- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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A side thought: what would the world look like if you needed to be 18+ to make a social media account?
I assume practically the same in terms of child safety. Teens will find a way around or a more underground alternative to hang out with each other online.
To your question: More headaches and invasion of privacy for everyone due to enforcement. How do you enforce it other than state issued ID? It would also exclude a lot of people who either don’t have that ID or don’t have access to it. Then there’s the whole question if whether you want the government to know what media you’re interacting with. For legal reasons the social media company would need to keep evidence on file of your identification, if not report it. Keeping is regardless of whether it’s part of that law, CYA and all.
Define social media and then imagine a constant argument of semantics where online communities get destroyed and created based on law suites.
So USA slowly becoming China now? What’s next VPN users will face jail time?
Maybe our republicans will develop a strange love for China like they already have with Russia.
Too many American corporations rely on VPNs for that to happen. The last thing politicians want is to piss off their corporate masters.
How could American politicians be so against pornography, when so many keep getting caught with prostitutes?
Typical. Rules for thee I guess.
“Could” is the important word here. In other contries, we long have laws making age verification mandatory. It’s just that it’s a popup asking “Are you over 18?” And you can click whatever you want. Also the companies are in different jurisdictions, don’t comply with local law while the internet spans the globe. I don’t see any substantial difference here.
That was the case here in the US, but a lot of states are now passing laws that require actual verification, not just a button. The result is that PornHub is no longer accessible in my state w/o a VPN, and if more states do it, I would probably need to send in a picture of my ID or something and make an account.
That all happened this year, right? And PH does the blocking from their side. I mean it’s not some DNS blocking that internet service providers are required to do? And what’s with the next biggest porn sites? Do you still have access to xvideos .com and xhamster?
The law passed either last year or the year before, I can’t remember, and it’s going into effect this year or last. There’s also a social media ID law as well, but I don’t think it has gone into effect yet (I don’t use SM aside from Lemmy, so I haven’t noticed, but occasionally follow Twitter links).
I just checked, and xvideos works fine, but xhamster has a “start verification” pop-up upon page load that requires uploading my ID, or logging in if I’ve already verified myself. Pornhub just refuses to load with a protest screen with the following text:
Dear user,
As you may know, your elected officials in Utah are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.
In addition, mandating age verification without proper enforcement gives platforms the opportunity to choose whether or not to comply. As we’ve seen in other states, this just drives traffic to sites with far fewer safety measures in place. Very few sites are able to compare to the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place. To protect children and user privacy, any legislation must be enforced against all platforms offering adult content.
The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the best and most effective solution for protecting children and adults alike is to identify users by their device and allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that identification. Until a real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Utah.
Please contact your representatives before it is too late and demand device-based verification solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy.
The checks are all on the service side, not the ISP, and Pornhub lays out the rest of the problems here. I assume Utah would sue noncompliant companies.
So the simplest solution for people in Utah is just to use a VPN in Colorado, our next door neighbor, which adds minimal latency (like 10-20ms). I’m in the process of setting that up for my Wi-Fi network so nobody in our network needs to show ID.
For those wondering about the upswing here:
If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.
“This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.
Yup, and this is exactly why I plan to use a VPN once my state starts enforcing this law. There’s no way I’m going to show ID to any website unless they absolutely need it. There are very few websites where that’s necessary, so I’ll just use a VPN to a neighboring state (or even to Canada) instead of complying with that nonsense.
I already have to worry about identity theft, I don’t want to make that even easier…
i’ve been toying with the idea of hosting deep web porn front ends. Not sure how legal it would be. But morally, you’d be on pretty good grounds.
I mean what 13 year old is using tor browser lmao.
I don’t think there’s any website where it is necessary, excluding ones that adhere to unjustified laws.
I had to post a pic of it to a dispo’s website in DC to buy legal weed there.
I’ve had to submit it for remote work authorization, travel on a cruise line (not required, but strongly recommended), and to prove my identify for a web host when their automated check failed (that was the fastest way). So yeah, pretty rare, but still a thing.
a survey of 1,000 young people concluded that pornography can normalise sexual violence and harmful attitudes among children.
That’s irrelevant. This argument assumes that age verification laws will reduce children’s consumption of porn. The war on drugs has shown us that prohibition of this kind of stuff doesn’t reduce anything and only ever makes it worse. All that will happen is children (and adults) will now go to worse/less moderated websites which will on average have more CSAM and other real sexual abuse.
Pretty sure the normalization of sexual violence and harmful attitudes came from the adults in my life. If parents and teachers adequately teach kids to identify those things and know that they are unequivocally wrong, then teens who see unhealthy stuff in porn will notice and be critical of it. Probably indignant, too, since no one is more justice focused than a teen who has just learned something about the world.
The issue is backward ideas about relationships being reinforced by adults, either through active misogyny or just never talking about it. This argument boils my blood because the porn itself is not the problem. Awful attitudes about relationships and women start very early and they often come directly from parents themselves.
Interesting. Maybe it’s projection about the porn THEY watch?
If you were a teenager, back when online porn were all pay sites, and so you were using Kazaa/Limewire instead, then you know.
That was never a thing. I grew up in the 90s and I could easily find free porn websites. My main limitation was dial-up internet, not knowing where to find it…
I used to leech my neighbours WiFi on my PSP and download stories on the Sex Stories Text Repository because images were too slow.
Sometimes that wasn’t enough and the anticipation of not knowing whether you’ll see a nipple or a dick on the next few lines of the image was preferable.
I got in the habit of opening multiple tabs while reading a text story, and then finishing up when the tabs finally loaded.
We had these kinds of debates when I myself was a minor (in the late 2000s). I would have thought it would be over by now and people would have realized that allowing teenagers to watch porn isn’t actually very harmful to them at all. Seems not, humanity doesn’t get smarter over time.
Idk, I think teenagers watching porn is harmful, but preventing them from watching it is more harmful. As a parent, you want your kids to come to you with any questions or problems, and locking down everything breaks every ounce of trust you might have with them.
My state is doing this crap, so I’m installing a VPN on my wifi to a state w/o these stupid laws so my kids can make their own choices.
The porn landscape has changed quite a bit since the 2000s:
- Accessibility: In those days people had the “family computer” which limited the time you could access porn and had to be extra careful as to not get caught. Nowadays you can see porn on a plethora of devices and can basically see porn 24/7.
- Variety: Nowadays you can find porn for anything and it can get pretty dark. Porn addicts get bored of regular porn and go down a dark rabbit hole. Back in the day you had to make due with what you get or go through a lot of effort to find something you like more.
Mind you I am not saying that porn should be outright banned but there should be barriers in place. Example porn can only use the domain “xxx” so parents can add the filter to the parenting controls of whatever devices. Sure there are ways to circumvent that but it at least takes more effort.
Lol to the “back in the day porn was safer”. Back innthe day the worst stuff was openly distributed on normal porn sites. It was actually difficult not to stumble over illegal ot really disturbing stuff when browsing those sites. And don’t get me started on the stuff people send you on some irc servers unasked (that was more in the late 90s though).
Even non porn sites could be bad. Like one time I was browsing a non-porn anime site and suddenly landed on a porn site that had me scared the police might kick in my door, despite closing it immediately after it opened.
This, luckily, is a lot better regulated nowadays.
I give you accessibility though. Having a internet connected computer in you pocket 24/7 might make things much worse.
I might have worded my comment poorly. I did not mean to insinuate that it was “safer” but that there is more variety. That is, it is easier to find 18th century toaster porn today than back in the 2000s.
Porn addicts get bored of regular porn and go down a dark rabbit hole.
This has been disproven over and over. The only people who go to the “darker stuff” are people who are already inclined. They just work themselves up to it by going through the regular stuff.
It’s the same thing with serial killers, they warm up to it with animals. Which is why someone killing animals is a massive warning sign.
No, I’m not comparing serial killers to porn addicts. I’m comparing the process of warming up to the extreme stuff by first doing the less extreme stuff.
