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.
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.
There’s such a strange dichotomy in these conversations.
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.
Because when buying alcohol, you can for the most part (outside of online purchases, but even then the courier can check an ID upon delivery hypothetially) verify it fairly easily. With online porn, the scale and complications doing it put a much bigger burden on the providers.
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...
2. I don't want to live in a permission society where I have to submit to inspection to do anything.
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.
> If it’s not a big deal then verifying your age shouldn’t phase you anymore than verifying your age to buy alcohol.
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
The ol' "if you have nothing to hide" argument was flawed a century ago and it isn't getting any less wrong. Recognize that "age verification" is 100% about taking control out of individual hands and into the government's.
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?
>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?
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.
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.
> is effectively a theocracy operated by an ultra-conservative religious minority.
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.
Ehh it's definitely not just the ultra religious conservatives who are raising issues with pornography.
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.
Not exactly on-topic but: it appears this bill carefully defines "the Internet" as the global packet-switched network (!) but then fails to define "website", which is used (as "internet website") in the actual law. This isn't necessarily a drafting error because laws must always have undefined terms, but it is rather odd. I'm perennially concerned at the conflation of these two concepts, internet and www, because it makes it easier for malicious actors to seize personal domains and generally gatekeep the internet for use by the (commercial) web.
Canada's similar bill just passed senate reading on the 18th and needs to go to the house. It just says "sexually explicit material" and I'm having trouble finding an exact definition because its changed a bunch and I can't find the current definition.
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 won't kill it, it just means that porn sites will be hosted outside of those jurisdictions, and people will use VPNs to access them if needed (which, ironically, might actually spread awareness of VPNs in general, making it harder to regulate other online content in the future).
Is there a mechanism for empowering a polity to protect minors from certain things the polity deems they're not ready for that doesn't rely on arbitrary rules?
How about: If you don't want your kids to see it, that's on you. Either accept that you are a shitty parent who can't raise children to your satisfaction, or get better at parenting. Don't force consequences on me just because you are incompetent.
One of my favourite concepts in "late night" style comedy is when they test the censors by gradually incrementing something boring into something "unacceptable," whether it be language, the context of a sketch, or something graphic. And then once they've got the line they play with that line (eg. words/names that sound like "fuck", or Cecily Strong having sex with Bill Hader under a small throw).
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.
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
Isn't the US still the world largest producer of porn?
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.
More correct and less inflammatory version: "Think of the US less like a single (European) country and more like a collection of countries (states) representing various different cultures, some of which have widely divergent or more conservative values."
ummm. Don't think of the US this way? Think of it as a complex representative government that is federated and representing a highly diverse population, unlike Iran, which is not exactly pro-immigration.
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.
Mandatory reminder that the US covers more land area than the entire EU. And while the population is 185 million people smaller, think about how wildly different the various EU countries are culturally.
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).
My experience living in North Carolina, Texas, New York, and California gives me the picture that this is an exaggeration. Imho, the difference is somewhat like that between a northern town near Newcastle and Covent Garden.
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.
Way to regurgitate a tired argument. Kids are addicted to porn before they’re old enough to drive these days and it’s messes them up for life (see: the incel movement.) Something has to be done about corporations that profit off of showing literal children hardcore porn.
“Talking to your kids” doesn’t work when multinational corporations are incentivized to addict them for ad revenue.
This doesn't sound right. While pornography certainly has impacts on immature minds (kids or young adults), I suspect it's rather in a completely opposite area than you've pointed out - like teenage pregnancies or kids engaging in various inappropriate sexual behaviors.
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.
"Incel movement"
For the love of god. It is like calling poor people "powerty movement". Lost your arm? How dare you to belong to "one arm movement"? Don't you know there was was one arm rober with vad political views?
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!
Blocking access to pornographic websites is the responsibility of parents or other responsible adults absent a federal ID verification system that would enable websites to reliably block kids (similar to S. Korea).
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.
What evidence do you have that the incel movement is driven by pornography? I always attributed it to the recruitment efforts of the alt-right and other misogynistic groups.
Honestly, I think you both have a valid concern. However, these two views are not mutually exclusive.
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?
Nothing wrong with government wanting people to wear burkas and cover up some more, it’s part of respectful and dignified society. Maybe don’t insult and denigrate modesty and other cultures next time.
> 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.
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.
If your moral code dictates what other people can or cannot do with their own lives in their homes then I contend that your moral code may be corrupt or severely misguided.
An identity provider can make verified age one of the claims on an OAuth token. It removes anonymity, but at least you don't have to provide your personal details to everybody on the internet demanding age verification. You provide those details to your trusted identity provider, they provide the claim of your age to the website.
With that in place we can easily make beer, liquor, marijuana and tobacco sales on the internet possible! And porn too, I guess.
+1 for teaching lawmakers how to achieve their goals at the protocol layer.
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 cookie consent was a browser protocol on top of HTTP headers.
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).
> 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.
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?
A much better solution than was suggested by PornHub:
> 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.
>Fingerprinting is not and should not be the sanctioned way of identifying people.
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?
Yeah I really did not understand what they were suggesting with "device verification" but it seemed both ineffective and likely to provide them with far more data than needed.
Where are you based? I can purchase alcohol from Amazon UK with no obvious age checks. Deliveroo require that riders verify your age but in reality they just ask you to type it in. And the major grocery stores deliver alcohol without any obvious checking too. I imagine teenage drinking is much easier these days thanks to the above :)
> I imagine teenage drinking is much easier these days thanks to the above
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!
About a month ago I had my groceries delivered from Wholefoods and the deliver driver carded me for some non-alcoholic beer I had purchased. I tried explaining to him that he didn't have to do that, but he wouldn't unload my groceries until I let him scan my ID.
But God forbid you try to buy a kitchen knife! It used to be that you had to show ID at delivery, but now Amazon requires adding ID before the purchase.
In the Bay Area I’m also easily able to order alcohol on all the big delivery services, but they all seem pretty consistent about scanning your ID for age verification before they drop it off.
Denmark has a system like this, MitID, it support OAuth2 and OpenID Connect, so here it should be possible. The US doesn't have a country wide system for identification only, not that I know of at least. I can understand companies, like PornHub, not wanting to pay along, unless the government provides a system for age verification. Still it would also be a lot of work to integrate with every single government ID scheme around the world.
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.
More interesting data for the identity provider.. Leaving the filtering to the client side is a less intrusive method and puts the responsibility into the hands of parents (or work places). rtalabel.org proposes simple well-known meta tags to simplify this filtering.
I support the idea of shifting this to the client side, but RTA seems to be going about it in a rather bizarre way:
> 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:
With physical goods it's probably enough to check the age of the person taking delivery. Presumably the people who deliver groceries know what to do if the groceries include a crate of beer and the person who opens the door looks as if they might be under 18. Presumably they ask to see a driving licence or for someone older to come to the door. Or the crate of beer gets sadly removed from the order and the teenager's father is disappointed when he gets back from his evening walk.
Checkbox for "I don't want to view or reply to comments by under 18s" for websites would be a plus. Think web will get somewhat better when adults stop getting into arguments with kids without knowing it. Wouldn't mind even more granularity, i.e. I don't want to interact with with anyone +/-10 my age.
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.
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.
Yeah, because the internet was free to access everyone, data became the background currency and advertisers figured out how to de-anonymize everyone years ago. That ship has sailed.
Proposed and enacted are a big difference. A single lawmaker can suggest or put forward a bill for anything. The majority voting to make it law is a huge barrier
it's aggregated though,because data is only valuable in volume. Showing ID every time you visit a site is significantly more identifiable at the individual level.
Is it? Is this a States thing? That in the United States that nudity and pornography is "dangerous", yet in other cultures throughout Europe, it's not taken as seriously, nor does it have this overall "dangerous" tag to it (generally speaking that is. Prudish people trying to impose their will on others can be a world-wide phenomenon).
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".
> Is it? Is this a States thing? That in the United States that nudity and pornography is "dangerous", yet in other cultures throughout Europe, it's not taken as seriously, nor does it have this overall "dangerous" tag to it (generally speaking that is. Prudish people trying to impose their will on others can be a world-wide phenomenon).
France and Germany have similar laws, and the UK is about to pass one.
Anything that can hijack the dopaminergic system should not be allowed to kids. Gambling, tiktok & smartphones in general, porn, drugs etc.
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.
Surely you understand that happening to see a woman's nipple is completely different to a 14 year old sitting up at 4am masterbating to whatever intense porn they can get their hands on are two completely different things. And if you think the latter is bad, as you should, then it makes sense to err on the side of caution when figuring out a way to reduce the likelihood of a young person, who has not fully developed a sense of self control, getting sucked into the wormhole of a porn addiction. If that means reducing the likelihood of an innocent breast being seen, then that seems like a reasonable trade-off.
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?
You’ll get some angry responses to this but I think it’s very worthwhile to say. Yes, ID verification in order to watch pornography is deeply Orwellian and terrifying (which is the aspect places like HN tend to focus on) but the bulk of the public support for these measures isn’t because people want government surveillance, it’s because they want to look out for children. Are they misguided? Perhaps. But you can’t win them over without addressing it. Shouting “it’s government overreach!” at those people will achieve nothing.
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.
> 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.
That is something that your parents or community elders could have told you. Why does the state need to intervene?
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.
PornHub refused to take down child porn and rape videos (not actors, actual assaults) on their platform for years. They only took them down when the victims in the videos took them to court and the NYT published an exposé. They're in the middle of being sued right now, and the evidence that's coming to light in that case is pretty damning.
Given how poorly they've behaved so far, I don't agree that they're incentivized to play nice.
I think it's good, but I really wish the solution was, "We need parents to take a more active role in their children's lives and supervise their internet usage" and not, "Lockdown and de-anonymize the web."
On the other hand, if you as a legislator perceive a social evil, and your options are to pass a law or to get all the parents to take away their kids' phones and switch back to desktop computers (used only in a common area), which do you pick?
Except despite the vast amounts of counter-evidence, people still are somehow dumb enough to think that hiding stuff from kids works (drugs, guns, porn, e.t.c).
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.
You're equating porn with sexuality. I'm a grown man and I find most of what's on the front page of PornHub to be deeply disturbing. I see racism, misogyny, incest, even simulated assault.
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.
I have even wondered why it's that big a deal for many people. I guess idle minds have nothing better to do other than think about solely sex, porn, food or drugs. And the only way they can prevent themselves from overindulging in these things is to have an external authority figure like the government impose strict restrictions on them.
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.
Porn is very addictive to many people (Reddit has some great posts by many people trying to break free) - anything that gives you a huge dose of dopamine for little effort can be dangerous to someone’s life (not medically dangerous, but certainly emotionally and motivationally). It’s like saying drugs are absolutely fine because they don’t destroy everyone that take them. Or maybe alcohol is a better comparison.
> Except despite the vast amounts of counter-evidence, people still are somehow dumb enough to think that hiding stuff from kids works (drugs, guns, porn, e.t.c).
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.
Yes “think about the children”. If anything, there should be a law that forces all ISPs and even device manufacturers of “internet enabled devices” to have clear instructions on how to use parental controls.
This would be far less onerous since it’s already a feature they have and it protects privacy.
It's addictive for one. There are increasing number of support groups for men who are struggling with pornography use and for their spouses in dealing with having a dependant partner.
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.
I suspect any academic study proposing to show pornography to minors is going to get shut down pretty quickly.
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 think it's perfectly fine to assume that pornography might warp a child's view of sex and intimacy. The solution shouldn't be to force people to identify themselves, though. Parents have all the tools they need to shield their children from pornhub, if they so wish.
It’s noteworthy to me that in your replies not one single comment links to any research. Multiple comments state point after point as fact with no sources, one comment directly ascribes its entire opinion to an anecdote.
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.
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? I think the same thing should be done with social media. There's obviously a thin line where you have to use common sense (where do we start and where do we stop?) but the consensus has always been that this is adult content just like violent movies and alcohol so it should be enforced in at least some way.
It’s probably about as dangerous to minors as sitting the minor in a room while 2 consenting adults have sex, or taking that minor to a strip club. Does the screen itself prevent trauma? Would you be ok with having your child exposed to either of these?
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.
Usually what happens in this environment is immature/ underage people are exploited. You don’t have to look far. The local track in your nearest city or megalopolises in India where adults sell off children, among other places in the world. In Mexico the local business guys go into the town plaza in the evenings and chat up young girls, in Japan you get “compensated dating”. These are all places where they let those of modest means take advantage of the underprivileged and underdeveloped and treat them as objects.
I don’t know how one would go about doing that research. Anecdotally I figured out the parental lock code on a cable box when I was 12, watched one of the porn channels, I was more excited that I was able to guess the code than anything else. The porn itself didn’t really have any impact on me.
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.
It seems likely to be, particularly in the forms available today. There seems to be increasing consciousness on this both on the left and the right.
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.
It does appear to be a bit more dangerous for minors than for adults. The main issue is that your brain is much more plastic around your teenage years and is more susceptible to building long-term habits.
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.
Pornography is that which harms the soul. That's true of all people not just minors.
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.
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
My 22 year old son vehemently disagrees. And from what I've read from young men, many agree with him. When I (we?) were kids porn was Playboy or Penthouse or Hustler. Tame by comparison to today. As my son stressed with me, you can find _anything_ via the internet. Anything. ANYTHING. A developing brain can't unsee stuff and it does warp people's perceptions of what is normal.
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.
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!
Pornography is dangerous. It's extremely addictive and users become increasingly tolerant to what their viewing, often leading to the development of distressing fetishes or real life intimacy issues.
I'm sex positive and I believe in being open with children about the realities of life but the dangers of pornography are real.
Porn absolutely is dangerous if it becomes a habit.
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.
Downloading a movie is illegal, using a VPN to do it is not. If using a VPN was illegal then you would have two charges and extra time in prison. That's a giant difference.
No, it doesn't. RESTRICT empowers the federal government to enforce website bans, and provides for enforcement against efforts to evade those bans.
This is a[1] Utah state law, and a voluntary ban set up by Pornhub itself to comply. Just not relevant.
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.
There are countless programmers, from self taught amateurs to professional SWEs, white hats, grey hats and black hats, who would immediately jump at the opportunity to create stronger VPNs, mirror sites, Tor nodes, and other tools to allow the public to bypass these restrictions. Trying to control the Internet in America is a losing proposition, for better or worse.
This is a huge problem, because it's another example of turning a wide swath of humanity into criminals for doing relatively normal things that should be allowed.
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.
I would have agreed with you 20 years ago. But I think today, large scale internet censorship would be feasible. My wife and I marvel at her (much younger) Gen Z siblings’ computer illiteracy. These kids are the iPad/walled garden generation. These laws would be effective to keep Internet porn out of the hands of a large majority of younger people. That’s especially true because so many kids rely on phones and iPads, so governments can easily control VPN apps and things like that by leaning on Apple and Google.
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.
That is a consolation, but only a small one when the state violence apparatus is standing by to punish those who use them. It must never be illegal in the first place.
The funny thing is the minors know how to use a VPN to get around this law whereas the many older users don't! So, in Utah the minors will be able to access porn and many of the adults will not!
Not quite, have you not been following the news that new generations are worse with technology than the previous ones?
Minors barely know how to use a computer nowadays, they only use smart phones.
Every third YouTube video has a pause at midroll for the host of the video to thank the sponsor, a VPN service. Smart phones can use VPNs, even iPhones. Kids know about them, and they certainly will when they see 20 second tutorials on Tiktok for how to access state-blocked sites.
Today's video is sponsored by NordVPN. Prevent hackers, governments, and ISPs from accessing your private data with a VPN -- or Virtual Private Network -- from NordVPN. Plus, you can access the internet from any of over 120 countries. I can't get Naruto on Netflix in the United States, but with NordVPN I just switch my country to Belarus and look, there it is!
It's a myth that "prohibition doesn't work" which is one of the roots of this type of thinking. It does actually work (e.g. reduce alcoholism, increase health) but it also leads to the increase in organized crime which became much more of a problem.
The increase of organized crime and the spawning of a giant black market do not seem to be indicators that prohibition "worked".
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.
Maybe that was true for millennials vis-a-vis boomers. But Gen Z is far less tech savvy than millennials or Gen X. My parents couldn’t have blocked my access to anything. But my wife and I can easily do so with our kids.
What’s weird is, from my reading of the law in question, a minor using either a VPN or a stolen ID card to access PornHub is a violation. . . for PornHub.
Similar to FOSTA-SESTA, I'd guess that de facto recriminalizing sex work is largely seen as, at an absolute minimum, a happy side effect by the bill's authors.
From my reading, this is just another attempt to bypass 1st Amendment by allowing a civil suit against a porn-merchant by members of the public: if the entity imposing censorship isn't the government, then it doesn't fall foul of the 1st.
Yes. Though I suspect a lot of users know the site by reputation and may not specifically know others other than indirectly when they search (google/bing) or are linked to them from elsewhere (reddit, etc.). For those people the constant VPN advertising via sponsorship of podcasts and youtube channels will attract a number of users. The other porn sites can't advertise in those mediums.
I was thinking about this. Do sites like Pornhub use DRM in their players? Asking because AFAIK browsers will pass a network ID that does not change when DRM is used. In Firefox it is in "about:networking#networkid" and they don't make it easy to change that. I believe Chrome has something similar. I think it also uses serial numbers? Could be I am mixing up identifiers used in DRM vs. browser specific integrations.
I'm not sure that's relevant. I assume you're suggesting that a user who had accessed the site from Utah could be perpetually flagged as someone who should be blocked. However, that would mean visitors to Utah or anyone no longer residing there could be permanently blacklisted unnecessarily.
Presumably they are using some form of IP address geolocation. If that's as inaccurate in the USA as it is in Australia, they're going to have problems - a lot of the time it puts me in the wrong State.
Sure you could, you could mandate providers in the state give accurate geolocation data with some sort of lookup service and standard. I'm not saying it's a good idea but providers could certainly do it. They provide the physical infrastructure, and I assume have to deal with understanding state boundaries, laws, taxes etc already on a per customer basis when it comes to near state border cases.
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.
"They're going to have a problem" — for whom is that a problem?
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?
> 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."
Mobile phones cannot be reliably geo-located by IP as that depends on the datacenter serving them, which can easily be out of state. Usually the only half reliable part is the country which doesn't work in Europe when it comes to roaming (it uses the host country regardless the location).
The law is more about intent than technical compliance. Both are important, but the most important thing is demonstrating good faith efforts to comply.
It's a very different world from technology, where technical compliance is more or less the same thing as policy compliance.
It’s much better in the US than in Australia, where there are only a few IP exit points for the whole country. It largely has to do with ISP. My IP resolves to a few feet in front of my house.
My home ISP usually resolves to within 15 miles but my mobile often resolves to NYC which is across two state borders and almost 150 miles away. If I'm looking for something at Home Depot or whatnot it always sets my store location to Manhattan. Probably good for confusing trackers.
Readit News
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.
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
AFAICT, within the state, Mormons are not a minority but a majority. Wikipedia says[1] 60.68% as of 2020.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Utah
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.
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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.
Anyways, back to debating porn.
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.
That isn’t, however, an argument against restraint in such arbitrariness, but the opposite.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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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.
With that in place we can easily make beer, liquor, marijuana and tobacco sales on the internet possible! And porn too, I guess.
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.
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).
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?
> 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?
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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!
Using your UK credit card? If so, that's an age check in itself.
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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.
> 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
The point of the US is to let the states self-regulate things like this.
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.
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.
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.
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This would be far less onerous since it’s already a feature they have and it protects privacy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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
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!
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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.
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.
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I don't like the RESTRICT Act but you're overstating your case.
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.
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.
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.
So VPNs aren't a "bypass" or a loophole, they're the desired outcome of these laws.
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.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_Scream
easy sales opportunity
That seems a little wonky to me.
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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."
It's a very different world from technology, where technical compliance is more or less the same thing as policy compliance.