Summary
Several U.S. states have enacted laws requiring pornography sites, such as PornHub, to implement age verification to prevent minors’ access, prompting the site’s parent company, Aylo, to block access in affected states.
Proponents argue these laws protect children, while critics highlight privacy risks, inefficiencies, and potential censorship.
These measures reflect growing social conservatism, with some advocates aiming to restrict adult content broadly.
While privacy-focused age verification methods exist, regulatory clarity is lacking.
Critics warn these laws may suppress responsible platforms, favoring unregulated alternatives, and escalate broader culture wars around sexuality and LGBTQ+ rights.
Often on 1337x I find nsfw stuff. I wonder if there are people torrenting this stuff
Its about VPN sales.
I’m curious what this graph looks like compared to states with legal weed.
Lol. Montana’s wilding up there. Toke up all you please, but no porn.
I think the most fascinating thing is that of out of all states Idaho seems to be the only one that doesn’t even allow medical use.
(Not that the low THC states are much better… you could probably get similar or better stuff from the gas station/head shop in almost any state after McConnells farm bill pseudo legalized it)
There are thousands of porn sites. Blocking pornhub doesn’t even register. If someone wants to find porn it is no more difficult than it was the day before the ban, it just won’t be pornhub porn.
These states didn’t block pornhub, pornhub blocked these states. Those states passed laws that would require legitimately operated adult sites to check ID at entry and then worry about keeping that information secure against breaches. This is more likely step 1 for those states to taking legal action against websites they deem are “adult oriented” for mentioning Queer people existing and not checking ID first.
The biggest issue here is that (at least in Texas), your ID has to be checked by a specific company.
I didn’t know that… That’s even worse. It is probably a company already setup to share data with Texas officials for the purpose of oppression.
I think this is just step one. Once the porn sites with money stop fighting it then they will go after any search engine that lists porn sites.
If you can’t find it on Google/Bing/Etc. it may as well not even exist for a majority of people.
I welcome the re-emergence of newsgroups again.
It would be funny if it just ended up teaching everyone how to torrent stuff.
They must know that that’s the case. Even if they blocked the entire internet in those states, porn would still be easily accessible. Blocking PornHub is just whacking a single mole in a huge field full of them.
At least they’re wasting some of their time with this limp-dicked bullshit. Better than using it to pursue their broader, more sinister goals.
So no one wants to talk about how maybe we should just be talking to our kids about sexuality? This is just the absence only crowd again. And of course it’s taking the rest of our liberties with it but can we stop framing this has tech was of protecting children here? It’s Trojan horse bullshit.
Yeah. I’m sure it’s awkward, but it’s also necessary. My mom was honest and open about such topics with me and it was really good for me. It meant that had an adult touched me inappropriately as a child I knew what to do and that I could trust my mom to keep me safe and it meant that as I grew older and began experimenting I wasn’t taking undue risks because I knew enough to make reasonably informed decisions.
Teenagers are going to engage in sexual exploration. Some won’t, sure, but most of them are pretty hardwired to want to try and to be willing to break rules to do it. And, given that they’re inexperienced and dealing with a hormonal hurricane some of them will make choices they regret. We can bury our heads in the sand and swear up and down that our kids know better because we told them not to do it, or we can grow the fuck up and accept that little kids need to know how to report a bad touch, elementary schoolers need to know what their body will do in a few years, and teenagers need to know enough to make informed choices when they inevitably experiment
It’s the sex doesn’t exist if we don’t talk about it crowd. Just like they don’t like talking about the gays or the trans or CRT. Talking about any of these things means accommodation and mental effort has to be expended. Can’t have that.
Mad conservative computer scientists: “Yes, using the fear that kids might see porno, we will soon require the implementation of the impossible device: Anonymous age verification! Since no one will be able to implement it, we will ban all pornography off the internet!”
Mad liberal computer scientists: : “Using generative AI, anyone can now produce any porno they want, even offline! And the interface is so easy that even a kid can use it!”
Porn companies: “We will have the computer take a picture of you and analyze your age to grant access.”
Users: Uses generative AI to generate fake pictures to get access to real porn.
User: uses the VPN they had already
It’s there like, 3,000,000 other porn sites people can use? I don’t hover how this is a victory in any form.
don’t even for a second think this is in favour of you.
it’s some weird christian idea that the human must be “purified” and watching porn stops that. it’s about an ideology, not about you or your wellbeing.
“Another method, used in Germany, lets people show their ID card at a post office and get a unique ID to access adult sites. This could potentially be done without logging the person’s identity, but as CNIL points out such systems require much work to set up.”
This exactly what I was thinking of while reading the article. It’s just like going to a bar and getting carded. As long as no info is stored, I would be fine with this if were seriously looking for a solution for the kids
When I got my first smart phone, to access adult media and even Facebook, I needed to go in to a shop and verify my age using ID and they edited my account details, with this phone I had an instantly refunded penny charge on my credit card. There are very simple ways around it, which they apparently aren’t interested in.
Who is “they” in this context.
Honest question I promise. I don’t understand what’s going on…
I don’t know a lot either. By “they” I just mean those who are trying to ban porn.
they keep saying its about trans people but then they keep blocking porn so i don’t know what it is. i think christians and conservatives are stupid as fuck
Every time that a conservative equates the mere existence of trans people with sex, they’re just outing their own kink.
“These people who’ve historically been marginalized to having to do sex work to live authentically and are more likely to be victims of sexusl violence are inherently sex crazed freaks.”
Like, as soon as we could openly do jobs that aren’t sex work we got a reputation as computer programmers. Turns out we’re all multidimensional human beings.
Socially accepted mental illness
it’s mostly because the red hats love trans porn, and hate themselves for loving trans porn, and they just need a little help resisting temptation
Right. “Protecting children”. Meanwhile, lowering the age range for child workers…
“No beating off! You need to save your energy for the night shift.”
https://clockify.me/learn/business-management/minimum-working-age-by-state/
“While privacy-focused age verification methods exist, regulatory clarity is lacking.”
It’s not lacking clarity. Privacy-focused age verification is simply not wanted by big tech and politically (because money from big tech) as they wouldn’t be able to collect and make money with building profiles of what you do online.
There’s no reliable way to verify age without extensive face verification with liveliness checks. A child can easily upload a parent’s or some other adult’s id card photo to get ‘verified’. Also nothing stops kids to explore porn corners of social media (including lemmy) and thousands of porn sites operated not by the Big Porn. Porn is fundamental to internet.
Edit: I purposefully omitted vpn, that being the most trivial solution.
That’s all besides the point however.
If a young kid is motivated by highschool seniors to watch porn, it is s parenting issue. If some adult encourages some child to watch porn as a grooming technique that’s a much more serious case of child abuse. If a teenager is porn addict and doesn’t do anything else, it is a major mental health concern, not a porn concern itself.
It is kind of accepted fact that many late teenagers are familiar with porn and explore it like any other sexual aspects of their life. Whether that’s harmful is upto debate but teenagers/adults do many things harmful everyday and banning everything with law isn’t realistic either. It is not end of the world if a teenager has sex or watches a porn movie. Children have greater dangers in general where they get abused by their relatives, teachers and even by their own parents and are continuously attempted to be programmed not to critically think by the religions.
“it’s for the children” is always a red flag
step
- declare children don’t understand the world
- declare children can’t make reasonable choices
- parents and officials now get to decide what children do or don’t
- have obedient slaves.
Except when it’s Wu-Tang!
Depends on the context. After WW2 a lot of great things were done in favour of future generations, or the children of that time.
In these times hate is being used to divide us while at the same time it’s socially and morally unacceptable to justify certain views, thus they look for pseudo reasons to mask their true reasons, in this case -for the children". Unfortunately we’re also entering a time where the psuedo reasons start becoming obsolete as hate mongering is being accepted.
So i gotta disagree on the always, but it’s true for these times.
classic fascist tactic. there’s a reason half of the 14 words is about children
At the core of the debate is a genuinely thorny technical and legal question: how to verify someone’s age over the internet without exposing them to cyber theft or government surveillance.
Age verification providers are adamant that this is possible.
I agree that it is possible if you can guarantee absolutely zero corruption in the system. Which you cannot.
Proving, in a safe, privacy-friendly way, that you’re able to provide to some third-party website credentials proving that you’re an adult, is very easily doable. Most countries decided against the good version of it, but it is doable.
It does not, however, prove anything regarding the actual user in front of the computer. Let’s remind people that we live in a world where kids have access to their parent’s CC and regularly abuse it online. I doubt “more technical stuff” will prevent them from getting their hand on whatever certificate/token/thingamajig would be used for age check.
Unless we consider “good practice and proper communication”, or, parenting, to be a key point in this. In which case, there’s no need to do any technical implementation at all in the first place.
