Presumably they are using some form of IP address geolocation. If that's as inaccurate in the USA as it is in Australia, they're going to have problems - a lot of the time it puts me in the wrong State.
Mobile phones cannot be reliably geo-located by IP as that depends on the datacenter serving them, which can easily be out of state. Usually the only half reliable part is the country which doesn't work in Europe when it comes to roaming (it uses the host country regardless the location).
The law is more about intent than technical compliance. Both are important, but the most important thing is demonstrating good faith efforts to comply.
It's a very different world from technology, where technical compliance is more or less the same thing as policy compliance.
Sure you could, you could mandate providers in the state give accurate geolocation data with some sort of lookup service and standard. I'm not saying it's a good idea but providers could certainly do it. They provide the physical infrastructure, and I assume have to deal with understanding state boundaries, laws, taxes etc already on a per customer basis when it comes to near state border cases.
I guess people providing wifi near the border could get complex but you could pass that responsibility to whomever owns the physical line and where it terminates. Satellite might be a little difficult.
But I'm not entirely sure we should do it just because it could be done.
"They're going to have a problem" — for whom is that a problem?
Porhub made the best reasonable effort. The ISPs supplied inaccurate data and are in the jurisdiction, but aren't required to supply anything at all AFAICT. Who has a problem?
Mutatis mutandis. ISPs aren't required by law to supply accurate geolocation AFAICT, but neither are you, neither am I, and neither is the company in the building next to your office.
> Porhub made the best reasonable effort. The ISPs supplied inaccurate data and are in the jurisdiction, but aren't required to supply anything at all AFAICT. Who has a problem?
Given the known problems with IP geo-location, I don't think this would count as "the best reasonable effort." Unless you interpret "reasonable" to mean "half-ass."
I've done geoip for a film streaming company, my job included getting the error rate low enough to satisfy the rights owners from whom the company leased content. It was a bit of work, but not really difficult.
If you think Disney's happy with "half-ass", then "half-ass" is what I mean.
It’s much better in the US than in Australia, where there are only a few IP exit points for the whole country. It largely has to do with ISP. My IP resolves to a few feet in front of my house.
My home ISP usually resolves to within 15 miles but my mobile often resolves to NYC which is across two state borders and almost 150 miles away. If I'm looking for something at Home Depot or whatnot it always sets my store location to Manhattan. Probably good for confusing trackers.
What’s weird is, from my reading of the law in question, a minor using either a VPN or a stolen ID card to access PornHub is a violation. . . for PornHub.
Similar to FOSTA-SESTA, I'd guess that de facto recriminalizing sex work is largely seen as, at an absolute minimum, a happy side effect by the bill's authors.
From my reading, this is just another attempt to bypass 1st Amendment by allowing a civil suit against a porn-merchant by members of the public: if the entity imposing censorship isn't the government, then it doesn't fall foul of the 1st.
Yes. Though I suspect a lot of users know the site by reputation and may not specifically know others other than indirectly when they search (google/bing) or are linked to them from elsewhere (reddit, etc.). For those people the constant VPN advertising via sponsorship of podcasts and youtube channels will attract a number of users. The other porn sites can't advertise in those mediums.
I was thinking about this. Do sites like Pornhub use DRM in their players? Asking because AFAIK browsers will pass a network ID that does not change when DRM is used. In Firefox it is in "about:networking#networkid" and they don't make it easy to change that. I believe Chrome has something similar. I think it also uses serial numbers? Could be I am mixing up identifiers used in DRM vs. browser specific integrations.
I'm not sure that's relevant. I assume you're suggesting that a user who had accessed the site from Utah could be perpetually flagged as someone who should be blocked. However, that would mean visitors to Utah or anyone no longer residing there could be permanently blacklisted unnecessarily.
I'm not actually sure what I am suggesting to be honest. I just had these little voices in the back of my head saying to finish researching the various identifiers used by DRM. And I think you are right, if such things were used then people might have to prove they moved and it would be a PITA for everyone involved.
I imagine it's hard to study since you need to find two countries with similar socio-economic status, rights of women, attitudes towards marriage, rape etc but that have opposite opinions on pornography.
If the countries are more similar, the results have higher precision. If less, then lower precision.
Such things have been done. I remember a study discussed on HN where they used the same neighbourhoods before/after a change of law. That wasn't porn though, I think it was strip clubs, and the result was something like "when a strip club opens in an area that had none before, the number of sexual assaults in the vicinity decreases by a few per cent".
From the stats I've seen, the only recent change to transgender rates is female-to-male, which is the exact opposite of autogynephilia, increasing.
Also, the absolute numbers are tiny, so it's not an "epidemic" by any measure.
If you'd just focused on addiction and escalation of weirdness, you might have a point. Possibly. Not my field, but it's at least not as implausible as your chosen bug-bear.
It's astonishing that we must repeat again and again that when alcohol was prohibited, it was sold anyway under the counter, and among those profiting from that black market were Al Capone and other similarly nice people.
Plus a bunch of people actually died from low quality or incorrectly manufactured alcohol (that isn't even a reference to when the government intentionally poisoned some). We're seeing the same problem today with fentanyl getting into other illegal drugs.
Pornographic content also has an analog: If companies need to be illegitimate to provide it, then they won't be quite as picky about if the content itself was produced legally or illegally (e.g. CP and other abuse/sex trafficked originating content).
Banning pornography won't make it go away, it will just make it unregulated.
Some people will have their fix anyway, while others will find that the friction starts to change their habits away from it. Unless you believe access friction has no psychological impact at all.
And the friction is going to be especially impactful if you're a young teen and haven't been hooked into it as a habit yet.
I speak partially from experience, as someone from a country with a lot of porn blocked. It was super annoying at first, but I just (mostly subconsciously) shifted to written erotica and other forms of erotic media. Sexual need is of course a deep seated human need, but porn is hardly the only way to deal with it, and in fact is one of the least healthy ways. There's a lot of f'ed up erotica out there, but in the end it's still much easier to see the characters as people and remember that sex happens in the larger context of life.
> Some people will have their fix anyway, while others will find that the friction starts to change their habits away from it.
Yeah, I think people forget in these discussions how costs work. Making drug / alcohol / pornography usage illegal increases the costs involved, and these cost increases will reduce demand for at least some consumers.
For example, I can't smoke weed because then I can't get Adderall. That's a kind of local prohibition. I could go to the black market for both weed and Adderall but I'm not going to do that, so prohibition has worked here.
Porn, social media, online dating, toxic streamers, children having untethered access to perverse information ... yes, prohibition isn't the answer, we need more of these amazing things - that'll certainly lead to better outcomes of wellbeing
Hahaha yeah right, how is porn a scourge on society, it is a niche art that a minority of people engage in, at most a right of passage for teenagers to watch when they stumble across it. Although these days probably not as hard as in vhs times.
There are far bigger things to worry about than the social impact of people engaging in consensual sexual activity for the film and magazine.
I don’t know about you but I still have to verify my age from time to time when certain sites ask I just have to click a button saying I am over X years old.
20 years ago, Microsoft Internet Explorer had settings for exactly what maximum age rating of websites you wanted to be allowed to see. I vaguely remember one of the options being "full frontal nudity". Were there separate options for sex vs. violence, or was that just my imagination?
Some of them have taken on the responsibility of prosecuting vendors for selling certain material to minors. It's not what the child is doing; it's what the vendor is doing.
I'm not sure I agree. If the parents don't do it, someone ought to. I disagree on the part that all types of porn (especially by the USA level of prudishness) is necessarily harmful to 16-year-olds.
I'm honestly surprised that there isn't a "good enough" "is adult" verification browser api thingy.
Where "good enough" wrt. correctness doesn't mean crypto-graphically pro-oven but only "you need to do some hacky things to circumvent it". Because IMHO for anything which doesn't also require to know the _exact_ identity of the user that is good enough.
Where "good enough" wrt. privacy doesn't mean perfect, but means for the "age verification provider" not worse then what fingerprinting can do even if you have a ad-blocker and for the "age verification checking" website means yes or no and that's all they get (preferable, in worst case also the identity of the "age verification provider" (e.g. some organization) id but under no circumstances anything more than that).
Where "good enough" wrt. usability means you have to use an verification provider of your country (because what adult means differs).
This solution isn't perfect, it doesn't distinguish between different countries having different ages for being adult and intentionally doesn't handle other age steps like 12+, 16+ (mainly matters for games).
Honestly the only real problem I see is that in the US it can't be used to buy alcohol because for some reasons they don't allow adult to buy alcohol until 21 (but do allow them to do decisions way more dangerous then that). Except it's not really a problem as the US can define "internet adult" to be 21+, given that this is mainly needed for porn, buying alcohol etc. the US would love doing that anyway AFIK.
I mean sometimes the perfect solutions is just to bothersome bother with it (the perfect solutions probably needs something like 0 knowledge proofs to preserve privacy).
Quite a few places do age verification by requiring a small nominal fee in order to get an account. Most kids under 18 aren't going to have their own credit card or a credit card that their parents don't monitor.
Because most kids can get there parents credit card number, and the "small nominal fee" is often too little and also often too cryptically booked for many parents to realize what is going on or to ask their bank about it.
And because it's just a "small nominal fee" many kids are also not worried about causing any harm when doing so.
Additionally with the credit card e-comerce system becoming more dominant in the world it becomes increasingly more likely for not-quite adults to have something which looks like a credit card for the shop (but likely acts a bit different behind the scene).
Lastly it potentially leaks _a lot_ of private information, which in some contexts is okay but in others is not. Which is also why the small nominal fee trick works, it's often not just based on "only adults have a credit card" but on "let's use the credit card number to get a lot information about the user including if they are adult".
This all seems a little disingenuous. First, from their summary, it doesn’t sound like the law actually requires checking a photo ID. They’re treating it like some maximalist regulation that it isn’t—it requires them to do more than nothing though. And also
> PornHub said that a better solution is to identify users by their device.
Pornhub effectively does absolutely nothing to verify users’ ages right now. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if they did something.
Obscene material is not inherently protected speech, but as it's a content-based restriction, the government is still bound by strict scrutiny to narrowly tailor its laws to achieve its legitimate interest in limiting the distribution of pornography. Furthermore, the definition of obscenity (the Miller test) is actually rather narrow, and there are likely to be several sexual fetishes that don't actually qualify as obscene, and therefore protected speech.
There are several precedents that say restrictions based on content must be evaluated using strict scrutiny, which means the restrictions must be as narrow as possible to achieve the government's interests.
Just my own thoughts: there could theoretically be an identity system that simply replies "Yes/No" if someone is underage or not. But nothing like this exists to my knowledge.
"Information about past presentments — including where, when, and what personal information you share — is encrypted and stored only on your device. Neither the state issuing authority nor Apple can see your presentment history."
I see. My understanding of it is that apple gives you a signed letter saying that you're verified to be over 18. While it's possible to verify that the signed document is legitimate, if it's in any way tied to the person presenting it, you just created an id, no?
It would be possible to design a protocol that allows you, a website that needs to know your age but not anything else about you, and a third party verification service that knows who you are to verify your age to the website without the verification service knowing who you are verifying your age to, and without a fourth party such as a government with a subpoena that lets them get the records of the web site and the verification service figure out that you have used the latter to prove your age to the former.
No, there are fairly well established technologies to do this without giving the third-party any information about which site is asking for authentication. The most famous that comes first to mind is the Kerberos protocol.
An simplified example could be that I ask the third-party to sign a package that include my current IP address, a message that say "I am over 18", and a validity period. They sign it (after I identify myself to the third-party), and give me the requested signature. I then give this to the website and the website can verify the signature of the third-party. The website only know my IP address, the time, and what third-party service I use to verify my age. Third-party only know my ip address, the time, and that I requested a token for "I am over 18".
A major drawback occur if this is only used for porn. In that case, the message "I am over 18" will be synonymous with porn use and thus giving the third-party information that they should not have.
You could have a design where encrypted requests and responses were routed so that the relying party (PornHub) new who the responding party (third party verifier) was, but the responding party only knew who the requesting party (user) was, and then only at the level of “the same party making the request to view”, not their actual identity.
Seems unsafe to telegraph to the web that a device is being handled by an underage user. And redundant, since that would probably require some intervention from the user/client to set up, who could already block adult websites on devices anyway. If they're capturing the edge case of parents who do nothing, but expect their kids to be protected when they hand them a tablet, I don't think there's much to do. Seems way more effective, with no downsides, to just communicate to parents on the govt's part.
Adult streaming sites have the "are you 18 years of age?" pop-up. As far as those managing the sites are concerned that should be enough.
The problem is, every data provider has to get on board first. For instance, the city you live in can verify if you're over eighteen. If their IT can handle setting the bit 'over eighteen' in the IRMA app, you can securely and verifiably show this bit of information, and only this piece of information, to the party asking to verify this information. They have to support IRMA too though.
But even then, if I'm under age and just borrow your phone...
Technology does not solve people problems. It only makes them worse/creates new ones in the process of (generally poorly) trying to partially solve them.
You can estimate age from images of the user's face (taken via webcam/front-facing camera). It wouldn't work well right at the threshold: you can't reliably differentiate 17 year olds from 18 year olds, but you can reliably keep the 10 year olds out. Or at least make a reasonable effort to do so, clever teenagers will find workarounds involving pictures or Halloween masks.
This method doesn't seem to be allowed by the law in question though.
Personally I think these kinds of regulations are pointless and just needlessly destructive. If you actually start to enforce them you get results like in germany, where they created an AI/ML tool scanning public posts for lewd pictures (marked 18+ or not, since that doesn't matter under german law) and try to fine the poster. Compliant sites actually do require state-issued ID to validate your age and grant access. It's extremely invasive.
I think the internet access of minors is their parents business. This is a very reasonable approach, largely the case for most other aspects of law anyway, and has minimal externalities. Lawmakers can pass minimum standards for content filtering/restrictions that major device manufacturers need to comply with.
It is also orders of magnitude more practical to ensure a "safe experience" with device-side restrictions compared to the feeble and nonsensical attempt of making the entire internet safe for ten year olds.
There are some people who believe that access to certain services should be age-gated. Thus follows that a web page offering the service should handle this age gating, in the same way that alcohol sellers are responsible for checking that their customers are of drinking age.
In the Real World(TM) this is a fairly uncontroversial idea. The Internet is very wild west on these things and that has lead to interesting outcomes... but really age gating porn is in line with many things in the world.
Where can one buy an internet connection without being at least 18 years old?
To use your analogy, it is parents who are paying for the alcohol and then leaving it in a place where it is easy for their children to access. Responsible parents either teach their children about appropriate alcohol use or make it difficult to access, or both.
But usually coupled to legally-mandated identity (and age, but it might not be 18) verification so you have an address to send the cops to when someone calls in a bomb threat.
We've learned that parents aren't responsible in the USA. This might change with the parents on trial for the teen shooter recently but ultimately up to this point, unless it's physical neglect, the parents delegate to the schools and then get upset when their kids are taught non-racist ideologies. Or they force the school board to ban/burn books like it's nazi germany.
The analogy breaks down when you remember that everything you do on a networked computer is effectively public information. In a physical store, you can show the clerk your ID, they'll verify the birthdate, sell you the "secret item", and then forget your name & face the instant they move to the next customer. But to do the same thing online, you are associating your name & face with the "secret item" to literally everyone on the planet for the rest of eternity. The calculus changes.
> In a physical store, you can show the clerk your ID, they'll verify the birthdate, sell you the "secret item", and then forget your name & face the instant they move to the next customer.
This is not exactly correct. The clerk might, but not the database the card was scanned into. Depending on the secret item such as certain OTC medications, alcohol, tobacco, the information is not forgotten but kept for an extended time, and is stored and correlated in a centralized DB.
This depends on what you're buying and where. In Virginia we have an ABC (Alcholic Beverage Control) which is the only place you can buy spirits. They do scan your ID. The grocery store does not. The restaurants do not. The porn shops presumably do not, either. Basically the only other time might be to buy something like sudafed at a pharmacy, but I haven't done so recently enough to know if that's actually scanned at all, either.
> Thus follows that a web page offering the service should handle this age gating, in the same way that alcohol sellers are responsible for checking that their customers are of drinking age.
There's no practical way to check ID on the web. In your "Real World" the vast majority of the time checking ID is just some person that works for an establishment looks at a little plastic card with your photo on it and checks to make sure the birthday is before a certain date, then they hand it back to you. To do something like this online would require something much more intrusive to personal privacy and adds another pointless complicated technological solution when a much more practical solution exists. That solution being parental controls.
Cell phone operators offering age verification is an actual real thing that exists right now in Japan. No ID handover requires. You need to make a user ID (and have a cell phone).
The impossible becomes possible real quickly when businesses decide they need it to move forward.
Well... if you pay for this stuff, you're already having a credit card involved (for example. Maybe you're buying gift cards, and age gating can happen there!). If you're not.... maybe the decimation of free porn is not a bad thing for the universe.
I do believe in privacy rights, but... free porn just doesn't feel like a must-exist thing in the sense we are all talking about.
I do think that there's a universe where self-governance sort of resolves these problems. Many industries have done this! In a universe where basically you needed a credit card to access this stuff ~always, this law would likely not exist.
> I do believe in privacy rights, but... free porn just doesn't feel like a must-exist thing in the sense we are all talking about.
In other words, you don't actually believe in privacy rights because all it takes is one flimsy reason that you happen to, if not agree with, don't really find objectionable to violate them. Is the harm caused by anyone under arbitrary age seeing porn harmful enough to violate everyone's right to privacy, even when there are already existing solutions to help prevent minors from accessing pornography?
Parental controls exist. Tools to block websites like pornhub or any other porn website exist already. You might say that it's too easy to circumvent parental controls. I'd say that it's just as easy to circumvent ID requirements, so if your goal is to actually protect children from pornography, it's not going to be anymore effective than current access controls.
>I do believe in privacy rights, but... free porn just doesn't feel like a must-exist thing in the sense we are all talking about.
...Well gee golly gosh, did you ask anyone else in the room? Or did you unilaterally decide what's best for everyone else?
And clearly you don't support privacy rights if you're willing to turn around and hand everyone else's off. Talk about saying one thing and doing something completely different. The turn of phrase this brings to mind is "Stop pissing on my shoes, and trying to convince me it's raining."
My point is that this privacy dilemna exists only for sites like pornhub, which offer it for free.
I can go to a convenience store right now and by credit for a large porn site here. It's "private" in the sense that everyone in this discussion seems to believe it to be. The fact that it's paid means that we can have privacy-preserving purchasing methods because there is money that helps to finance these checks.
Hell, pornhub could easily set up a "gift card" system where you have to go pay a dollar somewhere to get your age verified. This is far from an unsolvable problem.
The controversiality is exactly that in the Real World(TM) it's possible to either anonymously verify a certain age (by trivial visual inspection in most cases) or handle it in a way that does not require the potential storage of information (Handing - or better, showing - a cashier your ID doesn't mean they can take a photo of it and store for however many months)
Meanwhile, back on Teh Interwebz, the only way we have right now of verifying age is by uploading photos, or equivalent information, of the identification document, which could be intercepted, stored, or otherwise pilfered with no further indication.
I think there was someone proposing a cryptography-based way of proving "yes, this visitor has access to a non-minor identity", but that requires some sort of government (or similar) service that could also log incidental information, and would require some sort of digital identity service (for example gov.br here in Brazil): Service generates a random token, user gives token to identity service using their authentication, identity service replies with the token signed with a key whose public part the website knows.
This would be "better", in the sense of you don't have to provide any actual identifying information to arbitrary websites, but very bad because now the government can log all age-check attempts. There is probably some more complicated solution to that, but it goes beyond me. In the meantime, my opinion is that online age checks are dumb, easily bypassed, and possibly dangerous. Until we find a proper solution, just educate yo kids properly.
Friendly reminder that criminals don't have to obey laws, so actually dangerous websites (be it just psychologically, like I don't know, gore, to actual illegal things) won't be so kind as to implement an age check themselves anyways. If you want the minor you're responsible over to not view harmful content, teach them about the internet and have a healthy relationship with them so they trust you in the eventuality they see something disturbing.
I remember trying to buy some video games when I was a kid, and they wouldn't sell it to me because it was rated as 15+ and I wasn't 15. People would also check ages at movie theatres; I had some trouble getting in to Jurassic Park with my friend but we did manage, and also regretted it as I was scared witless for months, demonstrating that these age limits are perhaps not entirely nonsense.
A lot of people seem to have forgotten what the world was like 25 years ago.
I don't think 1 and 2 are the only possible options. The thing is that thus far there hasn't been much incentive to develop technology that can verify people's age or other aspects of their identity in a privacy-friendly way, because the internet hasn't really needed it before.
We should start by thinking about what we want to do: do we want to age-gate pornography? If so, why? If not, why not? And if we don't age-gate online pornography at all does that also mean a 10-year old can just walk in to a sex shop, live sex show, or BDSM club? Once we figured out some answers to that (and more) we can start thinking about the how of it all, keeping in mind that things like "access to online adult content is forever publicly associated with your personal information" would be undesirable.
I don't think "well, it's kinda hard so [throw up and hands and give up]" is really a good way forward. I don't have complete answers for all of this either, but I feel a number of people here are far too dismissive about this. At this point we – the broader "hacker/IT community" – can either be part of the conversation or sideline ourselves by dismissing it all.
There could be some future in which computer security actually exists, but I just don't see our industry going in that direction right now. In any case, that technology doesn't exist now so the options today, with this law in effect, are as I stated.
If there are no laws then there is no pressure to create technology, and if there's no technology we can't create good laws. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing innit? It's hard to tell where the future will go, but I will bet we will see more of these kind off laws passed around the world.
No, these systems do not and cannot exist today. There is no such thing as computer security[1]. We may get there some day, decades from now. But today, if your data is on a networked computer, it should be treated as public.
I think the comment is pretending to argue using the same logic as its parent comment uses, but about something the parent commenter would find normal and palatable, as a way of drawing an analogy.
US free speech law is weird in that even fairly innocuous sexual content is "obviously not speech" for 1A purposes but overt threats of violence, calls for genocide, blood libel, holocaust denial etc are "not obscene".
> US free speech law is weird in that even fairly innocuous sexual content is "obviously not speech"
This really isn't true. See the Miller test[1], and in that same Wikipedia article, the example of adult content (in Utah!) being found not obscene.
Christian nationalists like to use "pornography" and "obscenity" interchangeably as rhetorical positioning, but I am hard pressed to think of a case where innocuous sexual content was held to be obscene and therefore not protected speech.
I was going to type out lengthy post educating you on the first amendment, content-based restrictions on speech, strict scrutiny, and responsible parenting.
But then I was struck by the absurdity of good-faith engagement with someone who equates a de facto ban on adults enjoying pornography with bordellos for children.
I hope you find peace and learn to accept yourself before you harm too many others in the name of whatever it is you hate so much about your own character.
Don't gaslight me. You know good and well children aren't allowed the benefits of amendments. There is no ban on adults enjoying anything here, you're gaslighting. This is specifically about underage children, ya know the ones that legally aren't adults.
Maybe you ought to realize they're more important than your narcissistic behaviors? I'm so sick of this current generation of adults not being able to grow up and put the next generation before their own selfish interests.
The ban on speech affects those who are speaking. You're trying to turn it around to be about who is listening. That would be gaslighting, which you throw around so triumphantly.
I'm really sorry for whatever happened to you. Please don't perpetuate it.
Because it's literally illegal for children to view porn. The fact they've gotten away with doing nothing this long is ridiculous. Ultimately parents will need to be more involved but the idea that it's just ok to have a free for all on this stuff is ridiculous.
There's lots of things children aren't legally allowed to access but I can't think of any of them that do absolutely nothing to meet those legal requirements. Imagine if a liquor store just decided it was fine to let kids come in and purchase liquor and you said "Why is it the liquor store's responsibility to not sell booze to kids?"
>Because it's literally illegal for children to view porn
Is this actually even true? So if my underage son finds a porn magazine in my house, it's "illegal" for him to look at it? That doesn't sound right.
>Imagine if a liquor store just decided it was fine to let kids come in and purchase liquor and you said "Why is it the liquor store's responsibility to not sell booze to kids?"
Imagine comparing going to a physical location with no easy digital trace and buying something that is basically 100% socially acceptable to digitally tracking what kind of taboo and private porn someone wants to watch.
Yes it's true. Children can't go in a physical store and purchase porn anywhere.
"Imagine comparing going to a physical location with no easy digital trace and buying something that is basically 100% socially acceptable to digitally tracking what kind of taboo and private porn someone wants to watch. "
You're making excuses for allowing this. Just stop. The mental and physical health of children takes precedence over adults need to keep their fetishes "private". As if this stuff isn't being tracked in all sorts of ways already anyway. Until very very recently everyone had to go into a store to purchase this stuff.
>Yes it's true. Children can't go in a physical store and purchase porn anywhere.
That's not what I asked... you said it was "literally illegal for children to view porn". Give me a source for it because I can't find one.
There is a difference between SELLING porn to underage children, and children being able to view it. I'm talking about viewing it. Going to google and searching for porn and getting results is NOT the same as a store literally selling porn to kids- and since you are on a tech website, you obviously know that.
>You're making excuses for allowing this. Just stop
>The mental and physical health of children takes precedence over adults need to keep their fetishes "private"
Ah the response of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" to justify taking away our right to privacy. Where have I heard that one before?
>Until very very recently everyone had to go into a store to purchase this stuff.
Yeah, going to some random store in the 80s and buying what you wanted with cash where no one had any idea who you were, no way to track you is definitely the same as my license being linked to every link I click on at pornhub. Yup, same thing... why are you giving such a disingenuous argument?
"Ah the response of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" to justify taking away our right to privacy. Where have I heard that one before?"
Who's taking away what rights? Pornhub took this away, not the government. Show me where the government is removing rights please. I'm not aware of an amendment that says you must be allowed to view porn without anyone knowing about it.
Again, your right to view porn doesn't supersede the right of children to be protected from it. You sound like the people vying for child drag shows because it's their right to dangle their junk in kids faces.
I don't know what you mean by "very very recently", because even online porn has been around for literally decades (it was on Usenet for a while before the web was a thing). I remember folders full of it on the BBSes I frequented as a teen in mid-90s.
Yep that's incredibly recent as far as government and laws are concerned. You went from a society that had restrictions in place to just allowing open season on anyone at any age to access whatever the hell they want. The only place that exists to that extent is online.
What ways are there to verify age online other than photo IDs? Real question, I am not familiar with this area.
When I google, I find several third-party "age verification as a service" services. Their marketing isn't always clear about what they actually do, but I think they all look like they get photo ID (not sure if they do anything to try to confirm the person sending the ID is that person). Their pricing is also not generally public.
One example: in Japan cell phone operators provide a mechanism by which you can OAuth into their system, and then they will tell you whether the user is over 18 or not. This lets Line age-restrict "become friends with random people online" functionality.
User account associated to a phone number is a common tactic. Phone numbers serving as a proxy for identity is more and more of a thing.
People might talk about burner phones, but many localities never really had burner phones in the first place (Japan doesn't give a phone number on travel SIMs, there's "no way" to have a phone number without getting your ID checked somewhere), and other localities are tightening the grip on this.
It's not a universally nice and open solution. But it's probably one most markets will bear
That's interesting, and I have some questions about it. But doesn't currently seem to be available for complying with the Utah law. I was interested in ways that would be practical for pornhub to use, operating not just in Japan, and especially in the USA. The GP's comment made me wonder if they had some in mind, that could be used to comply with the Utah law.
>Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if they did something.
If it were instead illegal for sites to check for your ID outside of a handful of circumstances, that would be much preferable. Last thing we need is more privacy invasions on the web. Unfortunately, things are going in the wrong direction, both from private interests and from newer govt regulations.
Not to mention that "identifying users by their device" is the wet dream of BigTech - it's like a "hardware cookie" that can track you anywhere you go on the internet. (And that's exactly why BigTech like Microsoft, Google, Apple etc. are already promoting user authentication by device, as the first step towards this).
> 72 (9) "Reasonable age verification methods" means verifying that the person seeking to
> 73 access the material is 18 years old or older by using any of the following methods:
> 74 (a) use of a digitized information card as defined in this section;
> 75 (b) verification through an independent, third-party age verification service that
> 76 compares the personal information entered by the individual who is seeking access to the
> 77 material that is available from a commercially available database, or aggregate of databases,
> 78 that is regularly used by government agencies and businesses for the purpose of age and
> 79 identity verification; or
> 80 (c) any commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional
> 81 data to verify the age of the person attempting to access the material.
Edit: For clarity adding the definition of "transactional data" - there's no clever loophole there either. Basically, data mine/data broker shit. Perhaps less maximalist than "just check the ID", but hardly what anyone would consider a meaningfully "minimal" solution either.
> 84 (11) (a) "Transactional data" means a sequence of information that documents an
> 85 exchange, agreement, or transfer between an individual, commercial entity, or third party used
> 86 for the purpose of satisfying a request or event.
> 87 (b) "Transactional data" includes records from mortgage, education, and employment
Don't need an ID to buy a tablet. Or a used phone. Or back in the day, a Nintendo DS or PSP even. I'm sure I still have a PSP Memory Stick around here someone with saucy pixel art stashed away in the bookmarks. This is a genie that hasn't been in a bottle since the internet was born and it won't be put back in one now. At least not like this.
It relates to the question you asked, there's a difference between a physical store and a website, and the difference between uploading a copy of your ID to a porn website and letting a cashier glance at your ID for a moment is substantial. Porn is accessible on the open web. You can't plug all the leaks or even most of them, it's just not possible to put the genie back in its pre-internet bottle. Smut is out there and if sought, it will be found.
I'm not saying there's no difference. I'm saying it doesn't seem like a maximalist approach. Both a website and a cashier could choose to not record your ID.
Showing your ID isn't something that can be stored and leaked later. It also doesn't have the same stifling effect on speech that a normalized internet ID would have. They're two fundamentally different things.
Sure, but the store wouldn’t keep a database keeping track of exactly what porn you bought.
It’s also like having stores check IDs when other porn is just floating by on the wind with regularity. Even if all of the major porn websites did checks there’s still Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, Google/Bing image search, torrents…
Why do people always seem to use the word disingenuous disingenuously? :)
Obviously, the number of people willing to verify their identity and attach it to their pornhub searches and other activity is close enough to zero to make no difference to pornhub's business.
There are countless programmers, from self taught amateurs to professional SWEs, white hats, grey hats and black hats, who would immediately jump at the opportunity to create stronger VPNs, mirror sites, Tor nodes, and other tools to allow the public to bypass these restrictions. Trying to control the Internet in America is a losing proposition, for better or worse.
That is a consolation, but only a small one when the state violence apparatus is standing by to punish those who use them. It must never be illegal in the first place.
A block doesn't need to be completely effective as to prevent violations - all it needs is to provide enough data to authorities so they can make sure you don't do it too often.
Or let people violate the law so that you can selectively enforce it on the people that you want to. "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law" - Oscar Benavides
Yeah. I lock my front door at night, despite it being perfect.
This is such a blindspot for ‘24/7 engineer mindset’ people. And, in a professional context, things like this serve as a great litmus test for if someone is capable and geared to look at things at a bigger-picture level instead of just ‘computer problems’.
…not to equate looking at porn with getting burglarised. This is obviously BS.
> How exactly it doesn't work? Not even China has been able to make their Great Firewall resilient to stuff like VPNs.
I don't have any inside information, but my uninformed guess is that this is by design or at least tolerated to some extent. You don't want a watertight VPN because it stifles commerce.
China PR could pull a Singapore and impose the kind of punishment for using VPN that Singapore does for hard drugs. I have a friend from Texas who lives in China PR and regularly uploads to YouTube. Nothing political, he is talking about living and working as a teacher, so he isn't doing anything controversial but in theory what he is doing is unlawful by China PR laws, right?
Securitized regions like XinJiang will occasionally lock phones (including foreigners) with VPN installed, need to goto police station to unlock phone after uninstalling VPN apps. That's basically hardcore VPN/GFW enforcement mode.
Broadly PRC GFW is functionally VPN paywall for foreign content so most PRC nationals default to consuming media/narratives within the wall. TBH, apart from dissidents, researchers etc, in my experience, very few VPN users jump wall for foreign news, like exposure might be incidental due to being shared on timeline, but most PRC nationals jump wall for porn, business and lols. Plenty of foreign news gets filtered to domestic PRC net via diasphora who reverse VPN and post content back into PRC net - lots of foreign/western "propaganda" makes it's way in PRC, it's just rate limited to point where influence is limited, or censored if it ever gets legs.
In terms of regulations: VPN allowed for commerce, enforcement mostly against businesses who don't register/get approval using sanctioned VPNs. Individuals _generally_ free to use - there aren't clear laws yet against individual use, currently regulations target operators. 99% of VPN enforcement is at this level. Few individuals (outside XinJiang/Tibet) and no foreigners as far as I'm aware of have gotten in shit for VPN. For nationals who got in shit, it's what they do with VPN (coordinating with foreign forces etc), not use itself.
A rubber hose firewall doesn't need to be completely resilient to VPNs, in fact I imagine they would like a steady supply of people to make an example of.
China is a poor example if you're trying to say that people can circumvent political technology decisions. The firewall works for 90%+ of their population and allows them to present versions of events that don't align with the rest of the world. That can happen in the US as well, and we already know there's organizations that are willing to do it.
You don’t need a firewall to present versions of events that don’t align with the rest of the world. We’ve managed to do that with a completely unfiltered internet for years now.
If only 0.01% of the population has the technical saviness to bypass the Great Firewall, then they've succeed beyond their wildest optimism. No one cares about the few exceptions. If those people speak out to anyone about how they're able to get around it... then guess what happens? And if they just shut up and keep it to themselves, that's a good outcome too.
You're chuckling "but it's not 100%" when they might have been satisfied with 85%. Joke's on you.
I’ll show you: The next logical step would be to make it a crime of some sort to as a user attempt to evade the law. Maybe it’s even a felony to persuade folks to not to try. But the reality is they made the law just for political points and it never gets enforced it’s just there sitting on the books. Now years go on and you have been using vpn’s to evade the restrictions. Now 10 years later you decide to run for President and. a whole bunch of establishment politicians hate you for whatever reason. Now all of a sudden this phrase is really relevant: Show me a man and I’ll show you a crime.
China doesn't need 100% impermeability. As long as it circumvents most people from going outside the firewall, the job is done.
Think of it in terms of adblocking. You and I know all the tricks, but Google's bottom line suggests most people do not, and don't seem to mind. Similarly, the Great Firewall is tolerated because it doesn't block the things that are necessary for living life in China.
I would have agreed with you 20 years ago. But I think today, large scale internet censorship would be feasible. My wife and I marvel at her (much younger) Gen Z siblings’ computer illiteracy. These kids are the iPad/walled garden generation. These laws would be effective to keep Internet porn out of the hands of a large majority of younger people. That’s especially true because so many kids rely on phones and iPads, so governments can easily control VPN apps and things like that by leaning on Apple and Google.
It obviously won’t keep information from getting out. But that’s not the purpose of things like anti-porn laws. Dramatically curtailing prevalence and access is sufficient.
Good point. The new generation that came online this past decade never had to deal with popups, Limewire viruses and other things that forced us to learn to some basic level how a computer works and how it can be compromised.
It reminds me of this 2021 Verge article quoting a college engineering professor who had to revamp teaching material as many of their students did not understand folder structures and computer file systems. Why would they? For them, everything is on Youtube, Netflix and Spotify.
Yep, when I was a teenager, computers were tools that provided access to things previously inaccessible. They were tools that empowered users. Enter a command, the computer performed the command and returned the results. Access to anything simply involved knowing the magic spell, and I spent my entire teens learning every incantation I could. My dad, who was totally computer illiterate, would not have had a chance in hell at enforcing content blockers.
My daughter today lives in a world where users no longer issue commands to computers. 99% of computer users limit themselves to typing into a search box and clicking links they are fed. I don't even need to set up content blockers, because the idea of telling her computer what to do is foreign to her. Despite my attempts to get her curious about how they work and about hacking, she doesn't even care enough about it to venture outside of the pre-screened bookmarked sites I set up for her. If it's not reachable via her toolbar's Roblox and YouTube buttons, she doesn't even have a remote chance of finding it, and I know because I've seen the access logs.
Anecdotally I can tell you that once Internet censorship in Russia (coming both from the state itself, and from foreign websites blocking access) ramped up enough, suddenly many very non-technical people have figured out how to use VPNs.
And with something as popular as porn? Why, that just might end up being one of the largest VPN awareness campaigns. ~
This is a huge problem, because it's another example of turning a wide swath of humanity into criminals for doing relatively normal things that should be allowed.
Of course they won't be able to enforce this most of the time. But if you end up in their sights for any reason, they may then notice you using a VPN and use that information to legally blackmail you.
Usually this goes with making the punishment very harsh: A stolen MP3 on your hard drive? 20-to-life unless you take a plea bargain down to 2 years and turn in 3 friends as well. Same deal now with VPNs.
No, it doesn't. RESTRICT empowers the federal government to enforce website bans, and provides for enforcement against efforts to evade those bans.
This is a[1] Utah state law, and a voluntary ban set up by Pornhub itself to comply. Just not relevant.
Mind you, RESTRICT is a bad bill, and those provisions are vague, and the EFF is right to be screaming about it. But it doesn't do what you think it does.
[1] Hilariously and depressingly unconstitutional. Good grief.
My beard is gray but the government requires me to show a valid state ID when buying booze, cigs and porno mags at the gas station. If that's not a violation of the Constitution, why should carding people on porno websites be different?
I never said there was a constitutional issue (I don't think that there is).
The difference between showing ID to a clerk and this sort of thing is recordkeeping. A clerk is only checking the DOB on the ID, not keeping a record of your identity[1]. Online age checks keep records.
If there were some way of doing an age check without having your identity attached to it or having to expose yourself to some commercial third party, I wouldn't have an issue. That's a tough nut, though.
[1] I'm aware that certain businesses do keep a scan of your ID, but they're the exception and not the rule.
As a foreigner, it's kind of strange that violent movies (and political propaganda disguised as violent movies) are protected speech and pornography is not.
In Europe, parents fear that violent media might effect their children, but worry less about sexual media.
In America, parents worry that sexual media might effect their children, but worry less about violent media.
I'm of the opinion that both are half right and both are half wrong. Both violent and sexual media effect the people who consume it. We are what we eat. There is no kind of media that doesn't effect consumers of that media in some way. Also, it bears mentioning that a lot of pornography is both sexual and violent...
(In case it isn't clear, those two trends I list above are gross generalizations. When I was a child in America, my mother would not allow me to play with tin soldiers or GI Joes, nerf guns, or watch cartoons more violent than Arthur. Not a typical American childhood, but nevertheless still an American childhood. Generalizations always have exceptions but I think they can be useful nevertheless.)
I think it's silly to frame them as a tradeoff, and as protection being something special, when everything is protected by default with limited exceptions.
If you want to argue that pornography should not be an exception, or that violence should be, then fair enough, but given they're such different types of content it's nonsensical to try and put them on an axis and claim one is further along it than the other.
Laws restricting speech must pass strict scrutiny, which means they are the lightest restrictions on speech that meet the government's interests.
In Utah, it's clear that there would be less-restrictive ways to achieve the supposed goals of the law. For instance, jail parents whose minor children view pornography. That would not be a content-based restriction on speech.
Since there is no way for a website to know the age of its visitors, the Utah law is a de facto ban on certain speech.
> For instance, jail parents whose minor children view pornography.
Does this seem at all practical to you? To me, this seems akin to dropping ID requirements at liquor stores and bars, and instead enacting a law to jail the parents of minors who drink liquor.
Well, we jail parents who abuse their children. And if viewing pornography is so dangerous to children that it justifies restricting speech for everyone, surely that is such a compelling interest that we should punish parents who allow it to happen.
Which is all to say, no. None of this is workable because none of this is about protecting children from life-altering harm.
This law is intended to create a liabikity trap to attack companies a religious state deems immoral.
Well, the US Supreme Court considers pornography to be speech[1].
And it turns out that restrictions on speech are unconstitutional independently of whether you want to exercise that particular speech. If a law is passed prohibiting discussion of mohair rugs, it infringes on my free speech even if I have no intention of discussing mohair rugs.
It's an absolutely horrible idea. It only makes sense if maybe there's serious neglect by the parents, knowingly allowing it to continue. But probably that level of neglect is already illegal somehow anyway.
I mean, when I was a teenager I already knew how to program and my mother was completely tech illiterate. So how the hell was she supposed to control what a chronically horny teenage boy was getting up to on the internet?
I agree. But if Utah thinks that controlling horny teenage boys is such a vital state interest that it merits abrogating the first amendment, how can it be unreasonable to hold parents accountable?
Well, parents have to be pretty terrible at their job before taking the kids and putting them in a foster home is actually an improvement to their lives. From what I hear about CPS in the US, it should be the very last resort.
We should also remember that teenagers are supposed to disobey their parents. It's not really the norm to have much control over your teenage children. That's just a natural stage of development from a dependent child to an independent adult who makes their own decisions. Sometimes teenagers just have to learn the hard way.
I feel like porn is mostly harmful in combination with loneliness. I had a pretty bad addiction to it as a teenager but it kind of fixed itself when I started dating at 18 and realised the disconnect between porn and the real deal. If that never happened, I'd probably be a woman-hating incel by now.
> To me, this seems akin to dropping ID requirements at liquor stores and bars, and instead enacting a law to jail the parents of minors who drink liquor.
Purchasing liquor isn't a first amendment right. The standards are indeed different.
As a non-American, whether something is legislated in their/your constitution, or at some other level, is for the most part, an implementation detail of the law that isn't too relevant to my concerns about the actual laws enforced.
Downloading a movie is illegal, using a VPN to do it is not. If using a VPN was illegal then you would have two charges and extra time in prison. That's a giant difference.
I am interested in how the Christian nationalist agenda of targeting porn, abortion, trans-people and immigrants will play out. It seems that regression of societal freedoms is happening in Red American states.
Tangential question: given the Cold War memes of the "red scare" and "better dead than red", how/why did the Republican Party decide to keep that colour scheme?
I mean, if even the British Royal Family had to change its name from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor…
> how/why did the Republican Party decide to keep that colour scheme?
According to the Tampa Bay Times, the colors are fairly recent and largely a result of media depictions of electoral maps. It is not an official choice by the party.
I'm also seeing a variety of results saying that prior to that, the incumbent party was typically shown as blue on graphics, and the challenging party was red. In 2000, those colors lined up with the current party associations (Gore being a dem like Clinton), and that election cycle was a publicized enough election that the colors stuck to the parties.
That's the trick: they didn't keep it at all. By the time that colour scheme arose, the Cold War was long finished.
The idea of colour-coding the parties at all didn't really become widespread until 1980, and the exact colours in use weren't standard until the aftermath of the 2000 election - ABC had initially used yellow for Republicans, and even as late as 1996 The Washington Post, Time, and NBC were all still using blue for Republicans and red for Democrats, in line with the colour schemes of most other nations.
The Dems = blue/Reps = red thing wasn't actually a consistent thing until the 2000 election, when news agencies seemed to all start using it that way for electoral maps.
At the risk of starting a flame war, many of the current bills have absurdly broad language which makes it a crime to simply be in public dressed differently than your gender assigned at birth (i.e. somewhere where a minor _might_ be present). It's hard to argue the legislation that's being proposed (and passed) at a state and local level isn't having the effect of making it difficult to simply exist as a trans person.
Yes, much of that legislation is probably unconstitutional, but there is still a very real possibility of local law enforcement arresting someone who's violating these laws by simply walking down the street or visiting relatives.
I don't doubt that some of the broad brush legislation is at odds with many conservative individual's beliefs and intents for it, but the legislation being proposed and passed at a local and state level is quite concerning. It's a bit hard _not_ to see it as an attack.
Just gave it a once over - This is precisely what I was talking about - This is a bill which prohibits drag shows which appeal to a prurient interest from being open to all ages. How on earth is this "going after trans people". This is "Don't let kids into highly sexualized events - events which have lately allowed underage people to attend"
This seem reasonable to me, and even if its not reasonable, it is hardly "going after trans people".
The issue is the way it's defined and the language in the law.
What defines "drag"? As that legislation is currently written, it can be interpreted to be someone simply appearing in public.
That aside, though, I don't see how banning things like drag queen storytime (which has happened locally here) are somehow a ban on sexualized events. How is that sexualized?
"'Adult cabaret performance' means a performance in a location other than an
adult cabaret that features topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers,
male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient
interest, or similar entertainers, regardless of whether or not performed for consideration
(1) It is an offense for a person to engage in an adult cabaret
performance:
(A) On public property; or
(B) In a location where the adult cabaret performance could be
viewed by a person who is not an adult."
so this is not a ban on drag queen story hour: it is expressly a ban on sexual performances on public property or in front of minors. Now, if a drag queen story hour became sexualized, it could be criminal. With this language though, I seems to me that it would not criminalize a drag queen story hour where the participants were modestly dressed and did not do anything sexual in nature.
This legislation does not allow the possibility of someone being arrested for just being trans in public - It is explicitly banning performances.
The issue is that "purient interests" and "performance" is really not something that's well defined.
Walking down the street whistling a classic rock tune like "fat bottom girls"? Arguably fits that description. Also, a "performance" can simply be appearing in public without directly performing anything.
This sort of vage language in laws gives a lot of leeway for very selective enforcement.
I just don't think that is the case though. There is no real way to concretely delineate between something which "appeals to prurient interests" and something which does not. Re: the definition of obscenity in law is basically "you know it when you see it"
We only have so much ability to classify things in English.
Personally, I do not think it is appropriate for children to be present at sexualized drag shows. I believe that it is right to have laws that prevent this. I cannot think of any language better than what was in that bill to implement this.
The whole "attack woke & trans" thing played well with independents for a bit, but it's gotten tired and now it just looks angry and petty. Add in Nazi-like stuff we're seeing in states like Tennessee, and the anti-education/environment policy proposals, and the Republican party has backed itself into a tough spot that even their egregious gerrymandering might not save them from.
The porn industry exploits vulnerable women and ruins their lives, forces them to do stuff they never signed for and much more.
You trying to paint this issue as a white and black political thing makes you dismiss all the victims from this industry.
You're basically dismissing it as "if you're part of this specific political team you should support/be against this"
Yes and you pointing out victimization in the industry, a lot of which stems from the industry's "black sheep" status, also paints the issue as black and white.
I'm not doing that, I'm pointing out that when you say only the most extreme conservatives are against porn you're giving your back to all the people that have been affected by this.
Saying "not all porn companies do that" is meaningless in this case, because there are good enough reasons to be against porn that don't have anything to do with religion.
> The porn industry exploits vulnerable women and ruins their lives, forces them to do stuff they never signed for and much more.
It's absurd disinformation to paint all pornography this way. For only the most obvious example, please explain in detail how porn studios only featuring men do this?
To be clear, this is what (many) progressives call policies like "making it illegal to mutilate the genitals of children," or "keeping men out of women's prisons."
Some parts of the right-wing social agenda (abortion restrictions, for example) are broadly unpopular. But protecting people from the gender cult is a winning issue politically.
It seems most people recognize that the proliferation of easily-available porn has been a detriment to society, but short of blocking it there has been no proposals for rectifying the situation. IMHO society seems to have just shrugged its collective shoulders about it, especially about kids watching porn and the greater availability of it.
I guess we should get used to a future where porn is freely available to everyone, at every age, because it doesn't appear to be slowing down.
Probably. I suspect that quite a few people who in the past would satisfy their urges via actual physical sexual abuse find porn "good enough" to not bother, for one. Also, the average age at which teens first have sex has been rising steadily, which translates to fewer teen pregnancies etc.
A whole family of them, probably. The FBI loves recruiting Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists because of those religious sects' tendency to do mission work and learn less widely used languages. I guess it didn't hurt that both shun the use of intoxicants.
The previous owners of PornHub smartly sold the business earlier this year. The writing is on the wall w/r/t hyper regulating the internet. Not to mention the rapid advances in video AI which will render a lot of pornography and distributors in particular as obsolete.
Good time to remind everyone that this is what happens when states try to push strict age verification with harsh penalties. The same thing will happen if social media websites are required to do age verification (Reddit and HN are social media under these definitions)
Governments regardless of political affiliation and motivation seem intent on age verification, and it's easy to see where this could lead to, for better or worse, a less anonymous and more bureaucratically gated internet going forward. Whether that's good or not is the discussion we should be having.
Yeah, because the internet was free to access everyone, data became the background currency and advertisers figured out how to de-anonymize everyone years ago. That ship has sailed.
Proposed and enacted are a big difference. A single lawmaker can suggest or put forward a bill for anything. The majority voting to make it law is a huge barrier
it's aggregated though,because data is only valuable in volume. Showing ID every time you visit a site is significantly more identifiable at the individual level.
Pornhub reportedly says that rather than requiring identification, it's better to "identify users by their device" - what does that mean? If you're going to require ID, what does it matter how you acquire that ID?
So it would be up to Google and Microsoft to verify people's IDs, tie their identities to their devices, and ensure only verified persons use a device? That sounds 1000% worse for privacy.
Google already does this for Youtube due to EU legislation. They allow using a credit card to verify or using standard government ID.
Then again, a 1 cent credit card validation charge isn't going to stop any kids from using the magic digits printed on their parents' cards so that system probably wouldn't hold up.
Pornhub is already requiring ID in Louisiana, which has a similar law. But their traffic has gone done significantly because of this.
It seems to be that blocking Utah is a strategic PR move to try and make these kinds of laws unpopular. Lets blame the weirdo Mormons trying to pass strange laws. Nevermind these laws are starting to pop up around the world.
The funny thing is the minors know how to use a VPN to get around this law whereas the many older users don't! So, in Utah the minors will be able to access porn and many of the adults will not!
Maybe that was true for millennials vis-a-vis boomers. But Gen Z is far less tech savvy than millennials or Gen X. My parents couldn’t have blocked my access to anything. But my wife and I can easily do so with our kids.
Not quite, have you not been following the news that new generations are worse with technology than the previous ones?
Minors barely know how to use a computer nowadays, they only use smart phones.
Every third YouTube video has a pause at midroll for the host of the video to thank the sponsor, a VPN service. Smart phones can use VPNs, even iPhones. Kids know about them, and they certainly will when they see 20 second tutorials on Tiktok for how to access state-blocked sites.
Today's video is sponsored by NordVPN. Prevent hackers, governments, and ISPs from accessing your private data with a VPN -- or Virtual Private Network -- from NordVPN. Plus, you can access the internet from any of over 120 countries. I can't get Naruto on Netflix in the United States, but with NordVPN I just switch my country to Belarus and look, there it is!
It's a myth that "prohibition doesn't work" which is one of the roots of this type of thinking. It does actually work (e.g. reduce alcoholism, increase health) but it also leads to the increase in organized crime which became much more of a problem.
The increase of organized crime and the spawning of a giant black market do not seem to be indicators that prohibition "worked".
Also, during prohibition it was more efficient to smuggle stronger alcoholic drinks due to the fact that a bottle of whiskey can hold more standard drinks than a bottle of beer (30 ml whiskey ~ 285 ml beer). From what I red in Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream [1], this seemed to contribute to spirits becoming more available than lighter alcoholic beverages.
Muslims have been very successfull in prohibiton of all kinds of drugs and alcohol since 15 centuries.
There are clearly more factors at play than what the law says. What do you believe will happen if you drink alcohol in secret, out of range of the eyes of the State? Muslims believe this will still have consequences in afterlife. Atheists don't. Many Christians believe they'll be saved and forgiven by God as long as they are Christian.
> A 2012 study suggested that belief in hell decreases crime rates, while belief in heaven increases them, and indicated that these correlations were stronger than other correlates like national wealth or income inequality.
I don't have the data to back this up, but from what I've heard it is not unusual to drink alcohol in some predominantly Muslim countries like Turkey. Despite that, I agree with you that there are definitely more factors at play than just the law.
I live in Turkey, probably the most heavily and forcefully secularized muslim country in the world (Ataturk killed half a million population for his secular reforms according to some sources, Islamic alphabet got abolished, western dress code literally became law and religious clothing got prohibited, religion schools closed, religious scholars executed and prosecuted and Adhan was banned for 18 years).
It's free to drink here, but drugs are banned. Only a very small minority drinks alcohol in my region, I have no relatives I know of that ever drank. Drugs/weed/marijuana are horrible things no one ever wants in my entire social circle, I don't think I have ever seen a user of such substances in my entire life IRL. Western and some coastal cities drink more and there's more drug activity too (and they're less religious too).
I hope these laws don’t devolve into a special internet for Utah (and maybe more red states in the future). Remember this is about social media too.
This is eventually going to hit even Hacker News if the law is actually effective. Is HN going to jump through the hoops of complying with the law or just block Utah?
from a programmatic standpoint i think it is both easier and more ethical to simply block utah. Im working on a python library now that should easily remove the threat of utah from the internet in most cases, and can be rapidly deployed should anyone suspect utah on their local networks or extranets.
EDIT: i am told this is due to a specific law in utah and has nothing to do with the numerous well respected and certainly not crackpot theorists I subscribe to.
Realistically this is what Utah wants. Only 60% of Utah residents are Mormon, but 85%+ of their elected state representatives and senators are Mormon. They are happy to force the rest of society to carve out a space "just for them", which is pretty much in line with their entire history anyway.
Thanks for appropriately labeling this a conspiracy theory. As a Mormon in Utah I find this absurd, but conversations on Mormonism online are pretty tricky, so you come to expect absurd claims like that.
I support this law on its face, but I also don't have an issue with laws like this keeping those that might not successfully integrate into the existing culture of Utah from moving here. I imagine there are others that probably think like me.
What about people in Utah who don't want this? You don't like porn don't use it. You don't want your kids to watch it, stop them. Restricting the freedom of everyone is unacceptable
Unfortunately, it isn't just smut on the internet that's being locked down. Red state politicians are doing everything they can to curtail freedom of speech and expression. First it's just about protecting children, then they go after adults. We are already seeing this play out with LGBT rights in other places. I never thought I would see such extreme changes in legal speech take place between red and blue states in my lifetime. The last couple years have been wild.
I think it's perfectly fine to assume that pornography might warp a child's view of sex and intimacy. The solution shouldn't be to force people to identify themselves, though. Parents have all the tools they need to shield their children from pornhub, if they so wish.
I agree that -without more knowledge- it's probably best to presume pornography might warp young peoples view of sex and intimacy.
But isn't that all the more reason to research this and educate people in this? So that adults can provide context and background? And to learn which kind of pornography is more dangerous than others in this? So that, with knowledge kids can be shielded from the stuff that's bad from them, and help understand the stuff that isn't?
Some of the world's oldest institutions have already researched this topic significantly and have worked together to compile and provide a common piece of literature that is widely available should you wish to embrace it.
The same book that has clothing rules like "don't wear clothing of mixed material" or food safety guidelines like "it is forbidden to eat animals from the water which don't have fins"? A book that was written way before internet porn existed? Before science existed?
I know HN tends toward the libertarian slant, but this same perspective can be applied to all kinds of ills that are regulated, from smoking to driving.
This falls into the common refrain about "what do we do with kids who don't have responsible parents?"
I'm not sure just letting the chips fall where they may when it comes to kids who got a shit roll of the dice when it comes to parents is a great societal solution.
I'd say that I don't think children should be limited in opportunity due to the circumstances of their upbringing, but with those considerations in mind, protecting them from finding a way to access pornography is pretty low on that list of priorities, especially given that legislation like this will be wholly ineffective at accomplishing its purported goal and will needlessly burden the people who are legally trying to access pornography.
It's just not possible to address this issue without there being an intersection of how adults also access these adult things. A lot of other access controls in society are more reasonable than any proposal that people have come up with in this thread to restrict online pornography access to minors. This is why we place the burden on parents.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to say the risk isn't sufficient to justify this kind of action. But how exactly are you measuring the risk in terms of the higher priority risks you mention?
I think the danger is people revert to their intuition about what is risky, rather than defining it by an objective measure.
Higher priority risks are things that are easily measurable. A child that does not have food to eat or cannot access healthcare they need because their parents cannot afford it is very obviously bad for the child. Educational opportunities are another thing that's pretty easy to measure. Measuring the negative effects, if any, viewing pornography has on children isn't particularly easy to measure. I would say it's not ethically possible.
So ultimately, policy judgments with regards to increasing access controls are going to be dependent on intuition, one way or another, and individuals' political philosophies. I personally don't think there's any case where I think legislation like this is appropriate, though. If it were, it would be overwhelmingly obvious that it is. Clearly Utahan legislators think differently.
So where do you think the current research on the negative effects of pornography get it wrong?
I’m always a little leery when someone says something like
”I personally don't think there's any case where I think legislation like this is appropriate”
It usually means either someone’s mind is closed to considering new information (I.e., they have a dogmatic position) or their mental model isn’t open to nuance (I.e., they have dichotomous thinking)
> So where do you think the current research on the negative effects of pornography get it wrong?
This is a contentious issue. There's no consensus on whether or not use of pornography is harmful. Suppose there was consensus. To what degree is it harmful and is it harmful enough to legislate against it?
There's a very low chance that it'd pass that threshold for me, given that I generally prefer people be allowed to make choices over what they do with their body when it doesn't meaningfully harm others.
>There's no consensus on whether or not use of pornography is harmful.
I think a lot of the lack of consensus is due to an unclear definition of what constitutes "pornography". This makes it easy for bad-faith actors to muddle the issue.
>given that I generally prefer people be allowed to make choices over what they do with their body when it doesn't meaningfully harm others.
I generally agree when it comes to adults, but the crux of this discussion is risk to children. Do you extend this same logic to minors? If your stance is that it's up to the parents, do you think there should be safeguards for kids with "bad" parents? If so, what would that look like to you?
I'm not really a fan of the solution (something more along the lines of the v-chip where commercial sites in the US are required to identify their content categories in a standard way so browsers could be configured to block it seems like a better solution), and sites like pornhub are straightforward enough to include in blocking software, but currently sites like Reddit present a problem. Looking at recent dumps[0], it looks like ~40% of posts on Reddit are marked nsfw, but those posts are on the same domain as things like /r/teenagers and /r/roblox. Without a MITM proxy, parents can't really block the porn half of the site unless they block the whole thing.
There's also the problem that lots is highly viewed NSFW content on Reddit isn't porn. Check out r/AskReddit. There are questions about how people feel about death that are marked NSFW for reasons I can't understand.
Reddit has an account setting to hide NSFW-marked content from your feed and search results, so people will mark “distressing” content NSFW as a crude opt-in.
I feel like in our society we're always beta testing everything before researching its effects, shouldn't we research the effects of internet pornography in kids before allowing them unlimited access to it? I think the same thing should be done with social media. There's obviously a thin line where you have to use common sense (where do we start and where do we stop?) but the consensus has always been that this is adult content just like violent movies and alcohol so it should be enforced in at least some way.
I'm no sociological, or psychological scholar, but I can imagine that simply by asking kids in high school questions, you'll learn plenty.
There are many researches done and still being done on how addictive drugs are, or on the negative (or positive) effects of drugs. Eventhough they are both illegal and often rather dangerous. You don't need to feed a healthy 15 year/old a daily near overdose of cocaïne to learn about the effects of cocaïne on a young persons' brains.
> I feel like in our society we're always beta testing everything before researching its effects, shouldn't we research the effects of internet pornography in kids before allowing them unlimited access to it?
I suspect the effects are mental/emotional and a research team may not be conducting statistical research like group A/group B types of studies but there could be value in research on current 18-25 year olds, their social/mental/emotional well being and gathering info on how early they may have consumed it, frequency, along with rates of clinical disorders. Surveys or research on college campuses would probably be the easiest method of gathering data for that age group.
Problem with self selection (identify kids who decided to watch porn in the past, and compare with those that didn't) probably will not be that huge, when the people are only outraged about "kids" self selecting to watch porn.
> "shouldn't we research the effects of internet pornography in kids before allowing them unlimited access to it?"
Is that a rhethorical question? People of all ages capable of using it already have mostly unlimited access to the internet (and thus to porn). Sans parents understanding the internet more these days, and trying to set limits and failing.
Question should be whether somebody should do research before trying to limit access state/country wide in various ways. Ie. bigotry vs some informed decision making.
I suspect any academic study proposing to show pornography to minors is going to get shut down pretty quickly.
In my own anecdotal experience I’d say it definitely can be dangerous and depends on a variety of factors, a key one IMO being what kind of pornography we’re even talking about.
In my youth we discovered a friends dad nudie mag stash. Lots of glamour photography of topless women, some full nudity too but always pretty tame all things considered. I don’t think it had a negative effect on me. But the kind of porn available (and popular) on the internet is not that. From talking to a friends much younger brother I know they all have access to it and it’s led to some weird perceptions about what sex is, should be, etc. It’s rough, it’s often degrading, it’s almost exclusively focused on male satisfaction. It’s much more about one person’s power over another then snore any kind of intimacy.
The solution to all of this is, as always, parental and school sex education to ensure kids are learning the right things. But as a society we’re kind of terrified of that.
> I suspect any academic study proposing to show pornography to minors is going to get shut down pretty quickly.
I highly doubt this, because it's both important and relevant. 16y/o will consume pornography. I know I did, and I was 16 way before internet. Young adults will have had exposure before engaging in actual sex. This is important because it might be problematic. Because it changes behavior. But also because the right nudges, education and context probably make the difference between this growing into problematic behavior or healthy, normal, human behavior.
I know this is a difference between Europe and the US. Where the US (or any society under pressure of religious extremists, really) tries to simply forbid such research or knowledge. And hope (and pray) that by not knowing how this is shaping generations, it might simply go away. I'm pretty sure it won't just go away by praying hard and forbidding research. I'm pretty sure academics in this area know this very well too.
Any research which involved actually showing pornography to minors would almost certainly be shut down for ethical reasons. Studies would almost certainly have to be observational and post-facto, studying people who admit to having been exposed as minors.
Medical ethics practices in the U.S. are actually very advanced and restrictive. I cannot imagine an IRB ever approving showing minors pornography especially given that there is a reasonable expectation of harm and essentially no expectation of benefit.
You are completely correct with the minor edit that this study would never be shutdown as there is a 0% chance it ever gets approved.
Beyond how strict IRB/REB boards are in general, there are also additional federal requirements that must be satisfied when submitting a study proposal on children including surveys and not just interventions. In the US these are the pathways:
Section 404 requires that research poses no more than minimal risk. As the intervention itself is a federal crime this is not satisfied.
Section 405 allows for more than minimal risk if the anticipated benefit for the study subject justifies the risk. There is no individual benefit to the minor for watching pornography.
Section 406 requires that the risk is "commensurate with the subjects expected or actual psychological and social situations" which is hard to argue is expected when it is illegal to begin with. It also requires that the intervention is "likely to yield generalizable knowledge about the subjects’ disorder or condition which is of vital importance for the understanding or amelioration of the subjects’ disorder or condition", hard to argue that answering whether children viewing obscenity is addictive provides knowledge that is vitally important when there is no clear reason why children should be exposed to pornography.
If an IRB cannot satisfy sections 404-406 the only other way to get such a study approved is section 407 which requires direct approval from the Secretary of Health and Human Services if the "research presents a reasonable opportunity to understand, prevent, or alleviate a serious problem affecting children’s health or welfare, and, in addition, determines that the research will be conducted in accordance with sound ethical principles and that adequate provisions are made for soliciting the assent of children and permission of their parents or guardians". It is impossible that this would be satisfied as children NOT watching pornography (the alternative treatment/status quo) is hardly a problem let alone a serious one.
This has nothing to do with religious justifications but is due to very reasonable and heightened ethics requirements when conducting research on children, be it pornography or a new medication. Canada is essentially the same and I can't speak to Europe but I imagine most countries have similar requirements regarding to needing to demonstrate likely benefit to research subjects or contribute to understanding of a disease (which is nonexistent in paediatrics).
Every researcher thinks their question is relevant and important and that's why we have these rules in place.
Meanwhile, people used to (before the invention of chimneys) live in the same room as their family and it would have been common for parents to be having sex whilst their children were sleeping in the same room (or pretending to sleep). I wonder if modern pornography is a response to our society become more prudish and private.
If the intention is to expose young people to porn and then measure longitudinally how they fare in life, ethical issues aside, I suspect that wouldn't work because your control group is very likely to become contaminated. And good luck getting the experiment underwritten.
Rather I think you'd take a large sample of adults at a given age range, interview them as to the earliest age they recall consuming pornography, and compare it with their life outcomes: income, alcohol addiction, educational achievement, etc. Of course you're only measuring a correlation, but at least you'll be able to get your study funded. And naturally such studies have been done, although I suspect many are agenda driven:
If you go the interview approach you'll run into many potential confounds. If the average age of first exposure is 13, and someone says they waited until 17, it's possible that a third variable delayed them from seeking porn and also will have an impact on other life incomes.
This is why random assignment is the gold standard. With a large enough sample size random assignment will account for all confounds. Here, we can only measure likely confounds and attempt to 'account for' them with statistics. All of these introduces more noise and generally reduces the validity of the study.
In general, I dismiss all scientific studies with these looking back questionnaires as little more than well documented hunches.
Well the state of Utah defines pornography as anything showing a female nipple, so they don't really have any ground to stand on when it comes to defining what is or isn't "harmful".
Usually what happens in this environment is immature/ underage people are exploited. You don’t have to look far. The local track in your nearest city or megalopolises in India where adults sell off children, among other places in the world. In Mexico the local business guys go into the town plaza in the evenings and chat up young girls, in Japan you get “compensated dating”. These are all places where they let those of modest means take advantage of the underprivileged and underdeveloped and treat them as objects.
Do you think there is or isn't deleterious effects when children watch misogyny at a young age, what about watching programming that would show the beating of animals, even if animated and just for "fun", or programming that shows being "fat" is undesirable and indulging in bulimia is desirable (what could be wrong with over-eating and then just vomiting excess, right?)
No, I think there are things young minds should be shielded from some things to avoid future mental developmental consequences.
You know how movie directors make a movie and in their mind a given movie is supposed to be propaganda against something, but for people lacking this cultivated framework it's a celebration of doing the wrong thing? Take a movie about how being a gangster is bad --but for many moviegoers it's an invitation to the "glamorous" life or power, respect and success...
> Do you think there is or isn't deleterious effects when children watch misogyny at a young age, what about watching programming that would show the beating of animals, even if animated and just for "fun", or programming that shows being "fat" is undesirable and indulging in bulimia is desirable (what could be wrong with over-eating and then just vomiting excess, right?)
I think he was asking (and rightly so) what the scientific evidence says, not what someone's opinion is.
turning in to a pathetic, obese lech who sits at home alone blowing another paycheck on Onlyfans, clinging to the misguided notion that women want anal on the first date?
and even worse, when real life doesn't line up with six-minute videos, the even worse outcome of woman-hating manifests
Pornography is that which harms the soul. That's true of all people not just minors.
The question then becomes what should be classified as pornography. Justice Stewart famously said "I know it when I see it". My definition is close: "pornography is that which harms my soul". That means that what is porn will differ for different people and probably by age as well.
Porngraphy harms the soul? What exactly is the soul you're referring to? Something metaphysical? Do you have any science or data behind this assertion?
Which, in case it wasn't clear, is exactly what I'm saying. What harms my soul differs from what harms your soul. The government should not be in the business of preventing the harm to one soul.
It's addictive for one. There are increasing number of support groups for men who are struggling with pornography use and for their spouses in dealing with having a dependant partner.
It creates a space for people to explore and normalise their distressing sexual interests without questioning the root causes.
Producers will often intentionally seek out vulnerable young women and groom them with promises of fame and riches, only for them to become reliant on painkillers and other drugs to cope with the reality of it.
It creates a market for the abuse of trafficking victims. Most sites don't require verification of consent and most users don't care.
It teaches men to objectify their partners and to see them as something to be shared. There is a huge market now for non consensual revenge pornography. Reddit has seen multiple subreddiys dedicated to non-consensual intimate media.
It provides a safe space for people to express racist, misogynistic and otherwise antisocial viewpoints.
PornHub in its front page today has videos of stimulated assaults and incest. For young viewers it gives them the idea that it's normal to be sexually interested in these things.
I'm not religious. I'm sex positive and believe in being open with children about the realities of life. Pornography stole years of my life, warped my views of relationships and prevented me from reflecting seriously on my own traumas.
Yes it is, and that's why we teach our children about nutritional health and, in some places, regulate things like school dinners and products aimed at children.
What point are you making in relation to the topic at hand?
Are cars or guns regulated because of addiction? No. So GP compared porn to sugar, which is considered addictive and has probably more concrete evidence of self-harm than porn. I think the comparison is apt? Certainly fairer than comparing porn to driving a car or gun possession, which is sort of absurd.
Addictiveness was one of the multiple points I made about pornography. The other aspects apply to pornography and not to sugar. So it was apples and oranges to begin with.
But in terms of addiction potential alone Utah already has precedent in legislating for that. Example: Utah doesn't allow minors to purchase alcohol because of its addictive nature.
Most of your other points related to how pornography is produced, not to its consumption. Thus it wouldn't matter who is watching it, and thus ID check seems irrelevant.
Some of the aspects of the porn market are not great, but they should be investigated by the relevant authorities. Hiding them from only certain people won't make them go away.
I was replying to your own position of it being extremely inexpensive. I understand that comparisons and metaphors are never 1 to 1. If you have another point to make then I'll gladly hear it out.
Not nitpicking, I’m just saying a weak analogy doesn’t strengthen your case. Equating sugar to porn misses some of the important aspects of what makes porn potentially dangerous.
Lottery tickets are extremely inexpensive. But what do you think would happen to consumption of lotto tickets if they went from $3 to free, especially in a frictionless environment where you can just download them?
Lottery tickets are substantially more expensive than sugar. And if lotto tickets were free, (1) there would be no harm in consuming them and (2) you would also win $0, and no one would buy them.
That’s kinda the point. Sugar is also "substantially" more expensive than "free" pornography. With your analogy of sugar, there isn’t the same asymmetry of risk/reward as there is with “free” pornography.
The reward of lotto tickets is a function of cost with the current approach, but that’s the wrong point to get wrapped around the axle. Consider instead that if the lotto reward is funded by taxes. The point is the risk/reward profile gets skewed.
As an aside, I’m pretty sure you can find evidence that excessive gambling is a net negative.
It is free. It LITERALLY is in unlimited access. It's in everything you eat...unless you live in a cave and only eat squirrels and rabbits. Especially in the US where High Fructose Corn Syrup is in nearly every product that's consumed. Pornography is no where near as dangerous as the obesity epidemic in the United States, which costs the citizens and corporations billions and billions of dollars a year on healthcare alone. But sure, let's focus on porn.
Nobody is claiming obesity isn’t a risk. But it’s an error to equate sugar to the obesity for one. It is also not "literally" unlimited access unless the cost of sugar is zero and that's easily falsifiable. I'm assuming your point is that people can have as much sugar as they want. Two, food is necessary to life but porn is not. That makes controlling food much, much harder. It would be like someone addicted to sex having to walk through a brothel every day to get to work. Sugar is inexpensive (but still not free) and we’re experiencing the bad effects so I’m not sure what you’re pointing out other than as vices get more free and more accessible, the scale shifts towards worse outcomes. Your whole point boils down to whataboutism rather than debating the actual points.
Lastly, I’m not sure you made any case that pornography is relatively safe.
Sounds more like an argument for regulation targeting externalities surrounding sugar and artificial sweeteners than against regulation targeting pornography.
It would fall under Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder[0] in ICD-10. [1]
Pornography Addiction as a unique pathology is still not recognised but the issue is still young. We can see that it's an issue in that more than half of US divorce cases mention compulsive pornography usage. [2]
You can read more about Pornography Addiction and what I mean by that over at Wikipedia. [3]
You can see support groups for self-identifying addicts in places like Reddit. [4][5]
Furthermore, mutual support groups for partners of addicts. [6]
Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder is not an addiction. The Wikipedia article that you cited begins with the following sentence: “Pornography addiction is the popular but unscientific[5] application of an addiction model to the use of pornography.”
I'd love to stop believing in it but it's destroyed a large part of my life.
The issue with defining it as an addiction is more of a question of separating from other compulsive issues than not recognising the compulsive issues of the thing itself.
Yes, I understand there's a difference between compulsion and addiction but I'd expect the users of Hacker News to understand enough about how the dopamine system works to see the relationship between the two.
Thank you, I greatly appreciatie your well wishes and the human sentiment behind your remark. I'm glad to have places like this and people like yourself that challenge my beliefs, even when, or especially when, they are rooted in my personal experience.
> I'd love to stop believing in it but it's destroyed a large part of my life.
With all due respect, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that you destroyed a large part of your life? It seems like you're blaming porn, as if everyone who is exposed to it becomes addicted. Is it like heroin? Or is it more like alcohol, where many people consume it without becoming addicted, but a few people ruin their lives over it?
You're a bit overly focused on semantics here and misinterpreting the rationale behind it.
Behavioral addictions are acknowledged in DSM-5 although this does not extend to compulsive sexual behavior at this time due to insufficient (yet growing) evidence to suggest similar neurophysiological mechanisms for a clinical textbook to label it as 'addiction' [0][2].
A recent review article breaks down the differences from gambling which is considered a behavioral addiction in DSM-5[1] and had not been in prior editions.
Whether or not CSB/hypersexuality is an 'addiction' in the medical sense is controversial amongst medical experts and essentially interchangeable with what a layperson considers to be an addiction and it is therefore very reasonable especially noting the overlap of salience, conflict and relapse[1].
Although there is insufficient evidence at this time to conclude either way whether diminished satisfaction has a similar mechanism to tolerance or lack of control has a similar mechanism to withdrawal there is also no strong evidence to support the argument that CSB is not an addiction and consequently they are currently treated as separate entities.
The pertinence of this is to not conflate conflicting/controversial expert opinion with generally regarded truth and therefore stating that parent is 'wrong' for believing it is addiction when many experts share the same opinion[3].
"It seems that POPU (Problematic Online Porn Usage) is not only one subtype of hypersexual disorder, but currently the most prevalent since it also frequently involves masturbation. Although this is difficult to accurately determine given the anonymity and accessibility factors that make pornography use today so pervasive, we can at least confirm that the patron of consumption for pornography has changed for roughly the last decade. ... As far as we know, a number of recent studies support this entity as an addiction with important clinical manifestations such as sexual dysfunction and psychosexual dissatisfaction. Most of the existing work is based off on similar research done on substance addicts, based on the hypothesis of online pornography as a ‘supranormal stimulus’ akin to an actual substance that, through continued consumption, can spark an addictive disorder. However, concepts like tolerance and abstinence are not yet clearly established enough to merit the labeling of addiction, and thus constitute a crucial part of future research. For the moment, a diagnostic entity encompassing out of control sexual behavior has been included in the ICD-11 due to its current clinical relevance, and it will surely be of use to address patients with these symptoms that ask clinicians for help."
Porn addiction has not been classified as an addiction in and of itself because researchers are unsure that it is its own addiction, or a subset of other sexual related addictions and disorders. So it is highly likely that porn is addictive, but medical professionals are hesitant to declare "porn addiction" as a diagnosis without seeing if it is separated from other problematic sexual behaviors.
> researchers are unsure that it is its own addiction
Yes. Indeed, this is the reason experts object to the term “porn addiction”. Some “addicts” might be consuming a lot of porn, but that doesn't mean that porn is addictive --- just like how alcoholics use bottles a lot, but bottles are not addictive.
Let's hope that public discourse will continue and draw attention to the need for further research.
I've been addicted to pornography myself and spoken with many men who say the same, as well as many women who have had their relationships and mental health destroyed by being partnered with people like myself.
The current state of research and recognition is not always reflective of reality. I'd hope that anyone familiar with the history of science could accept that.
The fact that you were addicted to pornography means that you probably would have sought out and encountered lots of other people in the same problematic situation as yourself. I would look to your own tunnel vision as to why you tend to see it's perceived negative effects everywhere.
I'll take peer reviewed research over anecdotal data any day of the week.
I know someone who struggled with porn addiction. The person you replied to admitted to struggling with it. It's real, as an empirically observable fact.
What studies? The link you shared is a click-baity ("Science stopped believing in X and you should too") article by an individual clinical psychologist referencing (and overstating) the findings of a proposed etiological model and accompanying systematic review which suggested moral incongruity as one underlying cause, perhaps the key cause in these authors opinions[0].
Notably this study predated the addition of compulsive sexual behavior disorder to ICD-11 and was neither validated nor accepted as the correct model (hence excessive use of 'proposed' and 'preliminary'). You may also notice there are seven separate commentaries in response to this study with an eighth by the original authors in which they acknowledge the several limitations of their proposed model[1] and make the following statement:
"Rather than present an argument against CSBD, it is our intention and belief that our model of PPMI adds needed nuance to ensure the accurate use of the CSBD diagnosis."
That's like saying 'sleeping too much is the source of depression'. Viewing too much porn is a result of a different problem. Happy and healthy people aren't accidentally becoming addicted to porn.
Sure they do. There are literally thousands of stories of people who were in a car wreck, sports accident, or some kind of injury and then they get prescribed Oxy and when that runs out they are so addicted they end up getting black market pills and then when they can't afford that they move to heroin.
Opiates are insanely physically addictive and you can easily accidentally become addicted to them using them as prescribed, hence all the lawsuits.
The conversation rate from pill addiction to heroin is order of magnitude 10%, even ignoring the logical leap made in saying people who get addicted to pills all have happy fulfilling lives. I think it’s substantially correct to say that happy and healthy people, by and large, don’t get addicted to heroin.
I chose these points specifically because I felt I could back them up with sources if pressed.
I began with personal opinion and then removed everything I felt wouldn't stand to scrutiny, even if I do still believe it.
I chose not to include sources immediately because that would have required a great deal of upfront effort on my behalf, which I wasn't willing to spend since this is also a place where I come to find relaxation as well as intellectual stimulation.
If there are any particular points you're interested in discussing I'll be glad to share the basis for my belief and go into discussion.
If it's all of them then that still goes but it may be a week before I get back to you.
It’s probably about as dangerous to minors as sitting the minor in a room while 2 consenting adults have sex, or taking that minor to a strip club. Does the screen itself prevent trauma? Would you be ok with having your child exposed to either of these?
What about a gentle and loving uncle molesting a child in a way not much different from playful wrestling? Wrestling is fine, but we all recognize the molestation is incredibly harmful, even in this situation (because the harm isn’t the violence of it, it’s the actual sex itself).
This is just common sense. Of course sexualizing (sexually activating) children (which porn does) at a young age is harmful. It’s probably very harmful to adults too in large doses like porn addiction.
More likely they have not had sex or been to a strip club.
Whenever I see people argue that porn is just like sex they always turn out to be minors or young adults who have only ever experienced porn and not intimate relationships.
I don’t think it’s cruel. There’s nothing wrong with not having certain life experiences. I think it’s wrong to make assertions without knowing all the facts which is what these types of people do all the time. (See /r/relationships for many examples).
After being to strip clubs just twice in my life, and with both of those being very different experiences, I have to agree with you. Comparing it to porn (let alone an actual intimate relationship) is like comparing watching fast & furious movies to average driving experiences. While F&F movies are technically more wild, the real life experience of actual driving (even if it is technically waaay more mild than in the movies) is way more stressful/impactful/etc, to the point where even making the comparison feels ridiculous.
It does appear to be a bit more dangerous for minors than for adults. The main issue is that your brain is much more plastic around your teenage years and is more susceptible to building long-term habits.
That manifested in unexpected ways for men recovering from porn-induced ED. The older men - those who hadn't grown up with high-speed internet porn - recovered significantly faster than the younger men.
I don’t know how one would go about doing that research. Anecdotally I figured out the parental lock code on a cable box when I was 12, watched one of the porn channels, I was more excited that I was able to guess the code than anything else. The porn itself didn’t really have any impact on me.
My school also showed us Holocaust documentary footage around the same age. People getting shot in the head, piles and piles of dead bodies, etc. That plus gory movies like Hostel and scenes where people are chopped up and stuffed into a suitcase fucked me up WAY more than any of the porn I happened to come across at that age.
Not all porn is just people sticking their penis into someone else's vagina. It can get pretty disturbing. And disturbing porn is not that harder to find as the non-disturbing one. Now it's the age of anyone being able to upload almost anything for anyone to easily see. And people do.
(Anyway, I'm not for the internet wide parental lock. Just noting that things are different than in the past, with ease and breadth of access.)
But isn't the lack of destination a part of the problem, or maybe the whole problem?
It has been proven, scientifically, that making a distinction between soft- and harddrugs help in fighting drug abuse, death and misery. It's, for example, what the Dutch policy is based on.
By making a clear distinction, and decriminalizing it, you can educate people on it. You can say "this is very bad, that is dangerous and that there is merely unhealthy".
I'm sure a lesson can be drawn tlfor porn there too. By criminalizing, or forbidding it all, blanket, you loose all opportunity to teach about what is normal and what isn't. You just get one big pile, where disturbing and terrible stuff is just as (in) accessible as the stuff that's fun, pleasant or even educational.
It seems likely to be, particularly in the forms available today. There seems to be increasing consciousness on this both on the left and the right.
The Left has been increasingly concerned about the abusive acts becoming common in pornography and the seemingly pervasive use of underage or barely-of-age women with consent extremely sketchy or not present at all.
The Right has been increasingly concerned about how the pervasive presence of pornography encourages people to focus on that for their needs rather than pursuing real-life relationships and obsess over extreme acts that very few real partners are actually willing to do.
This is all exacerbated by internet startup tendencies, where maximizing "engagement" at all costs is the priority. It's in their incentives to maximize most of the bad effects that everyone is concerned about.
It's not clear exactly how bad everything is or that this particular thing is the right way to address it. But clearly enough people are concerned about it and aren't willing to accept endless delaying tactics around insisting that you can't do any particular thing about it because it can't be proved to be perfect.
It’s noteworthy to me that in your replies not one single comment links to any research. Multiple comments state point after point as fact with no sources, one comment directly ascribes its entire opinion to an anecdote.
In short…I’m not getting the kind of perspective expanding value I often find on HN from this discussion. Just a lot of back and forth from people exchanging the opinions they already had before opening the parent article.
I would instinctively agree that it's unhealthy for minors to have unchecked access to pornography but on the other hand I don't see how we could effectively address that problem societally without any kind of objective understanding of it. Has the exchange of unqualified personal opinions ever resulted in effective political policy, especially policy meant to manage a vice? That didn't work well for Prohibition or the War on Drugs.
People rarely link to research on this site or any other. It's a social network. People want to share their opinion and so they do. I cant remember the last reply to a comment I saw on here that actually linked to research.
That's generally true, but one common practice that originally drew me to HN was the frequent use of [#] citations by commenters to support their remarks with external sources. So in replies to a user specifically asking about research and evidence for these risks, it's disappointing for me to not see any research or evidence.
My 22 year old son vehemently disagrees. And from what I've read from young men, many agree with him. When I (we?) were kids porn was Playboy or Penthouse or Hustler. Tame by comparison to today. As my son stressed with me, you can find _anything_ via the internet. Anything. ANYTHING. A developing brain can't unsee stuff and it does warp people's perceptions of what is normal.
Having said that, I am deeply suspicious of any move to "protect the children" because it's always used as a cover for a move toward authoritarianism.
I'm not that much older than your son and had a different experience. (My youth was definitely not magazines, if that's what playboy and penthouse are supposed to refer to.) I think we'll need more than n=2 before being able to come to an informed conclusion here.
“Children, after we watch Daniel Tiger, we will watch what happens to this school teacher by all these men”
There is actually a long dark history of adults abusing children by exposing/exploiting them in regards to such topics. It was rife in Germany post WW2 in certain communities, currently a huge issue in Pakistan. Child trafficking on an absolute basis is higher now than it has been.
That’s just to say, people like who you are asking to seek help are numerous and unchecked behavior in this area has a dark history in humanity.
But watching a woman getting chocked while DPed in her anus while a half dozen men ejaculate on her is not the type of extra-curricular activity [1] I want my soon to be teenaged daughters' boyfriends interested in.
Im just... overprotective I guess.
[1] If anyone calls me out for knowing what's on the front page of all of these smut sites, guess what? We all know what's on those sites!
I’m sympathetic to your argument, but consider the case where you remove the sex from the above picture. It is normal and not specially restricted to have violent torture-like scenes in modern media.
The problem isn’t the sex. The problem is the violence.
Choking's sort of an interesting case for this, because it's one where someone should (ideally) also be doing it safely. Someone can enjoy it and consent to it, but not be sufficiently educated to do it without more risk than they realize. (This applies to many acts, but this one's particularly potentially-lethal.)
Porn, being a fantasy, rarely shows the prep-work required to do something properly. This is what I personally worry about when it comes to setting the wrong expectations in kids who haven't had that whole "this isn't representative of real sex" context properly set, leaving them thinking they can reproduce what's happening on-screen without realizing the background work required...
It's the same with Shibari, that's in fact a lot more dangerous than choking if not done properly. Because choking you can simply stop when you notice it's going wrong. A Shibari rope that isn't secured and suddenly slips to the neck takes time to cut.
Yet Shibari is viewed as an art form because it's much more stylish.
But people really into this kind of stuff are also very much into consent and safe practices. Is there really a wave of accidental chokings?
School shootings on the other hand... Maybe we should look at violent movies first?
If you're that concerned about it you should talk to your daughter about the risks of consenting to group sex, and the risks of hanging out with boys who are interested in it.
All this content was available when I was a teenager and my friends watched it. Those who actually follow through with having group activities quickly find out that it's way different than porn and not really all that enjoyable anyway.
This kind of porn has been around for decades and very few people actually do that kind of stuff. Something that's published isn't automatically a role model.
And the ones that do are really and truly into it. Yes it happens, it's not my kind of thing either but I know some people that love it.
What helps more is real sex ed. Explaining what sex is about, how to respect a partner, about safety. Rather than really easily circumventable bans. I got good sex ed when I was young in the Netherlands and I turned out fine and very respectful to women just like my peers despite having access to porn. The problem are religious schools not wanting to do serious sex ed. So the kids only have porn to go by.
If you've ever taken a look at the "Popular with Women" category on PH or similar sites, it seems like women sometimes actively seek out more degrading porn than you might expect.
haha.. as if it would be her boyfriend's fault. Way to pass the blame.
Download the latest dating app - Feeld - and peruse for yourself what women explicitly state that they are looking for when the shame for stating so is removed/reduced.
But high school kids are having less sex and, those that do, with fewer partners and it continues to trend down. [1]
So, assuming porn has any effect at all, it's possible highly available internet porn is decreasing the amount of sex kids are having.
The sexual violence trend on page 56 is concerning however it looks like the CDC has not been tracking that question as long either (only 4 year trend instead of 10+ like other categories).
Another concerning thing to me is the decreasing condom use, especially with current abortion trends. If we think porn drives behavior, maybe porn actors should be mandated to use condoms.
>But watching a woman getting chocked while DPed in her anus while a half dozen men ejaculate on her is not the type of extra-curricular activity [1] I want my soon to be teenaged daughters' boyfriends interested in.
If this is consensual, it actually sounds rather fun. But it's interesting that the example is simply an amalgamation of relatively common things:
* Choking is a common kink
* Anal sex is a common sex act
* Group sex is at least a common fantasy; I don't know how common double anal penetration is outside porn though
* Providing and receiving facials is also quite common as an alternative to spitting.
All of the acts are relatively innocuous on their own, but the combination is portrayed to be almost demonic :)
You’ll get some angry responses to this but I think it’s very worthwhile to say. Yes, ID verification in order to watch pornography is deeply Orwellian and terrifying (which is the aspect places like HN tend to focus on) but the bulk of the public support for these measures isn’t because people want government surveillance, it’s because they want to look out for children. Are they misguided? Perhaps. But you can’t win them over without addressing it. Shouting “it’s government overreach!” at those people will achieve nothing.
> but the bulk of the public support for these measures isn’t because people want government surveillance
Does not mean the majority of the public supports those measures, though perhaps those who do support those measures do so because of reasons other than explicitly wanting the government to surveil them.
I don't think you are implying that the majority of the public supports those measures but I did want to make it clear that this was still an open question.
The issue is that it's _their_ job to look out for their children.
We don't force all beds to have "walls", and give adults the keys to lower them if they show proof of age. Parents are supposed to buy _cribs_ for their children.
But if a parent neglects those responsibilities society is understood to have the right to intervene. In other words, the state has the responsibility to intervene on behalf of society for the well being of children. Given that responsibility, its pretty easy to suggest that the state has the power to make laws which may protect children over and above what individual parents might do.
I think most of us understand the line for gov't involvement to be much closer to the abuse end of the scale than the ate-too-much-candy end. We know empirically that gov't intervention itself has significant consequences that may completely outweigh the damage being done by whatever bad behavior they were trying to solve.
Just recently a black child, who was born at home with jaundice, was taken from the parents to be given care in a hospital, because a doctor didn’t think the parents would provide effective treatment.
It's unequivocal that the state has the right and obligation to intervene in cases of child neglect/abuse (which refusal or inability to provide necessary medical care is an example of) and is easily evidenced by the existence of agencies like the Child Protective Services or Children's Aid Society.
It is completely unnecessary to state the child's ethnicity to make this point which is entirely irrelevant to the argument you are attempting to make.
It takes a village to raise children. While it is the parent's responsibility to raise a child, it's not unreasonable for them to ask government to make society conducive for raising and protecting the next generation. The incentives are mismatched. The organizations providing access to pornography have no incentive to limit access to their product without legal enforcement.
Hacker News is filled with technical people. However, think about all the workers who are not tech workers who have families. The burden of knowledge for these parents to setup home networks and devices that provide content filtering, monitoring, and alerting is way too high.
Access to pornography ends up being an economic negative externality caused by the increased access to the internet, and we haven't really figured out how to handle the cost.
Should pornography be allowed to be displayed on billboards or in storefront windows? Is it the job of parents to cover their children's eyes as they stroll through town? As a society we have (mostly) set limits on where pornography can be accessed. Adult shops have a proprietor who can shoo kids out. Is the www different from public streets?
> The issue is that it's _their_ job to look out for their children.
Perhaps, but society seems to be increasingly creating hostile environments for parents and their children. Immediate and constant access to unlimited pornography is the tip of the iceberg. Social media has been shown to be highly toxic to young adults. Most digital content, be it social media, video games, etc is being explicitly designed to addict users, especially children. Education is crumbling. Food is loaded with artificial sweeteners and additives making them addictive and unhealthy. Local communities and support have decayed. And all the while the average income in comparison to inflation has cratered, making it more difficult for parents to actually spend time away from work to actually parent.
The ability of parents to raise healthy, well adjusted children has gotten much more difficult in recent decades, largely due the pursuit of profit over human well-being. You can disagree with individual laws, but you should not simply bury your head in the sand and respond to every attempt to help parents out with “just do your job and parent!”
Yes “think about the children”. If anything, there should be a law that forces all ISPs and even device manufacturers of “internet enabled devices” to have clear instructions on how to use parental controls.
This would be far less onerous since it’s already a feature they have and it protects privacy.
Except despite the vast amounts of counter-evidence, people still are somehow dumb enough to think that hiding stuff from kids works (drugs, guns, porn, e.t.c).
Porn is absolutely fine for kids to watch as long as the parents properly contextualize it. The issue is that somehow societally accepted that its taboo to talk to your kid about sex at an early age, and plenty of otherwise normal parents are embarrassed to do it.
Who said anything about hardcore pornography? 2 people having consensual romantic sex is still porn. Nothing wrong with educating a kid how sex works by showing him/her a video of that.
At some point later in the years, the kid will probably stumble onto some hardcore porn, but if you contextualize it properly, he/she will understand that its not how real relationships work.
In the same way, its ok (and probably good) if your teen tries weed/alcohol under your supervision, with the proper education around it, but you aren't going to give your kid like a heroin injection just because he/she is curious. But the fact that you establish trust and educate your kid about drugs that he/she will certainly come across is the more important bit about them staying away from harder drugs. Instead of outright ban, and then kid discovering how good weed makes them feel, and then going out and trying harder drugs.
Like I shouldn't have to explain this basic concepts to people. Really makes me worry about all the parents raising their kids these days.
I think in a world in which teenagers have a realistic/healthy view on their sexuality and human sexuality in general is a world in which they are capable of inferring that what can be seen in porn is unrealistic, most of the time demeaning, and not something to be idealised.
Anti porn or anti sex sentiment is rooted in religion. Even if the person isn't practicing religion, him or her holding these views are indicative of some religious upbringing with the standard amount of brainwashing.
Certainly not rational thinking, people aren't discussing specific psychological research at mass. The instant ad hominem attack instead of rational discussion is highly indicative of ideological underpinning.
United States certainly and unfortunately has a strong religious background. Quite a few remnants of it are in peoples minds without it realizing it. For example, lot of people would consider it rude not to say "Bless you" when someone sneezes, which is 100% religious origin.
There are many non-religious arguments being made in this very thread, some of which can be backed up by science and others which can be supported by evidence.
You're accusing them of lacking rational thinking and leaping to personal attacks while doing the same.
Many of the users of this site are not from the US and many live in some of the world's most secular societies.
You're equating porn with sexuality. I'm a grown man and I find most of what's on the front page of PornHub to be deeply disturbing. I see racism, misogyny, incest, even simulated assault.
In a world where sexual assault is so common I think we need to seriously reconsider what we're consuming and what we're normalising by calling this stuff harmless.
And I don't get what you're suggesting in saying hiding stuff doesn't work. Like, I like to enjoy a bit of LSD sometimes but I definitely keep that out of reach of children.
Except that you skip over the whole "Media contains certain content -> viewing this content leads to bad behaviour -> said media should be banned" argument as being valid, which is not. You have to demonstrate the causal link between the first two.
Also, your subsequent argument is flawed. For the vast majority of popular porn, an actress in a scene where she is "abused" is doing so consensually. Part of having healthy romantic relationships in life is being able to navigate the aspect of consent. For example, a girl may have different standards for sexual intercourse when it comes to having a one night stand, where she may engage in kink or a fetish, versus a long term relationship where she may not want to do that. If you are unable to contextualize this, this means that your parents did a poor job of educating you about sexuality, which further reinforces my argument.
This absolutely does not equate to ISIS beheading videos, where the people being beheaded are most likely not consenting to it.
I'm skipping over it because there are inherent differences in different types of media. A) Video games don't involve real people and B) Sexuality is wired in the mammalian brain in a unique way. We can't generalise so easily as you're suggesting.
If I see an actress in a movie being shot, she's not actually being shot. If I see an actress in a porn movie being choked, she's actually being choked. That's not a question of consent, it's a question of content.
But on that note, have you ever worked a shitty or degrading job and had to do things you found painful because you couldn't afford to say no? I have. It's painful to go through. I can't imagine coupling that with the complex layers of human sexuality.
You're saying it doesn't equate because of consent but that's not the aspect I was equating.
Take a look at the front page of PornHub now. There's a video on there showing a man flashing strangers. Yes, they must be actors, but it's filmed in a way that suggests they're not. There's absolutely nothing there that would promote the idea of consent in the mind of a young viewer.
Yes, maybe parents could watch those videos and explain that it's normal to fantasise and play-act about assault. But I'd hope that at the same time we, as adults, would speak with qualified therapists and try to ascertain the roots of our attraction to forcing our genitals onto unsuspecting women.
Final point: PornHub has only required verification from uploaders since relatively recently, after dozens of women took them to court for hosting their rape videos and after it was widely publicised that there was a good deal of underage rape videos on there. There are still other popular sites such as chatpic.org or videos that happily allow abuse content to circulate without any concern for consent. That's only what's on the open web.
That's an interesting point and thank you for raising it.
Indeed I would not.
I think it does come down to a moral issue then, which is related both to the core messages communicated and to the audience.
In terms of violent media I can think of 3 ways of categorising it: A) media with a moral message abut the use of violence (self defence, save the innocent) B) purely whimsical (something like Doom) and C) explicitly brutal material.
Of those three only the first two have popular reach. It's easy for children to understand and it provides a structure for parents to use to educate their youngsters.
When I compare that to pornography I feel that the stuff that would fall into category C is what the norm is, what's popular on the major channels. Therfore it takes on a difference socially for me.
We need way way better education on what healthy sex looks like and why respect for women is important. But I honestly believe that we've passed a sort of critical point and do therefore support the introduction of age based restrictions.
Explicitly brutal material does have one educative characteristic.
It educates one on the depths of human depravity. It is good to ensure the little ones eventually become aware of the shit we have to deal with. Hiding it helps no one.
Then we should also ban any material that contains violence until there are no more homicides.
Just watching, or even enacting (as in violent games), violence doesn't make them violent beings. Why would this other outlet lead to more real-world sexual assault? I understand why one might think it a priori (without having evidence either way), but we do have evidence: the reality we live in where, to my knowledge, it hasn't gotten more common despite porn having become 100x easier to get by, as well as the research on how virtual violence enactment relates to real-world violent behaviour.
Not sure why this got a downvote. I was going to say that this shows only reports without estimating the proportion of unreported rape over time (I tried for the last ~10 minutes to find it myself but no dice), but it's a constructive comment.
I didn't vote either way, but your argument assumes causality without considering other factors (like lower social stigma for reporting rape and higher social expectations of police responsiveness). In general, it's much easier to repot rape and sexual assault and have the report taken seriously than it was 10, 20 or more years ago.
I think you should consider the possibility that your argument was deficient instead of making assumptions based on tropes. Communities are not monolithic and HN is less monolithic than most. For example, I differ strongly from you in not believing in censorship in the name of protecting youth, but I also differ from a lot of people here in saying that tech companies have massively failed to deal with the distribution of CSAM.
Yes I agree with what you're saying and thank you for calling it out. It's just that I've had many similar discussions to this in many different environments and it's easy to become jaded.
> You can see that the number of rape reports have almost doubled since the invention of web pornography.
This is the worst case of cherry picking data I've seen in a long time. First, if your supposition is true then why would the number have dropped with the rise of internet pornography from the late 90s all the way through 2012? Second, what's the per-capita rate instead of absolute number? Third, what other confounding factors are there (did the reporting method stay the same)? This chart tells me nothing except that something weird happened after 2012 and that's it.
This is one of the worst possible arguments I've seen on HN. I'm not going to address the morality issue at stake here, but you've fallen into one of the most common traps when it comes to trying to compare rates of reports over a period of time which is that population also grows. From 1990 to 2020 the US population grew from 250 million to 330 million. Additionally, as the chart you pointed out the FBI changed its definition of what constitutes rape in 2013, hence the rise in reported rape from that year onwards.
> In a world where sexual assault is so common I think we need to seriously reconsider what we're consuming and what we're normalising by calling this stuff harmless.
There's evidence that porn reduces the rate of sexual assaults [0].
Yeah, just like how US spending on science, space, and tech increased suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation [0]. The article I cited talks about natural experiments, which examine what happens before and after porn was legalized.
Porn is very addictive to many people (Reddit has some great posts by many people trying to break free) - anything that gives you a huge dose of dopamine for little effort can be dangerous to someone’s life (not medically dangerous, but certainly emotionally and motivationally). It’s like saying drugs are absolutely fine because they don’t destroy everyone that take them. Or maybe alcohol is a better comparison.
Porn is very addictive because the person has no idea how to form real life relationships and engage in real sex in a healthy way.
In the same way video games are very addictive because it gives you a sense of accomplishment when you have no mental tools to go out and improve your situation in life.
In the same way weed is addictive when you have no mental tools to face hardships in your life and you would rather escape into a care free state of mind.
Nothing to do with the things at hand, everything to do with mental conditioning from an early age, a.k.a upbringing, a.k.a parenting.
That sounds like everything to do with the thing at hand to me. We wish everyone had the awesome perfect parents. That’s never going to happen. And even kids with great parents fall into the traps you mentioned above. All the things above are dangerous to people’s lives for the reasons you mentioned, and more reasons you didn’t mention.
I have even wondered why it's that big a deal for many people. I guess idle minds have nothing better to do other than think about solely sex, porn, food or drugs. And the only way they can prevent themselves from overindulging in these things is to have an external authority figure like the government impose strict restrictions on them.
Personal observation: most people just do fine if they are exposed to porn as kids. In fact they are more well-rounded, and intellectually mature compared to their peers who were never exposed to those things early on, just like all other topics.
> Except despite the vast amounts of counter-evidence, people still are somehow dumb enough to think that hiding stuff from kids works (drugs, guns, porn, e.t.c).
It's super effective. Not perfect, but "hiding stuff from kids" has excellent ROI—relatively easy, and damn effective. Ask any parent, we do it all the time, and if it didn't work, we'd stop.
Pornography is dangerous. It's extremely addictive and users become increasingly tolerant to what their viewing, often leading to the development of distressing fetishes or real life intimacy issues.
I'm sex positive and I believe in being open with children about the realities of life but the dangers of pornography are real.
> It's extremely addictive and users become increasingly tolerant to what their viewing, often leading to the development of distressing fetishes or real life intimacy issues.
This is a strong claim - please provide a source. I think it may be true, but is it?
It's more of an issue of classifying it separately from other sexual disorders than recognising the addictive potential of pornography itself.
I myself have been addicted to pornography so I understand the reality of it intimately. I have been in groups with other men who are distraught with their lack of control. I have spoken to countless women whose relationships have been destroyed by this.
I can point you towards some large support groups online if you'd like to inform the men who are suffering that their issue is not scientifically recognised.
By the way, did you have anything to say about the other point I made? It wasn't clear which point the grandparent was finding questionable.
Thanks for recognizing this problem, really online support groups helped so much when it seemed so much of common society didn’t know or care about these issues.
... I gotta say, that's a surprisingly good comeback. One would have to dive into the stats on how many people get married in the first place and then divorce (iirc the latter is about a third? At least in my country) and then halve that rate, so it's not going to be an "extremely" by any definition I think, but I do better see your point.
Makes me think about gambling. Most people either don't do any or do it in normal proportions. For those that do have trouble, as this argument is about addiction after all, there's a self-imposed timeout mechanism that gets centrally registered so that any gambling place will enforce the timeout on this person. I don't know how much it helps, and it also goes into having to identify users to avoid circumventing even a self-imposed safeguard, but it might be an industry to compare against and draw research from (I haven't seen it mentioned yet in the greater thread).
Porn absolutely is dangerous if it becomes a habit.
But just like binge-drinking and narcotics, parents and kids should have conversations and work together to build healthy ideas of sexuality. It shouldn't be a government decree thing, because that seemingly takes the responsibility off parents. But we all know a decree won't work, kids will find a way, so it will return to being the parents' problem.
This was actually what I was thinking, but sort of the other way around. We already have an age limit drinking, narcotics are more or less banned.
I don't know how the US handles this, but online gambling is a pretty good model for this. You need to be of a certain age, verified with a government ID (here in Denmark at least) and if you have a gambling problem, you can add yourself to a list the ensures that you're blocked on all gambling sites (and casinos).
That is something that your parents or community elders could have told you. Why does the state need to intervene?
Phub is also a legitimate business that has commercial advertising interests in the US, so they're incentivized to play nice. There are about a million other websites that aren't based in North America, contain only pirated material, and don't care about what laws are applicable where.
PornHub refused to take down child porn and rape videos (not actors, actual assaults) on their platform for years. They only took them down when the victims in the videos took them to court and the NYT published an exposé. They're in the middle of being sued right now, and the evidence that's coming to light in that case is pretty damning.
Given how poorly they've behaved so far, I don't agree that they're incentivized to play nice.
I think it's good, but I really wish the solution was, "We need parents to take a more active role in their children's lives and supervise their internet usage" and not, "Lockdown and de-anonymize the web."
On the other hand, if you as a legislator perceive a social evil, and your options are to pass a law or to get all the parents to take away their kids' phones and switch back to desktop computers (used only in a common area), which do you pick?
I dunno, is the law unlikely to work at its nominal goal and likely to, in practice, substantially burden adults in activities that they are and ought to be free to do, and also largely being advocated by people who fairly openly want to curtail adults practical access, but have been frustrated by Constitutional protections in their efforts in that direction?
Is it? Is this a States thing? That in the United States that nudity and pornography is "dangerous", yet in other cultures throughout Europe, it's not taken as seriously, nor does it have this overall "dangerous" tag to it (generally speaking that is. Prudish people trying to impose their will on others can be a world-wide phenomenon).
And does this put a curb on explicit R rated movies that has nudity and acts of sex? Is it just the penetration shots that are "dangerous"? Also, it doesn't even touch on if ultra violent content strewn around, well, EVERYWHERE isn't "dangerous"? Where is the state bans on violence in movies and TV (they've already tried with video games)? But OMFG, if you dare to show a woman's breast, it's "dangerous".
> It's embedded by the puritanical roots of the US. It's nonsense really.
It's worth noting that the reactionary response to that (e.g. porn is good and totally healthy and everything bad said about it is fake news) is also nonsense.
You're absolutely right, but the issue is more nuanced than simply "porn is good" or "porn is bad.". The root of the problem lies in the fact that the discussion around sex and sex health in the US is often clouded by puritanical beliefs and an aversion to discussing these topics in an open and honest manner. This typically leads to a lack of comprehensive sex education and the stigmatization of porn, which has never done anyone any good. As a country, we need to be more open and honest about sex, and recognize that censorship and puritanical attitudes have no place in shaping our laws or social norms.
I agree generally that there is some serious puritanical roots in the US that are still at heavy play today. But there must be more to what's happening than just that. in other threads it's bewing shown that many European countries and Canada are passing similar laws. Puritanical roots of Europe?
Honestly, idk enough about what's happening in Europe or Canada as it relates to this topic, but it's possible that there are other cultural or historical factors at play. My initial assumption is maybe it's due to a rise in conservatism in certain countries? Again, idk, I haven't been keeping up with the news on this.
The US has a different history than Europe. One aspect of that history being the strong influence of religious puritans who were among the earliest colonizers, and whose impact has and can still be seen today in various aspects of American society and culture.
> Is it? Is this a States thing? That in the United States that nudity and pornography is "dangerous", yet in other cultures throughout Europe, it's not taken as seriously, nor does it have this overall "dangerous" tag to it (generally speaking that is. Prudish people trying to impose their will on others can be a world-wide phenomenon).
France and Germany have similar laws, and the UK is about to pass one.
Anything that can hijack the dopaminergic system should not be allowed to kids. Gambling, tiktok & smartphones in general, porn, drugs etc.
We used to have shame as a societal mechanism to deal with these issues. It was shameful to be an alcoholic, which was how alcoholism was kept in check. The same way it was shameful in ancient Greece to surrender to your carnal urges.
Shame is disappearing. Our societies are going haywire.
> Anything that can hijack the dopaminergic system
This is far too broad, just because something could be used for evil is not enough to ban it for all children. What about TVs? Candy? Stimulating toys? I think all of these can have negative outcomes when abused, but that isn't enough for me to say all children should not access them.
All online pornography is scientientifically demonstrated to be harmful for both children and adults, see the research: https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/
Places with robust systems for shame and conformation to its populace - particularly religious nations - are less civilized and developed than their "shameless" national counterparts. This isn't the only variable, and it's clearly not the determining factor. Push an agenda elsewhere.
Depends on how you define development and civilization. There are plenty who see Western nations as became more barbarian (as opposed to being more civilized) with and due to development of technology. They don't see development of technology as good either.
We really need to get back to the good old days – you know the ones – where slavery was legal, women didn't have the right to vote, and homosexuality could be punished with forced sterilization.
Surely you understand that happening to see a woman's nipple is completely different to a 14 year old sitting up at 4am masterbating to whatever intense porn they can get their hands on are two completely different things. And if you think the latter is bad, as you should, then it makes sense to err on the side of caution when figuring out a way to reduce the likelihood of a young person, who has not fully developed a sense of self control, getting sucked into the wormhole of a porn addiction. If that means reducing the likelihood of an innocent breast being seen, then that seems like a reasonable trade-off.
Also, you say Europe is more open about nudity, implying that is a good thing, but Asia and the middle east are in many cases more prudish than even the US, so why not look to them or use them as an example? Where's your objective measure for which societies we should admire and emulate?
That's a myth based on a single very flawed study that's 15 years old. Every study since then has Utah in close to last place for porn consumption per capita.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 345 ms ] threadIt's a very different world from technology, where technical compliance is more or less the same thing as policy compliance.
Technology is technical. Policy is political.
I guess people providing wifi near the border could get complex but you could pass that responsibility to whomever owns the physical line and where it terminates. Satellite might be a little difficult.
But I'm not entirely sure we should do it just because it could be done.
Porhub made the best reasonable effort. The ISPs supplied inaccurate data and are in the jurisdiction, but aren't required to supply anything at all AFAICT. Who has a problem?
Given the known problems with IP geo-location, I don't think this would count as "the best reasonable effort." Unless you interpret "reasonable" to mean "half-ass."
If you think Disney's happy with "half-ass", then "half-ass" is what I mean.
easy sales opportunity
That seems a little wonky to me.
It is ok to not have to differentiate them, since mostly you are after a correlation between the different underlaying attitudes.
The banning of porn is a symptom - it is a sign of the attitudes, and you can EASILY test against that.
Such things have been done. I remember a study discussed on HN where they used the same neighbourhoods before/after a change of law. That wasn't porn though, I think it was strip clubs, and the result was something like "when a strip club opens in an area that had none before, the number of sexual assaults in the vicinity decreases by a few per cent".
Also, the absolute numbers are tiny, so it's not an "epidemic" by any measure.
If you'd just focused on addiction and escalation of weirdness, you might have a point. Possibly. Not my field, but it's at least not as implausible as your chosen bug-bear.
Pornographic content also has an analog: If companies need to be illegitimate to provide it, then they won't be quite as picky about if the content itself was produced legally or illegally (e.g. CP and other abuse/sex trafficked originating content).
Banning pornography won't make it go away, it will just make it unregulated.
And the friction is going to be especially impactful if you're a young teen and haven't been hooked into it as a habit yet.
I speak partially from experience, as someone from a country with a lot of porn blocked. It was super annoying at first, but I just (mostly subconsciously) shifted to written erotica and other forms of erotic media. Sexual need is of course a deep seated human need, but porn is hardly the only way to deal with it, and in fact is one of the least healthy ways. There's a lot of f'ed up erotica out there, but in the end it's still much easier to see the characters as people and remember that sex happens in the larger context of life.
Yeah, I think people forget in these discussions how costs work. Making drug / alcohol / pornography usage illegal increases the costs involved, and these cost increases will reduce demand for at least some consumers.
For example, I can't smoke weed because then I can't get Adderall. That's a kind of local prohibition. I could go to the black market for both weed and Adderall but I'm not going to do that, so prohibition has worked here.
I’m honestly more surprised this didn’t happen 20 years ago.
Where "good enough" wrt. correctness doesn't mean crypto-graphically pro-oven but only "you need to do some hacky things to circumvent it". Because IMHO for anything which doesn't also require to know the _exact_ identity of the user that is good enough.
Where "good enough" wrt. privacy doesn't mean perfect, but means for the "age verification provider" not worse then what fingerprinting can do even if you have a ad-blocker and for the "age verification checking" website means yes or no and that's all they get (preferable, in worst case also the identity of the "age verification provider" (e.g. some organization) id but under no circumstances anything more than that).
Where "good enough" wrt. usability means you have to use an verification provider of your country (because what adult means differs).
This solution isn't perfect, it doesn't distinguish between different countries having different ages for being adult and intentionally doesn't handle other age steps like 12+, 16+ (mainly matters for games).
Honestly the only real problem I see is that in the US it can't be used to buy alcohol because for some reasons they don't allow adult to buy alcohol until 21 (but do allow them to do decisions way more dangerous then that). Except it's not really a problem as the US can define "internet adult" to be 21+, given that this is mainly needed for porn, buying alcohol etc. the US would love doing that anyway AFIK.
I mean sometimes the perfect solutions is just to bothersome bother with it (the perfect solutions probably needs something like 0 knowledge proofs to preserve privacy).
Because most kids can get there parents credit card number, and the "small nominal fee" is often too little and also often too cryptically booked for many parents to realize what is going on or to ask their bank about it.
And because it's just a "small nominal fee" many kids are also not worried about causing any harm when doing so.
Additionally with the credit card e-comerce system becoming more dominant in the world it becomes increasingly more likely for not-quite adults to have something which looks like a credit card for the shop (but likely acts a bit different behind the scene).
Lastly it potentially leaks _a lot_ of private information, which in some contexts is okay but in others is not. Which is also why the small nominal fee trick works, it's often not just based on "only adults have a credit card" but on "let's use the credit card number to get a lot information about the user including if they are adult".
> PornHub said that a better solution is to identify users by their device.
Pornhub effectively does absolutely nothing to verify users’ ages right now. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if they did something.
If you are going to make exceptions to the first admendment for safety can you prove the danger explicitly?
Why not the 2nd admendment?
I'm not arguing legal cases I'm arguing the gp's first point.
See for instance Ashcroft v. ACLU: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/377/ashcroft-v-...
Saying this is protected speech is ridiculous.
You know full well, under the age of 18 you do not get full rights.
But, I think Apple already does this. https://developer.apple.com/wallet/get-started-with-verify-w...
"Information about past presentments — including where, when, and what personal information you share — is encrypted and stored only on your device. Neither the state issuing authority nor Apple can see your presentment history."
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213046
An simplified example could be that I ask the third-party to sign a package that include my current IP address, a message that say "I am over 18", and a validity period. They sign it (after I identify myself to the third-party), and give me the requested signature. I then give this to the website and the website can verify the signature of the third-party. The website only know my IP address, the time, and what third-party service I use to verify my age. Third-party only know my ip address, the time, and that I requested a token for "I am over 18".
A major drawback occur if this is only used for porn. In that case, the message "I am over 18" will be synonymous with porn use and thus giving the third-party information that they should not have.
Adult streaming sites have the "are you 18 years of age?" pop-up. As far as those managing the sites are concerned that should be enough.
The problem is, every data provider has to get on board first. For instance, the city you live in can verify if you're over eighteen. If their IT can handle setting the bit 'over eighteen' in the IRMA app, you can securely and verifiably show this bit of information, and only this piece of information, to the party asking to verify this information. They have to support IRMA too though.
But even then, if I'm under age and just borrow your phone...
[0] https://privacybydesign.foundation/en/
Technology does not solve people problems. It only makes them worse/creates new ones in the process of (generally poorly) trying to partially solve them.
This is a people problem.
Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.
This method doesn't seem to be allowed by the law in question though.
I think the internet access of minors is their parents business. This is a very reasonable approach, largely the case for most other aspects of law anyway, and has minimal externalities. Lawmakers can pass minimum standards for content filtering/restrictions that major device manufacturers need to comply with.
It is also orders of magnitude more practical to ensure a "safe experience" with device-side restrictions compared to the feeble and nonsensical attempt of making the entire internet safe for ten year olds.
I don't get that. Why would it be good? Why should it ever be a webpage's responsibility?
In the Real World(TM) this is a fairly uncontroversial idea. The Internet is very wild west on these things and that has lead to interesting outcomes... but really age gating porn is in line with many things in the world.
To use your analogy, it is parents who are paying for the alcohol and then leaving it in a place where it is easy for their children to access. Responsible parents either teach their children about appropriate alcohol use or make it difficult to access, or both.
Prepaid phone cards are a thing.
Most cities are full of places offering free internet connections to anybody in the vicinity.
This is not exactly correct. The clerk might, but not the database the card was scanned into. Depending on the secret item such as certain OTC medications, alcohol, tobacco, the information is not forgotten but kept for an extended time, and is stored and correlated in a centralized DB.
Anything with pseudoephedrine, ephedrine, and phenylpropanolamine requires scanning by US federal mandate.
It is done so the government can capture it across the nation.
I am just saying that there are things that already have the requirements of data collection & retention both at Federal and State level in the USA.
There's no practical way to check ID on the web. In your "Real World" the vast majority of the time checking ID is just some person that works for an establishment looks at a little plastic card with your photo on it and checks to make sure the birthday is before a certain date, then they hand it back to you. To do something like this online would require something much more intrusive to personal privacy and adds another pointless complicated technological solution when a much more practical solution exists. That solution being parental controls.
The impossible becomes possible real quickly when businesses decide they need it to move forward.
I do believe in privacy rights, but... free porn just doesn't feel like a must-exist thing in the sense we are all talking about.
I do think that there's a universe where self-governance sort of resolves these problems. Many industries have done this! In a universe where basically you needed a credit card to access this stuff ~always, this law would likely not exist.
In other words, you don't actually believe in privacy rights because all it takes is one flimsy reason that you happen to, if not agree with, don't really find objectionable to violate them. Is the harm caused by anyone under arbitrary age seeing porn harmful enough to violate everyone's right to privacy, even when there are already existing solutions to help prevent minors from accessing pornography?
Parental controls exist. Tools to block websites like pornhub or any other porn website exist already. You might say that it's too easy to circumvent parental controls. I'd say that it's just as easy to circumvent ID requirements, so if your goal is to actually protect children from pornography, it's not going to be anymore effective than current access controls.
...Well gee golly gosh, did you ask anyone else in the room? Or did you unilaterally decide what's best for everyone else?
And clearly you don't support privacy rights if you're willing to turn around and hand everyone else's off. Talk about saying one thing and doing something completely different. The turn of phrase this brings to mind is "Stop pissing on my shoes, and trying to convince me it's raining."
I can go to a convenience store right now and by credit for a large porn site here. It's "private" in the sense that everyone in this discussion seems to believe it to be. The fact that it's paid means that we can have privacy-preserving purchasing methods because there is money that helps to finance these checks.
Hell, pornhub could easily set up a "gift card" system where you have to go pay a dollar somewhere to get your age verified. This is far from an unsolvable problem.
Meanwhile, back on Teh Interwebz, the only way we have right now of verifying age is by uploading photos, or equivalent information, of the identification document, which could be intercepted, stored, or otherwise pilfered with no further indication.
I think there was someone proposing a cryptography-based way of proving "yes, this visitor has access to a non-minor identity", but that requires some sort of government (or similar) service that could also log incidental information, and would require some sort of digital identity service (for example gov.br here in Brazil): Service generates a random token, user gives token to identity service using their authentication, identity service replies with the token signed with a key whose public part the website knows.
This would be "better", in the sense of you don't have to provide any actual identifying information to arbitrary websites, but very bad because now the government can log all age-check attempts. There is probably some more complicated solution to that, but it goes beyond me. In the meantime, my opinion is that online age checks are dumb, easily bypassed, and possibly dangerous. Until we find a proper solution, just educate yo kids properly.
Friendly reminder that criminals don't have to obey laws, so actually dangerous websites (be it just psychologically, like I don't know, gore, to actual illegal things) won't be so kind as to implement an age check themselves anyways. If you want the minor you're responsible over to not view harmful content, teach them about the internet and have a healthy relationship with them so they trust you in the eventuality they see something disturbing.
A lot of people seem to have forgotten what the world was like 25 years ago.
1) No age verification, or
2) Every access to online adult content is forever publicly associated with your personal information?
I agree neither is ideal, but I think 1 is better than 2.
We should start by thinking about what we want to do: do we want to age-gate pornography? If so, why? If not, why not? And if we don't age-gate online pornography at all does that also mean a 10-year old can just walk in to a sex shop, live sex show, or BDSM club? Once we figured out some answers to that (and more) we can start thinking about the how of it all, keeping in mind that things like "access to online adult content is forever publicly associated with your personal information" would be undesirable.
I don't think "well, it's kinda hard so [throw up and hands and give up]" is really a good way forward. I don't have complete answers for all of this either, but I feel a number of people here are far too dismissive about this. At this point we – the broader "hacker/IT community" – can either be part of the conversation or sideline ourselves by dismissing it all.
If there are no laws then there is no pressure to create technology, and if there's no technology we can't create good laws. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing innit? It's hard to tell where the future will go, but I will bet we will see more of these kind off laws passed around the world.
[1] Every day there is a new headline proving this. Here is today's: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/t-mob...
Yes. I'm pretty sure the entire reason porn is legal is it's considered a 1FA issue in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalit...
This really isn't true. See the Miller test[1], and in that same Wikipedia article, the example of adult content (in Utah!) being found not obscene.
Christian nationalists like to use "pornography" and "obscenity" interchangeably as rhetorical positioning, but I am hard pressed to think of a case where innocuous sexual content was held to be obscene and therefore not protected speech.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test
But then I was struck by the absurdity of good-faith engagement with someone who equates a de facto ban on adults enjoying pornography with bordellos for children.
I hope you find peace and learn to accept yourself before you harm too many others in the name of whatever it is you hate so much about your own character.
Maybe you ought to realize they're more important than your narcissistic behaviors? I'm so sick of this current generation of adults not being able to grow up and put the next generation before their own selfish interests.
I'm really sorry for whatever happened to you. Please don't perpetuate it.
1FA issues get trumped by secondary agreements you agreed to.
There's lots of things children aren't legally allowed to access but I can't think of any of them that do absolutely nothing to meet those legal requirements. Imagine if a liquor store just decided it was fine to let kids come in and purchase liquor and you said "Why is it the liquor store's responsibility to not sell booze to kids?"
Is this actually even true? So if my underage son finds a porn magazine in my house, it's "illegal" for him to look at it? That doesn't sound right.
>Imagine if a liquor store just decided it was fine to let kids come in and purchase liquor and you said "Why is it the liquor store's responsibility to not sell booze to kids?"
Imagine comparing going to a physical location with no easy digital trace and buying something that is basically 100% socially acceptable to digitally tracking what kind of taboo and private porn someone wants to watch.
"Imagine comparing going to a physical location with no easy digital trace and buying something that is basically 100% socially acceptable to digitally tracking what kind of taboo and private porn someone wants to watch. "
You're making excuses for allowing this. Just stop. The mental and physical health of children takes precedence over adults need to keep their fetishes "private". As if this stuff isn't being tracked in all sorts of ways already anyway. Until very very recently everyone had to go into a store to purchase this stuff.
That's not what I asked... you said it was "literally illegal for children to view porn". Give me a source for it because I can't find one.
There is a difference between SELLING porn to underage children, and children being able to view it. I'm talking about viewing it. Going to google and searching for porn and getting results is NOT the same as a store literally selling porn to kids- and since you are on a tech website, you obviously know that.
>You're making excuses for allowing this. Just stop
>The mental and physical health of children takes precedence over adults need to keep their fetishes "private"
Ah the response of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" to justify taking away our right to privacy. Where have I heard that one before?
>Until very very recently everyone had to go into a store to purchase this stuff.
Yeah, going to some random store in the 80s and buying what you wanted with cash where no one had any idea who you were, no way to track you is definitely the same as my license being linked to every link I click on at pornhub. Yup, same thing... why are you giving such a disingenuous argument?
Who's taking away what rights? Pornhub took this away, not the government. Show me where the government is removing rights please. I'm not aware of an amendment that says you must be allowed to view porn without anyone knowing about it.
Again, your right to view porn doesn't supersede the right of children to be protected from it. You sound like the people vying for child drag shows because it's their right to dangle their junk in kids faces.
When I google, I find several third-party "age verification as a service" services. Their marketing isn't always clear about what they actually do, but I think they all look like they get photo ID (not sure if they do anything to try to confirm the person sending the ID is that person). Their pricing is also not generally public.
People might talk about burner phones, but many localities never really had burner phones in the first place (Japan doesn't give a phone number on travel SIMs, there's "no way" to have a phone number without getting your ID checked somewhere), and other localities are tightening the grip on this.
It's not a universally nice and open solution. But it's probably one most markets will bear
Could you make a SSO where the website owner just gets a true / false bool back from the SSO? :thinking:
If it were instead illegal for sites to check for your ID outside of a handful of circumstances, that would be much preferable. Last thing we need is more privacy invasions on the web. Unfortunately, things are going in the wrong direction, both from private interests and from newer govt regulations.
> 72 (9) "Reasonable age verification methods" means verifying that the person seeking to
> 73 access the material is 18 years old or older by using any of the following methods:
> 74 (a) use of a digitized information card as defined in this section;
> 75 (b) verification through an independent, third-party age verification service that
> 76 compares the personal information entered by the individual who is seeking access to the
> 77 material that is available from a commercially available database, or aggregate of databases,
> 78 that is regularly used by government agencies and businesses for the purpose of age and
> 79 identity verification; or
> 80 (c) any commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional
> 81 data to verify the age of the person attempting to access the material.
Edit: For clarity adding the definition of "transactional data" - there's no clever loophole there either. Basically, data mine/data broker shit. Perhaps less maximalist than "just check the ID", but hardly what anyone would consider a meaningfully "minimal" solution either.
> 84 (11) (a) "Transactional data" means a sequence of information that documents an
> 85 exchange, agreement, or transfer between an individual, commercial entity, or third party used
> 86 for the purpose of satisfying a request or event.
> 87 (b) "Transactional data" includes records from mortgage, education, and employment
> 88 entities.
It’s also like having stores check IDs when other porn is just floating by on the wind with regularity. Even if all of the major porn websites did checks there’s still Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, Google/Bing image search, torrents…
I suppose this does indeed happen, if you count the internet as the wind.
Using advertising cookies is probably the most like real life. You look at a user and guess their age. If they might be under 18 you check ID
Why do people always seem to use the word disingenuous disingenuously? :)
Obviously, the number of people willing to verify their identity and attach it to their pornhub searches and other activity is close enough to zero to make no difference to pornhub's business.
This is such a blindspot for ‘24/7 engineer mindset’ people. And, in a professional context, things like this serve as a great litmus test for if someone is capable and geared to look at things at a bigger-picture level instead of just ‘computer problems’.
…not to equate looking at porn with getting burglarised. This is obviously BS.
I don't have any inside information, but my uninformed guess is that this is by design or at least tolerated to some extent. You don't want a watertight VPN because it stifles commerce.
China PR could pull a Singapore and impose the kind of punishment for using VPN that Singapore does for hard drugs. I have a friend from Texas who lives in China PR and regularly uploads to YouTube. Nothing political, he is talking about living and working as a teacher, so he isn't doing anything controversial but in theory what he is doing is unlawful by China PR laws, right?
Broadly PRC GFW is functionally VPN paywall for foreign content so most PRC nationals default to consuming media/narratives within the wall. TBH, apart from dissidents, researchers etc, in my experience, very few VPN users jump wall for foreign news, like exposure might be incidental due to being shared on timeline, but most PRC nationals jump wall for porn, business and lols. Plenty of foreign news gets filtered to domestic PRC net via diasphora who reverse VPN and post content back into PRC net - lots of foreign/western "propaganda" makes it's way in PRC, it's just rate limited to point where influence is limited, or censored if it ever gets legs.
In terms of regulations: VPN allowed for commerce, enforcement mostly against businesses who don't register/get approval using sanctioned VPNs. Individuals _generally_ free to use - there aren't clear laws yet against individual use, currently regulations target operators. 99% of VPN enforcement is at this level. Few individuals (outside XinJiang/Tibet) and no foreigners as far as I'm aware of have gotten in shit for VPN. For nationals who got in shit, it's what they do with VPN (coordinating with foreign forces etc), not use itself.
If only 0.01% of the population has the technical saviness to bypass the Great Firewall, then they've succeed beyond their wildest optimism. No one cares about the few exceptions. If those people speak out to anyone about how they're able to get around it... then guess what happens? And if they just shut up and keep it to themselves, that's a good outcome too.
You're chuckling "but it's not 100%" when they might have been satisfied with 85%. Joke's on you.
I’ll show you: The next logical step would be to make it a crime of some sort to as a user attempt to evade the law. Maybe it’s even a felony to persuade folks to not to try. But the reality is they made the law just for political points and it never gets enforced it’s just there sitting on the books. Now years go on and you have been using vpn’s to evade the restrictions. Now 10 years later you decide to run for President and. a whole bunch of establishment politicians hate you for whatever reason. Now all of a sudden this phrase is really relevant: Show me a man and I’ll show you a crime.
That is why it needs fixing at the source.
Think of it in terms of adblocking. You and I know all the tricks, but Google's bottom line suggests most people do not, and don't seem to mind. Similarly, the Great Firewall is tolerated because it doesn't block the things that are necessary for living life in China.
It obviously won’t keep information from getting out. But that’s not the purpose of things like anti-porn laws. Dramatically curtailing prevalence and access is sufficient.
It reminds me of this 2021 Verge article quoting a college engineering professor who had to revamp teaching material as many of their students did not understand folder structures and computer file systems. Why would they? For them, everything is on Youtube, Netflix and Spotify.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
My daughter today lives in a world where users no longer issue commands to computers. 99% of computer users limit themselves to typing into a search box and clicking links they are fed. I don't even need to set up content blockers, because the idea of telling her computer what to do is foreign to her. Despite my attempts to get her curious about how they work and about hacking, she doesn't even care enough about it to venture outside of the pre-screened bookmarked sites I set up for her. If it's not reachable via her toolbar's Roblox and YouTube buttons, she doesn't even have a remote chance of finding it, and I know because I've seen the access logs.
And with something as popular as porn? Why, that just might end up being one of the largest VPN awareness campaigns. ~
So VPNs aren't a "bypass" or a loophole, they're the desired outcome of these laws.
Of course they won't be able to enforce this most of the time. But if you end up in their sights for any reason, they may then notice you using a VPN and use that information to legally blackmail you.
Usually this goes with making the punishment very harsh: A stolen MP3 on your hard drive? 20-to-life unless you take a plea bargain down to 2 years and turn in 3 friends as well. Same deal now with VPNs.
Mind you, RESTRICT is a bad bill, and those provisions are vague, and the EFF is right to be screaming about it. But it doesn't do what you think it does.
[1] Hilariously and depressingly unconstitutional. Good grief.
How is it unconstitutional? I don't know the ins and outs.
The difference between showing ID to a clerk and this sort of thing is recordkeeping. A clerk is only checking the DOB on the ID, not keeping a record of your identity[1]. Online age checks keep records.
If there were some way of doing an age check without having your identity attached to it or having to expose yourself to some commercial third party, I wouldn't have an issue. That's a tough nut, though.
[1] I'm aware that certain businesses do keep a scan of your ID, but they're the exception and not the rule.
As a foreigner, it's kind of strange that violent movies (and political propaganda disguised as violent movies) are protected speech and pornography is not.
In America, parents worry that sexual media might effect their children, but worry less about violent media.
I'm of the opinion that both are half right and both are half wrong. Both violent and sexual media effect the people who consume it. We are what we eat. There is no kind of media that doesn't effect consumers of that media in some way. Also, it bears mentioning that a lot of pornography is both sexual and violent...
(In case it isn't clear, those two trends I list above are gross generalizations. When I was a child in America, my mother would not allow me to play with tin soldiers or GI Joes, nerf guns, or watch cartoons more violent than Arthur. Not a typical American childhood, but nevertheless still an American childhood. Generalizations always have exceptions but I think they can be useful nevertheless.)
If you want to argue that pornography should not be an exception, or that violence should be, then fair enough, but given they're such different types of content it's nonsensical to try and put them on an axis and claim one is further along it than the other.
Unless you live in a state where they scan your ID for such transactions, those in-person purchases can be effectively anonymous.
Out of curiosity, what state do you live in where gas stations sell pornography?
As an aside, in many cases, porn served by websites isn't meant to be bought. It is effectively advertising.
In Utah, it's clear that there would be less-restrictive ways to achieve the supposed goals of the law. For instance, jail parents whose minor children view pornography. That would not be a content-based restriction on speech.
Since there is no way for a website to know the age of its visitors, the Utah law is a de facto ban on certain speech.
Does this seem at all practical to you? To me, this seems akin to dropping ID requirements at liquor stores and bars, and instead enacting a law to jail the parents of minors who drink liquor.
Which is all to say, no. None of this is workable because none of this is about protecting children from life-altering harm.
This law is intended to create a liabikity trap to attack companies a religious state deems immoral.
I don't believe everyone considers pornography to be speech, let alone practices it as speech.
And it turns out that restrictions on speech are unconstitutional independently of whether you want to exercise that particular speech. If a law is passed prohibiting discussion of mohair rugs, it infringes on my free speech even if I have no intention of discussing mohair rugs.
1. https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=101895573599950...
I mean, when I was a teenager I already knew how to program and my mother was completely tech illiterate. So how the hell was she supposed to control what a chronically horny teenage boy was getting up to on the internet?
We should also remember that teenagers are supposed to disobey their parents. It's not really the norm to have much control over your teenage children. That's just a natural stage of development from a dependent child to an independent adult who makes their own decisions. Sometimes teenagers just have to learn the hard way.
I feel like porn is mostly harmful in combination with loneliness. I had a pretty bad addiction to it as a teenager but it kind of fixed itself when I started dating at 18 and realised the disconnect between porn and the real deal. If that never happened, I'd probably be a woman-hating incel by now.
Purchasing liquor isn't a first amendment right. The standards are indeed different.
I don't like the RESTRICT Act but you're overstating your case.
don't think that's what RESTRICT act does tho
I mean, if even the British Royal Family had to change its name from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor…
According to the Tampa Bay Times, the colors are fairly recent and largely a result of media depictions of electoral maps. It is not an official choice by the party.
https://www.tampabay.com/things-to-do/visualarts/the-origins...
I'm also seeing a variety of results saying that prior to that, the incumbent party was typically shown as blue on graphics, and the challenging party was red. In 2000, those colors lined up with the current party associations (Gore being a dem like Clinton), and that election cycle was a publicized enough election that the colors stuck to the parties.
The idea of colour-coding the parties at all didn't really become widespread until 1980, and the exact colours in use weren't standard until the aftermath of the 2000 election - ABC had initially used yellow for Republicans, and even as late as 1996 The Washington Post, Time, and NBC were all still using blue for Republicans and red for Democrats, in line with the colour schemes of most other nations.
Yes, much of that legislation is probably unconstitutional, but there is still a very real possibility of local law enforcement arresting someone who's violating these laws by simply walking down the street or visiting relatives.
I don't doubt that some of the broad brush legislation is at odds with many conservative individual's beliefs and intents for it, but the legislation being proposed and passed at a local and state level is quite concerning. It's a bit hard _not_ to see it as an attack.
This seem reasonable to me, and even if its not reasonable, it is hardly "going after trans people".
What defines "drag"? As that legislation is currently written, it can be interpreted to be someone simply appearing in public.
That aside, though, I don't see how banning things like drag queen storytime (which has happened locally here) are somehow a ban on sexualized events. How is that sexualized?
"'Adult cabaret performance' means a performance in a location other than an adult cabaret that features topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest, or similar entertainers, regardless of whether or not performed for consideration
(1) It is an offense for a person to engage in an adult cabaret performance: (A) On public property; or (B) In a location where the adult cabaret performance could be viewed by a person who is not an adult."
so this is not a ban on drag queen story hour: it is expressly a ban on sexual performances on public property or in front of minors. Now, if a drag queen story hour became sexualized, it could be criminal. With this language though, I seems to me that it would not criminalize a drag queen story hour where the participants were modestly dressed and did not do anything sexual in nature.
This legislation does not allow the possibility of someone being arrested for just being trans in public - It is explicitly banning performances.
Walking down the street whistling a classic rock tune like "fat bottom girls"? Arguably fits that description. Also, a "performance" can simply be appearing in public without directly performing anything.
This sort of vage language in laws gives a lot of leeway for very selective enforcement.
It's the language of any law that should be evaluated. The language of these is problematic.
We only have so much ability to classify things in English. Personally, I do not think it is appropriate for children to be present at sexualized drag shows. I believe that it is right to have laws that prevent this. I cannot think of any language better than what was in that bill to implement this.
It's absurd disinformation to paint all pornography this way. For only the most obvious example, please explain in detail how porn studios only featuring men do this?
To be clear, this is what (many) progressives call policies like "making it illegal to mutilate the genitals of children," or "keeping men out of women's prisons."
Some parts of the right-wing social agenda (abortion restrictions, for example) are broadly unpopular. But protecting people from the gender cult is a winning issue politically.
I guess we should get used to a future where porn is freely available to everyone, at every age, because it doesn't appear to be slowing down.
I have not heard of this consensus. Where can I find out about it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: I can’t delete for some reason (a certain amount of time has passed prob).
Maybe these things just aren't compatible.
Choose local organic porn.
There have been attempts in Europe:
- https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-porn-ban-digital-economy-... - https://www.wired.co.uk/article/germany-porn-laws-age-checks
And its quite related to other pushes for age verification for social media services, as Utah and states like California have proposed:
- https://www.axios.com/2022/09/16/california-law-websites-chi...
Governments regardless of political affiliation and motivation seem intent on age verification, and it's easy to see where this could lead to, for better or worse, a less anonymous and more bureaucratically gated internet going forward. Whether that's good or not is the discussion we should be having.
Not saying it’s a good idea, that feels ripe for abuse if you can more or less identify minors just by looking at their requests… (or via JS)
Then again, a 1 cent credit card validation charge isn't going to stop any kids from using the magic digits printed on their parents' cards so that system probably wouldn't hold up.
It seems to be that blocking Utah is a strategic PR move to try and make these kinds of laws unpopular. Lets blame the weirdo Mormons trying to pass strange laws. Nevermind these laws are starting to pop up around the world.
Good job Utah!
Also, during prohibition it was more efficient to smuggle stronger alcoholic drinks due to the fact that a bottle of whiskey can hold more standard drinks than a bottle of beer (30 ml whiskey ~ 285 ml beer). From what I red in Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream [1], this seemed to contribute to spirits becoming more available than lighter alcoholic beverages.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_Scream
There are clearly more factors at play than what the law says. What do you believe will happen if you drink alcohol in secret, out of range of the eyes of the State? Muslims believe this will still have consequences in afterlife. Atheists don't. Many Christians believe they'll be saved and forgiven by God as long as they are Christian.
> A 2012 study suggested that belief in hell decreases crime rates, while belief in heaven increases them, and indicated that these correlations were stronger than other correlates like national wealth or income inequality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_correlations_of_cr...
It's free to drink here, but drugs are banned. Only a very small minority drinks alcohol in my region, I have no relatives I know of that ever drank. Drugs/weed/marijuana are horrible things no one ever wants in my entire social circle, I don't think I have ever seen a user of such substances in my entire life IRL. Western and some coastal cities drink more and there's more drug activity too (and they're less religious too).
This is eventually going to hit even Hacker News if the law is actually effective. Is HN going to jump through the hoops of complying with the law or just block Utah?
EDIT: i am told this is due to a specific law in utah and has nothing to do with the numerous well respected and certainly not crackpot theorists I subscribe to.
It’s a conspiracy that I could probably buy into.
I support this law on its face, but I also don't have an issue with laws like this keeping those that might not successfully integrate into the existing culture of Utah from moving here. I imagine there are others that probably think like me.
Nno no no bros, not like that. (I'll show myself out.)
What are you even trying to say? Is that not how it works currently? Freaking chud-brains lol.
If you don't like racism or porn sites don't go to them.
Either make an intelligent argument or hush.
But isn't that all the more reason to research this and educate people in this? So that adults can provide context and background? And to learn which kind of pornography is more dangerous than others in this? So that, with knowledge kids can be shielded from the stuff that's bad from them, and help understand the stuff that isn't?
Such a book would help? Thanks, but I'll pass.
This falls into the common refrain about "what do we do with kids who don't have responsible parents?"
I'm not sure just letting the chips fall where they may when it comes to kids who got a shit roll of the dice when it comes to parents is a great societal solution.
It's just not possible to address this issue without there being an intersection of how adults also access these adult things. A lot of other access controls in society are more reasonable than any proposal that people have come up with in this thread to restrict online pornography access to minors. This is why we place the burden on parents.
I think the danger is people revert to their intuition about what is risky, rather than defining it by an objective measure.
So ultimately, policy judgments with regards to increasing access controls are going to be dependent on intuition, one way or another, and individuals' political philosophies. I personally don't think there's any case where I think legislation like this is appropriate, though. If it were, it would be overwhelmingly obvious that it is. Clearly Utahan legislators think differently.
I’m always a little leery when someone says something like
”I personally don't think there's any case where I think legislation like this is appropriate”
It usually means either someone’s mind is closed to considering new information (I.e., they have a dogmatic position) or their mental model isn’t open to nuance (I.e., they have dichotomous thinking)
This is a contentious issue. There's no consensus on whether or not use of pornography is harmful. Suppose there was consensus. To what degree is it harmful and is it harmful enough to legislate against it?
There's a very low chance that it'd pass that threshold for me, given that I generally prefer people be allowed to make choices over what they do with their body when it doesn't meaningfully harm others.
I think a lot of the lack of consensus is due to an unclear definition of what constitutes "pornography". This makes it easy for bad-faith actors to muddle the issue.
>given that I generally prefer people be allowed to make choices over what they do with their body when it doesn't meaningfully harm others.
I generally agree when it comes to adults, but the crux of this discussion is risk to children. Do you extend this same logic to minors? If your stance is that it's up to the parents, do you think there should be safeguards for kids with "bad" parents? If so, what would that look like to you?
[0] https://files.pushshift.io/reddit/submissions/
How do you propose we do that ethically?
There are many researches done and still being done on how addictive drugs are, or on the negative (or positive) effects of drugs. Eventhough they are both illegal and often rather dangerous. You don't need to feed a healthy 15 year/old a daily near overdose of cocaïne to learn about the effects of cocaïne on a young persons' brains.
> I feel like in our society we're always beta testing everything before researching its effects, shouldn't we research the effects of internet pornography in kids before allowing them unlimited access to it?
Problem with self selection (identify kids who decided to watch porn in the past, and compare with those that didn't) probably will not be that huge, when the people are only outraged about "kids" self selecting to watch porn.
Is that a rhethorical question? People of all ages capable of using it already have mostly unlimited access to the internet (and thus to porn). Sans parents understanding the internet more these days, and trying to set limits and failing.
Question should be whether somebody should do research before trying to limit access state/country wide in various ways. Ie. bigotry vs some informed decision making.
In my own anecdotal experience I’d say it definitely can be dangerous and depends on a variety of factors, a key one IMO being what kind of pornography we’re even talking about.
In my youth we discovered a friends dad nudie mag stash. Lots of glamour photography of topless women, some full nudity too but always pretty tame all things considered. I don’t think it had a negative effect on me. But the kind of porn available (and popular) on the internet is not that. From talking to a friends much younger brother I know they all have access to it and it’s led to some weird perceptions about what sex is, should be, etc. It’s rough, it’s often degrading, it’s almost exclusively focused on male satisfaction. It’s much more about one person’s power over another then snore any kind of intimacy.
The solution to all of this is, as always, parental and school sex education to ensure kids are learning the right things. But as a society we’re kind of terrified of that.
I highly doubt this, because it's both important and relevant. 16y/o will consume pornography. I know I did, and I was 16 way before internet. Young adults will have had exposure before engaging in actual sex. This is important because it might be problematic. Because it changes behavior. But also because the right nudges, education and context probably make the difference between this growing into problematic behavior or healthy, normal, human behavior.
I know this is a difference between Europe and the US. Where the US (or any society under pressure of religious extremists, really) tries to simply forbid such research or knowledge. And hope (and pray) that by not knowing how this is shaping generations, it might simply go away. I'm pretty sure it won't just go away by praying hard and forbidding research. I'm pretty sure academics in this area know this very well too.
Medical ethics practices in the U.S. are actually very advanced and restrictive. I cannot imagine an IRB ever approving showing minors pornography especially given that there is a reasonable expectation of harm and essentially no expectation of benefit.
Beyond how strict IRB/REB boards are in general, there are also additional federal requirements that must be satisfied when submitting a study proposal on children including surveys and not just interventions. In the US these are the pathways:
Section 404 requires that research poses no more than minimal risk. As the intervention itself is a federal crime this is not satisfied.
Section 405 allows for more than minimal risk if the anticipated benefit for the study subject justifies the risk. There is no individual benefit to the minor for watching pornography.
Section 406 requires that the risk is "commensurate with the subjects expected or actual psychological and social situations" which is hard to argue is expected when it is illegal to begin with. It also requires that the intervention is "likely to yield generalizable knowledge about the subjects’ disorder or condition which is of vital importance for the understanding or amelioration of the subjects’ disorder or condition", hard to argue that answering whether children viewing obscenity is addictive provides knowledge that is vitally important when there is no clear reason why children should be exposed to pornography.
If an IRB cannot satisfy sections 404-406 the only other way to get such a study approved is section 407 which requires direct approval from the Secretary of Health and Human Services if the "research presents a reasonable opportunity to understand, prevent, or alleviate a serious problem affecting children’s health or welfare, and, in addition, determines that the research will be conducted in accordance with sound ethical principles and that adequate provisions are made for soliciting the assent of children and permission of their parents or guardians". It is impossible that this would be satisfied as children NOT watching pornography (the alternative treatment/status quo) is hardly a problem let alone a serious one.
This has nothing to do with religious justifications but is due to very reasonable and heightened ethics requirements when conducting research on children, be it pornography or a new medication. Canada is essentially the same and I can't speak to Europe but I imagine most countries have similar requirements regarding to needing to demonstrate likely benefit to research subjects or contribute to understanding of a disease (which is nonexistent in paediatrics).
Every researcher thinks their question is relevant and important and that's why we have these rules in place.
https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/regulations/...
Rather I think you'd take a large sample of adults at a given age range, interview them as to the earliest age they recall consuming pornography, and compare it with their life outcomes: income, alcohol addiction, educational achievement, etc. Of course you're only measuring a correlation, but at least you'll be able to get your study funded. And naturally such studies have been done, although I suspect many are agenda driven:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6571756/
https://wchh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/tre.79...
(Many many more results in a casual web search)
This is why random assignment is the gold standard. With a large enough sample size random assignment will account for all confounds. Here, we can only measure likely confounds and attempt to 'account for' them with statistics. All of these introduces more noise and generally reduces the validity of the study.
In general, I dismiss all scientific studies with these looking back questionnaires as little more than well documented hunches.
I was, however, questioning whether minors consuming pornography is (always, and/or provably) bad.
No, I think there are things young minds should be shielded from some things to avoid future mental developmental consequences.
You know how movie directors make a movie and in their mind a given movie is supposed to be propaganda against something, but for people lacking this cultivated framework it's a celebration of doing the wrong thing? Take a movie about how being a gangster is bad --but for many moviegoers it's an invitation to the "glamorous" life or power, respect and success...
GP: is X actually harmful?
You: a specific subset of X is, as well as entirely unrelated topic Y, don't you think? Clearly this should be prohibited
I think he was asking (and rightly so) what the scientific evidence says, not what someone's opinion is.
turning in to a pathetic, obese lech who sits at home alone blowing another paycheck on Onlyfans, clinging to the misguided notion that women want anal on the first date?
and even worse, when real life doesn't line up with six-minute videos, the even worse outcome of woman-hating manifests
The question then becomes what should be classified as pornography. Justice Stewart famously said "I know it when I see it". My definition is close: "pornography is that which harms my soul". That means that what is porn will differ for different people and probably by age as well.
I believe they were asking for research or something measurable, not platitudes.
It creates a space for people to explore and normalise their distressing sexual interests without questioning the root causes.
Producers will often intentionally seek out vulnerable young women and groom them with promises of fame and riches, only for them to become reliant on painkillers and other drugs to cope with the reality of it.
It creates a market for the abuse of trafficking victims. Most sites don't require verification of consent and most users don't care.
It teaches men to objectify their partners and to see them as something to be shared. There is a huge market now for non consensual revenge pornography. Reddit has seen multiple subreddiys dedicated to non-consensual intimate media.
It provides a safe space for people to express racist, misogynistic and otherwise antisocial viewpoints.
PornHub in its front page today has videos of stimulated assaults and incest. For young viewers it gives them the idea that it's normal to be sexually interested in these things.
I'm not religious. I'm sex positive and believe in being open with children about the realities of life. Pornography stole years of my life, warped my views of relationships and prevented me from reflecting seriously on my own traumas.
What point are you making in relation to the topic at hand?
Are cars or guns regulated because of addiction? No. So GP compared porn to sugar, which is considered addictive and has probably more concrete evidence of self-harm than porn. I think the comparison is apt? Certainly fairer than comparing porn to driving a car or gun possession, which is sort of absurd.
But in terms of addiction potential alone Utah already has precedent in legislating for that. Example: Utah doesn't allow minors to purchase alcohol because of its addictive nature.
Some of the aspects of the porn market are not great, but they should be investigated by the relevant authorities. Hiding them from only certain people won't make them go away.
The reward of lotto tickets is a function of cost with the current approach, but that’s the wrong point to get wrapped around the axle. Consider instead that if the lotto reward is funded by taxes. The point is the risk/reward profile gets skewed.
As an aside, I’m pretty sure you can find evidence that excessive gambling is a net negative.
Lastly, I’m not sure you made any case that pornography is relatively safe.
I assume no - it's just a ban on sinful behavior.
Citation needed. Porn addiction doesn't exist [0].
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/porn-addiction
Pornography Addiction as a unique pathology is still not recognised but the issue is still young. We can see that it's an issue in that more than half of US divorce cases mention compulsive pornography usage. [2]
You can read more about Pornography Addiction and what I mean by that over at Wikipedia. [3]
You can see support groups for self-identifying addicts in places like Reddit. [4][5]
Furthermore, mutual support groups for partners of addicts. [6]
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_sexual_behaviour_...
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10
2: https://s3.amazonaws.com/thf_media/2010/pdf/ManningTST.pdf
3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_addiction
4: https://old.reddit.com/r/PornAddiction/
5: https://old.reddit.com/r/pornfree/
6: https://old.reddit.com/r/loveafterporn/
[5] Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/2018...
The issue with defining it as an addiction is more of a question of separating from other compulsive issues than not recognising the compulsive issues of the thing itself.
Yes, I understand there's a difference between compulsion and addiction but I'd expect the users of Hacker News to understand enough about how the dopamine system works to see the relationship between the two.
With all due respect, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that you destroyed a large part of your life? It seems like you're blaming porn, as if everyone who is exposed to it becomes addicted. Is it like heroin? Or is it more like alcohol, where many people consume it without becoming addicted, but a few people ruin their lives over it?
It's more like a TV addiction or a video game addiction where the over consumption is a coping mechanism for other things that are wrong in your life.
Hence 'porn addiction' not really existing.
Behavioral addictions are acknowledged in DSM-5 although this does not extend to compulsive sexual behavior at this time due to insufficient (yet growing) evidence to suggest similar neurophysiological mechanisms for a clinical textbook to label it as 'addiction' [0][2].
A recent review article breaks down the differences from gambling which is considered a behavioral addiction in DSM-5[1] and had not been in prior editions.
Whether or not CSB/hypersexuality is an 'addiction' in the medical sense is controversial amongst medical experts and essentially interchangeable with what a layperson considers to be an addiction and it is therefore very reasonable especially noting the overlap of salience, conflict and relapse[1].
Although there is insufficient evidence at this time to conclude either way whether diminished satisfaction has a similar mechanism to tolerance or lack of control has a similar mechanism to withdrawal there is also no strong evidence to support the argument that CSB is not an addiction and consequently they are currently treated as separate entities.
The pertinence of this is to not conflate conflicting/controversial expert opinion with generally regarded truth and therefore stating that parent is 'wrong' for believing it is addiction when many experts share the same opinion[3].
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/add.13297
[1] https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2006/11/2/article-p166....
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4677151/
[3] https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2006/11/2/article-p210....
Porn addiction has not been classified as an addiction in and of itself because researchers are unsure that it is its own addiction, or a subset of other sexual related addictions and disorders. So it is highly likely that porn is addictive, but medical professionals are hesitant to declare "porn addiction" as a diagnosis without seeing if it is separated from other problematic sexual behaviors.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6352245/
> researchers are unsure that it is its own addiction
Yes. Indeed, this is the reason experts object to the term “porn addiction”. Some “addicts” might be consuming a lot of porn, but that doesn't mean that porn is addictive --- just like how alcoholics use bottles a lot, but bottles are not addictive.
I've been addicted to pornography myself and spoken with many men who say the same, as well as many women who have had their relationships and mental health destroyed by being partnered with people like myself.
The current state of research and recognition is not always reflective of reality. I'd hope that anyone familiar with the history of science could accept that.
I'll take peer reviewed research over anecdotal data any day of the week.
Notably this study predated the addition of compulsive sexual behavior disorder to ICD-11 and was neither validated nor accepted as the correct model (hence excessive use of 'proposed' and 'preliminary'). You may also notice there are seven separate commentaries in response to this study with an eighth by the original authors in which they acknowledge the several limitations of their proposed model[1] and make the following statement:
"Rather than present an argument against CSBD, it is our intention and belief that our model of PPMI adds needed nuance to ensure the accurate use of the CSBD diagnosis."
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-018-1248-x
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-1406-9
Opiates are insanely physically addictive and you can easily accidentally become addicted to them using them as prescribed, hence all the lawsuits.
Well lucky for you, I didn't make that claim!
I began with personal opinion and then removed everything I felt wouldn't stand to scrutiny, even if I do still believe it.
I chose not to include sources immediately because that would have required a great deal of upfront effort on my behalf, which I wasn't willing to spend since this is also a place where I come to find relaxation as well as intellectual stimulation.
If there are any particular points you're interested in discussing I'll be glad to share the basis for my belief and go into discussion.
If it's all of them then that still goes but it may be a week before I get back to you.
What about a gentle and loving uncle molesting a child in a way not much different from playful wrestling? Wrestling is fine, but we all recognize the molestation is incredibly harmful, even in this situation (because the harm isn’t the violence of it, it’s the actual sex itself).
This is just common sense. Of course sexualizing (sexually activating) children (which porn does) at a young age is harmful. It’s probably very harmful to adults too in large doses like porn addiction.
I think you have not seen the average porn online these days. Its way, way more extreme than this.
Whenever I see people argue that porn is just like sex they always turn out to be minors or young adults who have only ever experienced porn and not intimate relationships.
After being to strip clubs just twice in my life, and with both of those being very different experiences, I have to agree with you. Comparing it to porn (let alone an actual intimate relationship) is like comparing watching fast & furious movies to average driving experiences. While F&F movies are technically more wild, the real life experience of actual driving (even if it is technically waaay more mild than in the movies) is way more stressful/impactful/etc, to the point where even making the comparison feels ridiculous.
That manifested in unexpected ways for men recovering from porn-induced ED. The older men - those who hadn't grown up with high-speed internet porn - recovered significantly faster than the younger men.
My school also showed us Holocaust documentary footage around the same age. People getting shot in the head, piles and piles of dead bodies, etc. That plus gory movies like Hostel and scenes where people are chopped up and stuffed into a suitcase fucked me up WAY more than any of the porn I happened to come across at that age.
(Anyway, I'm not for the internet wide parental lock. Just noting that things are different than in the past, with ease and breadth of access.)
It has been proven, scientifically, that making a distinction between soft- and harddrugs help in fighting drug abuse, death and misery. It's, for example, what the Dutch policy is based on.
By making a clear distinction, and decriminalizing it, you can educate people on it. You can say "this is very bad, that is dangerous and that there is merely unhealthy".
I'm sure a lesson can be drawn tlfor porn there too. By criminalizing, or forbidding it all, blanket, you loose all opportunity to teach about what is normal and what isn't. You just get one big pile, where disturbing and terrible stuff is just as (in) accessible as the stuff that's fun, pleasant or even educational.
The Left has been increasingly concerned about the abusive acts becoming common in pornography and the seemingly pervasive use of underage or barely-of-age women with consent extremely sketchy or not present at all.
The Right has been increasingly concerned about how the pervasive presence of pornography encourages people to focus on that for their needs rather than pursuing real-life relationships and obsess over extreme acts that very few real partners are actually willing to do.
This is all exacerbated by internet startup tendencies, where maximizing "engagement" at all costs is the priority. It's in their incentives to maximize most of the bad effects that everyone is concerned about.
It's not clear exactly how bad everything is or that this particular thing is the right way to address it. But clearly enough people are concerned about it and aren't willing to accept endless delaying tactics around insisting that you can't do any particular thing about it because it can't be proved to be perfect.
In short…I’m not getting the kind of perspective expanding value I often find on HN from this discussion. Just a lot of back and forth from people exchanging the opinions they already had before opening the parent article.
I would instinctively agree that it's unhealthy for minors to have unchecked access to pornography but on the other hand I don't see how we could effectively address that problem societally without any kind of objective understanding of it. Has the exchange of unqualified personal opinions ever resulted in effective political policy, especially policy meant to manage a vice? That didn't work well for Prohibition or the War on Drugs.
Having said that, I am deeply suspicious of any move to "protect the children" because it's always used as a cover for a move toward authoritarianism.
There is actually a long dark history of adults abusing children by exposing/exploiting them in regards to such topics. It was rife in Germany post WW2 in certain communities, currently a huge issue in Pakistan. Child trafficking on an absolute basis is higher now than it has been.
That’s just to say, people like who you are asking to seek help are numerous and unchecked behavior in this area has a dark history in humanity.
Call me old fashioned.
Call me small minded.
But watching a woman getting chocked while DPed in her anus while a half dozen men ejaculate on her is not the type of extra-curricular activity [1] I want my soon to be teenaged daughters' boyfriends interested in.
Im just... overprotective I guess.
[1] If anyone calls me out for knowing what's on the front page of all of these smut sites, guess what? We all know what's on those sites!
The problem isn’t the sex. The problem is the violence.
Seems like a whole lot of people were deeply hurt by feet.
Porn, being a fantasy, rarely shows the prep-work required to do something properly. This is what I personally worry about when it comes to setting the wrong expectations in kids who haven't had that whole "this isn't representative of real sex" context properly set, leaving them thinking they can reproduce what's happening on-screen without realizing the background work required...
Yet Shibari is viewed as an art form because it's much more stylish.
But people really into this kind of stuff are also very much into consent and safe practices. Is there really a wave of accidental chokings?
School shootings on the other hand... Maybe we should look at violent movies first?
All this content was available when I was a teenager and my friends watched it. Those who actually follow through with having group activities quickly find out that it's way different than porn and not really all that enjoyable anyway.
And the ones that do are really and truly into it. Yes it happens, it's not my kind of thing either but I know some people that love it.
What helps more is real sex ed. Explaining what sex is about, how to respect a partner, about safety. Rather than really easily circumventable bans. I got good sex ed when I was young in the Netherlands and I turned out fine and very respectful to women just like my peers despite having access to porn. The problem are religious schools not wanting to do serious sex ed. So the kids only have porn to go by.
Download the latest dating app - Feeld - and peruse for yourself what women explicitly state that they are looking for when the shame for stating so is removed/reduced.
So, assuming porn has any effect at all, it's possible highly available internet porn is decreasing the amount of sex kids are having.
The sexual violence trend on page 56 is concerning however it looks like the CDC has not been tracking that question as long either (only 4 year trend instead of 10+ like other categories).
Another concerning thing to me is the decreasing condom use, especially with current abortion trends. If we think porn drives behavior, maybe porn actors should be mandated to use condoms.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/yrbs_data-sum... [Page 14 (17 pdf)]
If this is consensual, it actually sounds rather fun. But it's interesting that the example is simply an amalgamation of relatively common things:
* Choking is a common kink * Anal sex is a common sex act * Group sex is at least a common fantasy; I don't know how common double anal penetration is outside porn though * Providing and receiving facials is also quite common as an alternative to spitting.
All of the acts are relatively innocuous on their own, but the combination is portrayed to be almost demonic :)
> but the bulk of the public support for these measures isn’t because people want government surveillance
Does not mean the majority of the public supports those measures, though perhaps those who do support those measures do so because of reasons other than explicitly wanting the government to surveil them.
I don't think you are implying that the majority of the public supports those measures but I did want to make it clear that this was still an open question.
The issue is that it's _their_ job to look out for their children.
We don't force all beds to have "walls", and give adults the keys to lower them if they show proof of age. Parents are supposed to buy _cribs_ for their children.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/temecia-rodney-mila-jackson-ret...
It is completely unnecessary to state the child's ethnicity to make this point which is entirely irrelevant to the argument you are attempting to make.
Hacker News is filled with technical people. However, think about all the workers who are not tech workers who have families. The burden of knowledge for these parents to setup home networks and devices that provide content filtering, monitoring, and alerting is way too high.
Access to pornography ends up being an economic negative externality caused by the increased access to the internet, and we haven't really figured out how to handle the cost.
Perhaps, but society seems to be increasingly creating hostile environments for parents and their children. Immediate and constant access to unlimited pornography is the tip of the iceberg. Social media has been shown to be highly toxic to young adults. Most digital content, be it social media, video games, etc is being explicitly designed to addict users, especially children. Education is crumbling. Food is loaded with artificial sweeteners and additives making them addictive and unhealthy. Local communities and support have decayed. And all the while the average income in comparison to inflation has cratered, making it more difficult for parents to actually spend time away from work to actually parent.
The ability of parents to raise healthy, well adjusted children has gotten much more difficult in recent decades, largely due the pursuit of profit over human well-being. You can disagree with individual laws, but you should not simply bury your head in the sand and respond to every attempt to help parents out with “just do your job and parent!”
This would be far less onerous since it’s already a feature they have and it protects privacy.
Porn is absolutely fine for kids to watch as long as the parents properly contextualize it. The issue is that somehow societally accepted that its taboo to talk to your kid about sex at an early age, and plenty of otherwise normal parents are embarrassed to do it.
It works very well in Netherlands, where teens end up having much healthier relationships, fewer sexual partners, and less unwanted pregnancies.
At some point later in the years, the kid will probably stumble onto some hardcore porn, but if you contextualize it properly, he/she will understand that its not how real relationships work.
In the same way, its ok (and probably good) if your teen tries weed/alcohol under your supervision, with the proper education around it, but you aren't going to give your kid like a heroin injection just because he/she is curious. But the fact that you establish trust and educate your kid about drugs that he/she will certainly come across is the more important bit about them staying away from harder drugs. Instead of outright ban, and then kid discovering how good weed makes them feel, and then going out and trying harder drugs.
Like I shouldn't have to explain this basic concepts to people. Really makes me worry about all the parents raising their kids these days.
Well the main article is about PornHub which is a hardcore pornography site, so...
I have no problem with sex-Ed for kids
I'm sure none of my school peers thought bukkake sessions were actually normal behavior even though they would have been aware of them.
Certainly not rational thinking, people aren't discussing specific psychological research at mass. The instant ad hominem attack instead of rational discussion is highly indicative of ideological underpinning.
United States certainly and unfortunately has a strong religious background. Quite a few remnants of it are in peoples minds without it realizing it. For example, lot of people would consider it rude not to say "Bless you" when someone sneezes, which is 100% religious origin.
You're accusing them of lacking rational thinking and leaping to personal attacks while doing the same.
Many of the users of this site are not from the US and many live in some of the world's most secular societies.
In a world where sexual assault is so common I think we need to seriously reconsider what we're consuming and what we're normalising by calling this stuff harmless.
And I don't get what you're suggesting in saying hiding stuff doesn't work. Like, I like to enjoy a bit of LSD sometimes but I definitely keep that out of reach of children.
There are some notable differences though. If I play a violent video game then no one is actually being shot.
If I watch a woman being choked and ejaculated on by 20 men calling her a worthless slut whore in a porno then I'm watching that genuinely happening.
It's more akin to letting children watch videos from actual warzones. Even as an adult I find beheading videos to be disturbing.
Also, your subsequent argument is flawed. For the vast majority of popular porn, an actress in a scene where she is "abused" is doing so consensually. Part of having healthy romantic relationships in life is being able to navigate the aspect of consent. For example, a girl may have different standards for sexual intercourse when it comes to having a one night stand, where she may engage in kink or a fetish, versus a long term relationship where she may not want to do that. If you are unable to contextualize this, this means that your parents did a poor job of educating you about sexuality, which further reinforces my argument.
This absolutely does not equate to ISIS beheading videos, where the people being beheaded are most likely not consenting to it.
If I see an actress in a movie being shot, she's not actually being shot. If I see an actress in a porn movie being choked, she's actually being choked. That's not a question of consent, it's a question of content.
But on that note, have you ever worked a shitty or degrading job and had to do things you found painful because you couldn't afford to say no? I have. It's painful to go through. I can't imagine coupling that with the complex layers of human sexuality.
You're saying it doesn't equate because of consent but that's not the aspect I was equating.
Take a look at the front page of PornHub now. There's a video on there showing a man flashing strangers. Yes, they must be actors, but it's filmed in a way that suggests they're not. There's absolutely nothing there that would promote the idea of consent in the mind of a young viewer.
Yes, maybe parents could watch those videos and explain that it's normal to fantasise and play-act about assault. But I'd hope that at the same time we, as adults, would speak with qualified therapists and try to ascertain the roots of our attraction to forcing our genitals onto unsuspecting women.
Final point: PornHub has only required verification from uploaders since relatively recently, after dozens of women took them to court for hosting their rape videos and after it was widely publicised that there was a good deal of underage rape videos on there. There are still other popular sites such as chatpic.org or videos that happily allow abuse content to circulate without any concern for consent. That's only what's on the open web.
Indeed I would not.
I think it does come down to a moral issue then, which is related both to the core messages communicated and to the audience.
In terms of violent media I can think of 3 ways of categorising it: A) media with a moral message abut the use of violence (self defence, save the innocent) B) purely whimsical (something like Doom) and C) explicitly brutal material.
Of those three only the first two have popular reach. It's easy for children to understand and it provides a structure for parents to use to educate their youngsters.
When I compare that to pornography I feel that the stuff that would fall into category C is what the norm is, what's popular on the major channels. Therfore it takes on a difference socially for me.
We need way way better education on what healthy sex looks like and why respect for women is important. But I honestly believe that we've passed a sort of critical point and do therefore support the introduction of age based restrictions.
It educates one on the depths of human depravity. It is good to ensure the little ones eventually become aware of the shit we have to deal with. Hiding it helps no one.
Do you hide it for their first few years or do you begin as soon as they can grasp the content of the videos?
Just watching, or even enacting (as in violent games), violence doesn't make them violent beings. Why would this other outlet lead to more real-world sexual assault? I understand why one might think it a priori (without having evidence either way), but we do have evidence: the reality we live in where, to my knowledge, it hasn't gotten more common despite porn having become 100x easier to get by, as well as the research on how virtual violence enactment relates to real-world violent behaviour.
There's a world of difference between stimulated violence in a Mortal Kombat movie and a video of Taliban members playing football with a human head.
In terms of increase with the availability of pornography, take a look at this chart: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible...
You can see that the number of rape reports have almost doubled since the invention of web pornography.
I think you should consider the possibility that your argument was deficient instead of making assumptions based on tropes. Communities are not monolithic and HN is less monolithic than most. For example, I differ strongly from you in not believing in censorship in the name of protecting youth, but I also differ from a lot of people here in saying that tech companies have massively failed to deal with the distribution of CSAM.
This is the worst case of cherry picking data I've seen in a long time. First, if your supposition is true then why would the number have dropped with the rise of internet pornography from the late 90s all the way through 2012? Second, what's the per-capita rate instead of absolute number? Third, what other confounding factors are there (did the reporting method stay the same)? This chart tells me nothing except that something weird happened after 2012 and that's it.
There's evidence that porn reduces the rate of sexual assaults [0].
[0] Evidence Mounts: More Porn, Less Sexual Assault. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/all-about-sex/2016...
[0] Spurious Correlations. https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
In the same way video games are very addictive because it gives you a sense of accomplishment when you have no mental tools to go out and improve your situation in life.
In the same way weed is addictive when you have no mental tools to face hardships in your life and you would rather escape into a care free state of mind.
Nothing to do with the things at hand, everything to do with mental conditioning from an early age, a.k.a upbringing, a.k.a parenting.
I'm sure some people get addicted but people with talent for it can get addicted to pretty much anything
Personal observation: most people just do fine if they are exposed to porn as kids. In fact they are more well-rounded, and intellectually mature compared to their peers who were never exposed to those things early on, just like all other topics.
It's super effective. Not perfect, but "hiding stuff from kids" has excellent ROI—relatively easy, and damn effective. Ask any parent, we do it all the time, and if it didn't work, we'd stop.
What is dangerous is social media, which should be banned < 21.
I'm sex positive and I believe in being open with children about the realities of life but the dangers of pornography are real.
This is a strong claim - please provide a source. I think it may be true, but is it?
And YourBrainOnPorn gathered together some of the literature about escalation: https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/nl/relevant-research-and-art...
> Pornography addiction is the popular but unscientific[5] application of an addiction model to the use of pornography.
[5] Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/2018...
See this comment about the difficulty of getting pornography addiction recognised in the DSM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35790536
It's more of an issue of classifying it separately from other sexual disorders than recognising the addictive potential of pornography itself.
I myself have been addicted to pornography so I understand the reality of it intimately. I have been in groups with other men who are distraught with their lack of control. I have spoken to countless women whose relationships have been destroyed by this.
I can point you towards some large support groups online if you'd like to inform the men who are suffering that their issue is not scientifically recognised.
By the way, did you have anything to say about the other point I made? It wasn't clear which point the grandparent was finding questionable.
If someone says "water is extremely common in the solar system", I'd expect maybe two in three planets to have it. Half at minimum.
Makes me think about gambling. Most people either don't do any or do it in normal proportions. For those that do have trouble, as this argument is about addiction after all, there's a self-imposed timeout mechanism that gets centrally registered so that any gambling place will enforce the timeout on this person. I don't know how much it helps, and it also goes into having to identify users to avoid circumventing even a self-imposed safeguard, but it might be an industry to compare against and draw research from (I haven't seen it mentioned yet in the greater thread).
But just like binge-drinking and narcotics, parents and kids should have conversations and work together to build healthy ideas of sexuality. It shouldn't be a government decree thing, because that seemingly takes the responsibility off parents. But we all know a decree won't work, kids will find a way, so it will return to being the parents' problem.
I don't know how the US handles this, but online gambling is a pretty good model for this. You need to be of a certain age, verified with a government ID (here in Denmark at least) and if you have a gambling problem, you can add yourself to a list the ensures that you're blocked on all gambling sites (and casinos).
Phub is also a legitimate business that has commercial advertising interests in the US, so they're incentivized to play nice. There are about a million other websites that aren't based in North America, contain only pirated material, and don't care about what laws are applicable where.
Given how poorly they've behaved so far, I don't agree that they're incentivized to play nice.
All the other sites? Not so much.
The point of the US is to let the states self-regulate things like this.
And does this put a curb on explicit R rated movies that has nudity and acts of sex? Is it just the penetration shots that are "dangerous"? Also, it doesn't even touch on if ultra violent content strewn around, well, EVERYWHERE isn't "dangerous"? Where is the state bans on violence in movies and TV (they've already tried with video games)? But OMFG, if you dare to show a woman's breast, it's "dangerous".
Give me a break.
It's worth noting that the reactionary response to that (e.g. porn is good and totally healthy and everything bad said about it is fake news) is also nonsense.
What's going on exactly? Which countries?
France and Germany have similar laws, and the UK is about to pass one.
It would be nice if this were true, but it's not.
We used to have shame as a societal mechanism to deal with these issues. It was shameful to be an alcoholic, which was how alcoholism was kept in check. The same way it was shameful in ancient Greece to surrender to your carnal urges.
Shame is disappearing. Our societies are going haywire.
This is far too broad, just because something could be used for evil is not enough to ban it for all children. What about TVs? Candy? Stimulating toys? I think all of these can have negative outcomes when abused, but that isn't enough for me to say all children should not access them.
"[Shame and conformation aren't] the only variable, and it's clearly not the determining factor."
We really need to get back to the good old days – you know the ones – where slavery was legal, women didn't have the right to vote, and homosexuality could be punished with forced sterilization.
Also, you say Europe is more open about nudity, implying that is a good thing, but Asia and the middle east are in many cases more prudish than even the US, so why not look to them or use them as an example? Where's your objective measure for which societies we should admire and emulate?