- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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3 boats of Puritans and we still all have to suffer.
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 males it woese. 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.
The word “can” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. A lot of things “can” have negative effects.
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.
That’s not Jenna. That’s a snuff film.
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?
I honestly think it’s about degrading the right to free expression. But yes also probably. The people who cast women and kids as pawns in need of protection are usually not super respectful to the real women/kids in their lives.
Control addicts gotta get their fixes.
True. But the people advocating for these laws don’t want to deal with nuance and compromise on what it would take to have a society where you educate people on sex in a healthy and positive way. These prohibitionists see the world as either bad or good - nothing in between. Good (how ever they decide to define it) must win no compromises, and the weapon that they use is unfounded fear of the bad and it works.
And the reason fear works is because it is easy and visceral and reality’s complexity doesn’t work for media’s need for sound bites.
I think the part about IDs is what’s important. They are not against porn, it’s just a good excuse to account for another part of your activities. Which may be used to classify you or even blackmail you, but I think knowing your preferences is enough. It may allow secret services to predict whom you may like or may not.
Naturally it will allow to track you.
There are many factors affecting energy spent on doing something.
I personally think that this timeline is fucking bullshit and we got there by always choosing the lesser evil, so libertarian (you may make it left-libertarian, I genuinely don’t care about left-right division because it’s mostly traditional and imaginary) revolutions in all the civilized countries are long overdue.
Not even libertarian, maybe the Empire at War: Forces of Corruption game was onto something. Maybe the left-right and libertarian-statist distinctions are obsolete for our time just like Roman optimates-populares distinction. Maybe we need some new line, formalist-naturalist (as in formal law versus natural law) or something. Where the former part would be existing political mechanisms and the latter part would be saying “no” to fools, thieves and bandits.
First they came for the porn.
And then they got distracted with all the porn they had to audit.
A side thought: what would the world look like if you needed to be 18+ to make a social media account?
Define social media and then imagine a constant argument of semantics where online communities get destroyed and created based on law suites.
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.
This should give the dems all they need.
“You do what you need to do in that voting booth, we don’t judge”.
I hope they have some disinfectant wipes at each booth…
“If they removed porn from the internet, there would only be one website left and it would be called ‘bringbacktheporn.com.’”
Why are they even in war against porn?
/j lust is just the second layer, try doing something about worse stuff like greed or gluttony
Because cops like to check ID, and this allows them to check ID more often. I think they want to check my ID at every website, if they could.
Because christians think they can make the rules for the rest of us. And they use scare tactics like, “protect the children”, which they are molesting. Plus, they don’t want anybody to be happy and have any fun. That’s the point of christianity, to make everyone miserable, FOREVER.
That’s how I try to describe growing up with it when people ask why I don’t to to church or subscribe to any religion.
Aside from the many other aspects of it, even as a child, I couldn’t understand why I was supposed to be so enthusiastically smug that I belonged to this thing that seemed to exist only to impose rules on everything imaginable and that those rules would invariably be against anything even remotely fun or pleasurable. Hell we couldn’t even use most spices; thanks Dr Kellogg.
At age six or so I legitimately perceived it to be sinful to smile or laugh for fear I’d be punished because there would be some arbitrary rule that whatever caused me to smile or laugh was too worldly.
Fuck that. I’ll be miserable and curmudgeonly on my own terms!
It’s nice to be free of all of that. No one should be allowed to join a religion until they are 21.
FUCK RELIGION
Why are they even in war against porn?
First time that I heard that, and I really don’t think it’s a real war. Maybe a tiny quarrel :)
Well, they’re the ones that know which pizza shops have pedophile sex dungeons hidden underneath. So, I guess they’re fighting themselves. (As I typed that out, it occurred to me how true is a statement it was…😝)
Religious extremists that work tirelessly to impose their god’s laws on everybody else.
They’ve actually embedded themselves in US government now, over many years and much effort, and the burning embers of their religious war against the rest of us are finally starting to catch fire in a big way.
They recently took away a person’s right to an abortion. Madness, I know. What will they take away next?
You can’t adopt kids in Tennessee unless you’re Christian. They will deny you for being Jewish.
I wish I was joking, but this is the Christian Nationalist endgame: Nazism.
Because they want to use antiporn laws to restrict books and other media with LGBTQ content.
eventually men will be charged with murdering millions of kids
Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great. If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.
Royce dupont on the truth about god and porn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeeR38i2QqY
“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.
The difference is, I think, just how much of the content or there is hosted in America. If they succeed in forcing local companies to follow some new draconian measure, it’ll likely have a disproportionately high effect on non-US traffic.
Sure. I think people from the US can see what our privacy regulations did to the internet. For example with the cookie consent banners. And disclosing somewhere what personal info gets shared with whom. Up until now the USA hasn’t really made an effort to regulate the tech giants. Maybe that’s going to change with certain topics like porn. It’s definitely going to have an impact on the world. I mean lots of tech companies are located in the US. Pornhub though is from Canada as far as I know. And the second biggest porn site XVideos is based in the Czech Republic. So I’m curious how US law is supposed to be enforced here.
Huh, didn’t realize that. I understand a lot of the physical servers for those kinda companies are in the upper Midwest, but I never thought about where thire HQ is at; you make some excellent points.
There is definitely a fight brewing over who has final say in regards to what happens on the Internet. Gonna be interesting seeing how this plays out.
For sure. That’s going to be interesting. I mean at first the internet was for academics, students and smart people. Then it was the wild west. Now it’s long become integral part of society and everybody is on the internet. I think as of now it’s mainly big companies who “own” the place. My issue with that is mainly that they do with our personal info as they please. And their business tactics. Like Spotify ripping off artists, YouTube not really caring about the creators and their well-being. Everything is about ads and commercialized to the extreme. And the internet wasn’t always like this. But all of that is a slightly different story.
In the end, we have to apply our laws also to the online world. We can’t have that be a separate space. But laws are for single countries and have borders. The internet doesn’t. I sometimes see people wanting to introduce borders into the internet and make it more national. I think that’d break everything. The internet is supposed to connect us. And our world is globalized.
But we’re also not making an effort in the first place. Gambling, porn and all that unwelcome stuff is just hosted abroad. Doesn’t matter if 100% of the customers are somewhere, the company is just allowed to be ran from some small island and then it’s fine. We could just ban that in my opinion. I’m not a big fan of DNS blocking or messing with internet traffic, so we’d have to come up with a good technical solution. And I think the USA, the EU and Canada would be able to agree on some consensus regarding the protection of minors and that’d spread and affect most of the world.
Or we just go for their money. You can’t circumvent and run one of the largest online platforms without money. If all American and European comanies wouldn’t be allowed to advertise there, that’d solve the issue pretty quick. And we already had that. I think Visa or some other payment provider said they’d have to cease service if they continue not doing anything against revenge porn and exploitation and copyright infringement. That lead to all major porn platforms making account verification for the actresses mandatory and removing lots of amateur stuff and pirated videos. So that definitely works.
In a world where Monero exists, there is no way to stop the flow of money.
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.
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.
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 to 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.
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.
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.
Biggest problem is that generic production stuff too often models bad sex, a cartoon version of sex that’s not healthy or pleasurable for anyone, let alone unsafe.
It was already settled long ago by the Supreme Court, but evangelicals are trying to use private action as a way around it, and I bet they’re hoping that one of several current lawsuits makes its way up to our new and corrupt court.
Humanity is smart, those making such laws 1) want the information collected by identifying people, not to forbid porn, 2) just hate autistic people. Because non-autistic teenagers will find something. But then, TBH, autistic ones too.
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.
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.
I’m going to link my ID and look up the most mind blowingly vile, while remaining legal, porn. If they want to talk to me about it, then I am going to make them describe each video before I “remember” what I saw, after which point I will refuse to acknowledge it as porn.
Sure, it’s dumb, but it’s fun dumb.
It’s not a canary in the coal mine for censoring LGBT information and community, most of the proposed bills outright state that any LGBT related content is covered.
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’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.
I had to post a pic of it to a dispo’s website in DC to buy legal weed there.
Don’t care I just generate my own anyway
A system that needs ID verification to access a site is a problem. What if it’s used for other websites as well?
Then I won’t browse to them any more
Yeah, that could work; however, it would be a hassle. Just remember to save everything important locally.
One step ahead of you, I’m actively replacing all of my online accounts with self-hosted alternatives. My state passed both porn ID and social media ID laws, and I assume they’ll try to add this to anything with age gates (e.g. streaming sites).
So I’m moving my stuff to my personal cloud:
- Jellyfin - I’m going back to buying Blurays and DVDs and adding them to my own streaming service
- NextCloud/ownCloud - still playing with it, but I got Collabora set up for docs and spreadsheets, at it supports calendar sync as well
- Vaultwarden - working on switching from the hosted Bitwarden
- Actual Budget - I switched from Mint -> TillerHQ (hosted at Google Docs), and this is the next step (it integrates with SimpleFIN for bank sync)
All of this is available both over my self-hosted VPN, and over the internet with certain services exposed over my domain (all use LetsEncrypt certificates). So I can access whatever I want wherever I am. I do offsite backups with Backblaze B2 ($6/month/TB), and I sync important stuff to my phone w/ syncthing.
It’s a bit of a pain, but there’s no way my state can take any of that away from me. I’ll be adding more services as I find time, and I’ve got a good system now where a new service only takes a few minutes to spin up. Basically, my setup process is:
- add subdomain for the service to my DNS - could use a wildcard, but I like control and ability to move things around
- add haproxy config at my VPS - just copy/paste like a dozen lines of config
- update Caddyfile on my NAS to handle the new service - again, copy like 5 lines
- add and configure container in my compose.yml
docker compose up -d(to build the new service) followed bydocker compose restartto get Caddy to reload the config
Caddy fetches the TLS certificates, and docker handles setting up the service. Unless I make a mistake. Since everything is in docker, I don’t need any ports exposed except 80 and 443, which is managed by Caddy.
I wouldn’t have bothered if Netflix had kept reasonable rates for ad-free watching, but here we are. And now my state is being a pain, so I’ll probably configure my WIFI with a VPN out of state so I don’t have to deal with the stupid ID verification crap.
This is fantastic. Hopefully, crazy politics will at least have a side effect of all of this self hosted software becoming easier. It’s gotten to the point where companies like Hetzner will maintain nextcloud services for a monthly fee but Caddy is already more intuitive compared to what came before it.
Yup. I’m thinking of making a blog series or something about my setup. It’s a little complex, but the individual pieces are pretty simple, so anyone with time and interest could totally replicate it. Mine would focus on Linux, but since everything is in containers, it could easily be replicated on Windows as well.
Oh, and I’m working from the worst possible setup, I’m behind CGNAT, so I have to go through an outside server to make my internal stuff public. A lot of people can just use their router IP instead, which eliminates the VPN entirely (just port forwards from your router).
How the American war on porn could change the wat you use the internet
looks slightly annoyed
I’m not particularly enthusiastic about such state laws, but the UK spent the last several years having committed to mandate age verification itself prior to eventually abandoning it, and I didn’t see Voice of America trying to get people in the US riled up about British law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_UK_Internet_age_verification_system
And if I recall, they had some follow-up effort, which I assume is what is briefly referenced in the article.
looks
Yeah.
Implementing the Online Safety Act: Protecting children from online pornography
This is the second of four major consultations that Ofcom, as the appointed online safety regulator, will publish as part of our work to establish the new regulations under the Online Safety Act (2023).
Currently, services publishing pornographic content online do not have sufficient measures in place to prevent children from accessing this content. Many grant children access to pornographic content without age checks, or by relying on checks that only require the user to confirm that they are over the age of 18.
The Online Safety Act is clear that service providers publishing pornographic content online must implement age assurance which is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a user is a child to prevent children from normally encountering their online pornographic content.
I didn’t see Voice of America trying to get people in the US riled up about British law.
Good. They’re not supposed to.
The purpose of the VoA is to broadcast American news and perspectives to the rest of the world. Their programming is not intended for Americans and for most of its history the VoA was prohibited by law from intentionally broadcasting directly to American citizens. A lot of Americans aren’t even aware the VoA exists because of this. This prohibition was eased somewhat in 2013 to make putting VoA content online easier and to allow Americans access to VoA content if we want it. ie I as an American citizen am allowed to hear what the VoA says but they’re still not supposed to talk to me on purpose.
If you do hear the Voice of America trying to get people in the US riled up about anything, be sure to let us know so that we can make the responsible individuals be in trouble.
Let alone Spain has already implemented a system for this which is part of a bigger EU effort. https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-builds-porn-passport-to-stop-kids-watching-smut/
Sadly, I don’t think this is going away.
Papers please: for millions of Americans, accessing online pornography now requires a government ID
And I imagine everyone wants a picture of your ID. Which is horrible on so many levels…
From my cold, dead, lubricated hands!
