PornHub blocks users in Utah, cites state’s age verification law
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It starts off with arbitrary definitions of what pornography is (https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/static/SB0287.html): "nipple of the female breast"
You can suck on it when you are a baby, but god forbid you ever take a look at it again before you are married. What's wrong with these people?
Even public nudity laws differ from city to city (e.g. in California), so clearly, people aren't aligned at all on this subject (I'm emphasizing the arbitrary nature here).
Forbid and censor the things you're afraid of educating on.
This trend reminds tangentially of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority.
On a closing note, I do recommend supporting organizations like https://www.aanr.com/ who also provide legal help to citizens in states that'd rather have you wear a burka than show a nipple.
someone told me once "Think of the US less like a secular Western European country and more like a very rich Iran" and that really does help to make sense of a lot of these decisions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_LG...
Readers should note that all of the cited examples here are considered criminal and illegal in the United States.
No law on earth can physically prevent someone from acquiring a weapon and killing members of the LGBT community, the difference is whether this is tolerated and/or endorsed by the state and public, which it is not.
You provided a list of heinous crimes that in no way reflects the views of the United States government or the general public.
To make it even clearer, recent LGBT violence is not even remotely relatable to the widespread lynchings of Black Americans (which you are evoking with this word) that was 'illegal' yet systemically tolerated in the early-mid 1900s.
Literally none of these LGBT crimes were associated with a mob proclaiming justice as was the case with historical lynchings.
[1] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=h...
Here are some highlights from your misleading list:
> April 26, 2022 – An unidentified individual threw a rock through the front door of the Pride Center VT office. As of April, 2022 the incident remains unsolved and is being investigated as a hate crime
Only two items in the list are even killings, including this one:
> June 23, 2022 – Naasire Johnson was killed by his gay lover, Kylen Pratt.
There still are! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_Stat...
> As of March 2023, 14 states either have not yet formally repealed their laws against sexual activity among consenting adults or have not revised them to accurately reflect their true scope as a result of Lawrence v. Texas.
While Lawrence v Texas does limit these laws, there's a concerted effort to repeal it, and if that happens, these laws will go back into effect.
Our government is at least partly reactive to our votes. Utah is very different from Colorado or California or Connecticut. So, no, nothing like rich Iran.
So is Iran's. Keep in mind the country is a theocratic Republic that turned out this way because of a popular religious revolt against a secular absolutist monarch. That bottom up, democratic, religious zealotry is something you also have in the US but virtually nowhere in the developed world.
What about the Christian Democratic Union of Germany which officially believes in Catholic Democracy and didn't recognize same-sex marriage until 2017?
Honestly we (Europeans) make the same mistake the Americans do in regards to us, we view the US as one homogeneous mass. The difference between states seems like it's often as great as between European nations. I'd be less concerned about the laws of the individual state, if companies did target the lowest common denominator for the entire US, just to make business easier.
PornHub is in my mind doing the right thing, blocking the state that's causing issues.
Yeah, but only in a few areas in terms of studios, not individual creators. iirc studios/companies are mostly in California (LA mostly), Florida (Miami), and NYC.
> PornHub is in my mind doing the right thing, blocking the state that's causing issues.
Curious to know if this is strategic, in the sense that they're hoping their blocking of the state will piss off enough people to reverse the policy.
When introducing myself to Europeans now I've started saying the state I'm from, such as "I'm from the state of Idaho in the US". Utah is a different state/place than Idaho (see liquor laws, state lottery) and both are very different than California or New York. They're almost like different countries in some ways, especially over the last 10 or so years. Not too long ago you could pretty much live anywhere and the main difference would be where you buy your booze and your tax rates, but that's increasingly changing.
On the rather extreme end, there are some serious movements for secession from the US. Funny enough they don't usually go very far because (shockingly /s) the red states drop their enthusiasm when a red president gets elected, and the blue states drop theirs when a blue get elected. But if we had a steady president for 3 or more terms, I would bet you it gets serious again.
Not a comment on the policy; I'm a parent and AFAICT none of my cohorts in town know how to do this.
> If your son keeps braking the rules you've set....surely there comes a point where he loses his phone/PC or whatever?
The efficacy of this depends wildly on how the rules are explained and enforced, I think. This is a topic that comes up often between my aunt and I. She has two kids about 10 and 13 years younger than I am, and often asks my father and I, the tech people of the family, how to enforce content filtering and screen time limits for both kids. I've effectively refused to help on the basis that it'll only offer her a false sense of security, given that I was able to circumvent every control I faced with relative ease at the same age as her son. I felt that anything she tried to do on the "blind enforcement" angle would just encourage conflict with her oldest, who like me was rather technically inclined and often frustrated by parental oversight.
Note, I'm not a parent, just an adult with some frustrations over how this stuff was handled when I was a kid, so I'm sure there's blindspots and misconceptions here. Take all this with a grain of salt.
My mom embodied the philosophy of "these are the rules, and you lose privileges if you don't follow them." This most often came up in conflicts over technology. She would set rules over what kinds of games I could play (non violent only), when I could use the computer (not after like 7pm), and broadly how much time in a week I could spend on it (maybe 5 hours before I'd start getting pressure to hop off), in addition to the standard no-admin-rights and interent-content-filtering.
I'd often circumvent this stuff through a combination of linux boot disks and just messing with the BIOS clock.
Mom never really explained why the rules were what they were. Some I could extrapolate: the content filtering seemed to largely stem from her Puritan view of sex. Thou Shall Not, and no further discussion. The time-spent I was less clear on, but I think it was broadly just that "screen bad" and there were more interesting things to do in the world, in her opinion. For my part, games and computers were my only social connection to others, as an only child who lived across town from all his school friends. This means whenever I "lost privileges" for my phone/computer/etc, I was now socially isolated as well, which just made me more upset.
There certainly were times she took everything away, as a "loss of privileges" for breaking the rules, but then I just got more miserable because the root problems for me still weren't being addressed. Moreover, that meant she was constantly framed as an adversary: enforcing the rules as a single parent takes significant effort, because there's no outlet. I had nobody to vent to, she had no other adults for backup or to bounce ideas off of. Plus, I needed the thing for school often: writing papers for class, or looking up how to do my math problems. There came a point where, philosophically, it was difficult to physically take things away because I'd bought them with my own money or they were gifts from other family members.
Compare this to my dad's strategy: He knew there were plenty of things in the world he didn't want me having my life ruined by, so he went for education over prohibition: "You're too young for porn, because it gives you unrealistic expectations of both sex and relationships. Also it forms addictive habits. You can ask me questions, and I'll keep an eye on your internet usage in case I see anything we need to have a conversation about, but you should stay away from that." Infinitely more effective to a developing-me: now I understood his concerns, the goals, and had a method of recourse if I disagreed.
As an adult, I 100% understand that there's good damn reason to prevent kids from having unfettered access to the internet. Especially preteens and younger: holy crap, youtube is a brain-melting attention-hacking cesspool. Simultaneously, I think it's insanely unreasonable to "walled garden" everything off and call it a day. That's not how the world works, and if that's the chosen method of "safety" then you're just making it so your kids will never come to you with questions during their own exploring while also leaving them unprepared once they're outside of your bubble. I was always insanely frustrated that my mom didn't just talk to me, or when she did, that her beliefs and concerns were always more important than mine. Again, I get it: kids are not always rational, it is the job of the parent to watch out for forms of harm that kids aren't paying attention to, etc--but I still hold a lot of those frustrations as an adult, especially because I never felt like I got to voice them as a kid. So, I just went around them. Constantly.
I figure the best strategy (again, as a non-parent) is kind of defense-in-depth: implement some general screening to keep the ambient level of attention-bombardment somewhere sane, help your kids develop sane habits around their tech use and getting what they want out of it, and educate the kids on why those controls are in place for the stuff that leaks through.
Again, my main concern is how much people crutch off of "just block everything," along with the knock-on effects that can lead to. E.g., there's a growing pile of people in the US who class any form of LGBT media as "pornography", which is patently ridiculous, but if that's the criteria used by your chosen filter mechanism or if that's the criteria people try to apply to society....
I can't speak for all children, but I have five of them and this works pretty damned well in most circumstances.
Why is punishing misbehavior such a universal practice across all human cultures? Because it works. It never works perfectly but it does work generally.
This isn't to say the systems that exist are really good enough yet, many of them need to be more detailed. For example, most apps are an on or off toggle, rather than a "let my kid play minecraft but chat is disabled and they can only join designated family friendly realms". So what often ends up happening even for parents who do know about the filters, is they wind up relaxing them to the point of being useless.
I think this is a poor solution; a more empowering one would be to develop a standard for content categorization and require commercial websites and commercially developed browsers (so all of them that are in common use) to implement content blocking via e.g. header exchange, with criminal penalties for negligently providing pornography without the correct headers (have some provision for vandalism when good-faith moderation is in place). Then parents actually could just configure their OS or browser for what kinds of content should be allowed.
A better first step than this bill could also be to require any site that hosts a significant percentage of pornographic content (which I'd place at much lower than the 33% of this bill) to put it on a separate subdomain from any child-oriented content (e.g. forums for a children's game) so that DNS based filtering can work.
https://www.cisdem.com/resource/block-reddit.html
It's called being a parent
It's reasonable to demand that a company that's in the business of hosting forums dedicated to children's topics (e.g. /r/teenagers or /r/roblox) and also hosting forums dedicated to porn needs to do it in a way where the two can be effectively separated or understood by filtering software. The solution to Cartoon Network airing programs for children and adults isn't to block the channel entirely; they just need to correctly label their adult programming so filters will work. In reddit's case, they already mark threads and subreddits as nsfw so it'd be trivial for them to put that onto a separate domain. Even 4chan puts their hobby boards on a different domain from porn and /pol/, and they're not even trying to appeal to children, banning anyone that mentions they're under 18/in high school/etc.
I'm not missing the point at all. Reddit is a product. Your job as parent is to evaluate whether or not a product is appropriate for your child.
You know that Reddit doesn't have parental controls. If you can't trust your child to not go onto the NSFW subreddits, you should block Reddit so they can't access it. Sometimes you have to tell your child 'no' and they don't get the thing they want. The other thing you could do is write Reddit and advocate for parental controls.
It's absurd and entitled to believe that I should have to jump through hoops because you want your child to have access to a website that it sounds like is inappropriate for them. I personally think Robolox is terrible for kids. Should Reddit install a parental consent form to make sure that parents who don't want their kids to consume Robolox content can't access it? Where does it end?
>It's reasonable to demand that a company that's in the business of hosting forums dedicated to children's topics (e.g. /r/teenagers or /r/roblox) and also hosting forums dedicated to porn needs to do it in a way where the two can be effectively separated or understood by filtering software.
It's not reasonable to expect a company to filter content based on your personal understanding of porn. If a product doesn't meet your needs in terms of parental controls, be a parent and say 'no'.
>The solution to Cartoon Network airing programs for children and adults isn't to block the channel entirely; they just need to correctly label their adult programming so filters will work.
Again, you should write Reddit and ask for these parental controls. I'm fine with that. It's when you pass laws making me jump through hoops that a problem exists.
>n reddit's case, they already mark threads and subreddits as nsfw so it'd be trivial for them to put that onto a separate domain. Even 4chan puts their hobby boards on a different domain from porn and /pol/, and they're not even trying to appeal to children, banning anyone that mentions they're under 18/in high school/etc.
And those are the companies choices. I'm not opposed to parental controls, but if parental controls don't exist, don't pass laws to force them to.
> It's absurd and entitled to believe that I should have to jump through hoops because you want your child to have access to a website that it sounds like is inappropriate for them.
Where did I suggest you should have to jump through hoops? I said companies like reddit should design things such that filters work. If you don't need filtering, you'd be unaffected. Similar to how that little "TV-MA" pops up at the beginning of a TV show; every TV in the US market can be configured to block content above a desired rating level, and broadcasters are required to include the rating in their signal. I don't see how this would be so onerous to require a similar standard for businesses providing content online, particularly when that's information they already categorize out of politeness to their customers anyway.
> It's not reasonable to expect a company to filter content based on your personal understanding of porn.
I didn't suggest they should filter anything; I suggested they should label content and that the industry should be regulated to use standard way to do this that parental control software can understand. There's already precedent for how to solve this problem in TVs. It can be done in a way that completely preserves privacy and only requires action from people who want to configure their client to have filtering. Note that I also suggested they should label content categories. The person configuring the client can decide which categories are appropriate.
Similarly, if they move their nsfw images that they've already categorized from i.redd.it to e.g. p.redd.it, DNS filtering could easily block them all while still allowing roblox memes, and users who don't care wouldn't have to do anything.
> I'm not opposed to parental controls, but if parental controls don't exist, don't pass laws to force them to.
The problem is that parental controls increasingly cannot reasonably exist. With something like TLS with Encrypted Client Hello and DNS-over-HTTPS, and with most sites being hosted on large CDNs, the choice becomes "block all of cloudflare etc." or "block nothing". It's not that much to ask that if a company wants to provide both adult-only and child-oriented content, they should at least provide usable metadata for which is which to make sure filters can work.
Is Reddit targeted to children? My assumption has always been that due to the nature of having intermingled NSFW content, lack of content filters, or literally any other control that Reddit was squarely aimed at older users.
>Grocery stores are free to sell cigarettes and alcohol along with candy, but they're required to not sell the former products to children. We don't just say "don't let your child go to the store alone".
Tobacco is a lot less subjective of a thing than 'inappropriate content' or 'porn' and its bad health effects are actually substantiated. Is fine art porn? Is a naked person porn? It might be to you, it isn't to me. Who gets to decide what is porn? The government? Religious activists?
>I said companies like reddit should design things such that filters work. If you don't need filtering, you'd be unaffected.
I would be affected because there is now a whole system that dictates what content is. How does one do that? How much does it cost? Is it my responsibility to determine that? The site hosts? What if one host has a different labeling system? It's not simple. It's regulatory bloat that would exist solely because people who popped kids out don't want to actually parent.
>Similarly, if they move their nsfw images that they've already categorized from i.redd.it to e.g. p.redd.it, DNS filtering could easily block them all while still allowing roblox memes, and users who don't care wouldn't have to do anything.
If reddit wants to implement that, that's fine with me. What OP said and what I responded to was this
"I think this is a poor solution; a more empowering one would be *to develop a standard for content categorization and require commercial websites and commercially developed browsers (so all of them that are in common use) to implement content blocking via e.g. header exchange*, with criminal penalties for negligently providing pornography without the correct headers (have some provision for vandalism when good-faith moderation is in place). Then parents actually could just configure their OS or browser for what kinds of content should be allowed."
>The problem is that parental controls increasingly cannot reasonably exist.
You can black list the reddit domain right now. How do they not exist? It might not exist in the form that you want, but that's life. I can't have the government force movie theaters to show edited versions of movies so they are kid appropriate. Some stuff just isn't for kids.
> It's not that much to ask that if a company wants to provide both adult-only and child-oriented content, they should at least provide usable metadata for which is which to make sure filters can work.
Reddit, for the most part, does not provide content.
Among other child-oriented boards, they have a teenagers board with 3 million subscribers, so evidently, yes.
> Is it my responsibility to determine that? The site hosts?
The site host, given that they're the ones providing adult material in a commercial context.
> What if one host has a different labeling system?
I proposed we should create a standard system for labeling and mandate its use for commercial sites that offer adult material, just like we did with TV. Browsers from commercial entities (i.e. Chrome and its variants, Safari, and Firefox) would be required to implement the filter settings, just as TVs must contain a v-chip.
> It's regulatory bloat that would exist solely because people who popped kids out don't want to actually parent.
It's requiring site operators to provide the metadata needed for parents to be able to effectively parent without the solution being "lol just don't let your kid use any website at all".
> I can't have the government force movie theaters to show edited versions of movies so they are kid appropriate. Some stuff just isn't for kids.
But we can force movie theaters to provide ratings of movies and require them to bar children from watching any pornographic films they show. Currently companies self-enforce with ratings, but that's because if they didn't, they were going to have it forced upon them. The problem here is that we don't have any kind of rating system for web content, and clearly tech companies aren't going to develop one on their own, so it's reasonable to make them develop one.
> Reddit, for the most part, does not provide content.
Of course they do. They don't make it, but they're the ones providing it, and they make plenty of money doing so.
Any user can make a subreddit about whatever they want. I'd wager the large majority of those users are not teenagers. Regardless, 'used by teens' != 'targeted for teens'.
>The site host, given that they're the ones providing adult material in a commercial context.
Which site host? Reddit is primarily a link aggregator.
> proposed we should create a standard system for labeling and mandate its use for commercial sites that offer adult material, just like we did with TV.
Yes! We need to make sure adults in no way be aware of or responsible for what media their children consume!
Of course that's the end game. We start with forcing companies to 'categorize' their content. Then we make it harder and harder to access the content that people like you have determined is undesirable.
>It's requiring site operators to provide the metadata needed for parents to be able to effectively parent without the solution being "lol just don't let your kid use any website at all".
It's requiring businesses to implement a massively expensive and arbitrary censorship system because parents are unable to tell their kids no. Metata wont be magically created and you know it. What's to stop a host from just refusing to label stuff porn? You full well know that what you are advocating for is the governmental review of all content on the internet.
>But we can force movie theaters to provide ratings of movies and require them to bar children from watching any pornographic films they show
The MPA is a voluntary rating scheme. You should look into it because it highlights all the obvious problems with what you are presenting. Misogyny, christian norms dictating what content can be shown, it's a disaster.
>Of course they do. They don't make it, but they're the ones providing it, and they make plenty of money doing so. hey If that's you're understanding, you don't really understand Reddit in the first place.
Look, just be a parent and stop forcing draconian policies on everyone else because you can't tell your kid no or monitor what they do online. Reddit is inappropriate for children, be responsible, don't let your children use it.
You think a significant number of those people are adults who have nothing better to do than larp as teenagers? And yes if you have millions of children in your audience, it's fair to say you are targeting them. Reddit is a company with a 10 figure market cap and 60 million daily users. They're capable of targeting multiple segments at once.
> Which site host? Reddit is primarily a link aggregator.
Reddit has hosted their own media for years. If you go to e.g. /r/nsfw right now, you'll see plenty of content hosted on reddit domains (along with thumbnails for the other links).
> We need to make sure adults in no way be aware of or responsible for what media their children consume!
I'm literally advocating that we make that awareness easier by requiring sites with adult content to appropriately label themselves. The point is to empower parents to do their jobs without needing to helicopter parent.
> Then we make it harder and harder to access the content that people like you have determined is undesirable.
The entire point of my scheme is to put the end user in charge of what they want to see. You're arguing with a straw man here.
> It's requiring businesses to implement a massively expensive and arbitrary censorship system because parents are unable to tell their kids no. Metata wont be magically created and you know it.
It's already there. They already label posts. Most people don't want random porn mixed in with their hobby discussions, so sites already do that categorization and have some tools for users to control what they see. We just need a standard for http headers to expose it, and have browsers consume those headers.
But yes, business models that include adult material need to account for the cost of not distributing it to children, which is already illegal to do. I'm proposing labeling as an alternative. The current situation is that they should be prosecuted for negligently distributing porn to minors.
> The MPA is a voluntary rating scheme. You should look into it because it highlights all the obvious problems with what you are presenting. Misogyny, christian norms dictating what content can be shown, it's a disaster.
Yes I mentioned that it's "voluntary". The deficiencies are why I proposed labeling categories, not ratings. The parent can configure what categories they deem appropriate. If categories are too much work for a site, they can just label it generically as "adult", and use that to comply with existing relevant laws about distributing things like pornography to minors.
> you can't tell your kid no or monitor what they do online. Reddit is inappropriate for children, be responsible, don't let your children use it.
Reddit has plenty of content that is appropriate for children, which is the whole point. If they want to be all things and include both content for children and content that's illegal to distribute to children, then they should provide parents with tools to segment those things. Or they can choose to exit one of those markets and e.g. ban all users on /r/teenagers, and start putting their over 18 splash page on all pages like every other porn site.
There's also an age range where it's better to set guard rails and then let the kids do their own thing, and you trust that you don't need to spy on them/monitor everything they do. It's helpful if the guard rails are reasonable and actually work. It's absurd to have to block major video game forums because they're also porn sites.
Besides, I'm not sure why you think that parents are able to be 100% in control of things that their children see/eat/etc. Should we legalize nudity on billboards, and would your suggestion then be to "simply drive on different roads"?
You're not arguing that "laws don't actually do anything", right?
Gun control laws? Japan's ex-PM got blown away by a wacko with a homemade shotgun, so I guess gun control laws just don't work. Nevermind the rate of gun violence in Japan.. it's all or nothing.
that assassin was motivated by an extreme religious affiliation to the lawmakers. There is irony here.
> In 2019, 37% of US high school students reported lifetime use of marijuana and 22% reported use in the past 30 days.1 Past-year vaping of marijuana also remained steady in 2020 following large increases in 2018 and 2019. However, large percentages of middle and high school students reported past-year marijuana vaping—8% of eighth graders, 19% of 10th graders, and 22% of 12th graders.
> Past-year vaping of marijuana also remained steady in 2020 following large increases in 2018 and 2019.
I've got a guess about why the number might be rising, and it rhymes with "egalization", in which case, yes, making drugs illegal reduced use of drugs. I guarantee fewer people in general, including fewer kids, smoked when it was illegal, and less was consumed overall. I'd further bet there's a lot less pot consumption by kids now, than there would be if dispensaries didn't verify age.
But I also suspect it's just kinda hard to get clean data about teen drug use. I'd also guess the real figures are extremely uneven (that "8% of eighth graders", if accurate, probably means 20% some places and 2% in others) and high use correlates to places where it's easy to get, which supports the notion that carding or outlawing should reduce use (since they make it harder to get).
(Nb. I'm pro-legalization, I just think carding and outlawing almost certainly strongly curb use, though of course they don't stop it completely, and I think "this wasn't perfectly effective, so it's necessarily useless" isn't a strong point in most situations)
*Citation needed
The fundamental questions are
1. Does porn usage line up with other patterns of addiction?
2. Are similarly addicting things withheld from children because their brains are less equipped to handle it?
If yes to both, then it’s a no-brainer.
Well, yeah, it would...
>1. Does porn usage line up with other patterns of addiction?
I'm not sure what this question is asking. Porn usage may or may not 'line up' with patterns of addiction. That doesn't mean that porn always or even the majority of the time is. Can you rephrase this question into something more coherent?
>2. Are similarly addicting things withheld from children because their brains are less equipped to handle it?
LOL absolutely not. Children, especially American children, are given huge amounts of sugar, which is actually physically addictive. Many are given huge amounts of caffeine which is again, physically addictive.
Millions of children around the country have tons of access to video games and TV, which can be addictive.
>If yes to both, then it’s a no-brainer.
Well, you're first question doesn't make any sense, and your second question is a resounding no.
The best way to keep your child from becoming addicted to anything is to act like a parent.
A kid with a peanut allergy who came into contact with peanuts, even accidentally one time, could be fatal.
And we already have something similar for porn sites, in the form of the "Are you over 18?" landing page banners.
People do "make changes" for specific allergies & food restrictions by making the information available & creating some allergen-free zones (just like adult content is currently kept out of schools and family-friendly locations, and there are adult-content warnings most times) but peanut access is absolutely currently up to the parent, in general.
I'm not even sure what the billboard thing is getting at. We shouldn't have nudity on billboards (except female breasts in nonsexual contexts), just like we shouldn't keep peanuts where we know anyone allergic has to be. Counter-hypothetical: it would be incredibly stupid to lock up peanut butter because kids might take a $5 bill to the store and buy the clearly-labelled jar.
We mandate labeling. We could not do that and just say "parents, you must run a peanut-detection lab or have extremely restricted diets of only food you make yourself, to keep your kids safe", but we don't.
I realize I'm beating a dead analogy here, but I don't think we should impose those labelling restrictions on independent hobbyist websites, just like we don't require licensing or ingredient labelling for small bake sales.
But even if we did, "label obviously-adult content" would be way more reasonable than "collect personal information to verify the real-life identity of site visitors, and log this sensitive data so it can be accessed (/hacked) later"
It's still very much on the parents to prevent harm to their peanut-allergic children.
As an aside, the sharp rise in nut allergies is itself an unintended consequence of another well-meaning attempt at social engineering: about 30 years ago, manufacturers began printing "CHOKING HAZARD: DO NOT FEED NUTS TO CHILDREN UNDER TWO YEARS OLD" on nut labels. Many parents complied, and that lack of any early exposure to nut proteins resulted in a massive increase in life-threatening nut allergies among children.
But your attitude is, in a historical context, weird. At basically no point in history has it been the case that the sole responsibility for the well being of children lay entirely with the parents. If you look, for instance, at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (see the Parenthood article section Parental Responsibilities), you will see, for instance, that throughout most of western history and for most people, there is an explicit or implicit understanding that it is, in fact, the parents who operate as stewards of children _on behalf of_ society and that the ultimate locus of responsibility for the security and well being of children is the society at large, not the parents. This is why, for instance, the state is typically understood to have the right to remove a child from the home of an abusive or neglectful parent. Given that understanding, there is a commensurate power in society to make rules which may protect children and in our particular historical moment these rules take the form of laws at multiple levels of government.
It places a powerful (and disordered) burden on parents to make them _exclusively_ responsible for the safety and wellbeing of their children.
The state will _inevitably exercise power_. Only a vigilant citizenry can hope to modulate it.
Republicans can completely ignore California and Democrats can completely ignore the Bible Belt (except GA which is now Purple)
As far as what the state can do. Again as a parent, when my children were minors, we chose trusted family members to be their guardian. If that wasn’t an option, we would have chosen friends.
No matter how you feel about the abortion issue for instance, even in conservative states, the majority of people don’t want more restrictions as proven by recent ballot initiatives, yet the politicians are still passing laws.
In my home state (Florida) the government is wasting all kinds of taxpayer money going after Disney and out of the list of things Florida and especially my city (Orlando) cares about is that Disney spoke out against a policy.
As to that specific example, I trust my own judgment for who my kids would be reared by more than I trust a bureaucrat with the same role.
So you can’t have multiple marriage licenses, but you can legally hold a public polygamist civil ceremony followed by “cohabitation.”
Granted people want the legal befits of a recognized marriage rather than the state to treating it as two actors preforming a ceremony as part of a play. But such distinction are relevant when you say something is banned.
“On December 13, 2013, a federal judge, spurred by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups,[25] struck down the parts of Utah's bigamy law that criminalized cohabitation, while also acknowledging that the state may still enforce bans on having multiple marriage licenses.[26] The state of Utah appealed the decision, arguing that polygamist Kody Brown (whose relationships were documented in the show Sister Wives) lacked standing to bring his civil suit, since his county prosecutor, Jeff Buhman, had not followed through on any plan to prosecute the Brown family. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals (Denver) agreed with Utah and overturned the previous decision, thus effectively recriminalizing polygamy as a felony.[27]”
Of note, the state of Utah won the appeal because they didn’t bring action against the group rather than because the lower court’s decision was incorrect. Thus polygamy can remain illegal as long as nobody is ever prosecuted for it.
It also mentions: “Given that almost no polygamists bother to seek a second marriage license, the practice of forming a family with more than one spousal-styled relationship is very difficult to criminalize. In the majority of cases, the additional partner is considered a wife in the context of religious beliefs. Legally speaking, the practice is more akin to adultery.”
> If even one of the marriages is a legal, civil marriage, then Kody and the wives are probably guilty of bigamy under Utah's definition. The Utah Code states that a "person is guilty of bigamy when, knowing he has a husband or wife or knowing the other person has a husband or wife, the person purports to marry another person or cohabits with another person." This is broad in three respects -- it criminalizes the behavior of both purported spouses, not just the one who is already married; it, as interpreted by the state's highest court, includes religious ceremonies undertaken without a civil license as falling under the heading of "purporting to marry"; and it criminalizes cohabitation (as well as actual marriage) with a second person while married to someone else.
The family brought the lawsuit, which was thrown out because they didn’t have standing. They lacked standing because the government hadn’t prosecuted them.
In Hammurabi's Code fathers could literally sell their kids into slavery. This seems strange, shouldn’t society protect kids? But it turns out that’s a relatively recent idea, instead there were rules around what happens when both parents die but children were plentiful and many where injured or even killed by their parents without consequence.
Which doesn’t mean I disagree with them, just that their argument isn’t sound. Slavery was also depressingly common and I am glad it’s become vastly less common today.
generally, human civilization is us picking and choosing sensible/humane parts of cultures we encounter. the romans who conquered greece were of barbarian culture, only civilized by their adoption of the greek culture, which they later spread to parts of the world the conquered. the greeks remained uncivilized for a long time as well. they attribute most of their development to encounters with egyptians and babylonians. thus, it's almost possible to see a primitive culture that upheld some of the core values of our civilization today: human rights (not too far back but pericle's athens abolished slave trade), etc.
If you go to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide
“Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent.”
“Infanticide became forbidden in Europe and the Near East during the 1st millennium.” Except if you dig into the details those bans where very local, it continues:
“Christianity forbade infanticide from its earliest times, which led Constantine the Great and Valentinian I to ban infanticide across the Roman Empire in the 4th century. Yet, infanticide was not unacceptable in some wars and infanticide in Europe reached its peak during World War II (1939-45), during the Holocaust and the T4 Program.[2] The practice ceased in Arabia in the 7th century after the founding of Islam, since the Quran prohibits infanticide. Infanticide of male babies had become uncommon in China by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), whereas infanticide of female babies became more common during the One-Child Policy era (1979–2015). During the period of Company rule in India, the East India Company attempted to eliminate infanticide but were only partially successful, and female infanticide in some parts of India still continues. Infanticide is now very rare in industrialised countries but may persist elsewhere.”
Thus as far as we can tell it was common globally from the Stone Age, through Bronze Age up until quite recently. Also of note, those bans wouldn’t necessarily be reflected as a change in all cultures in that area only the options of those running the country.
> At basically no point in history has it been the case that the sole responsibility for the well being of children lay entirely with the parents.
If the community’s role is to protect children, maybe the community shouldn’t be creating the trap in the first place.
Children are curious creatures. It’s natural that they are curious about sex and the human body. In the past they could look around and see members of their family, tribe, etc nude and having sex. Now we’ve taken that away and made it taboo. You can either do nothing, try and lock it away harder, or go the other way.
It’s a very complex issue though so there’s nothing close to easy. But this kind of legislation seems like a fight that has just as much to do with a particular religious viewpoint as it does anything to do with “protect the children”.
Calling a parent shitty because their kid does something they would prefer they didn't means we've all had shitty parents. Kids are individuals that gain preferences the minute they gain any sort of mobility and trying to reign everything in will backfire.
I don't have strong opinions on this particular topic. I don't think porn is quite so damaging as others to the point where society needs to protect them. But the rational response to the views you expressed seems to contradict your actual views on the subject of how parents should raise their kids.
Kids are going to do things their parents don't like. It's literally part of the kid learning about the world and themselves. It's shitty parenting to not know how to deal with this rather than trying to pass laws so that they can pretend the kid is just a miniature clone of their worldview.
You do parenting and education yourself, protect yourself and your kids from any kind of harm outside. If you can't do it, just admit you are incompetent and don't force consequences of paying taxes on me
just because schools and the "government" exist doesn't free you from educating or taking care of your kid outside of those contexts. learn to be a parent
The web is maybe easy to control, but what about all the other means of communication kids have now, like in-game social tools? In the end that comes down to do you ban everything that could cause an issue, and then you are isolating your child from their friends.
Even if that issue is solved, I've heard stories of kids 'forcing' other kids to watch porn on phones at school. How do you prevent that one? Most often the other parents are unaware, don't care, or even provide the porn.
If we want to live in an environment where children have any degree of autonomy, that means delegating some aspects related to restricting age appropriate behaviors to the state. Now, I'm not a fan of government mandated age restriction on websites, but your point is obviously not well thought out.
That isn’t, however, an argument against restraint in such arbitrariness, but the opposite.
While the US has something of a shared culture, the South has a wildly different culture than New York. It's OK for Germany and France to say that the politics of Hungary and Poland shouldn't represent them, and vice versa.
Blanket statements about the US aren't much different than blanket statements about the EU. It greatly depends where you are. And in an alternate timeline, the US may have been more like the EU, especially back when US states had very large armies (er, "militias") of their own. And some still do though they are much smaller now (SDFs).
Most nations have regional differences in the realm of the US. Yes, a town like Alba in Texas isn't like NYC culturally or physically, but many countries have this difference.
I suspect that of the many that I have lived in or visited, the only ones with apparent uniformity are ones I haven't really seen deeply: Iceland and Norway perhaps.
“Talking to your kids” doesn’t work when multinational corporations are incentivized to addict them for ad revenue.
You can justify almost any amount of censorship based on "thinking about the kids". But our society is built for more than just the first 20% of human life. The proliferation of this argument that everything from the internet to IRL bookstores need to be censored to protect children starts from a good place, but it jumped the shark a long time ago.
This is beneficial to the manipulators for various reasons, be they financial or political.
It’s as old as time. They just happen to be on the Internet now and we’ve atomized society to the point where they’re super common.
Most everyone is an incel until they’re not. After all - there’s a point where you want sex and aren’t getting it. Thus, an incel.
Online, in incel echo chambers, such voices of reason and wisdom are expelled. The incels then spiral into unchallenged worldviews that alienate them from the general public, isolating them from women and everybody else even more than they were before.
Nowadays, you're constantly pushed all kinds of random shit. The usual incel rhetoric that I see is - there's not many women to talk to. Which is mostly attributed to the decline of social spaces due to again - whole atomized society stuff and late stage capitalism, yadda yadda. (If you haven't heard about it yet - just read some robert putnam)
I think you can have both the overly aggressive censoring of nudity and also at the same time have corporations aggressively pushing porn onto anyone and everyone for profit.
In my opinion, you could pretty clearly enact policy to resolve both of these issues without making it a one or the other argument or saying "something has to be done".
Why does it have to only be one "something"? Could it not be two different "somethings" that target each issue specifically?
No one chooses their life circumstances. Too poor ("just learn to code bruh!" (did)) and not good looking enough ("just work out bruh!" (tried did not grow my missing body part back)) to attract woman for one night stand in country with banned sex work? Well you must belong to some radical political party or be poisoned by porn!
I'm no expert, but I'd say incels' social ineptitude seem to come from personality traits and [mis]expectations that aren't that frequently portrayed in pornography. I'd say it's various media with unrealistic portrayal of romantic relationships that should be attributed (and that's typically not porn). And, obviously, strong meme-affirming effects of echo chambers, the bane of our times, but that's a whole different topic.
I don't believe your last statement either. Where - except for anti-porn propaganda statements - have you seen any large adult industry corporation intentionally targeting children? The article in question clearly indicates that virtually everyone in that whole industry want kids to stay away from their businesses, because they only cause trouble. If someone invents a way to keep kids off the porn sites without having any negative impact on adult audience, I'm sure they're gonna celebrate that person as a savior of the industry. Those companies surely have put a blind eye to the problem, but I find the claim of adult industry actually targeting children to be outrageous.
What makes me thing so is that I highly doubt the incentive. On the contrary, there's at least one very cynical reason to still say there isn't such incentive: kids aren't paying. Parents may tolerate them spending money on some in-game cosmetics, but surely they won't approve if they spot a porn purchase on a statement. Porn companies have enough problems making profits from adults, so them considering kids as a target audience sounds insane not just from a moral standpoint but from a business perspective as well.
It's Utah. Utah, for all the ways that actually matter, is effectively a theocracy operated by an ultra-conservative religious minority. Utah is about as similar to the rest of the United States as the rest of the United States is similar to the Middle East.
I see a lot more "health bro influencer"/Andrew Tate types warn against watching porn because they think it makes people weak minded, which I would agree with when it turns into an addiction and actually impacts your ability to form real life relationships.
The chief sponsor of the bill went to BYU.[1] The co-sponsor of the bill went to BYU [2]
[1] https://senate.utah.gov/sen/WEILET/
[2] https://house.utleg.gov/rep/PULSIS/
Edit: spacing
Utah was literally founded as a state to be a place for Mormons[2], because they were a persecuted religious minority in other states. I grew up in Missouri, and part of Missouri state history is that of the 1838 Mormon War[3]. At one point the Governor of Missouri signed an order that paid out for the scalps of Mormons[4]. The aftermath was a mass migration of Mormons from Missouri to what became Utah, literally founded as a place for Mormons, to this day Mormons consider Independence, Missouri as a holy site, but Utah is the headquarters of the LDS Church and the predominant residence of Mormons in the US.
It is for all intents and purposes a theocratic state within the US.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/07/23/b...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Utah#Settlement_by_...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Mormon_War
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_Extermination_Order
AFAICT, within the state, Mormons are not a minority but a majority. Wikipedia says[1] 60.68% as of 2020.
---
Utah is 85% white and 60% Mormon, so...
The only reason that Utah isn't whiter and more Mormon is due to all the immigrant workers, just like the Middle East...
LGBT rights in Utah is also middle of the road among U.S. states. The LDS church also supported the recent Respect for Marriage Act unlike many other conservative Christian organizations. Your other points about climate and economy are extremely generic and not really a strong argument for why Utah more similar to the Middle East than the rest of the US.
>Utah is 85% white and 60% Mormon, so...
Maine is ~95% white and ~60% Christian, so what's your point?
>The only reason that Utah isn't whiter and more Mormon is due to all the immigrant workers
Replace "Utah" with "United States" and "Mormon" with "Christian", then it remains a true statement for the entirety of your country's existence. The United States is far more culturally homogenous than most Americans like you think it is. Consider travelling outside North America for once before making such egregious comparisons again.
I've extensively traveled the world, to more than 70 countries, and have spent years of my life living abroad. The United States is far more diverse and heterogeneous than most other countries in the world, contrary to your statements. Some subsets of the US are regionally /very/ homogeneous, however, which is part of my point.
It would help to start thinking of the US for what it is, a federation of 50 states, not a single entity with a single mind. There is a high level of diversity within the US, but in each state, there tends to be a balance point towards some particular dominant culture, which can include religion, and in the case of Utah was explicitly created to include religion (Utah was founded to give the Mormons a home).
> The LDS church has prohibited polygamy for well over a century now: https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/polygamy-la...
Officially. Unofficially, polygamy is still widely practiced in Utah as part of the official doctrine of FDLS, which is the breakaway Fundamental sect of the LDS Church. The FDLS has recently gained more prominence, which lead to Utah making a surprising reversal recently by effectively decriminalizing polygamy, something that was for a long time a felony in Utah in order to follow LDS Church doctrine that banned polygamy as part of the split from FDLS. FDLS exists almost entirely within the state of Utah however, and the words of the Book of Mormon on this topic are literally plainly in black and white.
Technically speaking, the Quran heavily restricts polygamy in Al-Nisa', 4:3 and clarified in Al-Nisa', 4:129. In practice however, polygamy is widely practiced in the Middle East and is a core part of the way in which many people practice Islam and has had no significant actions taken against it. It's specifically a core tenet of the Wahabi sect of Islam, which is the dominant sect in the modern Middle East (although other sects generally reject polygamy).
As for the Respect for Marriage Act, they were pretty open about supporting it because it carves out exceptions against employment discrimination for religions (and they're certainly not the only religion to support it because of this). They're still pretty dead-set against having to support an employee's paycheck when that employee does everything else required for the job but is LGBTQ+. But I'd agree that the situation is getting better. SLC has a thriving LGBTQ population and social scene.
[1]: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topi...
Al-Nisa 4:3 literally says:
> Each man may marry two or three or four but do not exceed this
I'm not sure if this counts as a heavy restriction.
> [...] or restrict yourself to what your right hands own of slavegirls since these do not have the same rights as wives
It also allows having an infinite number of slavegirls.
"If you fear you might fail to give orphan women their ˹due˺ rights ˹if you were to marry them˺, then marry other women of your choice—two, three, or four. But if you are afraid you will fail to maintain justice, then ˹content yourselves with˺ one1 or those ˹bondwomen˺ in your possession.2 This way you are less likely to commit injustice."
The reason I said passage 4:129 gives context is that it says
"You will never be able to maintain ˹emotional˺ justice between your wives—no matter how keen you are. So do not totally incline towards one leaving the other in suspense.1 And if you do what is right and are mindful ˹of Allah˺, surely Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful."
The interpretation I've heard is that while the Quran does not forbid polygamy, it restricts it by stating that it is required that you maintain equality between your wives and do not raise one above another, but advises that this is often impossible, so it is best to only have a single wife, and further that it is advised only to marry more than one wife in the case that you are marrying orphan girls.
I am not Muslim, I am not a religious scholar, however I have read the major religious works of all of the major religions and some experts opinions of them, and this is my understanding. You may not consider this a "restriction", it's certainly rather loose, but it's been my interpretation that the Quran does not outright endorse unrestricted polygamy, it is allowed only in specific circumstances (orphanage), and advised against.
Why does all the rationality I come to expect on hacker news go out the window once my religion is being discussed? Or is it I only notice issues when I'm a subject matter expert?
Polygamists are 1% of Utah's population. The decriminalization of polygamy has nothing to do with fundamentalists gaining prominence, and everything to do with helping people escape.
> the words of the Book of Mormon on this topic are literally plainly in black and white.
Not sure what is meant by this. The Book of Mormon plainly states that monogamy is the norm and polygamy, while sometimes allowed, is not standard.
You should look up what the word theocracy means. Here. I'll do it for you: "a system of government in which priests rule in the name of God or a god."
Utah's government is a constitutional Republic. People vote in leaders who make laws and administer the government on their behalf.
> Utah is about as similar to the rest of the United States as the rest of the United States is similar to the Middle East.
Your unequivocally false, deceitful, and extremely hyperbolic statements aren't helping anyone out.
It's a state that was literally created to be a place for Mormons because they were a persecuted religious minority ran out of every other state and it was a huge desert wasteland nobody else wanted. It's only due to huge influxes of immigration, especially from the South, that Utah is... checks notes only 85% white and 60% Mormon.
So it's like less of a 51% attack and more, business as usual and intended. If anything, the non-Mormons are going to soon be able to do a 51% attack and take Utah back, since Mormons are only 2% of the US population, and Californians are mass migrating to Utah now that people realized you can build in the desert with modern technology.
Yes if someone starts a cult that does illegal things they don't get to claim religious freedom or cry about persecution.
Take a moment to think about history of US statehood. The Mormons, chased off Eastern settlements for their polygamy, settled most of the mountain West, declared governance, then watched big mining operations all around them get cut off from their territory and turned into full-fledged states, while they were not admitted to the union for decades.
It was a time of shared culture that is unrecognizable from where we stand today, and they absolutely didn't want to give statehood to polygamists...
I'm seeing no mention of Mormons breaking laws, the only mentions of law breaking references other people breaking laws to persecute Mormons. The governor of Missouri's declares that they are to be expelled or exterminated (!!!), the mobs attacked them and killed them, no mention anywhere in your link of Mormons breaking any laws.
Note that I do not take the position that Mormons broke no laws, I'd just like to know what laws they broke, and particularly what federal laws they broke, since my reply is to the claim that they broke American laws and not of some specific state.
No, they can't, at least not by a general citizenship against a general pool of candidates. The Vatican's citizens don't get to elect the pope, and among those few who do vote, they can't choose a Bhuddist to be Pope.
> I fail to see how your definition of a theocracy automatically disqualifies Utah from being an "effective theocracy".
Well,I think you have to try really, really hard, not to see that.
> No, they can't
Why not? The vast majority of people in Utah are Mormon, and people in high positions within the LDS Church often go into state and local politics and elected, precisely because they will enact policies that align with the moral tenets of the Mormon religion...
Yep. That's called a democracy, or a Republic, depending on which word you prefer. It's literally nothing like a Theocracy, in practice or in theory.
You should probably study what an actual theocracy is: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/theocracy...
Here are some major practical differences between a theocracy and a constitutional republic.
1. If citizens change their mind, within one election cycle they can replace every leader with atheists, or ones with different religions, and change the laws entirely. This is not possible in any theocracy, either in theory or in practice.
2. A constitution, both state and federal, limits what the state government can do, even when the leaders are all of one religion. Such limits do not exist in any theocracies, in theory or in practice, because, when you rule in the name of God, limits to your rule are sinful!
3. Utah has checks and balances via different branches of government. It has judicial procedures, for instance, where minorities can seek redresses. Our state and federal governments were explicitly designed to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. No such systems exist in any theocracies, in theory or in practice. For one, the majority doesn't rule in theocracies! When the majority rules, that makes it a democracy. I'm sure you've heard of that system of government?
4. Often, leaders disagree in Utah even when belonging to the same faith. The church itself has zero authority to adjudicate these disagreements. In a theocracy, the church's say would be final say, and all leaders would ultimately defer to church authority. Actually, they would be the ultimate church authority. In a theocracy, the ruling officials would be one and the same as the top church leadership.
> You can't get more theocratic while being inside the US.
You can't get past 0% theocratic in the US because theocracy is illegal in the U.S. You redefining the word to mean something else doesn't change this fact.
I’m genuinely asking because I personally don’t really have an answer. I have a personal intuition but that doesn’t count for much.
I was hoping for a genuine, curiosity driven discussion and instead it will end here with a personal accusation about what you think I believe in. That’s just unfortunate.
I wish you a good day.
Well that's quite the oxymoron.
If they're the majority in that region, any democratically elected government should reflect their interests. Barring infractions of Constitutional limits protecting individuals, like the Bill of Rights, of course.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, for instance, meets both.
Now, the assertion that Utah is effectively a theocracy rests on the claim that the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints asserts informal power loosely analogous to that held formally by, say, the Guardian Council in Iran. I’m nit saying that that’s true. But that it is formally a republic with democratic election of representatives isn’t even slightly incompatible with it being an informal theocracy, you can even be a formal theocracy with those features.
1. Porn shouldn’t be available to kids and it’s on the vendors legally to ensure that.
2. Porn should be unrestricted, it’s up to parents to do something about it.
What I can’t understand is if the people in camp 2 are so unashamed of the porn advocacy then why is age verification such a big deal?
If it’s not a big deal then verifying your age shouldn’t phase you anymore than verifying your age to buy alcohol. If it is then you know exactly why kids should be kept away from it.
Additionally porn has a much bigger stigma than alcohol, so keeping record of what you watch, especially if you're into something more niche connected to your name can be used to discredit political opponents or even single out certain group due to abuse of power. A good example would be exposing a conservative politician that watches gay porn. Not that would necessarily be a bad thing, but there is no equivalent to this with alcohol - oh you drink tequilla, but you're whole ideology is based on drinking whiskey...
This could be very easily done at the ISP level for the whole connection. (I'm talking best effort not a perfect implementation)
Why not just block all "Adult" content by default and allow the buyer to opt in (both temporarily via password, and permanently).
Then it would be a decision each household could easily make about what they want.
edit: I love the downvotes without rebuttal. Reminder that the downvote in this community is not "I disagree with you"
The "household" is a pretty bad level at which to have to make these decisions, given that people of all age ranges share the same household. It seems to me that age verification makes a lot more sense than this, (and ftr I think Utah's bill is ridiculous overreach and would have massive privacy implications that are highly problematic).
That was specifically addressed in my post. Temporary disable.
Remember that safe guards dont have to be perfect before being implemented. They just need to be better than the status quo. The status quo right now is 10 year old kids viewing porn and thinking that's what average intimate loving relationships look like.
What I'm suggesting does not require abstinence from those who have the password.
Correct. The first iterative step would be to simply block the big obvious domains and sources escalating the arms race. It will never be possible to keep 100% of porn out of your kids' hands, but just like alcohol, cigarettes, and getting behind a car we can setup a better starting point than "Do you promise you're older than 18/19/21? YES/NO"
It's a bit absurd that providing alcohol to minor is punishable by a fine, but we give the internet/porn industry a free pass. Also if you were to hand out porn to a minor you'd probably be hit with some kind of charge (inviting a minor to some sexuality), but the Porn industry is handing it out en masse without any repercussion
I assume they use some kind of regex to do this, and it works.
I think the underlying disagreement/debate is whether or not these initiatives are in good faith. Any implementation of this is going to be imperfect and a motivated person will probably be able to get around this. So the debate, I think, is, if we implement this are we going to incrementally improve it? Or is it just a pretext to point to and say, hey look, this can never work perfectly, so we should ban x, y, and z.
a) It's economically implausible. Age verification is very expensive, and the requirement means that many sites that currently permit adult content will ban it rather than pay for verification (Twitter bans sex workers in Germany rather than pay for verification).
b) It doesn't work - it just pushes audiences to pirate content, because pirate sites don't give a stuff about verification, and don't take down content of individuals distributed without their consent, and steals from content creators.
c) It's not safe - there are multiple instances of systems being breached, which can put the safety of performers and other groups at jeopardy.
d) It enables incredibly bad legislation from political groups who are not benign.
PII breaches require disclosure, and that's the last thing PH wants. There is also potential legal ramifications if they fail to handle the PII correctly and stuff gets leaked.
Then there is the risk that somehow a kid manages to get through anyway, and they face the risk on that angle -- angry parents and crusading politicians.
Furthermore, how are you verifying these? Actual human eyes? Image recognition for valid Utah driver's licenses? What if they live in Utah but are from out of state? Fake IDs are a thing, and if it's an uploaded image I could have easily whipped up something with Photoshop when I was like ~15. Compress the image a little to help mask any artifacts and then cry "potato quality phone camera" if anyone questions it.
Opens up a whole can of worms that don't make sense if you're trying to solve this on the scale of just one (1) state. Maybe if California, TX, and NY go in on it, too, but otherwise it's a lot of risk for little gain.
When marijuana became legalized in my state, you had to verify your age and they wrote down your ID in a book. It quickly went away because its draconian as shit. I'm not ashamed to buy weed or alcohol, or look at porn, but I still don't want to create a written record every time I do it.
I also generally don't agree with the moral panic that conservatives want to generate about porn. Most kids see porn and have since porn was produced. It's on the parent to, you know, be a parent.
These laws have nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with social control.
We're talking about a state that imprisoned a women for being topless around her children. These people are dangerous and want to enforce their fringe world view on everyone they can.
What I couldn't understand about this scenario (regardless of the product being purchased) is... how does it possibly get tracked? Like can't I just drive across town to the other grocery store and buy more cold meds there? How on earth is the state (???) collecting and reconciling paper records in the 21st century? The likely answer is that they aren't, but someone who wrote the law was certain there had to be an audit trail...
It's databases all the way down, me hearty.
If it’s not a big deal then verifying your age shouldn’t phase you anymore than verifying your age to buy alcohol.
I don't like that either and some years ago I stopped providing my ID on request. Corporate vendors (eg supermarkets) still insist on asking my birthdate. I'm in my 50s.
Paternalistic attitudes infantilize society and that's a lot more shameful than most porn could ever be. Absent specific reasons to believe abuse or exploitation is taking place, lawmakers need to stay out of other people's business.
How does this work with picking up prescription medication?
I have to show ID for a couple of prescriptions I have, and my understanding is that it then goes into some kind of database that gets cross-referenced between pharmacies to make sure that I don't have multiple prescriptions at multiple pharmacies.
I think that came about as part of the opioid crisis, because some people would have 5 different doctors write prescriptions for the same meds to 5 different pharmacies. No one had a way to detect that someone was getting 5 oxycontin prescriptions.
It's not 'paternalistic' to require people to pass a driving exam, or gasp, do a safety test to buy a gun.
This pseudo-liberatrian crap is the most toxic part of HN, and frankly what is 'infantile'.
I have a number of nephews and nieces now and completely emphasize with my brothers and sisters who don't want to allow you and others to infect their kids with your supposed 'ideals' willy nilly - it's a cesspool out there.
At minimum parents should have choice.
We can be smart about it and provide anonymous tokens to validate age, it's not even hard, we just have to think about it, it should have happened long ago.
Parents absolutely have a choice and always had it. They can always enable the adult filter in their internet box or on the devices they give to their children. Expecting the whole internet to implement sound age verification because they can't be bothered to do such a simple thing and instead need the state to nanny the other 80% of the population - that's actually infantile.
If the cashier asks for your ID when you buy a six-pack, that's completely ephemeral, with no record created. If they swipe your ID (I think this happens sometimes), that creates a record, but it's not clear if it stores personal info or just verifies that it's a valid ID with appropriate birthdate.
If you verify your age to view online pornography, there's no way to do so ephemerally, at least that most people would trust. I think most people who oppose these types of rules wouldn't have a problem with showing ID at an adult shop to buy an adult DVD (but I could be wrong).
Frankly, it's not even that hard you could come up with 3 'good ways' just by thinking about it a tiny bit, that would be less intrusive than showing your ID at a bar.
Trade this for getting the drinking age lowered to 18 and we win.
PH is a business, and the overhead of adding this system, on top of the PII, compliance, and access risks that come with it, doesn't make business-sense.
What costs more? implementing a sweeping system with tons of risk, or blacklisting one state?
This is very different. When I buy alcohol, the guy at the checkout looks at my ID picture, checks the DOB, then we move on with the transaction. Digitizing the process changes so much.
Will porn websites be required to provide an audit trail to regulators to verify compliance? Will providers need to send your ID to a third party provider to verify authenticity? What security and privacy guarantees are in place? What is to stop another Ashley Madison style leak from outing gay Mormons in Utah?
"We do it in analog, so it will be fine at scale in digital" is not an argument I would expect on HN.
The only reason we do this with alcohol is because of health and safety risks. Please tell me how boobies threaten the fabric of society?
Premature exposure to sexual content is thought to be deleterious to a developing brain. Sure, kids mature at different rates but what should be formative years might instead be spent in navel gazing porn addiction which can lead to developing a taste for evermore strange, fringe, and or violent self gratification or acting out of fantasies and disrupted socialization. Instead of going out and figuring things out, why leave the house when you can get your fix(es) in the comfort of your own room.
Yeah, it’s a judgement call but one I’m comfortable with. Kids have always figured sex out just fine, we don’t need to throw nitroglycerin on already raging fire in the way of ever increasingly fringe/violent/illegal unlimited free sexual videos on demand. You can read up on Reddit about people addicted to porn and how empty of shells they feel like, childhood is the wrong time to introduce this fuel to that fire.
Don’t worry the porn owners can learn to code.
https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/44-1/s-210
UK
https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65388255
I'm not sure where else these bills are being passed but it seems more or less in concert you will have to use a government approved age verification system to access porn, which may kill it off as I don't think people want to give the government information on what porn they watch.
It turns out, a mother's nipple has a far different effect on an infant than a young adult female nipple does on a teenage boy. If this is difficult for you to grasp, then you should consider stepping away from this conversation, as there is clearly nuance here that the average person can easily understand but that you can't.
> What's wrong with these people?
What's wrong with you?
> Even public nudity laws differ from city to city (e.g. in California), so clearly, people aren't aligned at all on this subject (I'm emphasizing the arbitrary nature here).
I don't think "arbitrary" means what you think it means. Just because people don't all agree on the definition of something doesn't make one person's definition arbitrary.
> Forbid and censor the things you're afraid of educating on.
"Education" has nothing to do with it. Pornography has been proven to be devastatingly harmful for many, many people. There is no world in which you can be morally consistent, for instance, in supporting an age minimum for alcohol consumption but not for pornography consumption.
> On a closing note, I do recommend supporting organizations like https://www.aanr.com/ who also provide legal help to citizens in states that'd rather have you wear a burka than show a nipple.
If your moral code drives you to make the world a better place by liberating people from restrictions on viewing pornography, then I contend that your moral code is corrupt or severely misguided.
The government unequivocally has the right and obligation to enforce federal law. To what extent and by which mechanisms they should do this is a different question altogether but this issue is hardly about 'dictating what other people can do with their own lives in their homes' as was the case with other laws like anti-LGBT.
That's literally the point of law. One person writes the law, and it dictates what others can and can't do with their lives. Are you an anarchist? Or are you just not thinking clearly about what you are saying?
If thing X demonstrably causes major harm to individuals, then it is often in the purview of government to restrict adults from exposing minors to X.
I think you should reflect a little on what you actually believe and why you believe it.
Anyways, back to debating porn.
One of the best ways to demonstrate how ridiculous and un-thinking this position is would be to do just that. If they "know it when they see it", just say "when!" as we systematically wax, outfit, camera angle, and contextualize this stereotypical, upper-endowed male football fan into a gorgeous female, who then slowly gets topless.
IANAL, but what would happen if you took a picture of a male nipple and used that to censor the female nipple? Would it be okay?
Traditionally, obscenity laws have been extremely vague. Having a fairly clear list of what counts is an improvement.
With that in place we can easily make beer, liquor, marijuana and tobacco sales on the internet possible! And porn too, I guess.
Most other developed countries get by just fine with a much more relaxed attitude. Demanding identification and legal documentation for every little thing is excessive and imposes a compliance burden on everyone. It's fair in the sense of being non-discriminatory, but unfair in the sense that it creates a massive aggregate burden, reduces privacy, and institutes authoritarian presumptions.
If the person manning the self-checkout operations thinks you look awfully young to be buying alcohol then they can always demand to see your ID.
Simple.
Far more harmful is self-checkout without a discount for free labor or treating your customers like criminals when they leave the store with their own property.
You seem to have missed the part where I do not want to ask permission of the government for every little thing. I'm well into middle age and do not appreciate having to seek governmental approval for what I consume. I am fine with some products like alcohol being subjected to taxes to balance out negative externalities. I am not fine with the idea of showing my papers on demand.
When I was in (secondary) school in the UK, we could get served beer in the pub at lunchtime while wearing school uniform! Doesn't get much easier than that!
I'm much older but I think 16 is old enough for a beer. I didn't when I were that age but I don't begrudge them their beer.
And it's not like the law will stop it from happening anyway.
I have seen this with several European friends who relocated to the US and found their relationship with alcohol turning dark.
My personal theory is that life in the states may be on average more stressful than in Europe, perhaps due to lack of healthcare, at-will employment, etc., and this life pressure causes people here to be more at risk of self-medication problem drinking.
Using your UK credit card? If so, that's an age check in itself.
Imagine how much better the web would be if cookie consent was a browser protocol on top of HTTP headers. This is the Obviously Correct solution, they just needed to work with browser vendors to make it happen.
I’d rather you have websites support a generic cryptographically-secure claim schema for ages (implementable in any signed token the browser can emit) than actually check everyone’s identity.
Imagine how much better the web would be if the browsers would have a built-in ability to accept or reject cookies on a per-site basis... oh, wait, they do. And had that since forever (or at least IE5). Almost no one used that because it was obnoxious to have a popup on every website. So browser vendors moved those settings to the farthest corners of the most obscure configuration dialogs... and then the politicians brought those prompts back (but in a crappy, non-standardized, not-even-working way).
The idea was that core functionality shouldn’t break if you block unnecessary tracking, which the old cookie blockers couldn’t achieve, which was why politicians got involved in the first place. Great idea, terrible implementation.
This is a great idea, and it doesn't seem like we need lawmakers to do anything about it. If browsers implemented this, websites could start using it right?
Also the sites have a disincentive to make it easier; most people just click through because it’s annoying. The sites want you to do that; they don’t want to make it easier.
I think some of the aim of these bills is to shame people into not consuming vice.
If they though they'd get away with it they would mandate public lists of who does these things.
It may get tricky if sites limit registration to unique keys, but so long as it's purely checking with a third party and not storing your info, they're shouldn't be a way to validate an id is used more than once.
> PornHub said that a better solution is to identify users by their device.
Fingerprinting is not and should not be the sanctioned way of identifying people. On the engineering side, it is a horrible hack. On the ethical side, it is much worse to (attempt to) fingerprint since it tells PornHub waaay more than just age.
If I understood PornHubs proposal correctly they want to only provide the content if your browser does not send a "Child-Mode" flag or something. Given that parents should introduce children to their first mobile devices and guide them, setting this flag seems not to be so hard. Just set at account creation "minor: true" and done, or am I missing something?
> Hit the SELECT TAG button, then copy and paste this META tag into the header section of every page on your site that includes content inappropriate for minors:
> <meta name="RATING" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" />
So far so good...
> by using the label you signify that you agree to our TERMS AND CONDITIONS.
...uh, what?
I'd rather support a different implementation released as an open standard.
Also they normally aren't free to use, each query normally cost money, why would the porn sites want to pay for a service they didn't want anyway.
Another issue with these system: They are high value target and they tend to be just as crashy as other government IT projects.
Queue the full Tinderization of online interaction, I only want to see coments from X race, Y age, Z height with following list of orientations and identitites.
There have been attempts in Europe:
- https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-porn-ban-digital-economy-... - https://www.wired.co.uk/article/germany-porn-laws-age-checks
And its quite related to other pushes for age verification for social media services, as Utah and states like California have proposed:
- https://www.axios.com/2022/09/16/california-law-websites-chi...
Governments regardless of political affiliation and motivation seem intent on age verification, and it's easy to see where this could lead to, for better or worse, a less anonymous and more bureaucratically gated internet going forward. Whether that's good or not is the discussion we should be having.
But isn't that all the more reason to research this and educate people in this? So that adults can provide context and background? And to learn which kind of pornography is more dangerous than others in this? So that, with knowledge kids can be shielded from the stuff that's bad from them, and help understand the stuff that isn't?
Such a book would help? Thanks, but I'll pass.
This falls into the common refrain about "what do we do with kids who don't have responsible parents?"
I'm not sure just letting the chips fall where they may when it comes to kids who got a shit roll of the dice when it comes to parents is a great societal solution.
It's just not possible to address this issue without there being an intersection of how adults also access these adult things. A lot of other access controls in society are more reasonable than any proposal that people have come up with in this thread to restrict online pornography access to minors. This is why we place the burden on parents.
I think the danger is people revert to their intuition about what is risky, rather than defining it by an objective measure.
So ultimately, policy judgments with regards to increasing access controls are going to be dependent on intuition, one way or another, and individuals' political philosophies. I personally don't think there's any case where I think legislation like this is appropriate, though. If it were, it would be overwhelmingly obvious that it is. Clearly Utahan legislators think differently.
I’m always a little leery when someone says something like
”I personally don't think there's any case where I think legislation like this is appropriate”
It usually means either someone’s mind is closed to considering new information (I.e., they have a dogmatic position) or their mental model isn’t open to nuance (I.e., they have dichotomous thinking)
This is a contentious issue. There's no consensus on whether or not use of pornography is harmful. Suppose there was consensus. To what degree is it harmful and is it harmful enough to legislate against it?
There's a very low chance that it'd pass that threshold for me, given that I generally prefer people be allowed to make choices over what they do with their body when it doesn't meaningfully harm others.
I think a lot of the lack of consensus is due to an unclear definition of what constitutes "pornography". This makes it easy to muddle the issue.
>given that I generally prefer people be allowed to make choices over what they do with their body when it doesn't meaningfully harm others.
I generally agree when it comes to adults, but the crux of this discussion is risk to children. Do you extend this same logic to minors? If your stance is that it's up to the parents, do you think there should be safeguards for kids with "bad" parents? If so, what would that look like to you?
How do you propose we do that ethically?
There are many researches done and still being done on how addictive drugs are, or on the negative (or positive) effects of drugs. Eventhough they are both illegal and often rather dangerous. You don't need to feed a healthy 15 year/old a daily near overdose of cocaïne to learn about the effects of cocaïne on a young persons' brains.
> I feel like in our society we're always beta testing everything before researching its effects, shouldn't we research the effects of internet pornography in kids before allowing them unlimited access to it?
Problem with self selection (identify kids who decided to watch porn in the past, and compare with those that didn't) probably will not be that huge, when the people are only outraged about "kids" self selecting to watch porn.
Is that a rhethorical question? People of all ages capable of using it already have mostly unlimited access to the internet (and thus to porn). Sans parents understanding the internet more these days, and trying to set limits and failing.
Question should be whether somebody should do research before trying to limit access state/country wide in various ways. Ie. bigotry vs some informed decision making.
In my own anecdotal experience I’d say it definitely can be dangerous and depends on a variety of factors, a key one IMO being what kind of pornography we’re even talking about.
In my youth we discovered a friends dad nudie mag stash. Lots of glamour photography of topless women, some full nudity too but always pretty tame all things considered. I don’t think it had a negative effect on me. But the kind of porn available (and popular) on the internet is not that. From talking to a friends much younger brother I know they all have access to it and it’s led to some weird perceptions about what sex is, should be, etc. It’s rough, it’s often degrading, it’s almost exclusively focused on male satisfaction. It’s much more about one person’s power over another then snore any kind of intimacy.
The solution to all of this is, as always, parental and school sex education to ensure kids are learning the right things. But as a society we’re kind of terrified of that.
I highly doubt this, because it's both important and relevant. 16y/o will consume pornography. I know I did, and I was 16 way before internet. Young adults will have had exposure before engaging in actual sex. This is important because it might be problematic. Because it changes behavior. But also because the right nudges, education and context probably make the difference between this growing into problematic behavior or healthy, normal, human behavior.
I know this is a difference between Europe and the US. Where the US (or any society under pressure of religious extremists, really) tries to simply forbid such research or knowledge. And hope (and pray) that by not knowing how this is shaping generations, it might simply go away. I'm pretty sure it won't just go away by praying hard and forbidding research. I'm pretty sure academics in this area know this very well too.
Medical ethics practices in the U.S. are actually very advanced and restrictive. I cannot imagine an IRB ever approving showing minors pornography especially given that there is a reasonable expectation of harm and essentially no expectation of benefit.
Beyond how strict IRB/REB boards are in general, there are also additional federal requirements that must be satisfied when submitting a study proposal on children including surveys and not just interventions. In the US these are the pathways:
Section 404 requires that research poses no more than minimal risk. As the intervention itself is a federal crime this is not satisfied.
Section 405 allows for more than minimal risk if the anticipated benefit for the study subject justifies the risk. There is no individual benefit to the minor for watching pornography.
Section 406 requires that the risk is "commensurate with the subjects expected or actual psychological and social situations" which is hard to argue is expected when it is illegal to begin with. It also requires that the intervention is "likely to yield generalizable knowledge about the subjects’ disorder or condition which is of vital importance for the understanding or amelioration of the subjects’ disorder or condition", hard to argue that answering whether children viewing obscenity is addictive provides knowledge that is vitally important when there is no clear reason why children should be exposed to pornography.
If an IRB cannot satisfy sections 404-406 the only other way to get such a study approved is section 407 which requires direct approval from the Secretary of Health and Human Services if the "research presents a reasonable opportunity to understand, prevent, or alleviate a serious problem affecting children’s health or welfare, and, in addition, determines that the research will be conducted in accordance with sound ethical principles and that adequate provisions are made for soliciting the assent of children and permission of their parents or guardians". It is impossible that this would be satisfied as children NOT watching pornography (the alternative treatment/status quo) is hardly a problem let alone a serious one.
This has nothing to do with religious justifications but is due to very reasonable and heightened ethics requirements when conducting research on children, be it pornography or a new medication. Canada is essentially the same and I can't speak to Europe but I imagine most countries have similar requirements regarding to needing to demonstrate likely benefit to research subjects or contribute to understanding of a disease (which is nonexistent in paediatrics).
Every researcher thinks their question is relevant and important and that's why we have these rules in place.
https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/regulations/...
Rather I think you'd take a large sample of adults at a given age range, interview them as to the earliest age they recall consuming pornography, and compare it with their life outcomes: income, alcohol addiction, educational achievement, etc. Of course you're only measuring a correlation, but at least you'll be able to get your study funded. And naturally such studies have been done, although I suspect many are agenda driven:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6571756/
https://wchh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/tre.79...
(Many many more results in a casual web search)
This is why random assignment is the gold standard. With a large enough sample size random assignment will account for all confounds. Here, we can only measure likely confounds and attempt to 'account for' them with statistics. All of these introduces more noise and generally reduces the validity of the study.
In general, I dismiss all scientific studies with these looking back questionnaires as little more than well documented hunches.
I was, however, questioning whether minors consuming pornography is (always, and/or provably) bad.
No, I think there are things young minds should be shielded from some things to avoid future mental developmental consequences.
You know how movie directors make a movie and in their mind a given movie is supposed to be propaganda against something, but for people lacking this cultivated framework it's a celebration of doing the wrong thing? Take a movie about how being a gangster is bad --but for many moviegoers it's an invitation to the "glamorous" life or power, respect and success...
GP: is X actually harmful?
You: a specific subset of X is, as well as entirely unrelated topic Y, don't you think? Clearly this should be prohibited
I think he was asking (and rightly so) what the scientific evidence says, not what someone's opinion is.
turning in to a pathetic, obese lech who sits at home alone blowing another paycheck on Onlyfans, clinging to the misguided notion that women want anal on the first date?
and even worse, when real life doesn't line up with six-minute videos, the even worse outcome of woman-hating manifests
The question then becomes what should be classified as pornography. Justice Stewart famously said "I know it when I see it". My definition is close: "pornography is that which harms my soul". That means that what is porn will differ for different people and probably by age as well.
I believe they were asking for research or something measurable, not platitudes.
It creates a space for people to explore and normalise their distressing sexual interests without questioning the root causes.
Producers will often intentionally seek out vulnerable young women and groom them with promises of fame and riches, only for them to become reliant on painkillers and other drugs to cope with the reality of it.
It creates a market for the abuse of trafficking victims. Most sites don't require verification of consent and most users don't care.
It teaches men to objectify their partners and to see them as something to be shared. There is a huge market now for non consensual revenge pornography. Reddit has seen multiple subreddiys dedicated to non-consensual intimate media.
It provides a safe space for people to express racist, misogynistic and otherwise antisocial viewpoints.
PornHub in its front page today has videos of stimulated assaults and incest. For young viewers it gives them the idea that it's normal to be sexually interested in these things.
I'm not religious. I'm sex positive and believe in being open with children about the realities of life. Pornography stole years of my life, warped my views of relationships and prevented me from reflecting seriously on my own traumas.
What point are you making in relation to the topic at hand?
Are cars or guns regulated because of addiction? No. So GP compared porn to sugar, which is considered addictive and has probably more concrete evidence of self-harm than porn. I think the comparison is apt? Certainly fairer than comparing porn to driving a car or gun possession, which is sort of absurd.
But in terms of addiction potential alone Utah already has precedent in legislating for that. Example: Utah doesn't allow minors to purchase alcohol because of its addictive nature.
Some of the aspects of the porn market are not great, but they should be investigated by the relevant authorities. Hiding them from only certain people won't make them go away.
The reward of lotto tickets is a function of cost with the current approach, but that’s the wrong point to get wrapped around the axle. Consider instead that if the lotto reward is funded by taxes. The point is the risk/reward profile gets skewed.
As an aside, I’m pretty sure you can find evidence that excessive gambling is a net negative.
Lastly, I’m not sure you made any case that pornography is relatively safe.
I assume no - it's just a ban on sinful behavior.
Citation needed. Porn addiction doesn't exist [0].
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/porn-addiction
Pornography Addiction as a unique pathology is still not recognised but the issue is still young. We can see that it's an issue in that more than half of US divorce cases mention compulsive pornography usage. [2]
You can read more about Pornography Addiction and what I mean by that over at Wikipedia. [3]
You can see support groups for self-identifying addicts in places like Reddit. [4][5]
Furthermore, mutual support groups for partners of addicts. [6]
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_sexual_behaviour_...
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10
2: https://s3.amazonaws.com/thf_media/2010/pdf/ManningTST.pdf
3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_addiction
4: https://old.reddit.com/r/PornAddiction/
[5] Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/2018...
The issue with defining it as an addiction is more of a question of separating from other compulsive issues than not recognising the compulsive issues of the thing itself.
Yes, I understand there's a difference between compulsion and addiction but I'd expect the users of Hacker News to understand enough about how the dopamine system works to see the relationship between the two.
With all due respect, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that you destroyed a large part of your life? It seems like you're blaming porn, as if everyone who is exposed to it becomes addicted. Is it like heroin? Or is it more like alcohol, where many people consume it without becoming addicted, but a few people ruin their lives over it?
It's more like a TV addiction or a video game addiction where the over consumption is a coping mechanism for other things that are wrong in your life.
Hence 'porn addiction' not really existing.
Behavioral addictions are acknowledged in DSM-5 although this does not extend to compulsive sexual behavior at this time due to insufficient (yet growing) evidence to suggest similar neurophysiological mechanisms for a clinical textbook to label it as 'addiction' [0][2].
A recent review article breaks down the differences from gambling which is considered a behavioral addiction in DSM-5[1] and had not been in prior editions.
Whether or not CSB/hypersexuality is an 'addiction' in the medical sense is controversial amongst medical experts and essentially interchangeable with what a layperson considers to be an addiction and it is therefore very reasonable especially noting the overlap of salience, conflict and relapse[1].
Although there is insufficient evidence at this time to conclude either way whether diminished satisfaction has a similar mechanism to tolerance or lack of control has a similar mechanism to withdrawal there is also no strong evidence to support the argument that CSB is not an addiction and consequently they are currently treated as separate entities.
The pertinence of this is to not conflate conflicting/controversial expert opinion with generally regarded truth and therefore stating that parent is 'wrong' for believing it is addiction when many experts share the same opinion[3].
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/add.13297
[1] https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2006/11/2/article-p166....
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4677151/
[3] https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2006/11/2/article-p210....
Porn addiction has not been classified as an addiction in and of itself because researchers are unsure that it is its own addiction, or a subset of other sexual related addictions and disorders. So it is highly likely that porn is addictive, but medical professionals are hesitant to declare "porn addiction" as a diagnosis without seeing if it is separated from other problematic sexual behaviors.
> researchers are unsure that it is its own addiction
Yes. Indeed, this is the reason experts object to the term “porn addiction”. Some “addicts” might be consuming a lot of porn, but that doesn't mean that porn is addictive --- just like how alcoholics use bottles a lot, but bottles are not addictive.
I've been addicted to pornography myself and spoken with many men who say the same, as well as many women who have had their relationships and mental health destroyed by being partnered with people like myself.
The current state of research and recognition is not always reflective of reality. I'd hope that anyone familiar with the history of science could accept that.
I'll take peer reviewed research over anecdotal data any day of the week.
Notably this study predated the addition of compulsive sexual behavior disorder to ICD-11 and was neither validated nor accepted as the correct model (hence excessive use of 'proposed' and 'preliminary'). You may also notice there are seven separate commentaries in response to this study with an eighth by the original authors in which they acknowledge the several limitations of their proposed model[1] and make the following statement:
"Rather than present an argument against CSBD, it is our intention and belief that our model of PPMI adds needed nuance to ensure the accurate use of the CSBD diagnosis."
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-018-1248-x
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-1406-9
Opiates are insanely physically addictive and you can easily accidentally become addicted to them using them as prescribed, hence all the lawsuits.
Well lucky for you, I didn't make that claim!
I began with personal opinion and then removed everything I felt wouldn't stand to scrutiny, even if I do still believe it.
I chose not to include sources immediately because that would have required a great deal of upfront effort on my behalf, which I wasn't willing to spend since this is also a place where I come to find relaxation as well as intellectual stimulation.
If there are any particular points you're interested in discussing I'll be glad to share the basis for my belief and go into discussion.
If it's all of them then that still goes but it may be a week before I get back to you.
What about a gentle and loving uncle molesting a child in a way not much different from playful wrestling? Wrestling is fine, but we all recognize the molestation is incredibly harmful, even in this situation (because the harm isn’t the violence of it, it’s the actual sex itself).
This is just common sense. Of course sexualizing (sexually activating) children (which porn does) at a young age is harmful. It’s probably very harmful to adults too in large doses like porn addiction.
I think you have not seen the average porn online these days. Its way, way more extreme than this.
Whenever I see people argue that porn is just like sex they always turn out to be minors or young adults who have only ever experienced porn and not intimate relationships.
After being to strip clubs just twice in my life, and with both of those being very different experiences, I have to agree with you. Comparing it to porn (let alone an actual intimate relationship) is like comparing watching fast & furious movies to average driving experiences. While F&F movies are technically more wild, the real life experience of actual driving (even if it is technically waaay more mild than in the movies) is way more stressful/impactful/etc, to the point where even making the comparison feels ridiculous.
That manifested in unexpected ways for men recovering from porn-induced ED. The older men - those who hadn't grown up with high-speed internet porn - recovered significantly faster than the younger men.
My school also showed us Holocaust documentary footage around the same age. People getting shot in the head, piles and piles of dead bodies, etc. That plus gory movies like Hostel and scenes where people are chopped up and stuffed into a suitcase fucked me up WAY more than any of the porn I happened to come across at that age.
(Anyway, I'm not for the internet wide parental lock. Just noting that things are different than in the past, with ease and breadth of access.)
It has been proven, scientifically, that making a distinction between soft- and harddrugs help in fighting drug abuse, death and misery. It's, for example, what the Dutch policy is based on.
By making a clear distinction, and decriminalizing it, you can educate people on it. You can say "this is very bad, that is dangerous and that there is merely unhealthy".
I'm sure a lesson can be drawn tlfor porn there too. By criminalizing, or forbidding it all, blanket, you loose all opportunity to teach about what is normal and what isn't. You just get one big pile, where disturbing and terrible stuff is just as (in) accessible as the stuff that's fun, pleasant or even educational.
The Left has been increasingly concerned about the abusive acts becoming common in pornography and the seemingly pervasive use of underage or barely-of-age women with consent extremely sketchy or not present at all.
The Right has been increasingly concerned about how the pervasive presence of pornography encourages people to focus on that for their needs rather than pursuing real-life relationships and obsess over extreme acts that very few real partners are actually willing to do.
This is all exacerbated by internet startup tendencies, where maximizing "engagement" at all costs is the priority. It's in their incentives to maximize most of the bad effects that everyone is concerned about.
It's not clear exactly how bad everything is or that this particular thing is the right way to address it. But clearly enough people are concerned about it and aren't willing to accept endless delaying tactics around insisting that you can't do any particular thing about it because it can't be proved to be perfect.
In short…I’m not getting the kind of perspective expanding value I often find on HN from this discussion. Just a lot of back and forth from people exchanging the opinions they already had before opening the parent article.
I would instinctively agree that it's unhealthy for minors to have unchecked access to pornography but on the other hand I don't see how we could effectively address that problem societally without any kind of objective understanding of it. Has the exchange of unqualified personal opinions ever resulted in effective political policy, especially policy meant to manage a vice? That didn't work well for Prohibition or the War on Drugs.
Having said that, I am deeply suspicious of any move to "protect the children" because it's always used as a cover for a move toward authoritarianism.
Call me old fashioned.
Call me small minded.
But watching a woman getting chocked while DPed in her anus while a half dozen men ejaculate on her is not the type of extra-curricular activity [1] I want my soon to be teenaged daughters' boyfriends interested in.
Im just... overprotective I guess.
[1] If anyone calls me out for knowing what's on the front page of all of these smut sites, guess what? We all know what's on those sites!
The problem isn’t the sex. The problem is the violence.
Porn, being a fantasy, rarely shows the prep-work required to do something properly. This is what I personally worry about when it comes to setting the wrong expectations in kids who haven't had that whole "this isn't representative of real sex" context properly set, leaving them thinking they can reproduce what's happening on-screen without realizing the background work required...
Yet Shibari is viewed as an art form because it's much more stylish.
But people really into this kind of stuff are also very much into consent and safe practices. Is there really a wave of accidental chokings?
School shootings on the other hand... Maybe we should look at violent movies first?
All this content was available when I was a teenager and my friends watched it. Those who actually follow through with having group activities quickly find out that it's way different than porn and not really all that enjoyable anyway.
And the ones that do are really and truly into it. Yes it happens, it's not my kind of thing either but I know some people that love it.
What helps more is real sex ed. Explaining what sex is about, how to respect a partner, about safety. Rather than really easily circumventable bans. I got good sex ed when I was young in the Netherlands and I turned out fine and very respectful to women just like my peers despite having access to porn. The problem are religious schools not wanting to do serious sex ed. So the kids only have porn to go by.
Download the latest dating app - Feeld - and peruse for yourself what women explicitly state that they are looking for when the shame for stating so is removed/reduced.
So, assuming porn has any effect at all, it's possible highly available internet porn is decreasing the amount of sex kids are having.
The sexual violence trend on page 56 is concerning however it looks like the CDC has not been tracking that question as long either (only 4 year trend instead of 10+ like other categories).
Another concerning thing to me is the decreasing condom use, especially with current abortion trends. If we think porn drives behavior, maybe porn actors should be mandated to use condoms.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/yrbs_data-sum... [Page 14 (17 pdf)]
If this is consensual, it actually sounds rather fun. But it's interesting that the example is simply an amalgamation of relatively common things:
* Choking is a common kink * Anal sex is a common sex act * Group sex is at least a common fantasy; I don't know how common double anal penetration is outside porn though * Providing and receiving facials is also quite common as an alternative to spitting.
All of the acts are relatively innocuous on their own, but the combination is portrayed to be almost demonic :)
> but the bulk of the public support for these measures isn’t because people want government surveillance
Does not mean the majority of the public supports those measures, though perhaps those who do support those measures do so because of reasons other than explicitly wanting the government to surveil them.
I don't think you are implying that the majority of the public supports those measures but I did want to make it clear that this was still an open question.
The issue is that it's _their_ job to look out for their children.
We don't force all beds to have "walls", and give adults the keys to lower them if they show proof of age. Parents are supposed to buy _cribs_ for their children.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/temecia-rodney-mila-jackson-ret...
It is completely unnecessary to state the child's ethnicity to make this point which is entirely irrelevant to the argument you are attempting to make.
Hacker News is filled with technical people. However, think about all the workers who are not tech workers who have families. The burden of knowledge for these parents to setup home networks and devices that provide content filtering, monitoring, and alerting is way too high.
Access to pornography ends up being an economic negative externality caused by the increased access to the internet, and we haven't really figured out how to handle the cost.
Perhaps, but society seems to be increasingly creating hostile environments for parents and their children. Immediate and constant access to unlimited pornography is the tip of the iceberg. Social media has been shown to be highly toxic to young adults. Most digital content, be it social media, video games, etc is being explicitly designed to addict users, especially children. Education is crumbling. Food is loaded with artificial sweeteners and additives making them addictive and unhealthy. Local communities and support have decayed. And all the while the average income in comparison to inflation has cratered, making it more difficult for parents to actually spend time away from work to actually parent.
The ability of parents to raise healthy, well adjusted children has gotten much more difficult in recent decades, largely due the pursuit of profit over human well-being. You can disagree with individual laws, but you should not simply bury your head in the sand and respond to every attempt to help parents out with “just do your job and parent!”
This would be far less onerous since it’s already a feature they have and it protects privacy.
Porn is absolutely fine for kids to watch as long as the parents properly contextualize it. The issue is that somehow societally accepted that its taboo to talk to your kid about sex at an early age, and plenty of otherwise normal parents are embarrassed to do it.
It works very well in Netherlands, where teens end up having much healthier relationships, fewer sexual partners, and less unwanted pregnancies.
At some point later in the years, the kid will probably stumble onto some hardcore porn, but if you contextualize it properly, he/she will understand that its not how real relationships work.
In the same way, its ok (and probably good) if your teen tries weed/alcohol under your supervision, with the proper education around it, but you aren't going to give your kid like a heroin injection just because he/she is curious. But the fact that you establish trust and educate your kid about drugs that he/she will certainly come across is the more important bit about them staying away from harder drugs. Instead of outright ban, and then kid discovering how good weed makes them feel, and then going out and trying harder drugs.
Like I shouldn't have to explain this basic concepts to people. Really makes me worry about all the parents raising their kids these days.
Well the main article is about PornHub which is a hardcore pornography site, so...
I have no problem with sex-Ed for kids
I'm sure none of my school peers thought bukkake sessions were actually normal behavior even though they would have been aware of them.
In a world where sexual assault is so common I think we need to seriously reconsider what we're consuming and what we're normalising by calling this stuff harmless.
And I don't get what you're suggesting in saying hiding stuff doesn't work. Like, I like to enjoy a bit of LSD sometimes but I definitely keep that out of reach of children.
There are some notable differences though. If I play a violent video game then no one is actually being shot.
If I watch a woman being choked and ejaculated on by 20 men calling her a worthless slut whore in a porno then I'm watching that genuinely happening.
It's more akin to letting children watch videos from actual warzones. Even as an adult I find beheading videos to be disturbing.
Also, your subsequent argument is flawed. For the vast majority of popular porn, an actress in a scene where she is "abused" is doing so consensually. Part of having healthy romantic relationships in life is being able to navigate the aspect of consent. For example, a girl may have different standards for sexual intercourse when it comes to having a one night stand, where she may engage in kink or a fetish, versus a long term relationship where she may not want to do that. If you are unable to contextualize this, this means that your parents did a poor job of educating you about sexuality, which further reinforces my argument.
This absolutely does not equate to ISIS beheading videos, where the people being beheaded are most likely not consenting to it.
If I see an actress in a movie being shot, she's not actually being shot. If I see an actress in a porn movie being choked, she's actually being choked. That's not a question of consent, it's a question of content.
But on that note, have you ever worked a shitty or degrading job and had to do things you found painful because you couldn't afford to say no? I have. It's painful to go through. I can't imagine coupling that with the complex layers of human sexuality.
You're saying it doesn't equate because of consent but that's not the aspect I was equating.
Take a look at the front page of PornHub now. There's a video on there showing a man flashing strangers. Yes, they must be actors, but it's filmed in a way that suggests they're not. There's absolutely nothing there that would promote the idea of consent in the mind of a young viewer.
Yes, maybe parents could watch those videos and explain that it's normal to fantasise and play-act about assault. But I'd hope that at the same time we, as adults, would speak with qualified therapists and try to ascertain the roots of our attraction to forcing our genitals onto unsuspecting women.
Final point: PornHub has only required verification from uploaders since relatively recently, after dozens of women took them to court for hosting their rape videos and after it was widely publicised that there was a good deal of underage rape videos on there. There are still other popular sites such as chatpic.org or videos that happily allow abuse content to circulate without any concern for consent. That's only what's on the open web.
Indeed I would not.
I think it does come down to a moral issue then, which is related both to the core messages communicated and to the audience.
In terms of violent media I can think of 3 ways of categorising it: A) media with a moral message abut the use of violence (self defence, save the innocent) B) purely whimsical (something like Doom) and C) explicitly brutal material.
Of those three only the first two have popular reach. It's easy for children to understand and it provides a structure for parents to use to educate their youngsters.
When I compare that to pornography I feel that the stuff that would fall into category C is what the norm is, what's popular on the major channels. Therfore it takes on a difference socially for me.
We need way way better education on what healthy sex looks like and why respect for women is important. But I honestly believe that we've passed a sort of critical point and do therefore support the introduction of age based restrictions.
It educates one on the depths of human depravity. It is good to ensure the little ones eventually become aware of the shit we have to deal with. Hiding it helps no one.
Do you hide it for their first few years or do you begin as soon as they can grasp the content of the videos?
Just watching, or even enacting (as in violent games), violence doesn't make them violent beings. Why would this other outlet lead to more real-world sexual assault? I understand why one might think it a priori (without having evidence either way), but we do have evidence: the reality we live in where, to my knowledge, it hasn't gotten more common despite porn having become 100x easier to get by, as well as the research on how virtual violence enactment relates to real-world violent behaviour.
There's a world of difference between stimulated violence in a Mortal Kombat movie and a video of Taliban members playing football with a human head.
In terms of increase with the availability of pornography, take a look at this chart: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible...
You can see that the number of rape reports have almost doubled since the invention of web pornography.
I think you should consider the possibility that your argument was deficient instead of making assumptions based on tropes. Communities are not monolithic and HN is less monolithic than most. For example, I differ strongly from you in not believing in censorship in the name of protecting youth, but I also differ from a lot of people here in saying that tech companies have massively failed to deal with the distribution of CSAM.
This is the worst case of cherry picking data I've seen in a long time. First, if your supposition is true then why would the number have dropped with the rise of internet pornography from the late 90s all the way through 2012? Second, what's the per-capita rate instead of absolute number? Third, what other confounding factors are there (did the reporting method stay the same)? This chart tells me nothing except that something weird happened after 2012 and that's it.
There's evidence that porn reduces the rate of sexual assaults [0].
[0] Evidence Mounts: More Porn, Less Sexual Assault. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/all-about-sex/2016...
[0] Spurious Correlations. https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
In the same way video games are very addictive because it gives you a sense of accomplishment when you have no mental tools to go out and improve your situation in life.
In the same way weed is addictive when you have no mental tools to face hardships in your life and you would rather escape into a care free state of mind.
Nothing to do with the things at hand, everything to do with mental conditioning from an early age, a.k.a upbringing, a.k.a parenting.
I'm sure some people get addicted but people with talent for it can get addicted to pretty much anything
Personal observation: most people just do fine if they are exposed to porn as kids. In fact they are more well-rounded, and intellectually mature compared to their peers who were never exposed to those things early on, just like all other topics.
It's super effective. Not perfect, but "hiding stuff from kids" has excellent ROI—relatively easy, and damn effective. Ask any parent, we do it all the time, and if it didn't work, we'd stop.
What is dangerous is social media, which should be banned < 21.
I'm sex positive and I believe in being open with children about the realities of life but the dangers of pornography are real.
This is a strong claim - please provide a source. I think it may be true, but is it?
And YourBrainOnPorn gathered together some of the literature about escalation: https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/nl/relevant-research-and-art...
> Pornography addiction is the popular but unscientific[5] application of an addiction model to the use of pornography.
[5] Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/2018...
See this comment about the difficulty of getting pornography addiction recognised in the DSM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35790536
It's more of an issue of classifying it separately from other sexual disorders than recognising the addictive potential of pornography itself.
I myself have been addicted to pornography so I understand the reality of it intimately. I have been in groups with other men who are distraught with their lack of control. I have spoken to countless women whose relationships have been destroyed by this.
I can point you towards some large support groups online if you'd like to inform the men who are suffering that their issue is not scientifically recognised.
By the way, did you have anything to say about the other point I made? It wasn't clear which point the grandparent was finding questionable.
If someone says "water is extremely common in the solar system", I'd expect maybe two in three planets to have it. Half at minimum.
Makes me think about gambling. Most people either don't do any or do it in normal proportions. For those that do have trouble, as this argument is about addiction after all, there's a self-imposed timeout mechanism that gets centrally registered so that any gambling place will enforce the timeout on this person. I don't know how much it helps, and it also goes into having to identify users to avoid circumventing even a self-imposed safeguard, but it might be an industry to compare against and draw research from (I haven't seen it mentioned yet in the greater thread).
But just like binge-drinking and narcotics, parents and kids should have conversations and work together to build healthy ideas of sexuality. It shouldn't be a government decree thing, because that seemingly takes the responsibility off parents. But we all know a decree won't work, kids will find a way, so it will return to being the parents' problem.
I don't know how the US handles this, but online gambling is a pretty good model for this. You need to be of a certain age, verified with a government ID (here in Denmark at least) and if you have a gambling problem, you can add yourself to a list the ensures that you're blocked on all gambling sites (and casinos).
Phub is also a legitimate business that has commercial advertising interests in the US, so they're incentivized to play nice. There are about a million other websites that aren't based in North America, contain only pirated material, and don't care about what laws are applicable where.
Given how poorly they've behaved so far, I don't agree that they're incentivized to play nice.
All the other sites? Not so much.
The point of the US is to let the states self-regulate things like this.
And does this put a curb on explicit R rated movies that has nudity and acts of sex? Is it just the penetration shots that are "dangerous"? Also, it doesn't even touch on if ultra violent content strewn around, well, EVERYWHERE isn't "dangerous"? Where is the state bans on violence in movies and TV (they've already tried with video games)? But OMFG, if you dare to show a woman's breast, it's "dangerous".
Give me a break.
It's worth noting that the reactionary response to that (e.g. porn is good and totally healthy and everything bad said about it is fake news) is also nonsense.
What's going on exactly? Which countries?
France and Germany have similar laws, and the UK is about to pass one.
It would be nice if this were true, but it's not.
We used to have shame as a societal mechanism to deal with these issues. It was shameful to be an alcoholic, which was how alcoholism was kept in check. The same way it was shameful in ancient Greece to surrender to your carnal urges.
Shame is disappearing. Our societies are going haywire.
This is far too broad, just because something could be used for evil is not enough to ban it for all children. What about TVs? Candy? Stimulating toys? I think all of these can have negative outcomes when abused, but that isn't enough for me to say all children should not access them.
"[Shame and conformation aren't] the only variable, and it's clearly not the determining factor."
We really need to get back to the good old days – you know the ones – where slavery was legal, women didn't have the right to vote, and homosexuality could be punished with forced sterilization.
Also, you say Europe is more open about nudity, implying that is a good thing, but Asia and the middle east are in many cases more prudish than even the US, so why not look to them or use them as an example? Where's your objective measure for which societies we should admire and emulate?
This is such a blindspot for ‘24/7 engineer mindset’ people. And, in a professional context, things like this serve as a great litmus test for if someone is capable and geared to look at things at a bigger-picture level instead of just ‘computer problems’.
…not to equate looking at porn with getting burglarised. This is obviously BS.
I don't have any inside information, but my uninformed guess is that this is by design or at least tolerated to some extent. You don't want a watertight VPN because it stifles commerce.
China PR could pull a Singapore and impose the kind of punishment for using VPN that Singapore does for hard drugs. I have a friend from Texas who lives in China PR and regularly uploads to YouTube. Nothing political, he is talking about living and working as a teacher, so he isn't doing anything controversial but in theory what he is doing is unlawful by China PR laws, right?
Broadly PRC GFW is functionally VPN paywall for foreign content so most PRC nationals default to consuming media/narratives within the wall. TBH, apart from dissidents, researchers etc, in my experience, very few VPN users jump wall for foreign news, like exposure might be incidental due to being shared on timeline, but most PRC nationals jump wall for porn, business and lols. Plenty of foreign news gets filtered to domestic PRC net via diasphora who reverse VPN and post content back into PRC net - lots of foreign/western "propaganda" makes it's way in PRC, it's just rate limited to point where influence is limited, or censored if it ever gets legs.
In terms of regulations: VPN allowed for commerce, enforcement mostly against businesses who don't register/get approval using sanctioned VPNs. Individuals _generally_ free to use - there aren't clear laws yet against individual use, currently regulations target operators. 99% of VPN enforcement is at this level. Few individuals (outside XinJiang/Tibet) and no foreigners as far as I'm aware of have gotten in shit for VPN. For nationals who got in shit, it's what they do with VPN (coordinating with foreign forces etc), not use itself.
If only 0.01% of the population has the technical saviness to bypass the Great Firewall, then they've succeed beyond their wildest optimism. No one cares about the few exceptions. If those people speak out to anyone about how they're able to get around it... then guess what happens? And if they just shut up and keep it to themselves, that's a good outcome too.
You're chuckling "but it's not 100%" when they might have been satisfied with 85%. Joke's on you.
I’ll show you: The next logical step would be to make it a crime of some sort to as a user attempt to evade the law. Maybe it’s even a felony to persuade folks to not to try. But the reality is they made the law just for political points and it never gets enforced it’s just there sitting on the books. Now years go on and you have been using vpn’s to evade the restrictions. Now 10 years later you decide to run for President and. a whole bunch of establishment politicians hate you for whatever reason. Now all of a sudden this phrase is really relevant: Show me a man and I’ll show you a crime.
That is why it needs fixing at the source.
Think of it in terms of adblocking. You and I know all the tricks, but Google's bottom line suggests most people do not, and don't seem to mind. Similarly, the Great Firewall is tolerated because it doesn't block the things that are necessary for living life in China.
It obviously won’t keep information from getting out. But that’s not the purpose of things like anti-porn laws. Dramatically curtailing prevalence and access is sufficient.
It reminds me of this 2021 Verge article quoting a college engineering professor who had to revamp teaching material as many of their students did not understand folder structures and computer file systems. Why would they? For them, everything is on Youtube, Netflix and Spotify.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
My daughter today lives in a world where users no longer issue commands to computers. 99% of computer users limit themselves to typing into a search box and clicking links they are fed. I don't even need to set up content blockers, because the idea of telling her computer what to do is foreign to her. Despite my attempts to get her curious about how they work and about hacking, she doesn't even care enough about it to venture outside of the pre-screened bookmarked sites I set up for her. If it's not reachable via her toolbar's Roblox and YouTube buttons, she doesn't even have a remote chance of finding it, and I know because I've seen the access logs.
And with something as popular as porn? Why, that just might end up being one of the largest VPN awareness campaigns. ~
So VPNs aren't a "bypass" or a loophole, they're the desired outcome of these laws.
Of course they won't be able to enforce this most of the time. But if you end up in their sights for any reason, they may then notice you using a VPN and use that information to legally blackmail you.
Usually this goes with making the punishment very harsh: A stolen MP3 on your hard drive? 20-to-life unless you take a plea bargain down to 2 years and turn in 3 friends as well. Same deal now with VPNs.
Mind you, RESTRICT is a bad bill, and those provisions are vague, and the EFF is right to be screaming about it. But it doesn't do what you think it does.
[1] Hilariously and depressingly unconstitutional. Good grief.
How is it unconstitutional? I don't know the ins and outs.
The difference between showing ID to a clerk and this sort of thing is recordkeeping. A clerk is only checking the DOB on the ID, not keeping a record of your identity[1]. Online age checks keep records.
If there were some way of doing an age check without having your identity attached to it or having to expose yourself to some commercial third party, I wouldn't have an issue. That's a tough nut, though.
[1] I'm aware that certain businesses do keep a scan of your ID, but they're the exception and not the rule.
As a foreigner, it's kind of strange that violent movies (and political propaganda disguised as violent movies) are protected speech and pornography is not.
In America, parents worry that sexual media might effect their children, but worry less about violent media.
I'm of the opinion that both are half right and both are half wrong. Both violent and sexual media effect the people who consume it. We are what we eat. There is no kind of media that doesn't effect consumers of that media in some way. Also, it bears mentioning that a lot of pornography is both sexual and violent...
(In case it isn't clear, those two trends I list above are gross generalizations. When I was a child in America, my mother would not allow me to play with tin soldiers or GI Joes, nerf guns, or watch cartoons more violent than Arthur. Not a typical American childhood, but nevertheless still an American childhood. Generalizations always have exceptions but I think they can be useful nevertheless.)
If you want to argue that pornography should not be an exception, or that violence should be, then fair enough, but given they're such different types of content it's nonsensical to try and put them on an axis and claim one is further along it than the other.
Unless you live in a state where they scan your ID for such transactions, those in-person purchases can be effectively anonymous.
Out of curiosity, what state do you live in where gas stations sell pornography?
As an aside, in many cases, porn served by websites isn't meant to be bought. It is effectively advertising.
In Utah, it's clear that there would be less-restrictive ways to achieve the supposed goals of the law. For instance, jail parents whose minor children view pornography. That would not be a content-based restriction on speech.
Since there is no way for a website to know the age of its visitors, the Utah law is a de facto ban on certain speech.
Does this seem at all practical to you? To me, this seems akin to dropping ID requirements at liquor stores and bars, and instead enacting a law to jail the parents of minors who drink liquor.
Which is all to say, no. None of this is workable because none of this is about protecting children from life-altering harm.
This law is intended to create a liabikity trap to attack companies a religious state deems immoral.
I don't believe everyone considers pornography to be speech, let alone practices it as speech.
And it turns out that restrictions on speech are unconstitutional independently of whether you want to exercise that particular speech. If a law is passed prohibiting discussion of mohair rugs, it infringes on my free speech even if I have no intention of discussing mohair rugs.
1. https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=101895573599950...
I mean, when I was a teenager I already knew how to program and my mother was completely tech illiterate. So how the hell was she supposed to control what a chronically horny teenage boy was getting up to on the internet?
We should also remember that teenagers are supposed to disobey their parents. It's not really the norm to have much control over your teenage children. That's just a natural stage of development from a dependent child to an independent adult who makes their own decisions. Sometimes teenagers just have to learn the hard way.
I feel like porn is mostly harmful in combination with loneliness. I had a pretty bad addiction to it as a teenager but it kind of fixed itself when I started dating at 18 and realised the disconnect between porn and the real deal. If that never happened, I'd probably be a woman-hating incel by now.
Purchasing liquor isn't a first amendment right. The standards are indeed different.
I don't like the RESTRICT Act but you're overstating your case.
don't think that's what RESTRICT act does tho
Good job Utah!
Also, during prohibition it was more efficient to smuggle stronger alcoholic drinks due to the fact that a bottle of whiskey can hold more standard drinks than a bottle of beer (30 ml whiskey ~ 285 ml beer). From what I red in Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream [1], this seemed to contribute to spirits becoming more available than lighter alcoholic beverages.
There are clearly more factors at play than what the law says. What do you believe will happen if you drink alcohol in secret, out of range of the eyes of the State? Muslims believe this will still have consequences in afterlife. Atheists don't. Many Christians believe they'll be saved and forgiven by God as long as they are Christian.
> A 2012 study suggested that belief in hell decreases crime rates, while belief in heaven increases them, and indicated that these correlations were stronger than other correlates like national wealth or income inequality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_correlations_of_cr...
It's free to drink here, but drugs are banned. Only a very small minority drinks alcohol in my region, I have no relatives I know of that ever drank. Drugs/weed/marijuana are horrible things no one ever wants in my entire social circle, I don't think I have ever seen a user of such substances in my entire life IRL. Western and some coastal cities drink more and there's more drug activity too (and they're less religious too).
easy sales opportunity
That seems a little wonky to me.
It's a very different world from technology, where technical compliance is more or less the same thing as policy compliance.
Technology is technical. Policy is political.
I guess people providing wifi near the border could get complex but you could pass that responsibility to whomever owns the physical line and where it terminates. Satellite might be a little difficult.
But I'm not entirely sure we should do it just because it could be done.
Porhub made the best reasonable effort. The ISPs supplied inaccurate data and are in the jurisdiction, but aren't required to supply anything at all AFAICT. Who has a problem?
Given the known problems with IP geo-location, I don't think this would count as "the best reasonable effort." Unless you interpret "reasonable" to mean "half-ass."
If you think Disney's happy with "half-ass", then "half-ass" is what I mean.
There would probably still be trivial ways to work around this (e.g. content blocker to remove the marker) but it would be no more trivial than the current vpn workaround and it would be more privacy preserving.
No online entity is legally able to provide minors access to pornography. It is just the nation, as a collective, doesn't care enough to enforce it.
Employing privacy eroding laws to address it via appeals to emotion seems like a slippery slope.
Not saying it’s a good idea, that feels ripe for abuse if you can more or less identify minors just by looking at their requests… (or via JS)
Then again, a 1 cent credit card validation charge isn't going to stop any kids from using the magic digits printed on their parents' cards so that system probably wouldn't hold up.
It seems to be that blocking Utah is a strategic PR move to try and make these kinds of laws unpopular. Lets blame the weirdo Mormons trying to pass strange laws. Nevermind these laws are starting to pop up around the world.
There are legitimate privacy concerns with checking ID online, but I think it’s way past time that the government does something to restrict the supply of porn to minors via the internet.
The same with social media. The evidence that social media causes harm to minors is clear and compelling.
I think the market should find the best solution here.
Personally I would like to see something like letsencrypt to take the role of central identification authority, with multiple open protocols available to prove identification. Neither governments or banks should be the single source for identity. Trust is a hard problem to solve with technology, and neither government nor for-profit organizations tend to be very good at it.
PornHub is somewhat unique in that it’s so large and totally free.
Uh.. no..
And how about you just go to google/bing whatever and search for some porn. It will come right up.
You are completely bonkers if you think free porn is somewhat unique to pornhub.
Right?
That is not why people don't want kids in sex shops.
Is that actually required and enforced in the USA?
So.. what, you have to enter a license number or a picture of a license to let people into a porn website? How does that prove anything other than someone has access to a license number/picture?
>There are legitimate privacy concerns with checking ID online, but I think it’s way past time that the government does something to restrict the supply of porn to minors via the internet.
First... how?
Second.. I sure as shit don't want that. Most people don't want that. Mostly religious nutjobs do, and politicians pretend like they care just to keep on good terms with religious nuts.
>The evidence that social media causes harm to minors is clear and compelling.
I'm not advocating for social media here- but no one being objective about the subject would ever speak that way. You obviously have a "PROTECT THE CHILDREN!" mentality and want to legislate everything with no respect to anything else. At least just be straight forward instead of trying to make silly arguments.
It's still a barrier to entry and will stop some kids. Sure, kids can still get fake IDs or use their parents so this wont stop everyone but no law ever will stop everyone.
> First... how?
Don't know. Let's let the people who have the most interest here figure out a workable way around this.
> Second.. I sure as shit don't want that. Most people don't want that. Mostly religious nutjobs do, and politicians pretend like they care just to keep on good terms with religious nuts.
You may not. But I'm not a religious nut job, in fact I'm a frequent user of online porn and have for almost 20 years now. That said, I think I'm mature enough now to recognize how fucked up a lot of stuff online is. And now that I have kids, I can see that the status quo is probably not where we want to be on this issue. Not necessarily for my kids (I can put strong content filtering on my networks), but for other people who aren't nearly as tech savvy.
> I'm not advocating for social media here- but no one being objective about the subject would ever speak that way. You obviously have a "PROTECT THE CHILDREN!" mentality and want to legislate everything with no respect to anything else. At least just be straight forward instead of trying to make silly arguments.
Looks pretty compelling to me: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3919760
You don't think people have thought about this shit since the internet started? There is literally no viable way- otherwise it probably would have already happened.
So honestly the entire argument is completely moot unless you want us to video chat with someone to verify our identity and age before we decide to search for a naughty image.
The market never did this because they never had to before, and the internet has also drastically changed since this was first brought up.
This is such a common argument for any new type of law. Yes, it turns out, you can try and commit fraud and break the law, and then you will be held accountable for it.
Banks also have to verify who you are before doing business with you. People are free to try and misrepresent who they are in order to gain access to financial services illegally.
I've looked into this recently and detecting state you are in without having access to your location data had just under 50% error rate.
It sounds like there's an opportunity here for someone to create (yet another?) tech company that manages this difficult problem. PornHub, gambling sites and other folks that need to verify age then pay you to do it! Laws like this are just a cost of doing business. Pass the cost of verification onto the consumers in Utah. If consumers don't like they can change the law or learn how to setup a VPN.
Doesn't this solve the problem? PornHub keeps their margins and people still have their freedom. If a kid really wants to look at porn, they'll at least have to be able to fund it or learn some valuable technical skills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Joseph_Smith%27s_wives
This happened after some anti-sex groups went on a pr campaign. And this american pretentiousness is now imposed on everyone, worldwide.
However, nanny-laws like this suck and end up having a horrible blast radius for privacy and security.
What happened to parents setting up content filters on cellphones and computers? Why is it the government's job to police your kids?
I can't believe how far Hacker News has fallen. Now we're cool with de-anonymizing the internet? Ludicrous!
No one’s stopping you; it’s to stop kids from ramping up what might be the most societally acceptable hardcore addiction.
There are elected representatives that push for these changes, this is how the society in the US is structured. If you want a different set of rules, get elected or change states.
This is a disenguine, bad faith take on a swathe of commenters, not half of hn. Please don't add to flame wars.
Advertising is close to a $1T industry. Many people here work for some of the most powerful corporations in the world, whose empires are built on advertising. The content we see and hear affects us. I think we would be wise to treat all kinds of media consumption, particularly novel forms such as the unlimited access to limitless amounts of porn at the touch of a button which has only been widely available 20 years at best, with some hesitancy and skepticism before we declare it as perfectly harmless.
This is eventually going to hit even Hacker News if the law is actually effective. Is HN going to jump through the hoops of complying with the law or just block Utah?
EDIT: i am told this is due to a specific law in utah and has nothing to do with the numerous well respected and certainly not crackpot theorists I subscribe to.
It’s a conspiracy that I could probably buy into.
I support this law on its face, but I also don't have an issue with laws like this keeping those that might not successfully integrate into the existing culture of Utah from moving here. I imagine there are others that probably think like me.
Nno no no bros, not like that. (I'll show myself out.)
What are you even trying to say? Is that not how it works currently? Freaking chud-brains lol.
If you don't like racism or porn sites don't go to them.
It’d be like comparing an old style police stakeout and telling everyone surveillance is no different today because it’s just the police (ignoring the part where technology changes the calculus).
In short, hacker news users have quite a bit to say about porn on the internet, while another "popular" post about Google's DeepMind CEO's belief about impending general artificial intelligence remains at 35 comments. lol
Stay classy HN users. :p
Why was your initial observation about shame?
Just make content tagging mandatory and make a device level filter that can be turned on by parents and locked with a password.
Done.
Maybe these things just aren't compatible.
Choose local organic porn.
(time sensitive link)
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=vpn&date=now%201-...
I’m honestly more surprised this didn’t happen 20 years ago.
Where "good enough" wrt. correctness doesn't mean crypto-graphically pro-oven but only "you need to do some hacky things to circumvent it". Because IMHO for anything which doesn't also require to know the _exact_ identity of the user that is good enough.
Where "good enough" wrt. privacy doesn't mean perfect, but means for the "age verification provider" not worse then what fingerprinting can do even if you have a ad-blocker and for the "age verification checking" website means yes or no and that's all they get (preferable, in worst case also the identity of the "age verification provider" (e.g. some organization) id but under no circumstances anything more than that).
Where "good enough" wrt. usability means you have to use an verification provider of your country (because what adult means differs).
This solution isn't perfect, it doesn't distinguish between different countries having different ages for being adult and intentionally doesn't handle other age steps like 12+, 16+ (mainly matters for games).
Honestly the only real problem I see is that in the US it can't be used to buy alcohol because for some reasons they don't allow adult to buy alcohol until 21 (but do allow them to do decisions way more dangerous then that). Except it's not really a problem as the US can define "internet adult" to be 21+, given that this is mainly needed for porn, buying alcohol etc. the US would love doing that anyway AFIK.
I mean sometimes the perfect solutions is just to bothersome bother with it (the perfect solutions probably needs something like 0 knowledge proofs to preserve privacy).
Because most kids can get there parents credit card number, and the "small nominal fee" is often too little and also often too cryptically booked for many parents to realize what is going on or to ask their bank about it.
And because it's just a "small nominal fee" many kids are also not worried about causing any harm when doing so.
Additionally with the credit card e-comerce system becoming more dominant in the world it becomes increasingly more likely for not-quite adults to have something which looks like a credit card for the shop (but likely acts a bit different behind the scene).
Lastly it potentially leaks _a lot_ of private information, which in some contexts is okay but in others is not. Which is also why the small nominal fee trick works, it's often not just based on "only adults have a credit card" but on "let's use the credit card number to get a lot information about the user including if they are adult".
One state is a democracy, the other is an undemocratic clerical state.
Now, close your eyes and try to guess which is which.
> Now, close your eyes and try to guess which is which.
Utah is the democracy? Doesn't seem too tough. Their elected officials passed a law, we assume with the will of the people. You disagreeing with the law doesn't change their status as a democracy.
> Pornhub forced to block Utah, but not Iran.
One has enforcement mechanisms that can actually hurt Pornhub, and the other is Iran. Big ole shrug here too.
I mean, except that that’s really not even a little bit surprising.
(Neither, really, is the fact—which seems more relevant here—that people raised in the context where liberal democracy is idealized often have trouble separating out the “liberal” and “democratic” elements of that system, and frequently confuse the construct as “democracy” and view democratic illiberalism as “undemocratic”.)
Also HN: "How dare Utah try and regulate a pornographic media company"
I guess we should get used to a future where porn is freely available to everyone, at every age, because it doesn't appear to be slowing down.
I have not heard of this consensus. Where can I find out about it?
"How do we handle the negative externalities that access to the worlds information at our fingertips has caused?"
In theory parents are responsible for general outcomes of their children.
However, do you expect non-tech, and realistically, non security/networking people to have the toolset to understand how to set up their networks and their devices to block access to this content? It's already a hard problem to solve in enterprise, or at least non Gov/Defense enterprises (hello Bluecoat?).
A company has no incentive to block users from their content like this unless their is a negative effect from letting someone view it who shouldn't. They say "you're the parent block it". It's almost as if a child walked into a bar and said "give me a beer" and the bartender did. Then didn't get in trouble because "the parent should have stopped it".
no, this is more like dad bringing home beers, the kids get into it, and they try to go after the store or beer manufacturer.
I mean it's still happening generally under a parents roof, likely in their own homes and I'm there's already plenty of tools out there to block shit like this, at least on WiFi and I'm sure mobile devices could also block it. This ban is more about the states' religious undertones than anything.
fyi, I live in Utah and used to be Mormon.
It's nothing like a parent bringing home the beers. In order to participate in education and social life your kids need access to the internet and devices. You parents are giving you a tool to do a job that comes with a negative externality of being able to access adult websites (and anything else on the internet).
It's not ridiculous for parents to vote for representatives who will put legal blocks in place to force a change since there's no way to vote with your dollar here, even if the source is religion where making children is a core tenant.
I'm very familiar with living with LDS. I'm in Idaho.
> PornHub said that a better solution is to identify users by their device.
Pornhub effectively does absolutely nothing to verify users’ ages right now. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if they did something.
If you are going to make exceptions to the first admendment for safety can you prove the danger explicitly?
Why not the 2nd admendment?
I'm not arguing legal cases I'm arguing the gp's first point.
See for instance Ashcroft v. ACLU: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/377/ashcroft-v-...
Saying this is protected speech is ridiculous.
You know full well, under the age of 18 you do not get full rights.
But, I think Apple already does this. https://developer.apple.com/wallet/get-started-with-verify-w...
"Information about past presentments — including where, when, and what personal information you share — is encrypted and stored only on your device. Neither the state issuing authority nor Apple can see your presentment history."
An simplified example could be that I ask the third-party to sign a package that include my current IP address, a message that say "I am over 18", and a validity period. They sign it (after I identify myself to the third-party), and give me the requested signature. I then give this to the website and the website can verify the signature of the third-party. The website only know my IP address, the time, and what third-party service I use to verify my age. Third-party only know my ip address, the time, and that I requested a token for "I am over 18".
A major drawback occur if this is only used for porn. In that case, the message "I am over 18" will be synonymous with porn use and thus giving the third-party information that they should not have.
Adult streaming sites have the "are you 18 years of age?" pop-up. As far as those managing the sites are concerned that should be enough.
The problem is, every data provider has to get on board first. For instance, the city you live in can verify if you're over eighteen. If their IT can handle setting the bit 'over eighteen' in the IRMA app, you can securely and verifiably show this bit of information, and only this piece of information, to the party asking to verify this information. They have to support IRMA too though.
But even then, if I'm under age and just borrow your phone...
Technology does not solve people problems. It only makes them worse/creates new ones in the process of (generally poorly) trying to partially solve them.
This is a people problem.
Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.
This method doesn't seem to be allowed by the law in question though.
I think the internet access of minors is their parents business. This is a very reasonable approach, largely the case for most other aspects of law anyway, and has minimal externalities. Lawmakers can pass minimum standards for content filtering/restrictions that major device manufacturers need to comply with.
It is also orders of magnitude more practical to ensure a "safe experience" with device-side restrictions compared to the feeble and nonsensical attempt of making the entire internet safe for ten year olds.
I don't get that. Why would it be good? Why should it ever be a webpage's responsibility?
In the Real World(TM) this is a fairly uncontroversial idea. The Internet is very wild west on these things and that has lead to interesting outcomes... but really age gating porn is in line with many things in the world.
To use your analogy, it is parents who are paying for the alcohol and then leaving it in a place where it is easy for their children to access. Responsible parents either teach their children about appropriate alcohol use or make it difficult to access, or both.
Prepaid phone cards are a thing.
Most cities are full of places offering free internet connections to anybody in the vicinity.
This is not exactly correct. The clerk might, but not the database the card was scanned into. Depending on the secret item such as certain OTC medications, alcohol, tobacco, the information is not forgotten but kept for an extended time, and is stored and correlated in a centralized DB.
Anything with pseudoephedrine, ephedrine, and phenylpropanolamine requires scanning by US federal mandate.
It is done so the government can capture it across the nation.
I am just saying that there are things that already have the requirements of data collection & retention both at Federal and State level in the USA.
There's no practical way to check ID on the web. In your "Real World" the vast majority of the time checking ID is just some person that works for an establishment looks at a little plastic card with your photo on it and checks to make sure the birthday is before a certain date, then they hand it back to you. To do something like this online would require something much more intrusive to personal privacy and adds another pointless complicated technological solution when a much more practical solution exists. That solution being parental controls.
The impossible becomes possible real quickly when businesses decide they need it to move forward.
I do believe in privacy rights, but... free porn just doesn't feel like a must-exist thing in the sense we are all talking about.
I do think that there's a universe where self-governance sort of resolves these problems. Many industries have done this! In a universe where basically you needed a credit card to access this stuff ~always, this law would likely not exist.
In other words, you don't actually believe in privacy rights because all it takes is one flimsy reason that you happen to, if not agree with, don't really find objectionable to violate them. Is the harm caused by anyone under arbitrary age seeing porn harmful enough to violate everyone's right to privacy, even when there are already existing solutions to help prevent minors from accessing pornography?
Parental controls exist. Tools to block websites like pornhub or any other porn website exist already. You might say that it's too easy to circumvent parental controls. I'd say that it's just as easy to circumvent ID requirements, so if your goal is to actually protect children from pornography, it's not going to be anymore effective than current access controls.
...Well gee golly gosh, did you ask anyone else in the room? Or did you unilaterally decide what's best for everyone else?
And clearly you don't support privacy rights if you're willing to turn around and hand everyone else's off. Talk about saying one thing and doing something completely different. The turn of phrase this brings to mind is "Stop pissing on my shoes, and trying to convince me it's raining."
I can go to a convenience store right now and by credit for a large porn site here. It's "private" in the sense that everyone in this discussion seems to believe it to be. The fact that it's paid means that we can have privacy-preserving purchasing methods because there is money that helps to finance these checks.
Hell, pornhub could easily set up a "gift card" system where you have to go pay a dollar somewhere to get your age verified. This is far from an unsolvable problem.
Meanwhile, back on Teh Interwebz, the only way we have right now of verifying age is by uploading photos, or equivalent information, of the identification document, which could be intercepted, stored, or otherwise pilfered with no further indication.
I think there was someone proposing a cryptography-based way of proving "yes, this visitor has access to a non-minor identity", but that requires some sort of government (or similar) service that could also log incidental information, and would require some sort of digital identity service (for example gov.br here in Brazil): Service generates a random token, user gives token to identity service using their authentication, identity service replies with the token signed with a key whose public part the website knows.
This would be "better", in the sense of you don't have to provide any actual identifying information to arbitrary websites, but very bad because now the government can log all age-check attempts. There is probably some more complicated solution to that, but it goes beyond me. In the meantime, my opinion is that online age checks are dumb, easily bypassed, and possibly dangerous. Until we find a proper solution, just educate yo kids properly.
Friendly reminder that criminals don't have to obey laws, so actually dangerous websites (be it just psychologically, like I don't know, gore, to actual illegal things) won't be so kind as to implement an age check themselves anyways. If you want the minor you're responsible over to not view harmful content, teach them about the internet and have a healthy relationship with them so they trust you in the eventuality they see something disturbing.
A lot of people seem to have forgotten what the world was like 25 years ago.
1) No age verification, or
2) Every access to online adult content is forever publicly associated with your personal information?
I agree neither is ideal, but I think 1 is better than 2.
We should start by thinking about what we want to do: do we want to age-gate pornography? If so, why? If not, why not? And if we don't age-gate online pornography at all does that also mean a 10-year old can just walk in to a sex shop, live sex show, or BDSM club? Once we figured out some answers to that (and more) we can start thinking about the how of it all, keeping in mind that things like "access to online adult content is forever publicly associated with your personal information" would be undesirable.
I don't think "well, it's kinda hard so [throw up and hands and give up]" is really a good way forward. I don't have complete answers for all of this either, but I feel a number of people here are far too dismissive about this. At this point we – the broader "hacker/IT community" – can either be part of the conversation or sideline ourselves by dismissing it all.
If there are no laws then there is no pressure to create technology, and if there's no technology we can't create good laws. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing innit? It's hard to tell where the future will go, but I will bet we will see more of these kind off laws passed around the world.
[1] Every day there is a new headline proving this. Here is today's: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/t-mob...
Yes. I'm pretty sure the entire reason porn is legal is it's considered a 1FA issue in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalit...
This really isn't true. See the Miller test[1], and in that same Wikipedia article, the example of adult content (in Utah!) being found not obscene.
Christian nationalists like to use "pornography" and "obscenity" interchangeably as rhetorical positioning, but I am hard pressed to think of a case where innocuous sexual content was held to be obscene and therefore not protected speech.
But then I was struck by the absurdity of good-faith engagement with someone who equates a de facto ban on adults enjoying pornography with bordellos for children.
I hope you find peace and learn to accept yourself before you harm too many others in the name of whatever it is you hate so much about your own character.
Maybe you ought to realize they're more important than your narcissistic behaviors? I'm so sick of this current generation of adults not being able to grow up and put the next generation before their own selfish interests.
I'm really sorry for whatever happened to you. Please don't perpetuate it.
1FA issues get trumped by secondary agreements you agreed to.
There's lots of things children aren't legally allowed to access but I can't think of any of them that do absolutely nothing to meet those legal requirements. Imagine if a liquor store just decided it was fine to let kids come in and purchase liquor and you said "Why is it the liquor store's responsibility to not sell booze to kids?"
Is this actually even true? So if my underage son finds a porn magazine in my house, it's "illegal" for him to look at it? That doesn't sound right.
>Imagine if a liquor store just decided it was fine to let kids come in and purchase liquor and you said "Why is it the liquor store's responsibility to not sell booze to kids?"
Imagine comparing going to a physical location with no easy digital trace and buying something that is basically 100% socially acceptable to digitally tracking what kind of taboo and private porn someone wants to watch.
"Imagine comparing going to a physical location with no easy digital trace and buying something that is basically 100% socially acceptable to digitally tracking what kind of taboo and private porn someone wants to watch. "
You're making excuses for allowing this. Just stop. The mental and physical health of children takes precedence over adults need to keep their fetishes "private". As if this stuff isn't being tracked in all sorts of ways already anyway. Until very very recently everyone had to go into a store to purchase this stuff.
That's not what I asked... you said it was "literally illegal for children to view porn". Give me a source for it because I can't find one.
There is a difference between SELLING porn to underage children, and children being able to view it. I'm talking about viewing it. Going to google and searching for porn and getting results is NOT the same as a store literally selling porn to kids- and since you are on a tech website, you obviously know that.
>You're making excuses for allowing this. Just stop
>The mental and physical health of children takes precedence over adults need to keep their fetishes "private"
Ah the response of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" to justify taking away our right to privacy. Where have I heard that one before?
>Until very very recently everyone had to go into a store to purchase this stuff.
Yeah, going to some random store in the 80s and buying what you wanted with cash where no one had any idea who you were, no way to track you is definitely the same as my license being linked to every link I click on at pornhub. Yup, same thing... why are you giving such a disingenuous argument?
Who's taking away what rights? Pornhub took this away, not the government. Show me where the government is removing rights please. I'm not aware of an amendment that says you must be allowed to view porn without anyone knowing about it.
Again, your right to view porn doesn't supersede the right of children to be protected from it. You sound like the people vying for child drag shows because it's their right to dangle their junk in kids faces.
When I google, I find several third-party "age verification as a service" services. Their marketing isn't always clear about what they actually do, but I think they all look like they get photo ID (not sure if they do anything to try to confirm the person sending the ID is that person). Their pricing is also not generally public.
People might talk about burner phones, but many localities never really had burner phones in the first place (Japan doesn't give a phone number on travel SIMs, there's "no way" to have a phone number without getting your ID checked somewhere), and other localities are tightening the grip on this.
It's not a universally nice and open solution. But it's probably one most markets will bear
Could you make a SSO where the website owner just gets a true / false bool back from the SSO? :thinking:
If it were instead illegal for sites to check for your ID outside of a handful of circumstances, that would be much preferable. Last thing we need is more privacy invasions on the web. Unfortunately, things are going in the wrong direction, both from private interests and from newer govt regulations.
> 72 (9) "Reasonable age verification methods" means verifying that the person seeking to
> 73 access the material is 18 years old or older by using any of the following methods:
> 74 (a) use of a digitized information card as defined in this section;
> 75 (b) verification through an independent, third-party age verification service that
> 76 compares the personal information entered by the individual who is seeking access to the
> 77 material that is available from a commercially available database, or aggregate of databases,
> 78 that is regularly used by government agencies and businesses for the purpose of age and
> 79 identity verification; or
> 80 (c) any commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional
> 81 data to verify the age of the person attempting to access the material.
Edit: For clarity adding the definition of "transactional data" - there's no clever loophole there either. Basically, data mine/data broker shit. Perhaps less maximalist than "just check the ID", but hardly what anyone would consider a meaningfully "minimal" solution either.
> 84 (11) (a) "Transactional data" means a sequence of information that documents an
> 85 exchange, agreement, or transfer between an individual, commercial entity, or third party used
> 86 for the purpose of satisfying a request or event.
> 87 (b) "Transactional data" includes records from mortgage, education, and employment
> 88 entities.
It’s also like having stores check IDs when other porn is just floating by on the wind with regularity. Even if all of the major porn websites did checks there’s still Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, Google/Bing image search, torrents…
I suppose this does indeed happen, if you count the internet as the wind.
Using advertising cookies is probably the most like real life. You look at a user and guess their age. If they might be under 18 you check ID
Why do people always seem to use the word disingenuous disingenuously? :)
Obviously, the number of people willing to verify their identity and attach it to their pornhub searches and other activity is close enough to zero to make no difference to pornhub's business.