https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkazpy/pornhub-sues-texas-over-age-verification-law
The law would require a “Texas Health and Human Services Warning” on all porn sites.
Jesus, at this point over half the country will ban porn because of religious extremists who hate freedom. Fascism and anti free speech.
Age verification for pornography has something like a 70% approval rating. It’s not a religious extremism issue, it’s a “normies don’t want or care about their freedoms issue”.
I think there's a lot of vague support for keeping porn away from children that evaporates in the context of the actual issue at hand where porn sites are being mandated to collect and store the IDs of every visitor.
The concept is not terrible, the implementation is. Passing this law with no secure way of proving identity is where it’s clearly just a Christo-fascist power move.
I think a law verifying your age over the internet inherently breaks the idea of a free internet, of which we are already seeing degradation of by Google and DRM/web integrity anyways.
I don't see how it doesn't violate free speech. Imagine needing the government's permission to talk to someone?
Edit: forgot a word
I agree. Even internet security protocols are at risk, and the dinosaurs responsible for writing laws don’t understand basic encryption let alone the idea that it is 100% a needed concept in a free, fair, and just society.
There are already age limitations that are constitutional. You can’t run for office, buy alcohol, drive a car etc.
That's not speech. You can age limit things, but not on speech. Beyond that, the limitations on speech have to meet certain conditions where it's in the publics best interest and doesn't put too much burden on the public.
I think a law verifying your age over the internet inherently breaks the idea of a free internet
That was broken decades ago.
today couldn't have happened if yesterday's degradation didn't occur. it's been slowly breaking for a while now.
I think there is a lot more to this that a secure way or protecting children.
It's the base idea that I have to prove who I am online at all. That I cannot lie. Lieing should be a fundamental right. Not identifying yourself should be a fundamental right. Giving a false name should be a fundamental right.
I get that too, but we wouldn’t want people buying alcohol or fire arms anonymously. Imo access to pornography should be like access to R-Rated movies or Parental Advisory music. Guidelines set either by the industries or government, but policed by parents.
You don't want people buying alcohol anonymously? Im totally for it.
You've hit the nail on the head while at the same time missing everything. Parents should be policing their children and what they do on computers. It's not like there is a spectrum between pg porn and x rated porn. The websites themselves are already the R rating.
things like Ecchi and stripteases exist, but its too mild for PornHub. Soo... I'm not really making a point.
I get that too, but we wouldn’t want people buying alcohol or fire arms anonymously. Imo access to pornography should be like access to R-Rated movies or Parental Advisory music. Guidelines set either by the industries or government, but policed by parents.
The way the US is going, with anti-LGBT laws popping up all over the place, I have less trust for the government collecting that information than the sketchy porn sites themselves.
The only implementation I would support is one where the asking website doesn't know your ID, and the verifying website doesn't know what you're trying to visit. Essentially just asking for a one-time use token that verified your age, and providing that token to the website you're trying to visit.
Edit for a bit more detail: User authenticates to ID website, which provides them a token with age verification (true/false) and a short (10 minute?) TTL. This token is encrypted by the ID website. User then provides this token to the asking website (eg: pornhub). Pornhub then sends the token back to the ID website to decrypt it. All pornhub knows about you is whether or not you're of age, and the verifying website never knows what the token is for.
There would be too much value in tracking that token for such a scheme to stay secure. Governments or shady corporations or illegal black markets or all of the above would be all over keeping tabs on what sites are visited by which tokens and matching them to identities.
The whole point is that the token itself doesn't have any personal info attached to it, only a yes/no and expiry time.
I'll even one up my original suggestion - it uses standard public/private key encryption, where the government issues a simple json token with a yes/no Boolean and a TTL. The public key that can decrypt the tokens is public. Pornhub then decrypts the token and verifies the boolean and expiry date, all without talking to the government at all.
that's amazing, I would love to see this implemented, problem is nobody wants to set it up, they want the data. I think they enjoy the discomfort hoping people will stop. If the system was setup and used despite all the pressure, the short TTL may create the risk of traffic correlation attacks, especially for the smaller, less traffic sites. this is something that can likely be fixed.
The concept is fine, but even the best known implementation is impossible without putting an unacceptable level of trust in one group.
This should be parental controls - make websites declare a rating, then let the owners lock down devices
Nothing is going to be absolute, but we have to prioritize freedom or soon our Internet will look like China's. They've already been talking about banning vpns and kosa would make you tie ID to anywhere you can post - all social media is considered possible adult content by default
I like this idea. Have the W3C create a rating system that sites self-select, and then work with Microsoft, Apple, etc to adhere to those ratings in their parental-control systems. I also approve of Apple's idea of CSAM or explicit image scanning on devices where it blurs it out for minors. All of which can be controlled by parents, not governments.
Both the concept and the implementation were approved almost unanimously, with overwhelming bipartisan support. Not sure why you’re having a hard time with this.
That just means that almost every politician on both "sides" are pushing a Christo-fascist power move.
The Democratic party is only better than the Republicans on this in relative terms. As a non-American looking in, both of them are right-wing parties that bow to religious interests. It's just that one of them is waaaay off to the right wing, out in the reeds of loonieville, whereas the other has kept at least within spitting distance of center most of the time.
Not sure where stating that means there's any difficulty in understanding anything. That's such a naive perspective to take. No one is claiming a Texas state senator that is a Democrat is the same as a Democrat in a deep blue state. It's all relative and only fools or liars would claim otherwise.
No, not “no one is claiming that”, because I am claiming that. Contrary to your apparent belief, large swathes of urban Texas are little different politically from a blue city anywhere else in the country. A state rep for Austin fought prescription drug companies and against putting the 10 Commandments in classrooms. Does that sound Christofascist to you? Because he voted for the bill. Close to 40% of the State legislature are Democrats and the majority of them approved this bill. Acting like a representative for Austin and a representative for rural Texas are both Christofascists because they come from the same state is actively counterproductive to gaining a better understanding of the situation. If you’re tilting at windmills and blaming imaginary enemies you’re going to miss the real forces that are driving these decisions.
Even if they aren’t Christian, there is a stream rolling effect on “protect the kids” bills where going against it is going to get you thrown out of office. That’s the kind of political climate we are in unfortunately.
It’s not Christi-fascist, both parties - if not the entirety of the US government want a Chinese type internet. Don’t fool yourself into thinking they don’t.
The Patriotic act was never revoked was it? I mean that thing was written in advanced of 9/11 just keep that in mind. There are probably stacks of legislation that is prepared and just waiting to be pushed through on a moments notice.
It doesn't need to stop, it needs to change. Before assuming it's doomerism or attempts to dissuade people from voting, learn the perspective. The example above was the Patriot Act, a bill written before 9/11 even occurred, passed (and continually passed extensions until 2019) with overwhelming support, and is a fundamental attack on privacy. Things like the Patriot Act don't come from just one side.
This “both sides” bullshit needs to fucking stop.
It is literally impossible for support to be nearing %70 without support from Blue voters.
What needs to stop is this pretense that this crap is only being supported by Conservatives / Republicans.
Sources and links are greatly appreciated, but could you post one that's not pay walled?
Ah yes, I stand corrected. It was replaced with the FREEDOM ACT - yet another Orwellian sounding spy program that was modified slightly to ease American fears of bulk domestic spying.
Like that really *stopped. *
"Are you over 18: Yes/No"
Think nobody is arguing against that. I'd rather not give 1000 different private companies my government ID who get hacked all the time. The same people passing these laws had nude magazines growing up too.
It's kinda tragic too. I do agree with the sentiment behind age verification, it is in the kids' best interest that they not be using porn at that age. But there's really no way to effectively enforce this without violating basic rights. There is no good solution. Given that dilemma, all we can do is try to better prepare parents to deal with this in their home.
Is it really that bad if kids see a bit of porn? Like really? I grew up before the internet, but even in my day porn mags and VHS tapes got passed around when I was a teenager. Kids are always going to be curious.
Even so on the internet there are much worse things than porn that are harmful for the development of children. There are various groups of questionable morality like incels, or other mysogynistic groups, alt right stuff like neonazis, christofascists, climate deniers, ... If I had children, I would be much more concerned about them falling into one of those ideological traps than them seeing some titties. Hell, even TikTok is probably more harmful for giving them a dopamine addiction and an increasingly short attention span.
So to me, it seems a bit weird to single out porn. It feels like a convenient scapegoat for parents who don't want to spend time raising their kids and paying attention to what they are looking at on the internet.
I don't have kids either, but my siblings and friends do, and kids today aren't just seeing a little porn. It's not like Playboys in the woods or a single 2 MB image downloaded for hours on dial-up. It's pretty violent sexual activities in video, like strangling or surprise anal sex. Even twenty years ago, my first sexual partners had moves they picked up from porn, but they weren't violent. Talking to young women today, the moves their partners are picking up and have been normalized by porn tend to be violent. Like, I never had a friend in college tell me that her boyfriend slapped her during sex and called her a dirty whore while she cried, but that seems to be a pretty common experience today.
The issue is that even older teens don't have the life experience to contextualize what they see in porn and separate it from how you act in real life. If you're into slapping people, that's fine, but you've got to talk to your partner about it before you do to. If you're getting your sex education from porn, then you don't get the people skills part that's important for successful relationships in real life.
This study touches on a lot of what I'm mentioning here, and they found a correlation between violence in teen relationships and porn viewing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6751001/
So, yeah. I don't know what the solution is. I don't think it's sending a copy of your ID to a porn site, which seems incredibly risky for other reasons. I think sex and relationship education would help a lot, but that only connects with the kids who listen. Obviously there's a parenting component there, but I don't know how many parents are mentally health enough to have those conversations honestly. 🙃 Probably not the ones who wrote this bill.
I don't really know what the answer is either, but you're right. The extremes we see in porn today are very concerning. The things you listed shouldn't be in main stream porn and need consent and open conversation outside of sex before adults who understand what they are doing actually do them. I find it crazy that it's made its way into mainstream videos and blame the idea of things having to be ever crazier, ever more extreme to get attention.
But blocking teenagers off from porn, or trying to, won't help anything. I think we need to be open, honest, and have real sex education. I also think these things are why some sex ed now includes actually how to have sex rather than the physical components. But that serves to give the prudish more ammo of how sex education is porn itself even when meant to be purely educational and combat these extremes people are seeing. There's so much nuance to the issue that I think a lot of people get bogged down on one part or on their own preconceptions.
Talking to young women today, the moves their partners are picking up and have been normalized by porn tend to be violent.
the other thing it does is gives people trauma.
At what age? 6? Sure.
16? 13? Less likely that it's "in their best interest", because they're now dealing with those physical and psychological changes that are very much in line with the content of porn.
Just like TV, movies, video games, books, and other forms of fantasy / entertainment, parents need to be involved, have earnest communication with, and provide education for, their kids about the porn they will be consuming.
But "porn is icky", so they won't.
How is it in their best interest not to consume porn?
I would have guessed that's where the religious oppression was targeted, whatwith being overly obsessed about peoples' sexualities.
Indeed, it's often stated but seldom justified. Religion is far more dangerous than boobs on a screen, we need to protect kids from sexual abuse in church instead
Watch HealthyGamerGG on YouTube, he's done a few videos on it. But, in short, depending on the person porn can have a lot of negative effects on the individual, including damaging one's ability to form and keep relationships.
It is my opinion that we would all be better off without porn, but it is your right to continue using it if you like.
The Republicans are absolutely going about this the wrong way. For the record, I've told my representatives in government to oppose bills like this. But that doesn't mean you and I can't understand where their sentiment is coming from.
This sounds an awful lot like confirmation bias to me, so I went to Google Scholar for about 15 minutes.
A quick scan of meta-studies seem to indicate that teenagers watching pornography mostly leads to them having slightly more sex, which is well known to be healthy.
For certain vulnerable groups of individuals (poor social integration, weak familial bonds, high risk seeking, and high aggression) porn seems to exacerbate their traits a bit.
There's also very tenuous results pointing to porn in pre-teens, as well as teens with low self esteem and poor social collection getting a skewed perception of sexuality. These are the only groups who have ever been shown to be affected negatively, and only in a single study each, without reproduction. And for the teens it reversed when they gained self esteem.
Seems we should actually have better sex education for teens so they have the support to talk and explore sexuality in a healthy manner with their peers.
A lot of the supposed "research" is religious propaganda. They've never given up their agenda to hold a monopoly over people's sex lives and are very angary that it's slipping away from them. We must resist
That's if you watch porn and don't have education or proper parenting along side it. If porn is used as the educative tool for the child learning about relationships and sex, sure. It's a problem. But if it's just used like it's meant to be used, I don't think it's clear cut. It's only a problem if a kid is sheltered from learning proper sex education and gender.
The simple "Are you over 18? Yes/No" prompt worked just fine. If a kid lies and presses yes, who fucking cares lol. They're not seeing it on accident at that point. We need to stop this puritan society, kids are going to explore this stuff. They always have and they always will.
70% approval rating but what's the base? If it only surveyed 10 people and 7 say yes, it is 70% but means nothing.
The actual study I've been able to find was only phone based and only in swing states, but didn't list which states exactly.
Genuinely curious where you're getting these numbers. I can't seem to find any formal public opinion polls on the enacted or proposed bills
There was a Politico article about this last week:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/08/age-law-online-porn-00110148
The public is also on her side. “You poll this, it’s like an 85-15 issue,” explained Jon Schweppe, the policy director for the socially conservative think tank American Principles Project. Age-verification for porn is not his think tank’s only priority, but when they poll it against other priorities in swing states, age-verification blows the rest out of the water, with 77 percent in support and 15 percent opposed.
Here’s a Pew survey suggesting that the majority of Americans consider porn harmful:
A large 70%-majority of Americans reject the idea that “nude pictures and X-rated videos on the internet provide harmless entertainment for those who enjoy it”; only 27% agree; in general, opinions about pornography have become slightly more conservative over the past 20 years. Currently 41% agree that “nude magazines and X-rated movies provide harmless entertainment for those who enjoy it,” while 53% disagree. The number saying such material is harmless has fluctuated, declining from 48% in 1987 to 41% in 1990 and then varying by no more than four percentage points thereafter. The pattern is more mixed for other values related to freedom of expression.
Note that trends in this space are getting more conservative, rather than less. This tracks with my experience with Gen Z.
Admittedly, I have not seen any polling about specific legislation. It hasn’t been long since these bills were passed, and I don’t know if it’s a priority for pollsters. But if nothing else, just look through the thread. Lemmy leans way further left that the general public, and even here most people’s problems with it are about execution rather than intent.
A lot of Gen-Z, of Gen-Y and Millennials are re-adopting 1950's prudishness. That has the potential to really be horrible for a generation or two before the repression sparks another sexual revolution.
I think as mainstream porn has become more extreme more people are viewing it as harmful.
The porn 20 years ago was way more extreme, no idea what you're even talking about there
Edit: oh, something that really changes how these stats are viewed. The poll was conducted solely by phone.
I do think it's worth noting that they specifically polled swing states. It's a bit different imo to address political stances in specifically swing states and to use that to judge the beliefs of society overall. I think it's also worth noting exactly how they phrased the questions. These answers also make me think that these aren't really swing states at all. I'm appalled by them.
Women’s Sports: 56 percent supported (33 percent opposed) laws to protect women’s sports at the K-12 and collegiate levels.
Sex Changes for Minors: 56 percent supported (31 percent opposed) laws banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and physical sex change surgeries for children.
Sexual Topics in Schools: 60 percent supported (34 percent opposed) laws banning instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade.
Parental Notification: 59 percent supported (30 percent opposed) laws requiring schools to notify parents if their child identifies in class as transgender.
Age Verification for Porn: 77 percent supported (15 percent opposed) laws requiring age verification for accessing online pornography. Reining in Big Tech: 50 percent supported (36 percent opposed) laws preventing censorship of political speech by Big Tech.
This is not an objective or unbiased pollster: the American Principles Project is a far-right stack of dark money with some window dressing.
I have a source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1365965/us-adults-support-online-age-verification-by-gender/
68% of people either Strongly or Somewhat support verification mechanisms for online content.
The only porn left will be yiff, because sites struggle to classify it as porn (it even makes it past google's filters). And a new generation of furries will be born. Their ban will be their undoing, lmao.
"The elder scrolls told of their return. The defeat was merely a delay."
Oh, don't forget kosa, it has bipartisan support
They want to hold sites responsible for children accessing NSFW content on them. Which means ID of some kind
It would also apply to user posted content
I doubt it could be actually banned. The US had this fight decades ago and Porn was given 1A protections. If they could ban it they would but they can't so they are doing the next best thing by making it inconvenient and uncomfortable for people to get to.
The problem though is that all those things we fought for before and being rolled back. You could have said the same about abortion, but then we regressed because of religious extremists.
If you think these bills will do anything to stop teens from accessing porn or women from being trafficked, I have a bridge to sell you. And if you think Republicans actually care about the health and well-being of vulnerable women, I have an even more luxurious bridge to sell you.
Meanwhile Nick Fuentes wants a child bride...it's almost as if sad excuses for sacks of shit republicans want to control the sexuality of children...
When we started opening up about sexuality, sexual assaults tanked. It also tanked when we started teaching sex ed to kids
There’s a difference between sex ed and having them jerk off to porn, much less encouraging them with unrealistic expectations on sex.
That sounds like a parents job then... Like shouldn't the parents be the ones keeping up with what their kids access and look at on the internet to make sure they don't access that stuff then? Shouldn't they be, you know parenting them instead of letting the state parent everyone else for their failures?
I thought as an American adult I could do whatever I wanted within my legal rights free from government over reach.
Now I'm being told I have to give my personal ID to a non-government website (to eventually get hacked and leaked, hurray another vector of ID theft being opened up!)... Because other people can't properly take care of their kids or take 15 minutes out of their day to set up a network filter like my parents did? Or even, you know... Just talk plainly to their kid...like growing up I saw blood and guts and gore from films (fictional entertainment and educational ones played at school) but my parents took the time to explain the things I see and interacted with in the world
This is gross government overreach and is entirely anthetical to American ideals. And as much as I hate the slippery slope argument, do you really trust the American government to not abuse the precedent being set here and expand on it?
This whole thing feels gross. Imagine the government later on starts saying that you have to have mandatory ID and facial scans to access certain websites. Imagine they use that to track down individuals who made aggressive or hyperbolic comments such as expressing dislike for a political party or person. I can imagine so many scenarios where this just goes from bad to worse that I can't type fast enough. The potential for something like this to slowly or even rapidly become abusable is infinite since we already have countries enacting on these models that started out with these same or similar requirements before ramping up.
Combine this with the stuff Google is trying to do and oh man, the future looks bleak for free internet and communication and the further enrichment of the elite and powerful... Road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that
LOL, you went with a strawman & personal attack because you know your actual argument is garbage.
Oh the attack isn't personal. I did refer to all republicans , there's enough of my disgust to go around.
Keep in mind that the republican party is the one that is courting Fuentes, and the meak attempts of republicans trying to curb pornography, sex ed, and LGBTQ content in public libraries is based off of a conservative Christian attempt to control and curb the dissemination of information related to sex and gender.
I do find this whole discourse sad and pathetic since this kind of control over content and identity never ends up having any positive lasting effect. The children of conservative parents generally become fed up with their repressed out of touch parents and becoming liberals. Or they end up in a hate filled exclusionary community that only accepts them based off of some form of restriction of expression and personhood.
To the majority of republicans, I will say that you've made your vision for the future plain. We all get that you want a future where generally white male strongmen determine the course of humanity. And to that I say fuck off.
It’s incredibly hard to change an Intelligent mans mind. It’s impossible to change an stupid mans mind.
My parents had a porn blocker, and all it made me do was learn enough about computers to circumvent it. Even if they put age verification in front of every porn site in the world there's still torrents and chat rooms and forums all over where you can find it, and kids will find it. Next thing they'll mandate is putting toothpaste back in the tube.
Trying to stop people from doing something is a sure fire way to guarantee they will do that thing.
It's not that. It's that if you tell a horny teenager that there's pictures of naked people somewhere they'll move heaven and earth to get to it.
Bit of a leap, my dude.
Of course we should have laws.
But for things that are actually harmful.
For everything else we should have regulation.
If your single point is "trying to stop people only makes them do it more", than no, it's not a "leap". That invalidates the very idea of having laws in the first place.
And fwiw, I'm not arguing in favor of this law, just against the idea you replied with.
I just stated a fact, not my opinion on it.
The leap was you assuming that i think that means there should be no laws. Which, as you can see by my previous response, you were wrong about.
Edit: in fact. The leap was you taking a statement of fact and going straight to the extreme of "there should be no laws" as opposed to every step along the way you could have visited first. Like relaxing laws, heavy to light regulations, just not this one particular law etc all the way to, eventually, no laws at all for anything.
Thats a fucking leap my friend.
We didn't say this about everything (although it is true that some kinds of people are attracted to anything forbidden). We said it's true of teenagers and porn. Duh.
Semi-Hemi-Demigod said:
It’s not that. It’s that if you tell a horny teenager that there’s pictures of naked people somewhere they’ll move heaven and earth to get to it.
And fwiw, I’m not arguing in favor of this law, just against the idea you replied with.
Whatever you're arguing for or against, you're arguing like a drunk uncle. You're taking it to an extreme that it's obvious no one actually intended, and then arguing against that extreme like it was the original point.
I'm not arguing against extremes, I'm arguing against a bad argument. And I'm not drunk, I only wish I were.
Not only will they find it, they'll end up going to the sketchier sites that don't do the age verification because they're not well known enough and not following the laws and they'll likely get something infected on the computer/network or worse.
Not only will they find it, they’ll end up going to the sketchier sites that don’t do the age verification because they’re not well known enough and not following the laws and they’ll likely get something infected on the computer/network or worse.
It's like that time we declared a war on drugs and then there were no drugs. Wait, actually that led to a massive black market and tons of violence.
Point being, you're not gonna stop it. You're just gonna make it less safe.
Yep. Who among us as idiot teenagers hasn't downloaded "$current_starlet full nude sex tape.exe" from some shady site?
I think you were the exception not the rule. Or maybe I'm just old. Back in my day you would try to open that linkin_park.mp3 that you downloaded off of limewire, and who knows what you were actually gonna get. Normally some heinous porn or gore video, but I'm sure there was an executable or three in those, too.
I think nowadays this is harder to do, but I could still see some kid getting fooled on some shady tracker site or something.
For me learning about file extensions was definitely heavily influenced by early Kazaa / Limewire / DC++ days :) Fool me once etc..
I definitely got my share of stuff that didn't match the title from Limewire, but the only .exe I ever downloaded from it was Limewire Pro. It took zero effort to check the file name for the extension.
Funny you should mention putting toothpaste back in a tube, because I actually helped someone do that last night. It's possible, but also a huge pain in the ass. That's not a commentary on anything besides literal toothpaste.
My housemate was going on a trip to Alaska the next morning. She had a mostly empty 3 oz toothpaste tube and she was trying to refill it from a larger tube. No idea what she was so opposed to just buying toothpaste when she arrived. I think she was mostly just doing it because she could.
The solution involved holding the tubes end to end and squeezing the larger tube, alternating with using a stirring rod to pack the toothpaste into the smaller tube.
My housemate was going on a trip to Alaska the next morning. She had a mostly empty 3 oz toothpaste tube and she was trying to refill it from a larger tube. No idea what she was so opposed to just buying toothpaste when she arrived. I think she was mostly just doing it because she could.
The solution involved holding the tubes end to end and squeezing the larger tube, alternating with using a stirring rod to pack the toothpaste into the smaller tube.
I'd build some kind of suction device to put negative air pressure on the tube while holding the nozzle in the toothpaste
When my wife insisted I put a porn blocker on the internet, I did some simple DNS tinkering, then told my son not to let his mother catch him bypassing the "blocker" I put on.
When I was growing up we had the ultimate porn blocker.
Dial up internet was far too slow to load more than about half an image per hour.
It would loan line by precious line. Should I look now and enjoy the suspense or wait ten minutes and see the whole pic in all of its glory? Usually I would be weak and sit there enjoying the anticipation..one line at a time..then finally, when you were so horny you just couldn't take it anymore..you see her penis :/
Kids today don't know how good they got it.
Mine straight up used Spyware. I learned to make multiple copies of older sessions to cover up anything I wanted, then I replaced current sessions just like they did on security cameras in the movies lol.
I just think of it as a safety net to prevent (or at least reduce the risk) of young children accidently stumbling upon something nasty or graphic that they didn’t mean to.
This should also be done by proper parenting and supervision but as technology and internet devices are friggin everywhere I don’t think it’s a bad idea for parents to also have some decent filters on their internet connection.
Doesn’t stop someone who even knows half way what they are doing, but by that point hopeful parents will have talked and educated their children about things before there’s a concern about intention seeking stuff out.
Porn sites have had "Confirm you are over 18" since the dial up days. That's about as much of a safety net as I think is necessary or practicable.
A decent filter on a network (think pi-hole and next dns and the like) helps block adverts, trackers, scam sites, shady pop ups as well as bog standard porn sites etc
Internet is full of things that it’s easy to accidentally stumble on that you wouldn’t want a young kid to see and I think it’s a reasonable step to have some basic levels of controls on your own network
The onus is on the parents to manage internet access in a way the feel best and shouldn’t be forced or assumed. definitely not to porn sites (or any other site!) to collect entirely unnecessary personal data which would inevitably get leaked.
I totally agree and I put in a good faith effort to block that stuff from my kids' devices using a pihole and what's available on their phones. But I remember being their age and getting away with things because I figured out the workarounds.
At the very least it'll teach them a little about networking and computers which will serve them well in their careers.
Absolutely, that’s why I keep saying “accidentally” - anyone who thinks an internet filter will stop someone with any determination is kidding themselves.
Instead of the age confirmation dialog, they should implement an age-captcha, like "identify these musical artists" or "click on all the squares with physical storage media."
Like in Leisure suite Larry! Although sometimes those answers change, like this one:
O. J. Simpson is
a.an R & B singer.
b.under indictment.
c.embarrassed by his first name (Olivia).
d.no one to fool with.
Ooph, that hit home for me. I got that in a bundle with King's Quest and Space Quest(which were both amazingly entertaining at the time) as a pre-teen and just kept going through the questions to learn all the answers. I hadn't heard of Carlsbad Caverns before then and when my wife brought up possibly visiting there this summer, it took me back to that glorious game.
What happens when the data in this "safety net" is breached and tons of peoples IDs get leaked? So safe.
I’m talking about network filters at the home level. Like a pinhole or nextdns. Ones the network owner is control of and can log or not log as they choose to. Parents can set up their own safety net if they choose.
I was Responding to the comment “my parents had a porn blocker” etc
I do not want some dodgy website to be collecting personal IDs that would be an obvious target and/or just get leaked accidebtly.
I am a parent and I have decided not to worry about this stuff. Teens will look at porn and that is just a fact about our existence. I don't have to like it or approve of it or concern myself with it.
Teenagers will. Young children though may accidentally stumble upon something nasty which is far from age appropriate and something they aren’t ready for.
Having good network controls can help with that, but so does good supervision and education about internet safety.
while that was pretty fucking bad, let's not pretend it is the singular source of all evil.
Republicans existed before Trump. How can you fail to understand the basic concept of persistence? The Republicans that are still helping to screw up what Trump started were here before, also screwing things up. They didn't poof in to existence with Trump.
Stop pretending like anyone is saying it was unicorns and rainbows. A false dichotomy is patheticlly inept thinking skills on your part.
The republicans of the 50s are far different than those of the 80s and today. You don't expect everyone to have the exact same beliefs as you do you?
The person they were responding to specifically referenced Trump and modern Republicans. My point does not require Republicans having kept the same ideals throughout many decades of time. The 80's were almost half a damn century ago.
They are also citizen of the country you live. It is not yours any more than it is theirs.
Would you tolerate the Taliban in your country? If the answer is no, then you wouldn't "tolerate" christofascists either.
Please separate government and politicians and media. Plenty hard work happening in our agencies solving important issues. And of course then congress wakes up and just spews bullshit.
Its full of evangelical Christians. That and Anglo-Saxon culture even minus the evangelical Christians is very squeamish around sex. Just look at the different attitude towards talking to kids about sex that you find in the UK and on the Continent, even the Germanic countries tend to be a lot more open about this stuff than the UK.
Its full of evangelical Christians.
That number has been shrinking for decades, while at the same time the christo-faccists are getting more pushy.
Who are these "christo-fascists"? I'm a big skeptical when people throw that f-word around. I might generally agree with their points but they almost always have a political ax to grind. Hence the hyperbole.
The Ohio Republican party just made a brazen attempt to consolidate power (and failed).
They tried to effectively remove citizen initiatives, because the legislature doesn't control those.
The overlap of people that call themselves devote christians and people that are racist and fascist is huge in America. Mind you, they call themselves christians, they don't act like they claim.
A while ago I saw someone flying the flags of the "Anti-Antifa" and a huge cross. Mathematically that makes them the "Fa". If only anyone knew what that part stands for...
P.S.: Oh and this isn't exclusive to the US of A. Here in Germany the conservative party bears the word "christian" in their name and they have been inching closer with the neo-Nazi party AfD for years now - if not politically then at least ideologically.
They know, guy. Fascists have stopped being afraid of the label except in terms of scaring the "centrists," but they don't mind that we know they're fascists.
Anti-antifa does not make one fascist. Britain and America were anti-Antifa and made sure they regained no power in the early days of the BDR. You might disagree with Western, anti-socialist and anticommunist politics, but they were decidedly not fascist.
This is what I mean. A political ax to grind and a bunch of word games.
Can you give me a source regarding that claim? It is also okay if its in german. All I know is that the communist party which had ties to the soviets was the first party the U.S allowed, because it was Nazi free. A few years later the "Christian Democrats", which were full of literal Nazis, made them illegal and continued the Nazi stuff without so much killing in Germany, they still funded the facists in Spain to continue murder people in the civil war the fascists began. People suspected to be Antifa couldn't get jobs or had to go to prison in germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_%28Germany%29?wprov=sfla1
The section postwar commities.
I’m late to this, but I think you were unfairly downvoted for asking a legitimate question. The modern definition of fascism that is separate from the Italian political party comes from Umberto Eco’s essay Ur-Fascism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
His 14 points closely align with the US Christian right wing and more generally the rise of right wing authoritarianism globally.
Thanks, I appreciate your response. But don't worry. I am here to help out FOSS software, and because I believe in the Lemmy project.
I am perfectly happy to share my honest opinions and be downvoted. That's part of being part of a community.
At any case, to respond more precisely to what you were saying. I will read the Umberto Eco essay at some point (sorry, its long and I'm busy). Nevertheless, I feel as though a redefinition of the term clearly has a political motivation behind it. Why not simply call right wing Christians by another name? I feel the word fascist is used because of its historical connotation and because it helps people with a far-left agenda get what they want. It's an effective strategy because conservatives end up defending themselves and trying go prove they're not Hitler rather than talking about something a bit more substantive.
No worries. It’s a short read as far as essays go. Both the Nazi and Fascist parties were authorization but neither were left or right in the modern US instances. Eco’s whole point was to divest the cultural and time trappings of this brand of authoritarianism into a general definition of modern populist authoritarianism. It’s a good read.
I am completely with you on the f-word being thrown around willy nilly these days, but there are a disturbing number of self proclaimed Christian nationalists in government and among the evangelical populace. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not the only politician to state this on a televised interview, but is the first one to jump out at me.
It's thrown around a lot now because it's apt. And the Republicans need to rely on it more and more as people realize the truth to the capitalist propaganda and they can't keep in power using BS like trickle down economics. People are understanding that equality isn't a part of what Republicans are interested in, so they need to appeal to the people who aren't interested in equality.
The rich are one group that benefits from inequality but are outnumbered by the poor, so that leaves people who believe in fascist ideals, like one race is better than others, or gender, or gender preference, or some other trait that means they can feel superior without needing to do anything that sets them apart.
Which might have been at the root of why people were willing to believe that bullshit that favoured the ruling class in the first place because my own reaction to "trickle down economics" the first time I heard of it was that it was fucking stupid. I still don't see many people pointing out that even if it did work, it implied that some people deserve the bulk of resources to pass through their hands and be used to get labour and other goods from those it "trickles down" to.
I'd argue that the American dream itself was fascist, at least the versions that have everyone aspiring to be billionaires. The Confederacy was fascist, existing purely because they thought that some men should be able to own others outright.
Delusional. You may disagree with American capitalism and the plutocracy it has become. I'm inclined to agree with you to a point. None of those things are fascist.
The far left is obsessed with fascism. Maybe it is because you are both brutal and authoritarian when you gain power.
The label "fascist" now gets tossed around as much as the label "communist" did in the 50s.
The Brits seem to have an obsession with pedophilia on par with the far-right in the US that you don't see in other countries.
It really is profoundly Anglo-Saxon (whether in Britain or the States). I really don't know why they're like that.
It's definitely not Anglo–Saxon as in "inherited from the Germanic tribes of Angles and Saxons", afaik medieval and early modern English society was quite open about sex.
After the Reformation, England bred or harboured quite a few fundamentalist Christian sects which had a huge impact on English and especially American society.
Dude you can't deny facts just 'cause they're uncomfortable. Texas is American.
I know it hurts, and I know it's hard, but you can't treat cancer by ignoring it. It can be cut out or medicated, but if you ignore it, it kills you.
They're the ones that keep talking about how they used to not be America and "threatening" to secede.
At this point I'm not sure we shouldn't kick them out.
Maybe give the land back to Mexico?
I'm not sure Mexico would want it, what with all the Texans running around on it...
(To all my lefty/socialist friends in Texas, I apologize if this is offensive. Also, living in Iowa, it's not like I have a lot of room to talk...)
NO!!! NNOOOOO!!!! SHUT UP!!! NOO!!!!
Ahhhh! Why does it hurt so much?! Whyyyyyyyyyy???
Even if there was some secure, hardened way of verifying people’s ages without handing over PII to random websites, these age verification laws are still utterly ridiculous.
It’s not the government’s job to parent your kids on the internet. If you don’t want your kids visiting specific websites or viewing specific content, you take 15 minutes out of your goddamn day to do your job as a parent, and set up a content blocker on your home network.
you take 15 minutes out of your goddamn day to do your job as a parent, and set up a content blocker on your home network.
Or, I don't know, talk to your kid?
Oh absolutely but that's a parent's decision. They might decide to be a crap parent and do the minimum amount of effort possible but if they're going to do that then they should be the ones to install the blocker not the government.
I remember when they tried to introduce a similar law in the UK and absolutely nothing ended up happening because it's utterly unworkable.
Can't you just use a VPN to get past a content block? Sounds exactly like a project a 14 year old me would research
Perhaps, but most of the good ones are paid, and I would try to set up some way to monitor the internet traffic if I really wanted to go that far.
I self-host on a VPS, but also spoof the client hello of another website so it looks like I'm accessing yahoo.com or something
You would have to actually reverse lookup each IP to realize "hey, that's not a yahoo.com IP"
Not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. The average parent has no idea how to block their kids from visiting pornhub. I don't think that's an excuse to make age verification required. Parents should educate themselves on this stuff.
The sicko in me hopes they spend the next two weeks linking every policymaker in the state to their pornography habits and just dump the whole dataset online. Yeah, it would probably counterproductive and not great for democracy but I wouldn’t it be the sickest burn of all time?
Ironically it would be so much easier to do that if they actually implemented the law they're suing over, which demands they record the ID of everyone who uses the site.
Hmm, the article is a little confusing, but it sounds like they're mostly just complaining about the age verification, not really suing over that specifically. The real sticking point, and the one they actually stand a good chance of winning in court is about the warning they're being required to display that's both libelous and factually false. Texas for better or worse is within their rights to require age verification, even the very odious version of it being proposed that would require collecting state IDs, so it's unlikely that they would actually win if that was their only issue with the law. Fortunately Texas (and others) massively overstepped by trying to slap a health and safety warning a la cigarette packages onto porn sites since they let a bunch of nutty politicians write the text of the message rather than actual medical professionals (probably because they couldn't find any respectable medical professional that would endorse their wacky notions).
Not really. It does kind of tread on the first amendment. Like, imagine I wasn't allowed to say something to you because the government doesn't allow me to. What does that sound like? Like, you can't put barriers on free speech.
This is a stupid take misunderstanding both the 1st amendment and free speech. The government is only prohibited from restricting citizens' free speech against itself.
But the government regulates all kinds of corporate speech, they're not allowed to lie, some are mandated to put certain labels and information on their products, many are required to submit financial reports, etc.
Also, there's plenty of limits on free speech for citizens when applied to other parties: libel, slander, defamation, hate speech, etc.
But you can criticise your government, you can even slander them and have no requirements on being truthful while doing it.
If you don't understand the rights, you are vulnerable to having them taken away by someone who knows to avoid the specific words you've memorised.
They restrict speech that violates the rights of others. And much of that is in civil court, not criminal. And a lot more of that is consumer protection in regards to how to legally sell something, not simple speech. You're confusing a lot of things with speech that are absolutely falling under entirely different regulations. And to be clear, the lawsuit does claim both aspects are violating the constitution. It's not just the warning that they're complaining about.
You're misunderstanding in your explanation shows you are less well versed in this aspect than I am.
Edit: it's also one of the first claims being made in the lawsuit. So. There's that.
Double edit: government can't pass laws "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;" it does not limit it to criticism at all
There is no absolute right to free speech as has been ruled again and again and again. Restricting access to pornography to adults is one of the areas that has been ruled as an allowable restriction, or more accurately there are laws against providing children with pornography, just like there are laws restricting access to alcohol and tobacco. The interesting argument in this case is, can the state require a specific mechanism of restriction be employed. Looked at another way, would the case hold up if instead of porn we were talking about alcohol? If Texas required a site selling wine for instance to maintain a database of customers state IDs would that be legal? I suspect the answer would be yes, but it's debatable, so it's risky to bring a lawsuit with that as its sole basis.
The warning on the other hand, that's a MUCH stronger argument. More so even than censoring speech, compelling speech is looked down on far more severely. The law is asserting as facts, things that at best are debatable, and at worst are just downright lies, and forcing sites to repeat those dubious "facts" is really not going to go over well. They are so bad in fact as to verge in libel. Focusing on the warning label is a pretty easy slam dunk in their case, while going after the ID portion is much more iffy. I don't think they'll be successful in getting the law overturned on the basis of the ID collection, but I do think they'll succeed on the basis of the required warning label.
Government has curtailed free speech only when the burden is justified by it's benefit. Here they're saying it fails, not because they're prescribing a specific method but because it's curtailing free speech beyond what is beneficial to the payout. It's high burden, but low effectiveness in its states goal. Hence why they're saying it's being used to curtail speech they simply don't like.
Edit: and no, a database being kept fails scrutiny as it doesn't serve the stated benefit.
This is a 5th grade understanding of the 1st amendment. Good job, now let's work on the adult one.
Exactly. Malicious compliance, while reminding people exactly why they shouldn’t be so quick to give up their anonymity on the internet.
I see what you're saying about it not being good for democracy...we shouldn't have politicians making decisions based on their personal use, and trying to avoid scrutiny of that use...but at the same time, we have that anyway. Honestly, at this point, burn it all down. Make the entire apparatus of government so transparent that the shitheels currently in office can't justify staying on. Make it to where the only people who can function in elected positions are political monks.
I think a lot of these states are going about this wrong. We should be helping parents restrict access for their children rather than trying to verify identities of adults who likely want to remain anonymous.
It's the same rhetoric that the UK government are using to get a backdoor on messaging apps with E2EE.
They've been trying for years and never get anywhere.
They face an issue that introducing age verification requires an ID system and whilst age verification polls well (as did earlier silly ideas like a watershed for the internet . Unfortunately, timezones exist..) ID verification polls extremely badly
So I suspect trying and failing is their holding position where they satisfy both.
Yeah, anytime you see somebody making the "think of the children!" argument, look at what the possible end goal could be with that removed. Protecting kids is a favorite smokescreen because kids can't speak up for themselves in these cases.
Yeah I think that's the proper route. Parents who want to restrict what their children see need to take responsibility for doing so and not try to make the government do it for them at the expense of everyone else's privacy.
I’m of the opinion that protecting children has little to do with the actual intended purpose of laws such as these.
Make a kid safe tld that requires whatever government certification. Done. Now parents, if they choose, can filter all but the kidsafe tld. Trying to instead blacklist is never going to work.
Whether companies choose to certify and publish there is something those who want this type of thing should provide incentives for.
Porn hub should make a VPN and offer it for free to people in texas They could call it VaginaPenisNards
I'm in Norway and can't find it in the Play Store. The links from their website seem dead or wrong.
There is a vpn app with the same name, but it has typos and looks suspect.
"You show me some lazy prick who's laying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis and I'll show you someone who's not causing any fucking trouble"
-George Carlin
Republicans really believe shit like this and banning abortion will be successful at restoring the nuclear family... at gunpoint.
What it will really do is increase sexual assault, suicide, violence in general...
Of course that will be everyone else's fault for not submitting to their attempts at coercion correctly. Republicans insist on personal responsibility, exclusively for their many enemies and explicitly not for themselves.
The funniest bit is, they are the reason for the death of the nuclear family and the reason it won't be restored. If you give the owner class all the money out of the asses of the working citizens that would have kids, herp derp they won't have kids.
If they really wanted the "traditional American family" to come back, they need only restore tax levels to pre-reagan levels, and actually enforce them. Instead they'd rather threaten everyone for masturbating instead of making new wage slaves they can't afford to raise so Republicans can also get that dopamine hit of schadenfreude by calling them irresponsible for having kids they can't afford.
You want to restore the nuclear family? Make it financially viable for us to have one.
One of the main reasons I don’t have children is because it’s too goddamn expensive.
Also I’m sterile. But there’s nothing anyone can do about that.
Fertility issues are also massively on the rise, probably just another side effect of all the pollution we let oligarchs inflict for private profit.
And Nero Bezos/Walton/Buffet/Koch/etc counted while humanity burned.
I want kids. But I need government programs like Universal Healthcare, real paternity leave rights, and maybe even extreme stuff like subsidized surrogacy to make that happen. My family in Japan has that. My SO in Canada has that. Why can't we have that here in the US?
If everyone is miserable and all vices are banned, there will be nowhere else to turn to but religion and that's exactly what they want. Religion is authoritarian by default and the main message of it is comply or else which fits right into the Republican's plan for us all.
From reading about the law it sounds like they are trying to take a page from CA's overreaching prop 65 law that effectively labels everything a potential carcinogen. Based on the data the main beneficiary of this are a handful of law firms. I wouldn't be surprised if this law is backed by a few law firms who smell easy money.
I thought they just blocked it in Louisiana and just had some sort of video telling you to call your rep to fix it. I'm too lazy to find a VPN endpoint in Louisiana to confirm though. So the article I read may be out of date.
There was no CP on there, it's the go-to excuse conservatives use whenever they don't like something they think is "degenerate", you've seen them do it to trans people recently. It's the same old BS song and dance I remember from the 1990's with right-wing conservatives whining about DOOM being too violent for children and GTA being a bad influence on kids, it's literally the same argument
Do you have any evidence for that? I find it hard to believe that there wasn't any CSAM on there considering that there was the whole expose, you know, the one that forced them to delete the majority of their videos, because the site didn't have any way to verify whether they were CSAM or not.
You could be right, but i thinks its wrong to say that there wasn't any CP on there. They probably weren't able to check all the millions of videos that were uploaded every year, nor did they care.
It wasn't just right-wing conservatives though. When videogames were a new concept to most parents, it wasn't initially wrong to be concerned about the violence. Nowadays we know that it's not really a problem and the people who are still against it are mostly right-wing conservatives.
So... you're just guessing that they had this highly destructive content on there, without any evidence?
I'm pretty disturbed by the attitude of lot of the comments on this thread. While this law is probably not going in the right direction, this knee jerk reaction of calling any regulation of porn "puritanical" and an infringement of your rights is crazy to me. I feel like access to internet porn is not a fundamental human right, and it's not puritanical to maybe want to prevent kids from being unwittingly exposed to a shitload of porn at a young age.
Regulations that require you to expose your personal data for no benefit are all those things and more.
Educating children about sex so they can consume porn in a healthy manner (because spoiler alert: these laws do nothing to stop them watching it) is 100 times more productive and positive than invading the privacy of law abiding adults. But that would actually require time and money which none of these law makers want.
It's never about protecting children or making the world a better place. It's about moral posturing and pretending you're doing something so you can get votes.
Of course kids would still try to access porn, there's always ways around walls on the internet. Just like how banning guns wouldn't prevent everyone from accessing guns, and banning sale of alcohol to minors doesn't make minors stop getting drunk.
In that sense, I do suspect that if there were more boundaries to accessing porn, children would watch it less, and would maybe be less likely to be exposed to it without their consent.
So pornhub apparently supports showing sexual material to underage viewers, who knew. Honestly what do you expect from a company serving porn, they're all sleezy fuckers anyway, porn is disgusting and sinful and the only people who watch it are incels who can't find a woman.
No, what Pornhub denounces is mandating that thousands of sites across the internet are being legally mandated to collect citizens private, identifiable information, and correlate it with their porn watching habits. It’s a prime example of government overreach. Y’all should stop using the “protect the children” excuse for your facist policy and actually develop a rational, logical argument.
people shouldn't even be watching porn, it's sinful and disgusting, get a real wife then you won't need porn in your life, stop being such a whiny incel and then you'll be able to find a girl.
People can just not visit the site if they don't wanna look at porn. That also works, lol. There are things that I think are morally repugnant that I just ignore.
That all changes once minors enter the picture, you really want people underage going to these sites because they think it's "edgy" or some shit? We can only mediate children's online activities so much in this day and age, there needs to be an effort from the site to make it difficult if not impossible for people who are underage to access.
i do not want arguments on lemmy, now im going to assume that you're addicted to arguments and now im going to not reply to you Wich is something i hate on things similar to Reddit. also you're username is probably made by a 4 year old