Pornhub Sues Texas over Age Verification Law
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I’m not necessarily saying that the old ways were better, just that it’s interesting how much can change in one lifetime. I wonder what we consider harmless today that will be taboo in two decades.
To put it another way; if you really loved freedom, you wouldn’t be “granting” freedom to wear leggings in return for our own to call you a creep.
He’s granting them the “freedom” from shame, and in return they won’t shame him by calling him a creep. If he has to become a creep, he won’t change himself he’ll try to change others by calling them names too.
My guess is social media is next.
How can this even be true? As a wise man once said, I type big booba in google and get million result.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/235280/americans-say-pornograph...
Liberals (and in particular, young men) are the biggest movers, but across the board, all demographics have shown increases.
Only one political party is making this a legal issue (and therefore, putting it in mainstream debate) in the first place.
I vote in every election. But in this instance my vote didn't matter in a very literal sense. Depending on what laws they pass next year I might not be able to access necessary medical care or even safely live in the state anymore. I don't plan on stopping voting, as I consider it my civic duty, but with political shenanigans like this I don't blame younger generations for feeling like their vote doesn't count.
I'd argue that gerrymandered votes matter more in primary elections for the dominant party. Primaries tend to be thinly attended, so a concerted effort by, say, Republicans in a heavily Democratic district would have a far better chance of ousting the Democratic incumbent in the primary than in the general.
Only if you do a bad job of it.
> Gerrymandering means a small number of districts with a large advantage for party A and a large number of districts with a small advantage for party B.
No, it doesn't.
Suppose you had a 5-district, 50-50 population state, with the population distributed homogenously enough that without weird district lines you would get 5 competitive, near 50-50 seats. An effective partisan gerrymander might make one 70-30 seat for the disfavored party and four 55-45 seats for the favored party, every seat being less competitive than without a gerrymander.
Sure, if you assume something that never happens, then I would be wrong.
In practice all states have D cities and R rural areas. To increase the number of R districts they create a bunch of districts that are mostly rural along with enough of the cities that instead of a small number of solidly R rural districts they have a larger number of mixed districts that lean R.
(And D's do the inverse).
This is happening all across the country, and it reeks of a political and ruling class who is unwilling to cede power to fresh faces.
You're that implying exposing children to porn is considered harmless today. Considered harmless by whom exactly?
This isn't about being taboo, this is about parents that don't want to be responsible and let their kids watch porn, it's already illegal to expose children to that. But nobody wants to take responsibility, not the ISP, not the parents, not the online porn companies themselves, nobody.
So in an environment where something illegal is perpretrated, if nobody wants to take responsibility then it's up to the legislator to FORCE someone to take responsibility. It turns out it's the digital pimps this time...
No, they clearly explicitly stated that exposing children to porn when considered harmless when they were 13, but is now hot topic in the media today.
The prudishness manifested differently. I recall a lot more nudity and at least as many sex scenes in movies I watched as a kid (under 18).
Highlander
Lethal Weapon
Robocop
Life of Brian
Even OG Batman had some nudity and referenced sex in it as a PG-13.
Exposed breasts and sex scenes were pretty common. Full frontal nudity was even relatively common. And sometimes wouldn't even garner an R rating.
There’s a TV channel for old shows/movies here. Clothed nipples are obscured. A sci-fi movie, the plaque on the NASA satellite with nude human figures was obscured. Who will protect the aliens?
Tipper Gore and Jerry Falwell lost the battle, but they won the war.
With that context, yeah, we are more prudish about movies and such today. That said, it's easier to distribute and sell NC-17+ materials today than it ever has been.
Natural meat, assuming the stuff from bioreactors works out. People already coo over livestock escaping to freedom in time to avoid the slaughterhouse.
Booze, if someone can invent a different social lubricant without ethanol's impact on things like driving and making bad decisions.
Apparently diamonds are non-stick; if so, Teflon cookware will probably be replaced with ginormous synthetic diamond surfaces.
Possibly BDSM: given the moral panic about porn when I was growing up was about porn encouraging misogynistic abuse, I'm surprised that Fifty Shades of Grey was ever popular (as are the people I know who are into BDSM), though from what I heard from second hand book sellers… perhaps it was a book people bought more than they read.
Some random subset of food additives is a safe bet. And for moral panics, synthetic materials, so lets say… rare earth magnets because everyone thinks they clog up your chakras or something.
David Nutt's working on that (GABALabs). Not sure if it'll pan out. I tried Sentia and maybe it works maybe it doesn't, but I do know it's undrinkable.
Some extremes that were early in the game, sure, but there's probably tens of thousands of people who posted/did things they didn't want to do to make ends meet and pay the rent.
Unlike the first profession, this time it's images and videos permanently saved to an always available and easily scraped/abused fairly well replicated database, and I can imagine that people get more desperate as the money fails to flow in, which I fully expect onlyfans is exploiting.
I'm not sure it's an economy that should exist. The traditional porn market was bad enough, but onlyfans seems 100x worse to me since it's basically the Uberification of sexwork or whatever you like to call it.
It's a really fucked up system through and through.
soon we'll just have LLaMA2-Onlyfans-Chat-Generic-V1.0 and if you'd like a premium version and have enough logs, LLaMa2-Onlyfans-Chat-<YourUserName>-v1.0 -- just let us know which time you were you and which time it was someone else, so we can make a premium product.
Not to mention being able to just make potential images with SD LoRA's -- which you dont have to be the creator to make.
Wait... what? On device filtering is a better, less restrictive means to accomplish this? Are those behind the on-device CSAM scanning behind this too?
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edit, thank you to all those who clarified that this is different from on device scanning and that is in fact a better solution
Because it means that instead of Pornhub having to identify a person's identity and all the expenses and privacy issues that entails, it happens in the home, by a parent, with an application that restricts access to certain content.
Pornhub doesn't need to know who you are and the government doesn't need to know what you're doing.
This legislation is not about children accessing smut. It's about the government knowing which adults are accessing smut. That some children attempt to gain access is simply a convenient excuse and a way to rationalize the intrusion into privacy.
Because sex workers do make out calls. Should 16 year olds be able to call for strippers for their birthday parties, and the onus put on their parents to stop their entry? I’d think you would say no.
The problem with the law as it stands isn’t the concept. It’s that it’s difficult to execute to the point where it basically bans free porn sites.
Pay sites can still live because asking for ID and credit cards is something they can do and check manually. However free sites can’t do that.
If the government provided some mechanism to automatically validate that a persons is over 18, when making an HTTP request then that would be fine. It would be no worse than having ID scanners at a club.
To take things even further, some ISP providers provide parental controls which block at the DNS level.
Pornhub is correct; they shouldn't be the one doing the blocking or verification. Leave that up to those that have control over the devices.
FWIW, iOS already does this. If you have parental controls enabled and a http request is made with a response that sets ‘rating: RTA-whatever’, webkit will refuse to render it.
This is a good thing. The texas law blows, same general category of “harass the user instead of embrace the platform” as cookie banners.
I’d love it if I could buy a device for my grade schoolers that auto-locked the screen if it saw that the next frame of whatever youtube kids video is being played contains porn or vivisections or whatever is sneaking past Google’s censors this week.
This could happen on-device, and be an opt-in, paid feature.
(The above are real examples, so we simply haven’t given them access to youtube yet.)
I remember people warning starkly against blindly scraping imgur as it had a lot of CP, but I had hoped Google had better image/video processing for it.
If I remember correctly, this came up a couple of times during Covid over religious gathering restrictions -- the question was less "can the government ever restrict a religious gathering" and more "is it actually necessary for you to do this? Have you taken steps to minimize the burden, is the burden imposed greater than the state's specific need for this restriction?"
How a judge would rule on that in this case... :shrug:, but it doesn't seem to be an uncommon argument. There have been Supreme Court ruling that boil down to, "it's not unconstitutional necessarily but you did it wrong and we think you were too slapdash doing it, so try again."
It was when the kind of “dumb” is a more intrusive (on fundamentlal rights) than necessary means of serving a compelling government interest that would otherwise be sufficient to warrant some intrusion on fundamental rights.
Or when it is an intrusion on fundamental rights without such an interest at all.
There are a mountain of historical rulings saying that obscenity isn’t protected speech, but the sonewhat fuzzy legal definition if obscenity is (at least in its normal application) narrower than the commom term “pornography”. Moreover, and more specifically related, mandatory age verification laws for adult content online have been struck down twice by the US Supreme Court as First Amendment violations, first when it struck them down as part of striking down most of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (leaving Section 230 intact but pretty much nothing else from that law), and again when it struck down the Child Online Protection Act of 1998.
EDIT: Correction: COPA was struck down by a Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court declined to hear the government’s appeal, there was no Supreme Court ruling on the merits; the end result is the same, but only the CDA was actually struck down at the Supreme Court level.
Its also safe to assume such ID would be directly associated with my account, which of course would also require an email address. This effectively kills anonymous viewing of adult content on the internet, while also letting companies build and sell profiles about you.
We give up so much to solve what? A problem that hasn't been quantified in either scope or harm?
ANY Fake ID or just a state/federal one?
Can you fake a, say, Hungarian Driver's License and send them that?
PornHub has a decent shot here. Most of the laws Texas has passed around social media haven't survived court scrutiny. There is a good chance this won't either.
The Conservative court is slightly weird; it's not always going to be perfectly aligned with what the party wants. Nor is it clear that the broader Republican party would be on board with these kinds of restrictions anyway even if the court was just parroting them.
It's an oversimplification and there are caveats (coughThomascough), but in general both Conservative and Liberal courts tend to overall lean more towards broad interpretations of the 1st Amendment than the average American does. It's not a safe bet that they would suddenly reverse that trend.
Why wouldn't you? They all have very predictable tendencies and don't ever surprise you. There are some cases where you can predict that Roberts will vacillate, but for the most part they are extremely predictable if you follow the court with even passing interest.
> Nor is it clear that the broader Republican party would be on board with these kinds of restrictions anyway even if the court was just parroting them.
These laws poll over a majority with Democrats. They are extremely popular.
:shrug: Sometimes I get surprised. But certainly if you are going to make a prediction, that prediction is not going to be "we'll do a 180 on our typical rulings on the 1st Amendment." That would not be extreme consistency or predictability. Most court precedent in this area is against this kind of restriction; me refusing to make a prediction is being charitable, it's leaving open the option that the justices might decide to do something weird.
If you really believe they're going to be predictable, then the situation I'm looking at is that the current Supreme Court (Conservatives included) hasn't exactly been kind to Internet regulation and has issued extremely broad rulings reinforcing the 1st Amendment. I'm not sure that not liking porn means that's going to go out the window; this is the same Supreme Court that recently ruled unanimously that Twitter wasn't liable for ISIS content on the platform -- even though I would hazard a guess that the Liberal and Conservative members of the court both don't love ISIS. There's a general trend here with how the court is approaching Internet regulation.
> These laws poll over a majority with Democrats.
I can find one source for this and it's a Conservative super pac specifically dedicated to "family values". I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just having a hard time finding any quality polling. Regardless, it still is not clear that the overall Republican party would broadly support ID verification online if it became a hot-button issue. Lots of things poll well in abstract before they become reality.
And I can't stress this enough, the Supreme Court does not simply parrot Conservative views. The members have their own definitions of what Conservatism means and their rulings bias towards their own definitions.
I would not be surprised to see Cavanaugh or Barrett rule in favor of Pornhub. Thomas is weird, he flip-flops a lot on these issues. I don't know how he'd rule. You might be referencing Barrett's Catholic beliefs here, but in terms of how she's actually ruled on the court and what she's written in her opinions, it would not be at all out of character for her to side with Pornhub.
Or I just use a VPN/TOR.
Pornhub et al sets this meta attribute; child mode on Android and iOS respect it.
How is that going to be counted? Per item? Or based on the actual amount of explicit content?
I.e. are a porn movie and a regular movie with a single explicit scene treated the same way?
What about written content, is non-stop erotica treated the same as Milan Kundera?
And what if media gets mixed? E.g. an art book with act photography, or a documentary from an exhibition could present multiple works.
That is pretty obviously breaking the first amendment right to say what you want to say.
Doesn't mean it can't happen but legally the bar is quite high to justify that.
Cigarettes were forced to cover, like, 40% of their box with warnings about their ability to cause cancer, harm fertility, and impair breathing capacity.
The FDA strictly regulates what medicines, as well as unapproved medicinal products, are allowed to say on their box. Multivitamin? You can say it supports health, but not that it improves health.
General electronics? You'd better have that FCC logo on it, showing that it was tested and certified, if it has any wireless radios in it. And if you're in Europe, CE belongs on basically everything.
Fireplaces? Anything with fire? Plumbing? Power conversion? Power delivery? Better have a certification from a Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory (NRTL), like UL or CSA.
Why are websites of any kind unique? In principle, the government can compel speech on products.
Don't pretend that the cigarette labeling was as simple as this bill. That was an incredibly complex process that took decades.
Restricting what can be said is not the same as forcing speech. (This is in reference to your FDA comment which is a different topic)
You added more examples all of which have significant effort and legal backing to their enforcement.
Most notably most of those examples come from working with the industry to create standards for safety.
All of them were developed working with the impacted industries and had solid justifications for why the labelling requirement is needed.
Especially anything involving natural gas. If you fuck up the natural gas line going into your house that doesn't just impact you it impacts anyone within several hundred yards of your house.
Similarly electrical requirements are either the federal government giving away access to a public good (frequencies of light for exclusive use) in exchange for certain restrictions on devices or electrical things that are quite dangerous again.
Actual proven safety is different than "I decided it was harmful" and pretending that they are the same is ignorant at best.
Well, it's awfully creative of you to frame warnings, that manufacturers are forced to print, as a "restriction" of speech.
Edit: The above paragraph was expanded by 2/3s since I wrote this comment. I have no interest in responding further.
I generally agree with you, but I think that ship sailed back in the early 1900's with the push for the FDA, USDA, etc.
We now use less lead in consumer goods because of the label. I would assume other carcinogens were similarly reduced in usage to avoid the labeling requirement.
All prop 65 warnings are required only for substances that show an increase in cancer risk.
We can argue whether a higher increase in risk should be required but pretending that "increase in risk" is a lie because the naive reading assumes a higher magnitude of impact doesn't mean it isn't science based.
You are referencing untested hypothetical challenges against laws you disagree with.
Also note I didn't say the Texas law was illegal or wrong.
I said compelling speech requires a higher bar to be constitutional.
An assumption. I also didn’t say whether the 2nd amendment laws were illegal or wrong.
Don't pretend it was anything else.
Wow, this is a weak case. I guess the good lawyers won't stoop to the level of arguing against keeping porn away from children.
A security guard would be more effective than a lock at deterring intruders from breaking into my house, but I still have a lock. They also imply that Texas lawmakers aren't interested in protecting children, which is absurd.
I have no sympathy for these creeps. I doubt they have any interest in keeping kids off their sites (probably the opposite), so they're just projecting and trying to deflect any responsibility.
No need for the government to be given a nice formatted list of all the porn each TX adult is consuming.
That information is also guaranteed to be a hacking target or be selectively leaked to prove a point by someone with a moral axe to grind
But if there's a store down the street where kids can easily get booze, then that kinda makes it impossible as a parent. In this case it's worse--that "store" is right in the kid's pocket.
I see your point but I can't find a great analogy - I feel it's more like a kid hanging around/texting with bad apples or something like that
I am not sure how well this will work anyway to keep suggestive content away from children, even big sites like YouTube seem to sometimes tend towards it on the regular front page from time to time
> I am not sure how well this will work
Same. Tobacco ID laws don't entirely stop kids from using, but they definitely help, and they create strong incentives for tobacco companies to stop kids from using their products. Tobacco companies have a history of exploiting children for profit, and continue to do when possible.
I'm sure children will continue to be exposed to porn on the internet, but we need to work to minimize that as much as possible, as we've done pretty successfully with tobacco (though vaping is turning that trend around). I'm a free market capitalist, but when it comes to harming children I draw a pretty hard line.
Also, unless already addicted, people aren't programmed to impulsively seek out tobacco as a core physiological drive.
For adults, the harm of porn may be less obvious and harder to quantify, but it's not theoretical. There are plenty of data to support the idea that porn is harmful.
For children, we don't need data. It's just common sense, and you would be hard-pressed to find a parent who is okay with his child watching content on Porn Hub.
> on-device content filtering would be a better method of restricting access to porn for children, they write.
The presence of porn online does not make it impossible for parents to do anything about the devices in kids' pockets. We have other avenues we can use try to address that problem before abridging speech. The lack of attention to those methods and the willingness of lawmakers to jump to the most burdensome restrictions that they think they can pass -- that makes the law (and their motivations) more suspect.
We are not actually in an impossible situation that can only be solved with Internet IDs. The existence of on-device filtering is why the situation is not like a liquor store that's down the street. Digital devices allow for additional mechanisms for safety and parental controls, and Texas lawmakers have ignored those mechanisms.
Forcing porn distributors to stop providing their content to children and to publish health disclosures is one of the most basic things that can and should be done. But I agree it shouldn't stop there, and on-device censorship could be another tool that legislators use. However, I think you're underestimating the burden and difficulty of rolling out such technology, and overestimating the effectiveness and legislators' ability to mandate it.
> is one of the most basic things that can and should be done.
The entire criticism of this proposal is that it's not basic and is in fact wildly complicated and has massive privacy and security implications. You can't really paper over that, you're advocating that we start with the most dangerous policies and get around to less dangerous policies later, maybe, if we feel like it.
> I think you're underestimating the burden and difficulty of rolling out such technology, and overestimating the effectiveness and legislators' ability to mandate it.
Perhaps Texas should study some of that stuff and look for solutions before jumping to more extreme policies. What are the actual problems in front of this technology? Pornhub already labels its content using standardized headers (https://www.rtalabel.org) and iOS and Android already have tools that react to those headers and can be used to block content. So is the problem here that parents don't know about these controls? Is this a problem of parental education? Or is the problem that the tools are buggy? Is the problem that the parental controls aren't comprehensive enough? If so, what areas and apps don't they cover?
Has any research been done on that by Texas legislature? No.
The fact that they've largely skipped over those controls entirely suggests that this is less about building safety mechanisms and more about controlling access, which is consistent with the fact that these laws are heavily sponsored by "pro-family" and religious groups who aren't only concerned with children accessing porn, but in fact have very public moral objections to porn in general. I'm not overestimating Texas's ability to legislate, I'm pointing out that they haven't haven't even tried to legislate, and that matters when they're trying to defend against 1st Amendment challenges.
There should be an order to the legislation we attempt because it is exactly as you say:
> There are many things that can be done to protect children, all with varying levels of effectiveness and burdens.
This is correct, every solution has varying levels of effectiveness and burdens. And that is how we prioritize legislation. Where constitutionality is concerned, it is the responsibility of the legislature to exhaust less burdensome solutions before they attempt to implement more burdensome solutions that abridge rights to adult privacy and access to adult content.
Texas hasn't gone through that process, but proponents of these bills still want to draw the (entirely incorrect) comparison between digital restrictions and physical ID checks. They're not equivalent, there are additional (largely unexplored) tools available in digital spaces to keep kids safe that are not present in physical spaces. There are also more risks to privacy and security that are present in digital spaces when collecting IDs, but proponents of these bills ignore those risks entirely (possibly because, again, these bills are regularly sponsored by (small-c) conservative family activists for whom being as burdensome as possible to the porn-industry across the board is a desired effect of the legislation.
It's improper to compare digital ID laws to physical ID laws; the affordances and risks of digital and physical spaces are entirely different, and many of those affordances in digital spaces remain largely unexplored by legislature. But proponents want to skip over that entire conversation and imply that protecting kids requires us to start forcing websites to start collecting drivers licenses or credit card details.
No, you're saying it is the most burdensome. I'm saying it makes to hold porn distributors accountable for who they distribute to. No matter what regulation there is, someone will have to bear a burden, but I'm not going to try to quantify that. Whatever that burden is, it simply makes sense to put a lot of it on the people producing and disseminating the stuff.
> iOS and Android already have tools that react to those headers and can be used to block content
Are you saying Apple and Google should be responsible for managing pornographic material used on their devices? Should Smith and Wesson be responsible for how people use their weapons? Apple and Google can provide these tools, but what kind of legislation would you propose we have around it?
> So is the problem here that parents don't know about these controls?
The problem is that parents protecting their children from porn is only part of the solution. Again, I'm not arguing against these kinds of tools (and possibly legislation). I'm saying that implementing these tools without reeling in the distributors is akin to banning drug paraphernalia without regulating drug sales.
I don't know the details of how TX legislators expect porn companies to ID their users, and I totally agree that people have a right to privacy, especially from the gov't. But we need to balance the competing interests here, and the current systems make it way too easy for kids to access porn. I'm not convinced that the best path forward is to let porn companies distribute to whoever they want, and require tech companies and parents to compete with that. We might as well deregulate vape pens while we're at it.
Then what value to the conversation are you bringing? Like, seriously, I don't mean to be snarky -- legitimately, if you're not going to evaluate the risks and burdens, then what possible conversation can you have about the 1st Amendment implications of this law?
"This law is dangerous"
"I'm not going to make a decision on whether it's dangerous, but we should do it"
What reaction do you expect me to have to that?
> Apple and Google can provide these tools, but what kind of legislation would you propose we have around it?
Legislating that the tools are provided could be an option. Legislating labeling would be problematic but would have fewer 1st Amendment implications than what you propose; it would be much more likely to survive a 1st Amendment challenge. Even beyond regulation, government awareness campaigns for parents about the availability and usage of these tools could be an option. Legislating standards for these tools and functionality requirements could be worth looking into. Whether or not public government institutions like schools are even using these tools at all might be valuable data to collect.
At the very least, you'd expect some kind of tangible information about where these tools fall short. 1st Amendment challenges can be won based on governments shortcutting other legislation and skipping out on requirements to provide actual evidence that other restrictions wouldn't have been sufficient.
Note that Pornhub is not actively trying to show porn to minors. They're just not, they voluntarily label the entire site. This is not like fighting against the ad industry, the businesses involved are trying to label their content, they're not trying to sneak it through filters. So what specifically are the holes in the current technological solutions and parental controls? You say that parents protecting kids is only part of the solution, but... what specifically is insufficient about that? What is deficient in the current tools and why couldn't that deficiency be met with additional regulation around labeling standards?
Again, on-device controls are an affordance that is totally absent in physical spaces. It is inaccurate to equate digital access controls and physical access controls, they exist quite literally in different worlds. Distribution is in many cases in the physical world the only mechanism available for restricting children's access to harm. On the Internet, that's not the case -- and so there's an additional responsibility here to justify a much riskier regulation and to explain why the additional safeguards that digital spaces afford are insufficient.
> I don't know the details of how TX legislators expect porn companies to ID their users
Maybe you should research that? You're having a conversation about the constitutionality of this law, the ID requirements are pretty important to that conversation.
> But we need to balance the competing interests here
You can't do that if you're unwilling to quantify what the burdens are. You're telling me we need to balance competing interests, and you're refusing to look at what the competing interests are and bringing no data or research forward as to why device-level controls aren't sufficient or what the actual problems are that need to be addressed.
> and require tech companies and parents to compete with that.
Pornhub is not trying to show children porn; this isn't a competition. I would love to see any kind of evidence that Pornhub is motivated by anything other than what they say -- that the law is extremely burdensome, runs the risk of bankrupting large swaths of the industry, and abridges the 1st Amendment rights of adult content producers and the 1st Amendment rights and privacy rights of adult consumers.
But to have that conversation, you can't handwave burdens. The entire conversation is about burdens. If you don't have an opinion on what those burdens and risks are, then respectfully, you don't really have anything to add to the conversation.
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I do think this in particular is a misconception here that's important to point out though:
> Whatever that burden is, it simply makes sense to put a lot of it on the people producing and disseminating the stuff.
I'm sorry, but that's not a 1st Amendment consideration. If a law creates a burden beyond the state's compelling interest in that law, then it doesn't matter who it's applied to, it's still unconstitutional. Additionally, part of the criticism of this law is that it doesn't only place a burden on distributors, it also places a burden on adult consumers. Putting a restriction where it "makes sense" is still inappropriate when it creates 1st Amendment burdens for ordinary citizens who will bear the brunt of the privacy risks involved. But even if that wasn't the case, you can't win a 1st Amendment lawsuit by saying, "yes the law is burdensome but if anyone should be burdened it should be them." The 1st Amendment doesn't care about that.
Unfortunately, the devil is in the details and surface-level analysis of the legislation doesn't capture the actual problems with the law.
Respectfully, you came into this conversation speaking pretty boldly about Pornhub's motivations and about the strength/weakness of the case (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37092329) but I think it's important when doing that kind of analysis to take the time to figure out what the actual consequences would be of the legislation being proposed.
Especially where sex/porn is concerned: we're coming off of FOSTA/SESTA, two bills that were designed to help keep sex workers safe that sounded good on the surface and that have been widely criticized by sex workers as having made their lives significantly more dangerous. Legislating sex is complicated. In this case, both free speech and child safety are too important for people to be making decisions about this law without digging into the details.
I came in saying that their stance that they should not have to ID their customers because there are better methods to keep porn away from kids and TX lawmakers don't care about children is weak.
I was specifically focusing on that rationale, not the details of an ID system. I have no doubt that that will be fraught with issues. But the porn companies don't want to play ball at all, which I think puts them in a very weak position.
Hopefully that clarifies my original comment.
Right, but you don't know if it's weak. You don't know what the downsides are of digital ID systems online, you don't know if the better methods being proposed aren't just as if not more effective. Digital ID systems sound good to you, but you haven't dug into the details to figure out whether they actually are a good idea here.
You're upset that Pornhub is saying they're not a good idea for online systems, but for all you know they're completely right.
> But the porn companies don't want to play ball at all
I don't understand how you can say this; Pornhub is offering solutions but saying that the ID requirements here are problematic. And you're refusing to look into the effectiveness of those solutions and refusing to try and figure out what would be deficient about those systems but you're mad that... what, Pornhub counter-offered mechanisms that would help reduce child exposure to porn? In what world is that not playing ball?
Of course in terms of the actual lawsuit, whether or not they're "playing ball" has nothing to do with the strength of Pornhub's position. It is not a valid defense against 1st Amendment claims to say, "but they're not helping enough." The government does not get extra rights to abridge speech just because they think a company should be working with them more. It's extra silly in this case because Pornhub is explicitly trying to be productive and offer suggestions. But even if they weren't -- no competent judge is going to look at cooperation with state governments as a precondition to 1st Amendment rights.
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In general I just think:
"We should do X"
"X has problems, why don't we try Y"
"I don't want to talk about the problems with X, why aren't you just doing it"
is not a reasonable take to have.
I never said I don’t want to talk about the problems with online ID. You’re arguing with a strawman.
> I was specifically focusing on that rationale, not the details of an ID system
> I didn't intend to get into the details of the legislation
> No matter what regulation there is, someone will have to bear a burden, but I'm not going to try to quantify that.
It's very easy for you to say that Pornhub is just being lazy or that they're deliberately trying to show porn to children when you refuse to look into what it would require to comply with Texas's law or what the magnitude of that burden would be both on companies and on regular adults.
Your description of Pornhub's "duty" is an abstract notion that you're refusing to connect to any practical real-world implementation online. That allows you to keep characterizing online ID as just a basic duty that Pornhub should be helping with. But you don't have anything to back that that up, it's a purely surface-level "but doesn't is sound good that Pornhub should take responsibility for this" perspective.
And when I've tried to talk about the actual consequences, you just handwave that as "well sure there will be consequences, but we should do it anyway." No, if there are massive consequences, we shouldn't do it. Even if it sounds instinctively good to you or feels more "fair" because internally you're just imagining this as a casual ID check like you'd give to a cashier before buying alcohol. In fact, if a system has obvious downsides and will be worse for everyone and if better options are available, then that does absolve Pornhub from the responsibility of going along with that obviously flawed system.
And digital ID is an obviously flawed system. This conversation has all the energy of law enforcement complaining that tech companies keep talking about how breaking E2EE harms security. "Yeah, we know it's difficult, but nerd harder, figure out how we can have the backdoor we want. You're not being constructive with us, you have a duty to access that information when we ask for it. What gives you the right to shirk your responsibility to know what your users are saying?"
But it's not Pornhub's fault that you have an unrealistic expectation about how digital online ID would go.
It's called a thesis. We haven't delved into any of those details because we can't even agree that this is their duty. Pornhub seems to think it isn't, because it says other things should be done instead. You seem to agree.
It's okay if you don't think porn providers have any duty to verify the age of their users. I think that's pretty messed up, but you're entitled to that opinion.
The notion that Pornhub is in the wrong because of some duty that overrides supposedly "secondary" details like whether the policy will work, who it will hurt, whether it can be practically implemented at all, and whether or not it's even an effective way to keep kids safe in the first place is very characteristic of a lot of conversations that people have about legislation today. Whether the law works isn't the thing they're debating, what they're debating is how the law feels and whether it feels fair or intuitive. Then a bunch of people end up getting hurt by the law, and they shrug their shoulders and ask how on earth they were meant to predict that.
I think it's a misguided attitude and will end up harming the same kids you're claiming to care about, but that's just my opinion. You're right that we have different opinions about duty. I think people have a duty to build mechanisms that actually protect kids, not just to make policies that sound like they're protecting kids. And I think that means we have a duty to actually evaluate the laws we're talking about and to figure out what their effects (both positive and negative) actually are.
Honestly, agreeing on the duty of porn companies to keep their content away from children was supposed to be a layup. Pretty concerning that we can't even establish that as common ground.
We don't disagree on the duty of porn companies to protect kids. We disagree on whether it makes sense to blindly support a policy that you know nothing specific about.
> And now you're even using their pathetic tactic of saying I only "claim" to care about children.
I will apologize for this, I can't speak to your motivations and I don't have any insight into what you feel about kids. I shouldn't have included that phrasing. I will however say that however much you do care, you don't seem to care enough about kids to actually make sure the policies you're supporting will help. I'm reminded of FOSTA/SESTA once again; people had good intentions, just not good enough intentions to figure out if they were helping or hurting. They did care about sex workers, but ultimately they cared about the image of helping sex workers more than they cared about the reality of helping them.
So they passed laws that looked good but were ultimately harmful, and when people pointed out that those laws were harmful lawmakers did exactly what you're doing now -- they accused critics of abdicating responsibility and supporting trafficking.
The Texas law is the same. It's an ineffective, harmful policy but it feels good, so it's easy for you to be outraged and say that people who point out that it's harmful just don't want to protect kids or don't believe that porn companies should protect kids.
It's irresponsible for me to read into your intent about why you're doing that, I apologize. You could very well be doing that because you want to protect kids. But I can pretty confidently say that your instinct to protect kids is not winning the fight against your instinct to look like you're protecting kids. It's irresponsible for you to advocate for laws that you don't know the impact of and where you don't know if those laws will help, and it's irresponsible for you to characterize criticism of those laws as antipathy to kids being exposed to porn. Criticism of bad policy is not the same thing as dereliction of duty.
I know you didn't comment on the specifics of the policy. My point is that you should have looked at and commented on those specifics.
Do you really think I know _nothing_ about the policy?
I've had enough of the insults, the assumptions, and strawman attacks. I don't see any effort on your end to understand my position, and you've done nothing to convince me that porn providers should not have to verify the age of their users. Ciao.
At the end of the day, we have to put a large share of the responsibility on parents. My kids have ipads and phones but I just disabled the internet. They are not old enough for it. When I feel like they are, I will enable it. I will also keep track of all sites that they visit when I do. Its on me.
My right to privacy doesn't just get rejected cuz I wanna watch some porn.
There are more effective ways to protect children and a broken solution is a poor solution.
The government does need to be involved when you're producing and distributing porn, though.
This law isn't forcing porn distributors to collect data on their customers and turn it over to the government. It's making sure distributors are verifying the age of their customers, and disclosing health risks to them, just like we do with alcohol, tobacco, and firearms.
There are solutions to resolve this (device-specific privacy controls a la parental controls in iOS) are probably the most secure and most effective.