirm or deny its existence.

Unless you've got an actual test which can definitively prove there's no afterlife, in which case I'm all ears.

I would say almost all religions are false. That's because if you have N different religions that claim different and incompatible things, at least N-1 of them must be wrong.

> Teaching magical thinking, false promises of afterlife, and hatred for outgroups can warp peoples’s whole lives.

Saying this is also outgrouping people.

Strongly disagree. That theory says that any criticism of anyone is "outgrouping". The word loses all meaning.

I can say that people who, IMO, teach children these harmful falsehoods are doing the wrong thing. WITHOUT saying they should be treated badly as a group, or jailed, or that they have bad hygiene, or anything else.

If we can't disagree with specific behaviors, I don't know what's left.

There's a lot left. "Religion" is not a tightly knit group with a single set of behaviours or teachings. I don't think I can agree that opposing that straw man to end all straw men is the same as disallowing any criticism of anyone.

There is a big difference between flashing a card at point-of-sale and having to register for a permanent record with the state.

When the database leaks — and it will - we know what it will look like: the AshleyMadison leaks. People died.

There are plenty of technical mechanisms that are available to parents and schools (etc) to block access to this material. None of them need involve the state.

In the end, we must treat this like any other substance that children aren’t ready for. Whether we are talking about taking cannabis, alcohol, pornography, or Tide pods, the most effective protection is parents and educators who care and teach children about potentially harmful behaviors.

I just upvoted this, and thought about posting something similar myself. I am right now buying "how to talk about sex" books for my 11 year old son. My wife and I are super sex positive.

But I look on Pornhub, and the idea that that might be my children's first impression of sex makes me sad. Its fine for adults, but not good for forming accurate impressions of how to connect with another human being.

My favorite book so far, by far, has been "The Hush Factor" by Karen Rayne. It has almost nothing about sex itself, its almost all about communicating with emerging adults (it would really be good for anyone who has a teenager). But its key thesis is that you are trying to help your children develop the capacity to have healthy sexual relationships.

I think the people downvoting this comment probably don't have kids this age (if you do, I'd be curious to hear your perspective). But I love my kids, and I care about all the kids that age and hope they will find good, healthy partners to sleep with eventually.

Even as someone who is quite tech savvy, it’s difficult to control access to this kind of material. This specific effort may be heavy handed, but there is a problem here that I believe is real and deserves attention.

> But I look on Pornhub, and the idea that that might be my children's first impression of sex makes me sad. Its fine for adults, but not good for forming accurate impressions of how to connect with another human being.

I was exposed to hardcore pornography by friends at a young age. It's done incredible damage and has warped my perception of the opposite sex, it's taken years of active effort to combat it. I know many people in a similar situation. Having continued to attempt to quit addictive pornography the effects are real, being off of what I describe as a drug for a long period of time I can consciously identify changes in my perceptions of people. This doesn't get talked about enough, so much harm is being done.

It can be a pretty quick talk, if you contextualize porn as a movie. Real people don't have sex the way the characters do in porn, just like they don't drive like the characters in action movies.

Thanks, this is actually very useful, and I will almost certainly use it.

But, I still think there are real issues here, regarding empowering parents to guide their children to appropriate resources and away from resources they view as negative (it’s not just sex, either, it’s stuff on YouTube as well). The tools just aren’t that good.

One thing I’d really like on YouTube is the ability to accept YouTube’s default recommendations, but then whitelist/blacklist additional channels at my discretion. Currently it’s YouTube’s recommendations, or curate everything yourself, making the latter really hard.

You won't be able to curate everything forever, so in the long run it's easier to get them asking questions (and to ask them questions) about what they're watching. They'll quickly be able to tell what's trash media on their own.

Advertisements were a big problem in our house at first. Every toy was enticing, but the fast cuts and up-tempo music made them look more fun to play with than they actually were. Have you tried asking them about motivation? Like, those YouTube channels you don't want them to watch were made deliberately, but for what purpose?

Making something forbidden doesn't make it any less misleading, you know? It's the ability to question it that takes away that power.

I'm not arguing for online porn here so do not take it as some form of whataboutism. I just wonder if such young kid should have unrestricted access to internet at all. Apart from sites like 4chan even random influencer can create unhealthy perspective on life.

I'm not trying to take any kind of side here, but I just wanted to raise this curious point: Within the span of a few years, and for well over a decade now, we've gone from porn being a few old magazines in your uncle's closet to something any anonymous person with an internet connection can binge-watch 24/7 for the rest of their life. If it has a bad impact on society, that should have been amplified by several orders of magnitude by now, and that impact should be plainly visible for anyone to see. Is it?

This is a level-headed point, and I appreciate that you acknowledge the changing nature of porn, which some commenters in the thread deny, saying that it has "always been there". Are the effects on society visible? Maybe yes. How do we know that it is unrelated to the epidemics in depression, social isolation, reduction in physical/social activity of young adults, etc.

Maybe it is completely unrelated. But before pushing something so radical and artificial on everyone (as you say, possible 24/7 binge on porn) shouldn't the burden of proof that it is not harmful be on those pushing it?

Also, significant number of people report porn-addiction and decreased personal quality of life due to it. If this is the self-assessment of so many people, how can it be dismissed?

The track record of other types of superstimulation at a society level (e.g. sugary food, drugs) is not good.

People got carded for buying porn? Only the ones who didn't look old enough, or everyone?

There's a huge difference between flashing your ID to a bored store worker for two seconds, and giving all your personal data to a huge company to store indefinitely, and that data might once be used against you... wanna run for president? Some pornhub worker can now look at the databse and see that you watched donkey midget porn once, (or in some areas, "even worse", gay or lesbian porn) and can blackmail you with that data.

> see that you watched donkey midget porn once, and can blackmail you with that data

or perhaps we'll just somehow move beyond caring about that sort of stuff? if PH (for example) is hosting it, there's some level of 'legality' they want to adhere to (to stay in business). Something is patently illegal, they'll take it down. So if I'm watching something there... it may be offensive to some, but not illegal.

As a general rule, I really don't care what sort of porn or sports or movies or music a politician consumes. I already have an idea of their governing philosophy based on party affiliation, public statements, voting records. It MIGHT be a problem for people who would be exposed as hypocrites but... even that doesn't seem to have an impact any more - people just double down on party loyalty? Someone voting to remove LGBTQ protections, somehow 'caught' watching lesbian porn... Yawn. That's par for the course now.

Just focusing on the part of whether this law will achieve it's stated aim, it's fairly clear it will not, meaning that the costs in terms of privacy are effectively for nothing.

Firstly people will just go to the sites which have under 1/3 and therefore are not in-scope.

Secondly sites will game the threshold, if they think it'll be to their financial advantage.

Thirdly underage kids will (I would imagine) work out how to bypass these filters pretty quickly, using VPNs et al.

Fourthly, people attempting to bypass these filters might fall prey to malware dressed up as VPN/bypass software.

When an 8 year old boy (the average age that boys are exposed to pornography) googles a pornographic term the whole page is listed with websites dedicated to pornography. Of course a more mature person can get around that but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do the bare minimum to stop literally 8 year olds from being exposed to hardcore pornography

The bare minimum is the parents. The overkill maximum is having government ID registration to access information.

Yup. This is the US in a nutshell. Going to absurd lenghts to enforce puritanism with zero parenting effort.

If you're a kid and your parent don't give a damn and set you free on the internet you will be exposed to porn.

Why talk to your kids and educate them + maybe do your best to limit their exposure to things you don't agree with when you can clutch your pearls and demand ridiculous things like this?

This will definetly backfire. It's a sad state of afair that reminds me about some dumbass local politicians somewhere that tried to make pi equal 4 since using 3.14 was too hard.

You may be doing a poor job of raising your 8 year old, but that doesn’t mean everyone else is. Bring in an advisor or an au pair or something. Don’t enlist the government to raise everyone else’s children just because you’re struggling.

And the bare minimum can (and probably should) be achieved without legislation.

Filter in the browser, at the ISP supplied router, using DNS ... None of it is perfect but also it doesn't require the privacy problems that this does.

Also I have a feeling (although it is just that) that kids aren't getting their porn via google searches. My guess would be social media/chat apps all the time.

> We know that porn is harmful

Please provide peer-reviewed studies from non-biased research firms / organizations detailing the harm porn is causing.

> We know that porn is harmful, especially to children, and we have done NOTHING to try to prevent it.

Citation needed. For every study claiming harm there are a multitude that refute the findings, nearly universally with better controls and a larger dataset.

> if they were carded for buying a pornographic magazine and I'm certain everyone here would not suggest children should be allowed to purchase such magazines. Why should it be any different online?

In one case your age is verified and that's it.

In the other your information is entered into a database that _might_ contain compromising information that may be used to blackmail you (e.g. you might be gay and not wish to disclose that fact to the world).

The first worries me very litte - the second worries me a lot.

> We know that porn is harmful

[Citation needed]

> We know that porn is harmful

I dispute this assertion. I think there's much more evidence that religion is harmful.

> evidence that religion is harmful

Calling either "harmful" relies on a second (or even third) order effects concept of harm that would absolutely terrify anybody who spends more than a few minutes thinking through the consequences of adopting that concept.

> We know that porn is harmful, especially to children, and we have done NOTHING to try to prevent it.

The solution is not impractical, ineffective privacy violations; it's education and media literacy.

I assure you that the groups advocating for laws like this are a) motivated by religion; and b) have a long-term plan for extending restrictions like this. "Won't somebody please think of the children" is always just a cover.

I’ll add to what you said by reiterating what happened not too long ago where PornHub were forced to purge millions of videos because they couldn’t verify that they were consensual. This happened after a large push-back from over two million people due to the publishing and re-publishing of rape footage of underaged women. These videos stood up for weeks and months before someone at PornHub took them down, they of course resurfaced again.

Imagine a child unknowingly watching rape on film. It’s bad for an adult, what about a child?

I don’t think most people really understand how vile and harmful porn is. I also think that regardless of the downvotes, it’s good to speak up against this. The intention is not to convince someone that doesn’t have a conscience, but to inform people who’re just unaware.

As someone that did watch porn as a minor (no distinction between child/teenager from the state) with an internet connection. Nothing harmful about it, people usually try to convince you that it is. it's not true.

>I'm okay with adults being inconvenienced if it means we can protect children. That's a standard we've had in America for generations.

Lol yes a standard used to violate and restrict rights. It's literally a meme: "Think of the Children!"

By your logic should we allow kids to buy alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs because it inconveniences adults too much? These are tired arguments from adults who are terrified that it might take 30 more seconds to access their hardcore porn.

> By your logic should we allow kids to buy alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs because it inconveniences adults too much?

By your logic, we should allow the government to search our phones, computers, cars, emails, etc before buying alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs because "it might save just one child!".

As someone who grew up in a different part of the world, I had access to alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. There was zero oversight from the state and people were pretty chill about it. My parents gave me the talk about it, let me try it - had my first beer when I was like 11 (imagine the outrage!!!) and nothing happened. I didn't turn into an alcoholic - alcohol does not even appeal to me to this day. Same with cigarettes. I could not afford to buy the drugs. Kids were sharing [low rez] porn on floppy disks in high school. Everyone knew what a dick and a vagina was, took sex ed, there were virtually zero teen pregnancies.

Those aren't remotely the same as what we're talking about. "Think of the children" is a logical fallacy and a tremendously weak argument. Unless you are a fool you know this has nothing to do with children and everything to do with moral policing by a right wing extremist state government.

> moral policing by a right wing extremist

Don't pretend the left wing is any better about this particular issue, though. It's the libertarian checks-and-balances constructs built into our form of our government that's resisted this sort of totalitarianism, not the principles of mercurial politicians.

>if it means we can protect children. That's a standard we've had in America for generations.

Thanks for the vomit fest.

Dunno how we got to a point where sexuality is such a taboo that is better having violence in movies than sex.

> That's a standard we've had in America for generations.

You mean like school shootings?

> We know that porn is harmful, especially to children

Dataset needed.

Bars verify your ID, they don't record it

Pornhub doesn't have to record it. Bars could record it and so could PH.

The law requires Pornhub to use a government service (LA Wallet) to verify the license, allowing the Louisiana government to log the event.

In order to foster faithful discussion on this site we enjoy citations. Do you have any for your parent comment? You make many bold claims but do not have any research to back it up.

They do have to record it, because it needs to be auditable if it's questioned legally.

Uh huh…

And when they’re dragged into court by the parents of some kid that got caught watching porn how are they supposed to prove they complied with the law?

In a bar they come in and randomly card people to make sure they’re not serving underage people. I’ve seen it once, just a spot check by the state liquor board or whoever. No need to store any information, if you’re in the bar be expected to be carded at any time.

I agree with you. I think the response you are getting is from people that have not seen how kids are being exposed to porn at younger and younger ages. We are doing an insane social experiment on the next generation because this kind of access to sexual content has not existed for all of human history.

> people that have not seen how kids are being exposed to porn at younger and younger ages. We are doing an insane social experiment on the next generation because this kind of access to sexual content has not existed for all of human history.

Citations needed.

Personally first saw porn when friends and I found a VHS tape around Grade 5. Many of my friends seem to have had similar experiences with finding VHS, DVD or Magazines around.

> Citations needed.

What citations are needed? This is obviously materially different than you finding some vhs that you can only watch at specific times when your parents aren't home. Children have unlimited access to every single type of pornography and can watch it whenever they are left alone in their room with a computer or phone.

edit: "Citations needed" is an extremely lazy way to respond to an argument that is extremely counterproductive and almost every time it's used it's done in bad faith to derail the conversation.

Citation needed that children are being exposed to sex younger than ever.

Citation needed that internet porn is more harmful than a magazine or VHS.

I think it’s counterproductive to try to shield young people from everything instead of teach. The same people encouraging things like this are almost a complete overlap with those pushing to eliminate sex ed.

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