Jesus, at this point over half the country will ban porn because of religious extremists who hate freedom. Fascism and anti free speech.
and then those same people who want it banned close their curtains and start watching it.
Like all these child protecting puritans who end up being pedophiles and sex traffickers lol
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”.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Coomers crying fascism because kids can’t jerk off to sexually trafficked women.😐
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.
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.
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.
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?
Even as an idiot teenager I knew the difference between an executable and a video file.
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.
This blows my mind. Why not just push back on your wife for being ridiculous? I say this as a woman with two boys who has been married for 10 years.
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.
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.”
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.
America is such garbage lol. You guys should really focus on the important stuff.
Did you think they can only be garbage or perfect and nothing else? Really?
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.
Then they can keep their “values” to themselves and out of my government.
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 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.
Religious zealots shouldn’t be dictating what I watch, read or do.
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.
Like the average person has a clue how to configure a content blocker. LOL
