This will only push underage users to more underground sites, that don’t care enough about the laws, and which have even more extreme content. Whoever thinks that teenagers will stop watching porn because of this is incredibly naive.
It's not a genuine attempt at legislation by christo-fascists, it's a way to push the overton window, and is also a failure that they can then bring back to their tribe to shout about how they're fighting the good fight against the heathens - so give them money / vote for them. Sometimes it's used to trade political capital. They submit lots of bills like this, the party leadership keeps refusing to support it, the christo-fascists threaten to take their voters and donations away, party leadership gives them some concession by pushing some other bill to lean further in their direction.
That's actually very plausible. And not limited to the fundies only. It's all fun and games, until such a bill gets passed and all of a sudden the UK leaves the EU (sure, it was a popular vote, but the spirit is the same).
There will probably be a secure 3rd party identity provider that all the sites use eventually. The video sites will only receive a binary yes or no indicating if the user is "authorized."
All of this is beyond sanity though. Porn is not evil. My dad grew up with Hustler, I grew up with The Pirate Bay, and my kids are growing up with 4K Pornhub (after they reached age 12 we disabled the content filters on the home DNS server, also using it as an opportunity to teach how DNS and basic networking functions).
Government (and let's be honest, on this topic it's almost entirely one party in particular) needs to mind its own business. Sex, and things related to sex, are a personal matter. Thinking that I have the right to dictate someone else's personal life in this manner is not something that ever cross my mind, much less thinking it consciousable, much less introducing and voting for it to be the law of the land.
Porn doesn't change you, so that concern can be safely discarded.
It's not evil because there's no harm being inflicted. Adults who consent to have sex and doing it on camera are not engaging in evil. A person consenting to watch the video is not engaging in evil. There are tangential harms such as abuse and exploitation of the actors, but that's not inherent to porn (there is ethically produced porn) nor unique to it (actors in Hollywood are also exploited). The answer to those problems are breaking down existing power structures and zealously protecting worker rights, not banning Pornhub and AMC Theaters.
It absolutely does change you. Seeing people degrade themselves for money has a corrosive effect on your soul, and it's worse when you're getting off on it. It is inherently evil. That there is harm being inflicted is obvious to anyone who hasn't been so desensitized to it that it doesn't register anymore. The willingness of an individual to degrade themselves for money has nothing to do with whether they are being degraded.
Many (most?) actors do not find it degrading. I already addressed the ones that do in my tangential harms comment. There's been plenty of easily googled interviews of both active and retired adult actors and for a numerous amount the work is not only not degrading, but the opposite - empowering. This matches the experience of SWs I know IRL.
I would hazard a guess that the average worker in a large number of low-wage blue collar fields feels that their job is more degrading than the average porn SW.
Regardless of line of work the solution is robust worker's rights protections and social safety nets, so that workers can't be exploited or financially pressured into jobs they find degrading, not to forbid the line of work or portray it as taboo.
If you don't know what you have, you won't know what you've lost. That's what's happening with "sex workers". Maybe some know, but it's too late. Others are just oblivious and that's too bad. To describe what these "performers" do on camera for a lewd, leering audience as empowering is absurd on it's face. Maybe they mean that in the sense of having a kind of power over their enslaved audience. The whole thing is evil.
It’ll act as an additional hurdle, which is good. If people want to take their time to use a proxy, then they can still do so. What this prevents is easy access by minors. Right now anyone, regardless of age is a few clicks away from seeing porn on their smartphone.
How exactly will this change the situation of porn being a few clicks away regardless of age? Kid searches for "porn" on Google and clicks through the links until they find a non-compliant website. Pornhub is owned by a Canadian company, btw.
The UK abandoned their effort to do this precisely because of how pointless it is.
You may be overestimating the reach of these small states when it comes to online content. These laws don't make porn any less available, it just changes who gets the traffic. And as others have noted, the operators who come out ahead are inherently the ones least aligned with the culture and values being asserted.
What the laws are really for is making voters in these states feel like their legislators are doing something, because proposing and voting on token nonsense like this is easy and negotiating effective change on meaningful policy is hard.
Striving to protect children isn't nonsense, even if the effort fails to accomplish its intended outcome. We need politicians who are more concerned with the rising generations, not less.
That applies to the voters, not the legislators. The legislators been around the block, they have lawyers, they have mentors, they have consultants, they have lobbyists. With the exception of the few loons who inevitably get voted in here and there, the careerists know exactly how something like this plays out.
Voters are presumably striving to protect children and want their legislators to do something. These legislators are in no position to do anything. But they can play pretend and only make the problem a little worse as they do. In politics, that's a win.
I do not understand the bearing of African turf wars on the topic at hand. This would in effect be a justification to never do anything about anything because there are “worse” problems in the world.
I mean, probably not, but like, the world doesn't care what we think we should show.
Should we dismantle people's bodies and show it to those people's children? Should we show children their own detached arms while trapping them in a burning house with a company of their mom who is missing lower part of a body and crawling around screaming from pain while her intestines are falling out? And a mangled head of their dead cousin who's been decapitated by a sharp sheet of metal launched at him as the GRAD hit the building? Did I mention it's fucking dark and no you can't call 911. That kind of shit is happening right this second I lived in Donetsk until 2004 and the stories that I see from there are fucking brutal. Why don't you go focus on that?
I mean yeah I'm not saying we should show porn to kids. Why are you even thinking about that? What part of not wanting my fetishes end up on easily hackable government databases and known to the world is even remotely correlated to showing hardcore porn everywhere? I'm not an exhibitionist, man. I'm a prude actually. I'm easily embarrassed by my girlfriend bringing up anything about our sexual life in public. When we go to sexshop and she discusses our fetishes with employee I leave the store and puke from stress and anxiety. The thought of the entire world having access to my sexual identity is horrifying. What about people who are LGBT who's family will disown or kill them?
I probably shouldn't have gotten this heated and I honestly don't think you actually mean evil. Just think about broader implications, please.
Maybe, especially if it helped break the destructive shame-driven attitude the US has towards sexuality.
I think a reasonable moderate start would be removing any restrictions on depictions of mere nudity. My city is already ahead of the game by legalizing public nudity (it is not necessary to wear clothing in public spaces - quite popular for sunbathing at city parks in the summer).
In the US, at least, parents seem much more upset about a child seeing a bare female presenting breast than someone being stabbed/shot/killed in a movie.
Movies are rated to try to target the appropriate audience. Do you have a study to corroborate your statement or you're just parroting a popular "gotcha"?
Normally bills like these would not get any traction. But lately western society as has fully embraced the delusion that multimedia when viewed on screens have the magical ability to bypass normal sensory perception and cause addiction like drugs do. The shift in the overton window from the "screen time" hysteria has enabled these bills to be presented and not immediately laughed out of congress like they're still laughed out of scientific journals.
Do not mistake christo-fascist right-wing extremists for "western society." These sorts of bills are nowhere near mainstream positions.
Even if they don't get the bill, they can still get something of an anchoring effect and shift the overton window. At the very least, they get to shout on their podcasts and religious radio talk shows about how they're fighting the good fight against us heathens.
Why do you assume it's about addiction? Maybe porn is evil in itself and you don't need a second order evil. Also, the entire advertising and marketing industry is based on creating desire from a distance, you've just saved them billions by declaring their efforts futile.
Obviously, this is problematic as it would be implemented currently, since age verification is necessarily tied to state identification, meaning that you're forced to give up your privacy to verify your age.
If there was a good way to verify age without needing my full identity, I'd probably be in favor of something like this. God knows I'd prefer my kids don't have access to porn (although I'm not 100% sure I think they shouldn't be able to access it at all until they're 18, they're currently young enough that a total ban is correct).
A few years back, some blockchain enthusiast was extolling to me the virtues of a blockchain backed identity system where you could provide some kind of verified attestation based on a credential - for example, I could use it to prove I'm 18 to the porn site without also giving forth all the other information on my ID.
One of the more interesting ideas I've heard for blockchain. I don't know enough about the topic to know if a chain is _necessary_ for that use case, but I like the idea of being able to verify information in a minimally invasive way.
You can do that without the blockchain using something like Estonia's 20 year old digital signature scheme. All you need is a private key, not distributed consensus 'not your keys not your porn' silliness. [1]
A blockchain doesn't help here because your personal identity is not a bearer token. If someone has your private keys they do not become you. And if they do have your private keys you better have some authority to revoke them.
That's really cool, I don't know how I'd never heard about this before.
And yes, just in case it wasn't clear, I'm not advocating blockchain here, I have no stake in that stuff or any real understanding of it. But I do like the "digital signatures/attestations" idea. Thanks for sharing the wiki link, I'll have to do some more reading on Estonia's system.
I personally believe this should be controlled at a device level, not at a state or national level.
But on a theoretical basis, yes, you could use so-called "soul bound tokens" attached to an Ethereum address, for example, for this use case. A soul bound token is similar to an NFT, but cannot be traded. It is bound to a particular address. So in theory, you could go through some service provider for the identity verification, give them an Ethereum address to attach the 18+ SBT to, and then you could simply sign a message from that address for any website that required 18+ verification (would cost no gas, it's just a signature).
> although I'm not 100% sure I think they shouldn't be able to access it at all until they're 18
Obviously I can’t tell you how to raise your own children, but you yourself are seeing that porn is harmful at least up to a certain age. It’s especially good to prevent porn during a child’s formative years.
I would argue that porn isn’t good for anyone really, considering at least the following factors:
1. Like a drug, it numbs the senses and leads to the consumer needing more and more extreme content to feel the same level of satisfaction as before.
2. It’s not clear whether or not the female participants are consenting or not. Not too long ago PornHub got a lot of heat for spreading videos of the abuse of minors on their platform. They ended up having to purge millions of their videos because consent could not be verified. So imagine if God forbid you or your child unknowingly watches these types of abuse.
3. It changes the viewer’s attitude to women. Porn portrays women as public toilets, no dignity or honour whatsoever.
4. If you’re fine with other people’s daughters acting in these videos, then ask yourself: would you accept that for your own womenfolk?
There is more to say, but let’s move on.
You can technically bypass this using a VPN. What this law practically does is adding an additional hurdle for children from seeing this stuff, and that’s something good. Adults on the other hand, are generally speaking capable of setting up a VPN to bypass whatever filter they want.
Your first point is the only one that stands for non-straight porn.
2 and 3 don’t apply to gay porn for obvious reasons.
Point 4 probably has more to do with your proximity to sex workers than anything. I have plenty of friends that make their own amateur porn, to me there’s nothing wrong with it. Also, living in sf, I’ve also met plenty of professional gay performers. They’re just like you and I, but they have a more interesting line of work.
My point is not to say that the effects of porn are all positive, but that your issue with porn might have more to do with the way society treats women and sexuality than it does with porn itself.
All porn is bad. It is detrimental to individuals and society, regardless of age. It's addictive nature is at legendary status. It blows up marriages and twists the expectations of sex to be convenient and casual instead of a long lived relationship that is worth personal sacrifice.
It's like a drug that attaches to your love receptors preventing you from really loving and receiving love. And most steeped in its grasp don't even know it because it is hard to explain color to someone that has only ever seen black and white.
Re 2: they just deleted all videos where they couldn't 100% verify things, as a "better safe than sorry" kind of strategy. The overwhelming majority of these videos were fine. I'm not saying there wasn't any problem on PornHub, but I feel the scope of it has been rather overstated, and any platform that allows user-generated content suffers from these problems: YouTube, Facebook, even Hacker News.
Re 1 and 3: I hate to be that guy, but I think "citation needed" is an appropriate request for these. Especially for "3", which seems rather strong.
Re 4: This is a little bit like "would you want your daughter to work at Wall-Mart?" Probably you will have higher hopes for your children than to work near-minimum wage all their lives.
I'm mostly hesitant due to my own understanding of my own desire to see naked women when I was a teenager and, to be crude about it, a pretty constant desire to jerk off.
Obviously ideally my kids will stick to their imaginations and consenting partners, that's what I would wish for for them if I could.
But I'm not sure it's a totally realistic expectation, and one of the weird things about being a parent but also a person who was once young is that I want my kids to have the opportunities to come to their own conclusions about what's good and bad for them.
As another example, I don't want my kids to drink or smoke pot before they are of legal age to do so. And ideally, maybe never? But at the same time, occasionally doing that stuff when I was a young man was fun, and formed good memories and social bonds. While it's my role as a parent to set rules that they can't do those things, to issue consequences if I catch them smoking weed or drinking it whatever, I also understand the desire and think tm there's a certain... benefit, I guess, to their attempts to circumvent my rules?
I realize I'm pretty much contradicting myself repeatedly here, and also failing to take a hard beneficial moral stance... but that seems to be part and parcel to the experience of being a parent but simultaneously remembering being a kid.
The way I look at parenting is that initially it’s guarding and restrictive, but slowly one lets go in such a way that the child is on a good path in life. So the way I look at it is that it’s a parent’s responsibility to provide some kind of framework. Then different parents may obviously argue what that framework should be…
The same folks that fought tooth and nail against the clipper chip are the ones now pushing for ID to watch porn.
The clipper chip was a self-censoring device, which gave parents control over their children. It was one of the various things that got democrats labeled as the "nanny state". There's a good reason to oppose the clipper chip, and it wasn't because the chip was the problem, it's because the chip used content ratings, and its use would have required further labeling of content.
This ID law is a form of state-sponsored censorship and tracking. The true purpose here is to later push this to requiring IDs for other things on the internet, and to setup the infrastructure necessary to do so. It's nanny-state, but as usual, the "protect the children" thing here isn't the purpose, just the vehicle. They don't want to protect your morals or your children, they want the ability to control your access to information.
As someone who is certainly on-board with the greater fight against the Devil's iconography, I can't foresee this kind of legislation as having an overall good impact, especially with how popular commercial VPNs have become and how frequently you see them advertised. Children aren't stupid. And as other commenters here have pointed out, kids that aren't smart enough to use VPNs will probably just look for non-compliant sites or other means of access.
States simply aren't equipped to deal with the issue of access. And not only that, but the issue of access is a false framing of the problem, when there should be as much (if not more) concern about the very existence of pornography, the means by which it is made (prostitution, voyeurism, and exploitation), and the motivations for making it (injured intellect and corrupt will). Until people are having the more important conversation about sexual ethics, the very meaning of our sex, and not this phony "sex education" you get in public schools, I don't think we will see meaningful improvement.
"After a series of setbacks, the planned scheme was eventually abandoned in 2019,[4] and would be formally repealed by the planned Online Safety Bill.[5]"
