You can suck on it when you are a baby, but god forbid you ever take a look at it again before you are married. What's wrong with these people?
Even public nudity laws differ from city to city (e.g. in California), so clearly, people aren't aligned at all on this subject (I'm emphasizing the arbitrary nature here).
Forbid and censor the things you're afraid of educating on.
On a closing note, I do recommend supporting organizations like https://www.aanr.com/ who also provide legal help to citizens in states that'd rather have you wear a burka than show a nipple.
There’s such a strange dichotomy in these conversations.
1. Porn shouldn’t be available to kids and it’s on the vendors legally to ensure that.
2. Porn should be unrestricted, it’s up to parents to do something about it.
What I can’t understand is if the people in camp 2 are so unashamed of the porn advocacy then why is age verification such a big deal?
If it’s not a big deal then verifying your age shouldn’t phase you anymore than verifying your age to buy alcohol. If it is then you know exactly why kids should be kept away from it.
Because when buying alcohol, you can for the most part (outside of online purchases, but even then the courier can check an ID upon delivery hypothetially) verify it fairly easily. With online porn, the scale and complications doing it put a much bigger burden on the providers.
Additionally porn has a much bigger stigma than alcohol, so keeping record of what you watch, especially if you're into something more niche connected to your name can be used to discredit political opponents or even single out certain group due to abuse of power. A good example would be exposing a conservative politician that watches gay porn. Not that would necessarily be a bad thing, but there is no equivalent to this with alcohol - oh you drink tequilla, but you're whole ideology is based on drinking whiskey...
I recently bought age restricted materials online and had to upload a picture of my photo id with a selfie to a 3rd party verifier. Similar to what crypto currency verification goes through.
I think the underlying disagreement/debate is whether or not these initiatives are in good faith. Any implementation of this is going to be imperfect and a motivated person will probably be able to get around this. So the debate, I think, is, if we implement this are we going to incrementally improve it? Or is it just a pretext to point to and say, hey look, this can never work perfectly, so we should ban x, y, and z.
Good faith is insufficient for me and what I would expect are a majority of users (not speaking strictly about porn, social media is coming under scrutiny with similar proposed solutions). Many good faith actors experience data breaches, often from internal attacks.
I think it would be difficult to find a majority of people who support minors having unrestricted access to pornography and shock content. The sticking point seems to be in the implementation details and true intentions of the people behind the initiatives that gives people pause.
Aside from the implications of turning an ISP into a decider of what you get to see rather than being a "dumb pipe," what about parents who want to view porn but don't want their kids to? Should they be forced to choose between 20 years of abstinence or potentially exposing their kids?
The "household" is a pretty bad level at which to have to make these decisions, given that people of all age ranges share the same household. It seems to me that age verification makes a lot more sense than this, (and ftr I think Utah's bill is ridiculous overreach and would have massive privacy implications that are highly problematic).
> what about parents who want to view porn but don't want their kids to
That was specifically addressed in my post. Temporary disable.
Remember that safe guards dont have to be perfect before being implemented. They just need to be better than the status quo. The status quo right now is 10 year old kids viewing porn and thinking that's what average intimate loving relationships look like.
Yeah the temporary disable isn't my complaint. That's not the worst part. My criticism is the system in place after the parent has made the choice. As a parent, do you choose your own freedom or to protect your children? Most will choose the latter and basically have to choose "abstinence" for themselves for many years. It's a pretty sucky choice to have to make given that such an artificial and unneccesary choice is being forced on them by the legal system and their ISP.
My point was at the moment of choosing they could either open the entire connection to $CONTENT or open the device (MAC address, DHCP assigned IP) up (afaik most ISPs control the router too) for traffic to those sites.
What I'm suggesting does not require abstinence from those who have the password.
Maybe I'm daft but how would ISPs be able to control it? Solely based on domain name? What about porn intermixed with other content on sites like reddit?
The iPhone already accomplishes this pretty well in my experience. You can go to Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > Content Restrictions > Web Content > Limit Adult Websites. It blocks everything, including porn subreddits.
I assume they use some kind of regex to do this, and it works.
> (I'm talking best effort not a perfect implementation)
Correct. The first iterative step would be to simply block the big obvious domains and sources escalating the arms race. It will never be possible to keep 100% of porn out of your kids' hands, but just like alcohol, cigarettes, and getting behind a car we can setup a better starting point than "Do you promise you're older than 18/19/21? YES/NO"
It's a bit absurd that providing alcohol to minor is punishable by a fine, but we give the internet/porn industry a free pass. Also if you were to hand out porn to a minor you'd probably be hit with some kind of charge (inviting a minor to some sexuality), but the Porn industry is handing it out en masse without any repercussion
2. I don't want to live in a permission society where I have to submit to inspection to do anything.
If it’s not a big deal then verifying your age shouldn’t phase you anymore than verifying your age to buy alcohol.
I don't like that either and some years ago I stopped providing my ID on request. Corporate vendors (eg supermarkets) still insist on asking my birthdate. I'm in my 50s.
Paternalistic attitudes infantilize society and that's a lot more shameful than most porn could ever be. Absent specific reasons to believe abuse or exploitation is taking place, lawmakers need to stay out of other people's business.
It's not 'paternalistic' to require people to pass a driving exam, or gasp, do a safety test to buy a gun.
This pseudo-liberatrian crap is the most toxic part of HN, and frankly what is 'infantile'.
I have a number of nephews and nieces now and completely emphasize with my brothers and sisters who don't want to allow you and others to infect their kids with your supposed 'ideals' willy nilly - it's a cesspool out there.
At minimum parents should have choice.
We can be smart about it and provide anonymous tokens to validate age, it's not even hard, we just have to think about it, it should have happened long ago.
I'm not saying that there should no regulations, or anything even remotely like that. I'm saying that I object to having to ask people for permission to do the most quotidian low-harm things that people have been doing for millennia before this country was even founded.
Parents absolutely have a choice and always had it. They can always enable the adult filter in their internet box or on the devices they give to their children. Expecting the whole internet to implement sound age verification because they can't be bothered to do such a simple thing and instead need the state to nanny the other 80% of the population - that's actually infantile.
Funny enough in my small town - I walk into the pharmacy, they ask the name and birthdate of the person for whom I'm picking up the meds (generally my kids), I pay and leave. On the other hand, at least for a while if you wanted to buy Sudafed (OTC) at a grocery store, they would ask for ID and write you down on a paper list. ???
For controlled substances like ADHD medication they do ask for ID. I think for most people the only controlled substance medication they get with any frequency is Sudafed, so that tracks. (For the record, I’m pretty sure “controlled substance” and “Rx required” are separate categories)
They do this because pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) is commonly used in illegal production of methamphetamine. This has been a common practice since the mid 2000s, iirc.
The only time I've been asked for an ID at a pharmacy was for non-prescription sudafed. I've picked up many prescriptions for myself and my family, and they have never asked for ID.
Same, I pick up prescriptions for myself, my kids, and my wife, all the time. I can't recall ever being ID'd, and I'm certainly I'm not usually asked for ID. Maybe it varies state-by-state?
I have to show ID for a couple of prescriptions I have, and my understanding is that it then goes into some kind of database that gets cross-referenced between pharmacies to make sure that I don't have multiple prescriptions at multiple pharmacies.
I think that came about as part of the opioid crisis, because some people would have 5 different doctors write prescriptions for the same meds to 5 different pharmacies. No one had a way to detect that someone was getting 5 oxycontin prescriptions.
I was addressing the requirement for alcohol sales, for which prescriptions are not required. I am not too hot on pharmacists requiring ID for everything either, the prescription is its own documentation.
> If it’s not a big deal then verifying your age shouldn’t phase you anymore than verifying your age to buy alcohol.
If the cashier asks for your ID when you buy a six-pack, that's completely ephemeral, with no record created. If they swipe your ID (I think this happens sometimes), that creates a record, but it's not clear if it stores personal info or just verifies that it's a valid ID with appropriate birthdate.
If you verify your age to view online pornography, there's no way to do so ephemerally, at least that most people would trust. I think most people who oppose these types of rules wouldn't have a problem with showing ID at an adult shop to buy an adult DVD (but I could be wrong).
"there's no way to do so ephemerally, " - there are ways people can be issued anonymous tokens, 3rd party verifications, regs against recording the data with strong regulatory authority.
Frankly, it's not even that hard you could come up with 3 'good ways' just by thinking about it a tiny bit, that would be less intrusive than showing your ID at a bar.
Trade this for getting the drinking age lowered to 18 and we win.
I didn’t claim that it’s impossible to imagine ways that this could be done. I was pointing out that no such methods are actually in common use, which means that when people think about validating their age online, they are concerned about their privacy.
Sure, there are ways. There are ways to watch every single American all the time; China is trying that with their citizens already. Doesn't mean we should, or will, or that it will ever make sense.
PH is a business, and the overhead of adding this system, on top of the PII, compliance, and access risks that come with it, doesn't make business-sense.
What costs more? implementing a sweeping system with tons of risk, or blacklisting one state?
> If it’s not a big deal then verifying your age shouldn’t phase you anymore than verifying your age to buy alcohol. If it is then you know exactly why kids should be kept away from it.
This is very different. When I buy alcohol, the guy at the checkout looks at my ID picture, checks the DOB, then we move on with the transaction. Digitizing the process changes so much.
Will porn websites be required to provide an audit trail to regulators to verify compliance? Will providers need to send your ID to a third party provider to verify authenticity? What security and privacy guarantees are in place? What is to stop another Ashley Madison style leak from outing gay Mormons in Utah?
"We do it in analog, so it will be fine at scale in digital" is not an argument I would expect on HN.
> What I can’t understand is if the people in camp 2 are so unashamed of the porn advocacy then why is age verification such a big deal?
a) It's economically implausible. Age verification is very expensive, and the requirement means that many sites that currently permit adult content will ban it rather than pay for verification (Twitter bans sex workers in Germany rather than pay for verification).
b) It doesn't work - it just pushes audiences to pirate content, because pirate sites don't give a stuff about verification, and don't take down content of individuals distributed without their consent, and steals from content creators.
c) It's not safe - there are multiple instances of systems being breached, which can put the safety of performers and other groups at jeopardy.
d) It enables incredibly bad legislation from political groups who are not benign.
an extension to a) is also that there is non-trivial risk.
PII breaches require disclosure, and that's the last thing PH wants. There is also potential legal ramifications if they fail to handle the PII correctly and stuff gets leaked.
Then there is the risk that somehow a kid manages to get through anyway, and they face the risk on that angle -- angry parents and crusading politicians.
Furthermore, how are you verifying these? Actual human eyes? Image recognition for valid Utah driver's licenses? What if they live in Utah but are from out of state? Fake IDs are a thing, and if it's an uploaded image I could have easily whipped up something with Photoshop when I was like ~15. Compress the image a little to help mask any artifacts and then cry "potato quality phone camera" if anyone questions it.
Opens up a whole can of worms that don't make sense if you're trying to solve this on the scale of just one (1) state. Maybe if California, TX, and NY go in on it, too, but otherwise it's a lot of risk for little gain.
OTOH what actually does work is to not give your 8yo kids unfettered and unsupervised 24/7 internet access, but the comments here whenever this topic comes up would suggest that's far too much to ask of HN parents, nevermind the average parent.
The ol' "if you have nothing to hide" argument was flawed a century ago and it isn't getting any less wrong. Recognize that "age verification" is 100% about taking control out of individual hands and into the government's.
The only reason we do this with alcohol is because of health and safety risks. Please tell me how boobies threaten the fabric of society?
Boobies are great, useful, and oftentimes beautiful. Yes, the US can be a bit puritanical but porn is hardly just boobies.
Premature exposure to sexual content is thought to be deleterious to a developing brain. Sure, kids mature at different rates but what should be formative years might instead be spent in navel gazing porn addiction which can lead to developing a taste for evermore strange, fringe, and or violent self gratification or acting out of fantasies and disrupted socialization. Instead of going out and figuring things out, why leave the house when you can get your fix(es) in the comfort of your own room.
Yeah, it’s a judgement call but one I’m comfortable with. Kids have always figured sex out just fine, we don’t need to throw nitroglycerin on already raging fire in the way of ever increasingly fringe/violent/illegal unlimited free sexual videos on demand. You can read up on Reddit about people addicted to porn and how empty of shells they feel like, childhood is the wrong time to introduce this fuel to that fire.
Kids have had access to porn on the internet for at least 25 years now. I don't know how harmful that has been but the premise that this is somehow a new situation is pretty absurd.
>What I can’t understand is if the people in camp 2 are so unashamed of the porn advocacy then why is age verification such a big deal?
When marijuana became legalized in my state, you had to verify your age and they wrote down your ID in a book. It quickly went away because its draconian as shit. I'm not ashamed to buy weed or alcohol, or look at porn, but I still don't want to create a written record every time I do it.
I also generally don't agree with the moral panic that conservatives want to generate about porn. Most kids see porn and have since porn was produced. It's on the parent to, you know, be a parent.
These laws have nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with social control.
We're talking about a state that imprisoned a women for being topless around her children. These people are dangerous and want to enforce their fringe world view on everyone they can.
>I still don't want to create a written record every time I do it.
What I couldn't understand about this scenario (regardless of the product being purchased) is... how does it possibly get tracked? Like can't I just drive across town to the other grocery store and buy more cold meds there? How on earth is the state (???) collecting and reconciling paper records in the 21st century? The likely answer is that they aren't, but someone who wrote the law was certain there had to be an audit trail...
You seem to underestimate the power of OCR. Or even more probably, the standards around any type of controlled thing. Buy yourself a copy of the NCPDP Telecommunications Standard if you want to see how prescriptions for controlled substances are electronically handled.
It's Utah. Utah, for all the ways that actually matter, is effectively a theocracy operated by an ultra-conservative religious minority. Utah is about as similar to the rest of the United States as the rest of the United States is similar to the Middle East.
I think the OP meant that they were a minority nationwide and worldwide. It isn’t surprising at all that they are a majority in UT; that is literally where they breed, heh.
> is effectively a theocracy operated by an ultra-conservative religious minority.
You should look up what the word theocracy means. Here. I'll do it for you: "a system of government in which priests rule in the name of God or a god."
Utah's government is a constitutional Republic. People vote in leaders who make laws and administer the government on their behalf.
> Utah is about as similar to the rest of the United States as the rest of the United States is similar to the Middle East.
Your unequivocally false, deceitful, and extremely hyperbolic statements aren't helping anyone out.
No, they can't, at least not by a general citizenship against a general pool of candidates. The Vatican's citizens don't get to elect the pope, and among those few who do vote, they can't choose a Bhuddist to be Pope.
> I fail to see how your definition of a theocracy automatically disqualifies Utah from being an "effective theocracy".
Well,I think you have to try really, really hard, not to see that.
Why not? The vast majority of people in Utah are Mormon, and people in high positions within the LDS Church often go into state and local politics and elected, precisely because they will enact policies that align with the moral tenets of the Mormon religion...
Theocracies can be republics (basically, any non-monarchic system is a republic), and can have elected representatives.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, for instance, meets both.
Now, the assertion that Utah is effectively a theocracy rests on the claim that the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints asserts informal power loosely analogous to that held formally by, say, the Guardian Council in Iran. I’m nit saying that that’s true. But that it is formally a republic with democratic election of representatives isn’t even slightly incompatible with it being an informal theocracy, you can even be a formal theocracy with those features.
It's literally a theocracy /in practice/ because the religious minority is the majority in that region, in a state literally created for them, and they have run it since its foundation on the basis of the their religious beliefs, and continue to do so. You can't get more theocratic while being inside the US.
It's literally not a theocracy /in practice/. You don't get to redefine words to mean whatever you feel like. A theocracy is not a state that has some laws that correspond to one religion's moral code. It has never meant that, nor will it ever mean that.
Here are some major practical differences between a theocracy and a constitutional republic.
1. If citizens change their mind, within one election cycle they can replace every leader with atheists, or ones with different religions, and change the laws entirely. This is not possible in any theocracy, either in theory or in practice.
2. A constitution, both state and federal, limits what the state government can do, even when the leaders are all of one religion. Such limits do not exist in any theocracies, in theory or in practice, because, when you rule in the name of God, limits to your rule are sinful!
3. Utah has checks and balances via different branches of government. It has judicial procedures, for instance, where minorities can seek redresses. Our state and federal governments were explicitly designed to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. No such systems exist in any theocracies, in theory or in practice. For one, the majority doesn't rule in theocracies! When the majority rules, that makes it a democracy. I'm sure you've heard of that system of government?
4. Often, leaders disagree in Utah even when belonging to the same faith. The church itself has zero authority to adjudicate these disagreements. In a theocracy, the church's say would be final say, and all leaders would ultimately defer to church authority. Actually, they would be the ultimate church authority. In a theocracy, the ruling officials would be one and the same as the top church leadership.
> You can't get more theocratic while being inside the US.
You can't get past 0% theocratic in the US because theocracy is illegal in the U.S. You redefining the word to mean something else doesn't change this fact.
In your definition, theocracy is only a theocratic dictatorship, however there are other forms of theocracy, and I am pointing out one such case. I do not believe either Israel or Utah are literally theocratic, only because they have constitutions that allow the free practice of religion, but in /practice/ both are.
I'm pointing out that the world operates pragmatically and things in practice matter, not only rigid dictionary definitions of terms. There is a difference between something meeting a literal definition and meeting that definition in practice. Does litigating the semantics matter for those who are affected by government policies created for religious reasons? No? Okay, well, then my point stands.
Should a religious person be allowed to follow said religion and be guided by it while at the same time being actively involved in policy making in a country that doesn’t have an office religion?
I’m genuinely asking because I personally don’t really have an answer. I have a personal intuition but that doesn’t count for much.
I was hoping for a genuine, curiosity driven discussion and instead it will end here with a personal accusation about what you think I believe in. That’s just unfortunate.
> because the religious minority is the majority in that region
Well that's quite the oxymoron.
If they're the majority in that region, any democratically elected government should reflect their interests. Barring infractions of Constitutional limits protecting individuals, like the Bill of Rights, of course.
I would argue the U.K. and Israel count as theocracies, too. It’s not a strictly defined term. But I agree that having a religious voting block a theocracy does not make.
England (but not the UK) has caesaropapism rather than theocracy (they are similar in the absence of Church-State separation, but in theocracy the Church supervises the secular authority, where the reverse is true in caesaropapism.)
I would argue that Israel is definitely a theocracy, and for similar reasons to why Utah is. It's a democratic state specifically created to house a persecuted religious minority that make up a majority of its polity and its leadership is ethnically and religiously aligned with that group and specifically elected and governs on the basis of their religious beliefs.
So, following that chain of thought, the POTUS isn't elected either because the USA's voters only choose their electors, and those few electors who do vote can't just choose any US citizen to be president?
Have you spent much time in Utah? Off the top of my head I can’t think of an organization that could be considered an even distant second to the LDS church in terms of influence over policies brought to and enacted by the elected officials in that state.
> It's a constitutional republic that got taken over by a 51% attack
It's a state that was literally created to be a place for Mormons because they were a persecuted religious minority ran out of every other state and it was a huge desert wasteland nobody else wanted. It's only due to huge influxes of immigration, especially from the South, that Utah is... checks notes only 85% white and 60% Mormon.
So it's like less of a 51% attack and more, business as usual and intended. If anything, the non-Mormons are going to soon be able to do a 51% attack and take Utah back, since Mormons are only 2% of the US population, and Californians are mass migrating to Utah now that people realized you can build in the desert with modern technology.
Take a moment to think about history of US statehood. The Mormons, chased off Eastern settlements for their polygamy, settled most of the mountain West, declared governance, then watched big mining operations all around them get cut off from their territory and turned into full-fledged states, while they were not admitted to the union for decades.
It was a time of shared culture that is unrecognizable from where we stand today, and they absolutely didn't want to give statehood to polygamists...
Polygamy was federally outlawed precisely for the purpose of (dare I say) oppressing Mormons. It was not the law of the land until well after the migration to Deseret and the first attempt at statehood.
> Violence broke out in 1833 as the “Old Settlers” under the guise of “extra-legal” justice took the law into their own hands.
I'm seeing no mention of Mormons breaking laws, the only mentions of law breaking references other people breaking laws to persecute Mormons. The governor of Missouri's declares that they are to be expelled or exterminated (!!!), the mobs attacked them and killed them, no mention anywhere in your link of Mormons breaking any laws.
Note that I do not take the position that Mormons broke no laws, I'd just like to know what laws they broke, and particularly what federal laws they broke, since my reply is to the claim that they broke American laws and not of some specific state.
> When the Mormons attacked a duly authorized militia under the belief it was an anti-Mormon mob, Missouri’s governor, Lilburn Boggs, ordered the Saints expelled from the state, or “exterminated,
I'm always vary of these arguments. Doesn't mean you are wrong, but remember there is a country call Democratic People's Republic of Korea and it has elections every 4-5 years. Last one was in 2019.
Well, both regions are deserts occupied in majority by religious zealots of a single ethnic group that believe in polygamy and their economy is primarily driven by natural resource exports (oil for the Middle East; gold, other metals, and agricultural products for Utah). I don't think the comparison is that far off.
Utah is 85% white and 60% Mormon, so...
The only reason that Utah isn't whiter and more Mormon is due to all the immigrant workers, just like the Middle East...
LGBT rights in Utah is also middle of the road among U.S. states. The LDS church also supported the recent Respect for Marriage Act unlike many other conservative Christian organizations. Your other points about climate and economy are extremely generic and not really a strong argument for why Utah more similar to the Middle East than the rest of the US.
>Utah is 85% white and 60% Mormon, so...
Maine is ~95% white and ~60% Christian, so what's your point?
>The only reason that Utah isn't whiter and more Mormon is due to all the immigrant workers
Replace "Utah" with "United States" and "Mormon" with "Christian", then it remains a true statement for the entirety of your country's existence. The United States is far more culturally homogenous than most Americans like you think it is. Consider travelling outside North America for once before making such egregious comparisons again.
> Consider travelling outside North America for once before making such egregious comparisons again.
I've extensively traveled the world, to more than 70 countries, and have spent years of my life living abroad. The United States is far more diverse and heterogeneous than most other countries in the world, contrary to your statements. Some subsets of the US are regionally /very/ homogeneous, however, which is part of my point.
It would help to start thinking of the US for what it is, a federation of 50 states, not a single entity with a single mind. There is a high level of diversity within the US, but in each state, there tends to be a balance point towards some particular dominant culture, which can include religion, and in the case of Utah was explicitly created to include religion (Utah was founded to give the Mormons a home).
Officially. Unofficially, polygamy is still widely practiced in Utah as part of the official doctrine of FDLS, which is the breakaway Fundamental sect of the LDS Church. The FDLS has recently gained more prominence, which lead to Utah making a surprising reversal recently by effectively decriminalizing polygamy, something that was for a long time a felony in Utah in order to follow LDS Church doctrine that banned polygamy as part of the split from FDLS. FDLS exists almost entirely within the state of Utah however, and the words of the Book of Mormon on this topic are literally plainly in black and white.
Technically speaking, the Quran heavily restricts polygamy in Al-Nisa', 4:3 and clarified in Al-Nisa', 4:129. In practice however, polygamy is widely practiced in the Middle East and is a core part of the way in which many people practice Islam and has had no significant actions taken against it. It's specifically a core tenet of the Wahabi sect of Islam, which is the dominant sect in the modern Middle East (although other sects generally reject polygamy).
Also, the SLC branch of the LDS movement hasn't performed polygamist marriages (for the living) since 1904[1], but they never annulled existing marriages from before then, so it's still less than a century since the prohibition against living polygamous marriages has been fully in effect by not having any existing within the membership. It's also still 100% part of the doctrine when it comes to the next life, and D&C 132 has never been officially repudiated or removed from the open canon. The current President/Prophet is sealed to two women for time and all eternity. This is an option only available to the men of the church, no such thing as polyandry (even though Joseph Smith himself was married to married women).
As for the Respect for Marriage Act, they were pretty open about supporting it because it carves out exceptions against employment discrimination for religions (and they're certainly not the only religion to support it because of this). They're still pretty dead-set against having to support an employee's paycheck when that employee does everything else required for the job but is LGBTQ+. But I'd agree that the situation is getting better. SLC has a thriving LGBTQ population and social scene.
> Unofficially, polygamy is still widely practiced in Utah as part of the official doctrine of FDLS
Why does all the rationality I come to expect on hacker news go out the window once my religion is being discussed? Or is it I only notice issues when I'm a subject matter expert?
Polygamists are 1% of Utah's population. The decriminalization of polygamy has nothing to do with fundamentalists gaining prominence, and everything to do with helping people escape.
> the words of the Book of Mormon on this topic are literally plainly in black and white.
Not sure what is meant by this. The Book of Mormon plainly states that monogamy is the norm and polygamy, while sometimes allowed, is not standard.
This is open to interpretation, but the reading I've always heard for this passage is it is intended to restrict polygamy except in the case in which you are marrying orphan girls.
"If you fear you might fail to give orphan women their ˹due˺ rights ˹if you were to marry them˺, then marry other women of your choice—two, three, or four. But if you are afraid you will fail to maintain justice, then ˹content yourselves with˺ one1 or those ˹bondwomen˺ in your possession.2 This way you are less likely to commit injustice."
The reason I said passage 4:129 gives context is that it says
"You will never be able to maintain ˹emotional˺ justice between your wives—no matter how keen you are. So do not totally incline towards one leaving the other in suspense.1 And if you do what is right and are mindful ˹of Allah˺, surely Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful."
The interpretation I've heard is that while the Quran does not forbid polygamy, it restricts it by stating that it is required that you maintain equality between your wives and do not raise one above another, but advises that this is often impossible, so it is best to only have a single wife, and further that it is advised only to marry more than one wife in the case that you are marrying orphan girls.
I am not Muslim, I am not a religious scholar, however I have read the major religious works of all of the major religions and some experts opinions of them, and this is my understanding. You may not consider this a "restriction", it's certainly rather loose, but it's been my interpretation that the Quran does not outright endorse unrestricted polygamy, it is allowed only in specific circumstances (orphanage), and advised against.
It is indeed open to intepretation, but given the prophet of the said book got married at least 11 times, and he had 9 wives when he died, I tend to interpret it in a different way.
> Shame on all those money you wasted travelling then because you clearly didn't make good use of it.
I'm happy with my experiences. I'm not sure what parts of the world you went to, but most of the world is /very/ homogeneous. There are parts of the world that are more diverse than the US, on some variable, for instance pretty much anywhere in Africa is more ethnically and linguistically diverse than anywhere in the rest of the world. But in the mix of things, the US is not the most diverse country, but is very much near the top. Canada is more diverse than the US, as an example, but the US is more diverse than essentially any country in Europe, any country in South America except perhaps Brazil, and most countries in Asia. It somewhat depends on what you mean by "diversity"? But the US has a mix of ethnic groups, religious groups, and cultural groups, as well as languages. You only don't see it because of assimilation over generations, but each of the groups leaves their mark on those regions in the US.
Ehh it's definitely not just the ultra religious conservatives who are raising issues with pornography.
I see a lot more "health bro influencer"/Andrew Tate types warn against watching porn because they think it makes people weak minded, which I would agree with when it turns into an addiction and actually impacts your ability to form real life relationships.
Roughly 1/3rd of the House and Senate of Utah are BYU grads [1], and BYU is not the only religious Mormon university in Utah, just the largest.
Utah was literally founded as a state to be a place for Mormons[2], because they were a persecuted religious minority in other states. I grew up in Missouri, and part of Missouri state history is that of the 1838 Mormon War[3]. At one point the Governor of Missouri signed an order that paid out for the scalps of Mormons[4]. The aftermath was a mass migration of Mormons from Missouri to what became Utah, literally founded as a place for Mormons, to this day Mormons consider Independence, Missouri as a holy site, but Utah is the headquarters of the LDS Church and the predominant residence of Mormons in the US.
It is for all intents and purposes a theocratic state within the US.
There’s evidence that the perception of “porn addiction” is mostly a religious thing, probably because it is a way of resolving conflict between the values of a religious identity group with which the “addict” identifies for cultural/social reasons and the “addict’s” preference for porn by externalizing/pathologizing the preference.
Not exactly on-topic but: it appears this bill carefully defines "the Internet" as the global packet-switched network (!) but then fails to define "website", which is used (as "internet website") in the actual law. This isn't necessarily a drafting error because laws must always have undefined terms, but it is rather odd. I'm perennially concerned at the conflation of these two concepts, internet and www, because it makes it easier for malicious actors to seize personal domains and generally gatekeep the internet for use by the (commercial) web.
Canada's similar bill just passed senate reading on the 18th and needs to go to the house. It just says "sexually explicit material" and I'm having trouble finding an exact definition because its changed a bunch and I can't find the current definition.
I'm not sure where else these bills are being passed but it seems more or less in concert you will have to use a government approved age verification system to access porn, which may kill it off as I don't think people want to give the government information on what porn they watch.
It won't kill it, it just means that porn sites will be hosted outside of those jurisdictions, and people will use VPNs to access them if needed (which, ironically, might actually spread awareness of VPNs in general, making it harder to regulate other online content in the future).
Is there a mechanism for empowering a polity to protect minors from certain things the polity deems they're not ready for that doesn't rely on arbitrary rules?
How about: If you don't want your kids to see it, that's on you. Either accept that you are a shitty parent who can't raise children to your satisfaction, or get better at parenting. Don't force consequences on me just because you are incompetent.
I'm against forcing people to provide their ID in order to see pornography. Indeed, I am, if anything, supportive of adults being able to understand and fully experience their erotic lives, as long as no one is harmed, and to do so anonymously where possible.
But your attitude is, in a historical context, weird. At basically no point in history has it been the case that the sole responsibility for the well being of children lay entirely with the parents. If you look, for instance, at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (see the Parenthood article section Parental Responsibilities), you will see, for instance, that throughout most of western history and for most people, there is an explicit or implicit understanding that it is, in fact, the parents who operate as stewards of children _on behalf of_ society and that the ultimate locus of responsibility for the security and well being of children is the society at large, not the parents. This is why, for instance, the state is typically understood to have the right to remove a child from the home of an abusive or neglectful parent. Given that understanding, there is a commensurate power in society to make rules which may protect children and in our particular historical moment these rules take the form of laws at multiple levels of government.
It places a powerful (and disordered) burden on parents to make them _exclusively_ responsible for the safety and wellbeing of their children.
It very much lines up with the historical context.
In Hammurabi's Code fathers could literally sell their kids into slavery. This seems strange, shouldn’t society protect kids? But it turns out that’s a relatively recent idea, instead there were rules around what happens when both parents die but children were plentiful and many where injured or even killed by their parents without consequence.
If someone makes an appeal to tradition/history, I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that they're advocating for things which happened 4,000 years ago in a society completely alien to our own.
That’s fair, but if there argument is “At basically no point in history…” it is reasonable to mention that they are mistaken in that belief and the reverse was true for most of recorded history.
Which doesn’t mean I disagree with them, just that their argument isn’t sound. Slavery was also depressingly common and I am glad it’s become vastly less common today.
the weakness of his argument is that he didn't restrict himself to a certain people's history. the hammurabi code you cite wasn't the universal law, and only applied to subjects of hammurabi. savages live in groups and share all sorts of responsibilities (see edward burnett tylor's primitive cultures vol. 1 & 2). which gives some weight to his original assertion.
generally, human civilization is us picking and choosing sensible/humane parts of cultures we encounter. the romans who conquered greece were of barbarian culture, only civilized by their adoption of the greek culture, which they later spread to parts of the world the conquered. the greeks remained uncivilized for a long time as well. they attribute most of their development to encounters with egyptians and babylonians. thus, it's almost possible to see a primitive culture that upheld some of the core values of our civilization today: human rights (not too far back but pericle's athens abolished slave trade), etc.
Hammurabi was just an example, describing global attitudes vs children globally across all of written history is a monumental tasks so let’s just focus on infanticide as a proxy for how much society actually protects kids. Genocide and slavery show a disregard for some children rather than all children. But be be warned it’s not pretty and western civilization pre christianity defiantly practiced it.
“Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent.”
“Infanticide became forbidden in Europe and the Near East during the 1st millennium.” Except if you dig into the details those bans where very local, it continues:
“Christianity forbade infanticide from its earliest times, which led Constantine the Great and Valentinian I to ban infanticide across the Roman Empire in the 4th century. Yet, infanticide was not unacceptable in some wars and infanticide in Europe reached its peak during World War II (1939-45), during the Holocaust and the T4 Program.[2] The practice ceased in Arabia in the 7th century after the founding of Islam, since the Quran prohibits infanticide. Infanticide of male babies had become uncommon in China by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), whereas infanticide of female babies became more common during the One-Child Policy era (1979–2015). During the period of Company rule in India, the East India Company attempted to eliminate infanticide but were only partially successful, and female infanticide in some parts of India still continues. Infanticide is now very rare in industrialised countries but may persist elsewhere.”
Thus as far as we can tell it was common globally from the Stone Age, through Bronze Age up until quite recently. Also of note, those bans wouldn’t necessarily be reflected as a change in all cultures in that area only the options of those running the country.
Could you please stick to the site guidelines when posting here? You've already broken them more than once. The comment here is a particularly clear-cut case, since the guidelines include "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Historically the level of privacy we have now is a recent phenomenon. What would nudity, sexuality and pornography be like if it weren’t taboo at all? Maybe societies role in this matter is creating the problem in the first place. And the best thing for it to do is to abandon the puritanical principles that probably lead to the issue in the first place.
If the community’s role is to protect children, maybe the community shouldn’t be creating the trap in the first place.
Children are curious creatures. It’s natural that they are curious about sex and the human body. In the past they could look around and see members of their family, tribe, etc nude and having sex. Now we’ve taken that away and made it taboo. You can either do nothing, try and lock it away harder, or go the other way.
It’s a very complex issue though so there’s nothing close to easy. But this kind of legislation seems like a fight that has just as much to do with a particular religious viewpoint as it does anything to do with “protect the children”.
I have no desire for “society” to make rules that govern my kids. Especially seeing that between gerrymandering, the electoral college and the fact that each state no matter what the size has two senators means that people who would love to impose their religious beliefs on others have an outsized influence on laws that are passed.
You may not have any such desire but imagine if you died and your kid was adopted by an abusive person you _would_ want the state to intervene. I'm as unsatisfied as you are about the current political situation in the United States, but the solution isn't to just demand the government withdraw. It is to actually engage _more_ politically and with an understanding of what the true responsibilities of the state are.
The state will _inevitably exercise power_. Only a vigilant citizenry can hope to modulate it.
So exactly how is “engaging politically” going to help when the majority viewpoint is already ignored because they know they can just appealed to their gerrymandered system?
Republicans can completely ignore California and Democrats can completely ignore the Bible Belt (except GA which is now Purple)
As far as what the state can do. Again as a parent, when my children were minors, we chose trusted family members to be their guardian. If that wasn’t an option, we would have chosen friends.
No matter how you feel about the abortion issue for instance, even in conservative states, the majority of people don’t want more restrictions as proven by recent ballot initiatives, yet the politicians are still passing laws.
In my home state (Florida) the government is wasting all kinds of taxpayer money going after Disney and out of the list of things Florida and especially my city (Orlando) cares about is that Disney spoke out against a policy.
Meta comment: Your attempted use of markdown italics multiple times in your comment made it a little unreadable (I made this mistake for a long time myself). So pro-tip: On HN, italics are the * * rather than markdown's _ _
It very much restricts people who want to marry more than one person from doing so and until a few years ago, the government restricted marriage to heterosexual couples.
The state doesn’t recognize such unions, but it doesn’t prohibit them either.
So you can’t have multiple marriage licenses, but you can legally hold a public polygamist civil ceremony followed by “cohabitation.”
Granted people want the legal befits of a recognized marriage rather than the state to treating it as two actors preforming a ceremony as part of a play. But such distinction are relevant when you say something is banned.
> If even one of the marriages is a legal, civil marriage, then Kody and the wives are probably guilty of bigamy under Utah's definition. The Utah Code states that a "person is guilty of bigamy when, knowing he has a husband or wife or knowing the other person has a husband or wife, the person purports to marry another person or cohabits with another person." This is broad in three respects -- it criminalizes the behavior of both purported spouses, not just the one who is already married; it, as interpreted by the state's highest court, includes religious ceremonies undertaken without a civil license as falling under the heading of "purporting to marry"; and it criminalizes cohabitation (as well as actual marriage) with a second person while married to someone else.
Wouldn't the solution be to not marry anyone and solely cohabitate with your partners? Get power of attorney, etc. to close the gap on the marriage perks.
A spouse is eligible to draw half of their spouses social security instead of their own if it would be a higher amount without affecting the working spouse’s social security.
You can’t minimize the chilling effect of being targeted and prosecuted by the government even if it is thrown out on appeal. Were they jailed during the appeal process? Were they allowed to leave the country or even state with a pending court case?
No to all of that, it was a civil not a criminal case.
The family brought the lawsuit, which was thrown out because they didn’t have standing. They lacked standing because the government hadn’t prosecuted them.
“On December 13, 2013, a federal judge, spurred by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups,[25] struck down the parts of Utah's bigamy law that criminalized cohabitation, while also acknowledging that the state may still enforce bans on having multiple marriage licenses.[26] The state of Utah appealed the decision, arguing that polygamist Kody Brown (whose relationships were documented in the show Sister Wives) lacked standing to bring his civil suit, since his county prosecutor, Jeff Buhman, had not followed through on any plan to prosecute the Brown family. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals (Denver) agreed with Utah and overturned the previous decision, thus effectively recriminalizing polygamy as a felony.[27]”
Of note, the state of Utah won the appeal because they didn’t bring action against the group rather than because the lower court’s decision was incorrect. Thus polygamy can remain illegal as long as nobody is ever prosecuted for it.
It also mentions: “Given that almost no polygamists bother to seek a second marriage license, the practice of forming a family with more than one spousal-styled relationship is very difficult to criminalize. In the majority of cases, the additional partner is considered a wife in the context of religious beliefs. Legally speaking, the practice is more akin to adultery.”
We don't apply this principle to something like peanut allergies. "If your kid touches a peanut, that's on you as a parent"? No, people recognized that peanuts are harmful enough to a certain segment of the population that it's worth making changes, even changes that might inconvenience others.
Besides, I'm not sure why you think that parents are able to be 100% in control of things that their children see/eat/etc. Should we legalize nudity on billboards, and would your suggestion then be to "simply drive on different roads"?
What does society do to solve the peanut problem? Outside of schools, it seems totally on the parent to stop the kid from eating peanuts. The parent does the grocery shopping, asks the right questions when taking the kid to a restaurant, and lets friends/other caregivers know not to give peanuts to the child.
People do "make changes" for specific allergies & food restrictions by making the information available & creating some allergen-free zones (just like adult content is currently kept out of schools and family-friendly locations, and there are adult-content warnings most times) but peanut access is absolutely currently up to the parent, in general.
I'm not even sure what the billboard thing is getting at. We shouldn't have nudity on billboards (except female breasts in nonsexual contexts), just like we shouldn't keep peanuts where we know anyone allergic has to be. Counter-hypothetical: it would be incredibly stupid to lock up peanut butter because kids might take a $5 bill to the store and buy the clearly-labelled jar.
> What does society do to solve the peanut problem?
We mandate labeling. We could not do that and just say "parents, you must run a peanut-detection lab or have extremely restricted diets of only food you make yourself, to keep your kids safe", but we don't.
I have no issue with labelling requirements for large commercial operations. To be honest I thought we already had that for adult content, given the specific TV/radio limits and the "confirm you're 18" popups so popular on the web.
I realize I'm beating a dead analogy here, but I don't think we should impose
those labelling restrictions on independent hobbyist websites, just like we don't require licensing or ingredient labelling for small bake sales.
But even if we did, "label obviously-adult content" would be way more reasonable than "collect personal information to verify the real-life identity of site visitors, and log this sensitive data so it can be accessed (/hacked) later"
Writing "produced on equipment that also processes peanuts" on a food label is hardly inconveniencing others.
It's still very much on the parents to prevent harm to their peanut-allergic children.
As an aside, the sharp rise in nut allergies is itself an unintended consequence of another well-meaning attempt at social engineering: about 30 years ago, manufacturers began printing "CHOKING HAZARD: DO NOT FEED NUTS TO CHILDREN UNDER TWO YEARS OLD" on nut labels. Many parents complied, and that lack of any early exposure to nut proteins resulted in a massive increase in life-threatening nut allergies among children.
Do you have kids in school? Our kids aren’t allowed to pack peanuts in their lunches because parents can’t put an allergic kid in a cafeteria otherwise.
Also, when you know something contains peanuts, you just stick a label "CONTAINS PEANUTS" on the packaging. You don't get the grocery store to ask everyone for a peanut allergy certificate before selling them a jar of PB, and also keep a log of who bought PB from them.
And we already have something similar for porn sites, in the form of the "Are you over 18?" landing page banners.
This sounds like a smart response until you think about the possibility of an academic study researching exposure of minors to hardcore porn. Think that would pass ethical muster?
The fundamental questions are
1. Does porn usage line up with other patterns of addiction?
2. Are similarly addicting things withheld from children because their brains are less equipped to handle it?
>This sounds like a smart response until you think about the possibility of an academic study researching exposure of minors to hardcore porn. Think that would pass ethical muster?
Well, yeah, it would...
>1. Does porn usage line up with other patterns of addiction?
I'm not sure what this question is asking. Porn usage may or may not 'line up' with patterns of addiction. That doesn't mean that porn always or even the majority of the time is. Can you rephrase this question into something more coherent?
>2. Are similarly addicting things withheld from children because their brains are less equipped to handle it?
LOL absolutely not. Children, especially American children, are given huge amounts of sugar, which is actually physically addictive. Many are given huge amounts of caffeine which is again, physically addictive.
Millions of children around the country have tons of access to video games and TV, which can be addictive.
>If yes to both, then it’s a no-brainer.
Well, you're first question doesn't make any sense, and your second question is a resounding no.
The best way to keep your child from becoming addicted to anything is to act like a parent.
“Sky wizard” is a bright red flag for a bad-faith argument, so I’m not going to do a bunch of research for you. Search around for voices of people who have struggled with porn addiction. If you think it’s a purely religious thing, you’re mistaken.
Having followed this space for ~30+ years, I've yet to see any research that shows more than marginal and subjective effects at any kind of scale. Including in meta-studies. Sure, some people can struggle with addiction to porn, just as they can to chocolate and almost anything else. We don't respond with age verification to the vast majority of those other things.
Since I haven't brought up "sky wizard", perhaps if you have any actual evidence of harm you might show me?
> In 2019, 37% of US high school students reported lifetime use of marijuana and 22% reported use in the past 30 days.1 Past-year vaping of marijuana also remained steady in 2020 following large increases in 2018 and 2019. However, large percentages of middle and high school students reported past-year marijuana vaping—8% of eighth graders, 19% of 10th graders, and 22% of 12th graders.
> Yes and forcing people to show ID has really stopped underaged drinking and making drugs illegal have stopped people from smoking weed.
> Past-year vaping of marijuana also remained steady in 2020 following large increases in 2018 and 2019.
I've got a guess about why the number might be rising, and it rhymes with "egalization", in which case, yes, making drugs illegal reduced use of drugs. I guarantee fewer people in general, including fewer kids, smoked when it was illegal, and less was consumed overall. I'd further bet there's a lot less pot consumption by kids now, than there would be if dispensaries didn't verify age.
But I also suspect it's just kinda hard to get clean data about teen drug use. I'd also guess the real figures are extremely uneven (that "8% of eighth graders", if accurate, probably means 20% some places and 2% in others) and high use correlates to places where it's easy to get, which supports the notion that carding or outlawing should reduce use (since they make it harder to get).
(Nb. I'm pro-legalization, I just think carding and outlawing almost certainly strongly curb use, though of course they don't stop it completely, and I think "this wasn't perfectly effective, so it's necessarily useless" isn't a strong point in most situations)
Laws against murder haven't stopped murder, so I guess those laws are useless.
Gun control laws? Japan's ex-PM got blown away by a wacko with a homemade shotgun, so I guess gun control laws just don't work. Nevermind the rate of gun violence in Japan.. it's all or nothing.
I'm not seeing the irony, unless you believe that opposition to pornography being available to kids must necessarily have a religious motive. I oppose it, and I am an atheist.
How about: dissolving all labor unions, schools and governments?
You do parenting and education yourself, protect yourself and your kids from any kind of harm outside. If you can't do it, just admit you are incompetent and don't force consequences of paying taxes on me
just because schools and the "government" exist doesn't free you from educating or taking care of your kid outside of those contexts. learn to be a parent
I believe they are facetiously pointing out the logical fallacy the original commenter was making by claiming that the law unjustly punished everybody to protect poor parents. But that same logical stretch could apply to any and all laws, thereby making all laws unjust in the same way. While that line of thinking may appeal to a anarchic-libertarian extremist minority, the overwhelming majority of people see this as stupid.
Sounds good to me, honestly. Or rather better than a system where moral busybodies seem to think they can get me to attach my name to porn consumption.
As a parent myself, I'd like to say that it's not that easy. There are measures you can take, but it doesn't always work.
The web is maybe easy to control, but what about all the other means of communication kids have now, like in-game social tools? In the end that comes down to do you ban everything that could cause an issue, and then you are isolating your child from their friends.
Even if that issue is solved, I've heard stories of kids 'forcing' other kids to watch porn on phones at school. How do you prevent that one? Most often the other parents are unaware, don't care, or even provide the porn.
"If you don't want your kids buying cigarettes that's on you."
If we want to live in an environment where children have any degree of autonomy, that means delegating some aspects related to restricting age appropriate behaviors to the state. Now, I'm not a fan of government mandated age restriction on websites, but your point is obviously not well thought out.
I was a free range kid (we just called it "being a kid" though). I feel bad for the kids of helicopter parents - the parent is hiding them from the world and blocking them from learning about the world as it exists and from discovering how they can/will interact with it. Then one day they cross a threshold of "number of days alive" and are expected to know how to live in the world they haven't ever been exposed to. Sounds like a derange science experiment carried out by insane control freaks more than parenting.
I agree. But if you aren't going to be a helicopter parent there needs to be some safety valves for when kids go too far off the rails.
Calling a parent shitty because their kid does something they would prefer they didn't means we've all had shitty parents. Kids are individuals that gain preferences the minute they gain any sort of mobility and trying to reign everything in will backfire.
I don't have strong opinions on this particular topic. I don't think porn is quite so damaging as others to the point where society needs to protect them. But the rational response to the views you expressed seems to contradict your actual views on the subject of how parents should raise their kids.
> Calling a parent shitty because their kid does something they would prefer they didn't means we've all had shitty parents.
Kids are going to do things their parents don't like. It's literally part of the kid learning about the world and themselves. It's shitty parenting to not know how to deal with this rather than trying to pass laws so that they can pretend the kid is just a miniature clone of their worldview.
Yes education on content filters is absurdly low despite how crucial they are for general use. There are so many layers of filters that exist today (and almost every major player has their own family filter app/system), but outside of the ones that are forced before use, many have absolutely no idea they exist. It gets tucked away in a settings menu somewhere under your account menu basically. Or like on iOS where you have to also go into screen time to set filters, it can be confusing!
This isn't to say the systems that exist are really good enough yet, many of them need to be more detailed. For example, most apps are an on or off toggle, rather than a "let my kid play minecraft but chat is disabled and they can only join designated family friendly realms". So what often ends up happening even for parents who do know about the filters, is they wind up relaxing them to the point of being useless.
I don't understand - if I did this kind of thing as a kid I'd just lose progressively more and more privileges. My parents never put technical obstacles in my way - there were just clear consequences for braking the rules. If your son keeps braking the rules you've set....surely there comes a point where he loses his phone/PC or whatever? No?
tldr: if your kid keeps breaking the rules, ramping up enforcement is not going to change that for the same reasons that punitive punishment in the judicial system is not effective. Your kid has to understand why the rules are if they're ever going to function well within them, and that also requires a level of parental compassion and understanding that often isn't present.
> If your son keeps braking the rules you've set....surely there comes a point where he loses his phone/PC or whatever?
The efficacy of this depends wildly on how the rules are explained and enforced, I think. This is a topic that comes up often between my aunt and I. She has two kids about 10 and 13 years younger than I am, and often asks my father and I, the tech people of the family, how to enforce content filtering
and screen time limits for both kids. I've effectively refused to help on the basis that it'll only offer her a false sense of security, given that I was able to circumvent every control I faced with relative ease at the same age as her son. I felt that anything she tried to do on the "blind enforcement" angle would just encourage conflict with her oldest, who like me was rather technically inclined and often frustrated by parental oversight.
Note, I'm not a parent, just an adult with some frustrations over how this stuff was handled when I was a kid, so I'm sure there's blindspots and misconceptions here. Take all this with a grain of salt.
My mom embodied the philosophy of "these are the rules, and you lose privileges if you don't follow them." This most often came up in conflicts over technology. She would set rules over what kinds of games I could play (non violent only), when I could use the computer (not after like 7pm), and broadly how much time in a week I could spend on it (maybe 5 hours before I'd start getting pressure to hop off), in addition to the standard no-admin-rights and interent-content-filtering.
I'd often circumvent this stuff through a combination of linux boot disks and just messing with the BIOS clock.
Mom never really explained why the rules were what they were. Some I could extrapolate: the content filtering seemed to largely stem from her Puritan view of sex. Thou Shall Not, and no further discussion. The time-spent I was less clear on, but I think it was broadly just that "screen bad" and there were more interesting things to do in the world, in her opinion. For my part, games and computers were my only social connection to others, as an only child who lived across town from all his school friends. This means whenever I "lost privileges" for my phone/computer/etc, I was now socially isolated as well, which just made me more upset.
There certainly were times she took everything away, as a "loss of privileges" for breaking the rules, but then I just got more miserable because the root problems for me still weren't being addressed. Moreover, that meant she was constantly framed as an adversary: enforcing the rules as a single parent takes significant effort, because there's no outlet. I had nobody to vent to, she had no other adults for backup or to bounce ideas off of. Plus, I needed the thing for school often: writing papers for class, or looking up how to do my math problems. There came a point where, philosophically, it was difficult to physically take things away because I'd bought them with my own money or they were gifts from other family members.
Compare this to my dad's strategy: He knew there were plenty of things in the world he didn't want me having my life ruined by, so he went for education over prohibition: "You're too young for porn, because it gives you unrealistic expectations of both sex and relationships. Also it forms addictive habits. You can ask me questions, and I'll keep an eye on your internet usage in case I see anything we need to have a conversation about, but you should stay away from that." Infinitely more effective to a developing-me: now I understood his concerns, the goals, and had a method of recourse if I disagreed.
As an adult, I 100% understand that there's good damn reason to prevent kids from having unfettered access to the internet. Especially preteens and younger: holy crap, youtube is a brain-melting attention-hacking cesspool. Simultaneously, I think it's insanely unreasonable to "walled garden" everything off and call it a day. That's not how the world works, and if that's the chosen method of "safety" then you're just making it so your kids will never come to you with questions during their own exploring while also leaving them unprepared once they're outside of your bubble. I was always insanely frustrated that my mom didn't just talk to me, or when she did, that her beliefs and concerns were always more important than mine. Again, I get it: kids are not always rational, it is the job of the parent to watch out for forms of harm that kids aren't paying attention to, etc--but I still hold a lot of those frustrations as an adult, especially because I never felt like I got to voice them as a kid. So, I just went around them. Constantly.
Yeah, there's a reason every single society on Earth, across all cultures, will dish out some form of punishment for misbehavior, however they define it. Even in Sweden or other scandi countries where I am told murderers are rehabilitated instead of punished, if you drive at 300 km/hr through a residential neighborhood I'm certain they'll hit you with a massive fine at the very least.
Why is punishing misbehavior such a universal practice across all human cultures? Because it works. It never works perfectly but it does work generally.
I support the education driven approach, but I still think there is room for content filtering. In the next few years, I hope turning on suite of content rules across platforms will mitigate explicit material from automatically being included in normal content feeds and prevent casual searches for porn. I have no expectations that blocking material from enterprising children will be effective and consider it a more of a parenting strategy failure anyway.
Yeah, I think there's absolutely value in controlling the pressures and expectations that kids are under--e.g., filtering sexually suggestive stuff out of social media feeds, etc. (Also for violence, too. I know seeing stuff like combat footage out of Ukraine is doing weird things to my psyche, I can't imagine what it'd be doing to a still-developing-brain.)
I figure the best strategy (again, as a non-parent) is kind of defense-in-depth: implement some general screening to keep the ambient level of attention-bombardment somewhere sane, help your kids develop sane habits around their tech use and getting what they want out of it, and educate the kids on why those controls are in place for the stuff that leaks through.
Again, my main concern is how much people crutch off of "just block everything," along with the knock-on effects that can lead to. E.g., there's a growing pile of people in the US who class any form of LGBT media as "pornography", which is patently ridiculous, but if that's the criteria used by your chosen filter mechanism or if that's the criteria people try to apply to society....
Exactly. I use content controls even though as a kid I easily worked around them. The reason is that it is insanely easy for kid to accidentally stumble upon explicit stuff. The content controls help a lot with that, whether kid is 5 or 15
Interesting dichotomy among the sibling comments. One is about removing privileges, the other is about (ostensibly) empowering a smart kid to continue learning how to hack and eventually possibly make a career out of it.
Getting around network restrictions started my software engineering career. You had to learn all about TCP/IP, transparent proxies, SSH tunnels, DNS, Linux boxes, /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, John The Ripper, write Perl scripts, cron jobs, CGI, how automate things and become the ghost in the machine. Best educational tool ever for kids.
Your overconfidence just got you hacked by your son because taking away the admin access did nothing. The kid just installed a scummy Chrome plugin that gives him a "free" VPN (I say "free" because it's surely logging everything he does) and it works directly from chrome. no admin needed. Source: my son did this to me
I posted this in another thread, but how are parents supposed to set up content filters for social media sites that allow pornography? Reddit's posts are ~40% marked nsfw, and they host hardcore porn of all types on the same domains as discussion forums for minecraft and roblox. Apparently some policy is needed to allow content filters to work in the first place, especially as everything is using TLS these days and it's being made increasingly difficult to install root certificates to do MITM filtering (not that it was ever easy).
I think this is a poor solution; a more empowering one would be to develop a standard for content categorization and require commercial websites and commercially developed browsers (so all of them that are in common use) to implement content blocking via e.g. header exchange, with criminal penalties for negligently providing pornography without the correct headers (have some provision for vandalism when good-faith moderation is in place). Then parents actually could just configure their OS or browser for what kinds of content should be allowed.
A better first step than this bill could also be to require any site that hosts a significant percentage of pornographic content (which I'd place at much lower than the 33% of this bill) to put it on a separate subdomain from any child-oriented content (e.g. forums for a children's game) so that DNS based filtering can work.
> posted this in another thread, but how are parents supposed to set up content filters for social media sites that allow pornography? Reddit's posts are ~40% marked nsfw, and they host hardcore porn of all types on the same domains as discussion forums for minecraft and roblox.
You're kind of missing the point here. Parts of reddit are fine. Kids should be able to participate in forums about children's interests. The problem is a site is comingling children's forums and porn in a way where filtering is unreasonably difficult.
It's reasonable to demand that a company that's in the business of hosting forums dedicated to children's topics (e.g. /r/teenagers or /r/roblox) and also hosting forums dedicated to porn needs to do it in a way where the two can be effectively separated or understood by filtering software. The solution to Cartoon Network airing programs for children and adults isn't to block the channel entirely; they just need to correctly label their adult programming so filters will work. In reddit's case, they already mark threads and subreddits as nsfw so it'd be trivial for them to put that onto a separate domain. Even 4chan puts their hobby boards on a different domain from porn and /pol/, and they're not even trying to appeal to children, banning anyone that mentions they're under 18/in high school/etc.
>You're kind of missing the point here. Parts of reddit are fine. Kids should be able to participate in forums about children's interests. The problem is a site is comingling children's forums and porn in a way where filtering is unreasonably difficult.
I'm not missing the point at all. Reddit is a product. Your job as parent is to evaluate whether or not a product is appropriate for your child.
You know that Reddit doesn't have parental controls. If you can't trust your child to not go onto the NSFW subreddits, you should block Reddit so they can't access it. Sometimes you have to tell your child 'no' and they don't get the thing they want. The other thing you could do is write Reddit and advocate for parental controls.
It's absurd and entitled to believe that I should have to jump through hoops because you want your child to have access to a website that it sounds like is inappropriate for them. I personally think Robolox is terrible for kids. Should Reddit install a parental consent form to make sure that parents who don't want their kids to consume Robolox content can't access it? Where does it end?
>It's reasonable to demand that a company that's in the business of hosting forums dedicated to children's topics (e.g. /r/teenagers or /r/roblox) and also hosting forums dedicated to porn needs to do it in a way where the two can be effectively separated or understood by filtering software.
It's not reasonable to expect a company to filter content based on your personal understanding of porn. If a product doesn't meet your needs in terms of parental controls, be a parent and say 'no'.
>The solution to Cartoon Network airing programs for children and adults isn't to block the channel entirely; they just need to correctly label their adult programming so filters will work.
Again, you should write Reddit and ask for these parental controls. I'm fine with that. It's when you pass laws making me jump through hoops that a problem exists.
>n reddit's case, they already mark threads and subreddits as nsfw so it'd be trivial for them to put that onto a separate domain. Even 4chan puts their hobby boards on a different domain from porn and /pol/, and they're not even trying to appeal to children, banning anyone that mentions they're under 18/in high school/etc.
And those are the companies choices. I'm not opposed to parental controls, but if parental controls don't exist, don't pass laws to force them to.
Reddit is a company that has products targeted toward both children and adults. If they want to do that, they should act like any other business and ensure that children aren't allowed access to products that are only for adults, or at least enable parents to make that decision. Grocery stores are free to sell cigarettes and alcohol along with candy, but they're required to not sell the former products to children. We don't just say "don't let your child go to the store alone".
> It's absurd and entitled to believe that I should have to jump through hoops because you want your child to have access to a website that it sounds like is inappropriate for them.
Where did I suggest you should have to jump through hoops? I said companies like reddit should design things such that filters work. If you don't need filtering, you'd be unaffected. Similar to how that little "TV-MA" pops up at the beginning of a TV show; every TV in the US market can be configured to block content above a desired rating level, and broadcasters are required to include the rating in their signal. I don't see how this would be so onerous to require a similar standard for businesses providing content online, particularly when that's information they already categorize out of politeness to their customers anyway.
> It's not reasonable to expect a company to filter content based on your personal understanding of porn.
I didn't suggest they should filter anything; I suggested they should label content and that the industry should be regulated to use standard way to do this that parental control software can understand. There's already precedent for how to solve this problem in TVs. It can be done in a way that completely preserves privacy and only requires action from people who want to configure their client to have filtering. Note that I also suggested they should label content categories. The person configuring the client can decide which categories are appropriate.
Similarly, if they move their nsfw images that they've already categorized from i.redd.it to e.g. p.redd.it, DNS filtering could easily block them all while still allowing roblox memes, and users who don't care wouldn't have to do anything.
> I'm not opposed to parental controls, but if parental controls don't exist, don't pass laws to force them to.
The problem is that parental controls increasingly cannot reasonably exist. With something like TLS with Encrypted Client Hello and DNS-over-HTTPS, and with most sites being hosted on large CDNs, the choice becomes "block all of cloudflare etc." or "block nothing". It's not that much to ask that if a company wants to provide both adult-only and child-oriented content, they should at least provide usable metadata for which is which to make sure filters can work.
>Reddit is a company that has products targeted toward both children and adults. If they want to do that, they should act like any other business and ensure that children aren't allowed access to products that are only for adults, or at least enable parents to make that decision.
Is Reddit targeted to children? My assumption has always been that due to the nature of having intermingled NSFW content, lack of content filters, or literally any other control that Reddit was squarely aimed at older users.
>Grocery stores are free to sell cigarettes and alcohol along with candy, but they're required to not sell the former products to children. We don't just say "don't let your child go to the store alone".
Tobacco is a lot less subjective of a thing than 'inappropriate content' or 'porn' and its bad health effects are actually substantiated. Is fine art porn? Is a naked person porn? It might be to you, it isn't to me. Who gets to decide what is porn? The government? Religious activists?
>I said companies like reddit should design things such that filters work. If you don't need filtering, you'd be unaffected.
I would be affected because there is now a whole system that dictates what content is. How does one do that? How much does it cost? Is it my responsibility to determine that? The site hosts? What if one host has a different labeling system? It's not simple. It's regulatory bloat that would exist solely because people who popped kids out don't want to actually parent.
>Similarly, if they move their nsfw images that they've already categorized from i.redd.it to e.g. p.redd.it, DNS filtering could easily block them all while still allowing roblox memes, and users who don't care wouldn't have to do anything.
If reddit wants to implement that, that's fine with me. What OP said and what I responded to was this
"I think this is a poor solution; a more empowering one would be *to develop a standard for content categorization and require commercial websites and commercially developed browsers (so all of them that are in common use) to implement content blocking via e.g. header exchange*, with criminal penalties for negligently providing pornography without the correct headers (have some provision for vandalism when good-faith moderation is in place). Then parents actually could just configure their OS or browser for what kinds of content should be allowed."
>The problem is that parental controls increasingly cannot reasonably exist.
You can black list the reddit domain right now. How do they not exist? It might not exist in the form that you want, but that's life. I can't have the government force movie theaters to show edited versions of movies so they are kid appropriate. Some stuff just isn't for kids.
> It's not that much to ask that if a company wants to provide both adult-only and child-oriented content, they should at least provide usable metadata for which is which to make sure filters can work.
Reddit, for the most part, does not provide content.
> Is Reddit targeted to children? My assumption has always been that due to the nature of having intermingled NSFW content, lack of content filters, or literally any other control that Reddit was squarely aimed at older users.
Among other child-oriented boards, they have a teenagers board with 3 million subscribers, so evidently, yes.
> Is it my responsibility to determine that? The site hosts?
The site host, given that they're the ones providing adult material in a commercial context.
> What if one host has a different labeling system?
I proposed we should create a standard system for labeling and mandate its use for commercial sites that offer adult material, just like we did with TV. Browsers from commercial entities (i.e. Chrome and its variants, Safari, and Firefox) would be required to implement the filter settings, just as TVs must contain a v-chip.
> It's regulatory bloat that would exist solely because people who popped kids out don't want to actually parent.
It's requiring site operators to provide the metadata needed for parents to be able to effectively parent without the solution being "lol just don't let your kid use any website at all".
> I can't have the government force movie theaters to show edited versions of movies so they are kid appropriate. Some stuff just isn't for kids.
But we can force movie theaters to provide ratings of movies and require them to bar children from watching any pornographic films they show. Currently companies self-enforce with ratings, but that's because if they didn't, they were going to have it forced upon them. The problem here is that we don't have any kind of rating system for web content, and clearly tech companies aren't going to develop one on their own, so it's reasonable to make them develop one.
> Reddit, for the most part, does not provide content.
Of course they do. They don't make it, but they're the ones providing it, and they make plenty of money doing so.
>Among other child-oriented boards, they have a teenagers board with 3 million subscribers, so evidently, yes.
Any user can make a subreddit about whatever they want. I'd wager the large majority of those users are not teenagers. Regardless, 'used by teens' != 'targeted for teens'.
>The site host, given that they're the ones providing adult material in a commercial context.
Which site host? Reddit is primarily a link aggregator.
> proposed we should create a standard system for labeling and mandate its use for commercial sites that offer adult material, just like we did with TV.
Yes! We need to make sure adults in no way be aware of or responsible for what media their children consume!
Of course that's the end game. We start with forcing companies to 'categorize' their content. Then we make it harder and harder to access the content that people like you have determined is undesirable.
>It's requiring site operators to provide the metadata needed for parents to be able to effectively parent without the solution being "lol just don't let your kid use any website at all".
It's requiring businesses to implement a massively expensive and arbitrary censorship system because parents are unable to tell their kids no. Metata wont be magically created and you know it. What's to stop a host from just refusing to label stuff porn? You full well know that what you are advocating for is the governmental review of all content on the internet.
>But we can force movie theaters to provide ratings of movies and require them to bar children from watching any pornographic films they show
The MPA is a voluntary rating scheme. You should look into it because it highlights all the obvious problems with what you are presenting. Misogyny, christian norms dictating what content can be shown, it's a disaster.
>Of course they do. They don't make it, but they're the ones providing it, and they make plenty of money doing so.
hey
If that's you're understanding, you don't really understand Reddit in the first place.
Look, just be a parent and stop forcing draconian policies on everyone else because you can't tell your kid no or monitor what they do online. Reddit is inappropriate for children, be responsible, don't let your children use it.
> I'd wager the large majority of those users are not teenagers. Regardless, 'used by teens' != 'targeted for teens'.
You think a significant number of those people are adults who have nothing better to do than larp as teenagers? And yes if you have millions of children in your audience, it's fair to say you are targeting them. Reddit is a company with a 10 figure market cap and 60 million daily users. They're capable of targeting multiple segments at once.
> Which site host? Reddit is primarily a link aggregator.
Reddit has hosted their own media for years. If you go to e.g. /r/nsfw right now, you'll see plenty of content hosted on reddit domains (along with thumbnails for the other links).
> We need to make sure adults in no way be aware of or responsible for what media their children consume!
I'm literally advocating that we make that awareness easier by requiring sites with adult content to appropriately label themselves. The point is to empower parents to do their jobs without needing to helicopter parent.
> Then we make it harder and harder to access the content that people like you have determined is undesirable.
The entire point of my scheme is to put the end user in charge of what they want to see. You're arguing with a straw man here.
> It's requiring businesses to implement a massively expensive and arbitrary censorship system because parents are unable to tell their kids no. Metata wont be magically created and you know it.
It's already there. They already label posts. Most people don't want random porn mixed in with their hobby discussions, so sites already do that categorization and have some tools for users to control what they see. We just need a standard for http headers to expose it, and have browsers consume those headers.
But yes, business models that include adult material need to account for the cost of not distributing it to children, which is already illegal to do. I'm proposing labeling as an alternative. The current situation is that they should be prosecuted for negligently distributing porn to minors.
> The MPA is a voluntary rating scheme. You should look into it because it highlights all the obvious problems with what you are presenting. Misogyny, christian norms dictating what content can be shown, it's a disaster.
Yes I mentioned that it's "voluntary". The deficiencies are why I proposed labeling categories, not ratings. The parent can configure what categories they deem appropriate. If categories are too much work for a site, they can just label it generically as "adult", and use that to comply with existing relevant laws about distributing things like pornography to minors.
> you can't tell your kid no or monitor what they do online. Reddit is inappropriate for children, be responsible, don't let your children use it.
Reddit has plenty of content that is appropriate for children, which is the whole point. If they want to be all things and include both content for children and content that's illegal to distribute to children, then they should provide parents with tools to segment those things. Or they can choose to exit one of those markets and e.g. ban all users on /r/teenagers, and start putting their over 18 splash page on all pages like every other porn site.
There's also an age range where it's better to set guard rails and then let the kids do their own thing, and you trust that you don't need to spy on them/monitor everything they do. It's helpful if the guard rails are reasonable and actually work. It's absurd to have to block major video game forums because they're also porn sites.
One of my favourite concepts in "late night" style comedy is when they test the censors by gradually incrementing something boring into something "unacceptable," whether it be language, the context of a sketch, or something graphic. And then once they've got the line they play with that line (eg. words/names that sound like "fuck", or Cecily Strong having sex with Bill Hader under a small throw).
One of the best ways to demonstrate how ridiculous and un-thinking this position is would be to do just that. If they "know it when they see it", just say "when!" as we systematically wax, outfit, camera angle, and contextualize this stereotypical, upper-endowed male football fan into a gorgeous female, who then slowly gets topless.
someone told me once "Think of the US less like a secular Western European country and more like a very rich Iran" and that really does help to make sense of a lot of these decisions
Isn't the US still the world largest producer of porn?
Honestly we (Europeans) make the same mistake the Americans do in regards to us, we view the US as one homogeneous mass. The difference between states seems like it's often as great as between European nations. I'd be less concerned about the laws of the individual state, if companies did target the lowest common denominator for the entire US, just to make business easier.
PornHub is in my mind doing the right thing, blocking the state that's causing issues.
When introducing myself to Europeans now I've started saying the state I'm from, such as "I'm from the state of Idaho in the US". Utah is a different state/place than Idaho (see liquor laws, state lottery) and both are very different than California or New York. They're almost like different countries in some ways, especially over the last 10 or so years. Not too long ago you could pretty much live anywhere and the main difference would be where you buy your booze and your tax rates, but that's increasingly changing.
On the rather extreme end, there are some serious movements for secession from the US. Funny enough they don't usually go very far because (shockingly /s) the red states drop their enthusiasm when a red president gets elected, and the blue states drop theirs when a blue get elected. But if we had a steady president for 3 or more terms, I would bet you it gets serious again.
If every half-serious scheme for dividing the US didn't end up stranding some parts or splitting control of the Mississippi, I bet we'd have amicably split in two several decades ago, if not back in the 19th century.
> Isn't the US still the world largest producer of porn?
Yeah, but only in a few areas in terms of studios, not individual creators. iirc studios/companies are mostly in California (LA mostly), Florida (Miami), and NYC.
> PornHub is in my mind doing the right thing, blocking the state that's causing issues.
Curious to know if this is strategic, in the sense that they're hoping their blocking of the state will piss off enough people to reverse the policy.
More correct and less inflammatory version: "Think of the US less like a single (European) country and more like a collection of countries (states) representing various different cultures, some of which have widely divergent or more conservative values."
Single European countries can have extreme differences in culture and politics as well. Go visit Berlin and rural Saxony in Germany and you'll feel like San Francisco and Mississippi culture wise.
ummm. Don't think of the US this way? Think of it as a complex representative government that is federated and representing a highly diverse population, unlike Iran, which is not exactly pro-immigration.
Our government is at least partly reactive to our votes. Utah is very different from Colorado or California or Connecticut. So, no, nothing like rich Iran.
>Our government is at least partly reactive to our votes
So is Iran's. Keep in mind the country is a theocratic Republic that turned out this way because of a popular religious revolt against a secular absolutist monarch. That bottom up, democratic, religious zealotry is something you also have in the US but virtually nowhere in the developed world.
Don't know what to tell you, man. The US is drastically more diverse than Iran, and as a result is not nearly as hegemonic. Also, the US is a lot more moderate in its views and policies than Iran. The US political party rhetoric is quite different than a lot of our policies actually are. Sure, much of the political right in the US leans puritanical, but, that leaning is a still more lip service to a small, vocal base than broadly representative of our population.
So you're saying there is no religious zealotry in Europe?
What about the Christian Democratic Union of Germany which officially believes in Catholic Democracy and didn't recognize same-sex marriage until 2017?
I'm sure you understand the difference between an individual committing a crime and a state-sanctioned execution. So what's the purpose of this comment, other than to mislead?
Here are some highlights from your misleading list:
> April 26, 2022 – An unidentified individual threw a rock through the front door of the Pride Center VT office. As of April, 2022 the incident remains unsolved and is being investigated as a hate crime
Only two items in the list are even killings, including this one:
> June 23, 2022 – Naasire Johnson was killed by his gay lover, Kylen Pratt.
i.e. state sanctioned or publicly accepted execution without trial.
No law on earth can physically prevent someone from acquiring a weapon and killing members of the LGBT community, the difference is whether this is tolerated and/or endorsed by the state and public, which it is not.
You provided a list of heinous crimes that in no way reflects the views of the United States government or the general public.
To make it even clearer, recent LGBT violence is not even remotely relatable to the widespread lynchings of Black Americans (which you are evoking with this word) that was 'illegal' yet systemically tolerated in the early-mid 1900s.
Literally none of these LGBT crimes were associated with a mob proclaiming justice as was the case with historical lynchings.
Not execute. But there were laws against “sodomy” - ie consensual non heterosexual sex between adults in some southern states as late as the 80s and people went to jail.
> As of March 2023, 14 states either have not yet formally repealed their laws against sexual activity among consenting adults or have not revised them to accurately reflect their true scope as a result of Lawrence v. Texas.
While Lawrence v Texas does limit these laws, there's a concerted effort to repeal it, and if that happens, these laws will go back into effect.
go to any impoverished town or neighborhood in any part of the USA and see for yourself: the running water is undrinkable, the food will slowly kill you, education is severely lacking, etc.
Mandatory reminder that the US covers more land area than the entire EU. And while the population is 185 million people smaller, think about how wildly different the various EU countries are culturally.
While the US has something of a shared culture, the South has a wildly different culture than New York. It's OK for Germany and France to say that the politics of Hungary and Poland shouldn't represent them, and vice versa.
Blanket statements about the US aren't much different than blanket statements about the EU. It greatly depends where you are. And in an alternate timeline, the US may have been more like the EU, especially back when US states had very large armies (er, "militias") of their own. And some still do though they are much smaller now (SDFs).
My experience living in North Carolina, Texas, New York, and California gives me the picture that this is an exaggeration. Imho, the difference is somewhat like that between a northern town near Newcastle and Covent Garden.
Most nations have regional differences in the realm of the US. Yes, a town like Alba in Texas isn't like NYC culturally or physically, but many countries have this difference.
I suspect that of the many that I have lived in or visited, the only ones with apparent uniformity are ones I haven't really seen deeply: Iceland and Norway perhaps.
Way to regurgitate a tired argument. Kids are addicted to porn before they’re old enough to drive these days and it’s messes them up for life (see: the incel movement.) Something has to be done about corporations that profit off of showing literal children hardcore porn.
“Talking to your kids” doesn’t work when multinational corporations are incentivized to addict them for ad revenue.
This doesn't sound right. While pornography certainly has impacts on immature minds (kids or young adults), I suspect it's rather in a completely opposite area than you've pointed out - like teenage pregnancies or kids engaging in various inappropriate sexual behaviors.
I'm no expert, but I'd say incels' social ineptitude seem to come from personality traits and [mis]expectations that aren't that frequently portrayed in pornography. I'd say it's various media with unrealistic portrayal of romantic relationships that should be attributed (and that's typically not porn). And, obviously, strong meme-affirming effects of echo chambers, the bane of our times, but that's a whole different topic.
I don't believe your last statement either. Where - except for anti-porn propaganda statements - have you seen any large adult industry corporation intentionally targeting children? The article in question clearly indicates that virtually everyone in that whole industry want kids to stay away from their businesses, because they only cause trouble. If someone invents a way to keep kids off the porn sites without having any negative impact on adult audience, I'm sure they're gonna celebrate that person as a savior of the industry. Those companies surely have put a blind eye to the problem, but I find the claim of adult industry actually targeting children to be outrageous.
What makes me thing so is that I highly doubt the incentive. On the contrary, there's at least one very cynical reason to still say there isn't such incentive: kids aren't paying. Parents may tolerate them spending money on some in-game cosmetics, but surely they won't approve if they spot a porn purchase on a statement. Porn companies have enough problems making profits from adults, so them considering kids as a target audience sounds insane not just from a moral standpoint but from a business perspective as well.
"Incel movement"
For the love of god. It is like calling poor people "powerty movement". Lost your arm? How dare you to belong to "one arm movement"? Don't you know there was was one arm rober with vad political views?
No one chooses their life circumstances. Too poor ("just learn to code bruh!" (did)) and not good looking enough ("just work out bruh!" (tried did not grow my missing body part back)) to attract woman for one night stand in country with banned sex work? Well you must belong to some radical political party or be poisoned by porn!
Blocking access to pornographic websites is the responsibility of parents or other responsible adults absent a federal ID verification system that would enable websites to reliably block kids (similar to S. Korea).
You can justify almost any amount of censorship based on "thinking about the kids". But our society is built for more than just the first 20% of human life. The proliferation of this argument that everything from the internet to IRL bookstores need to be censored to protect children starts from a good place, but it jumped the shark a long time ago.
What evidence do you have that the incel movement is driven by pornography? I always attributed it to the recruitment efforts of the alt-right and other misogynistic groups.
I think you're underselling the problem a bit. Before the internet, dudes who whine about not getting laid were generally not able to organize effectively into social echo chambers, at least to the same extent as today. In 'meatspace', people are exposed to other people who have a wide array of experiences, including older more experienced men who tell the young incels to quit bitching and go talk to women.
Online, in incel echo chambers, such voices of reason and wisdom are expelled. The incels then spiral into unchallenged worldviews that alienate them from the general public, isolating them from women and everybody else even more than they were before.
Idk man - we've got all kinds of crazy ass ideas from back in the past. The idea of echo chambers seems to be way more easy to come by when you're living in a small town in the middle of nowhere and that's all the info you've got to go on. The internet is big and pushes all kinds of crazy shit your way.
Nowadays, you're constantly pushed all kinds of random shit. The usual incel rhetoric that I see is - there's not many women to talk to. Which is mostly attributed to the decline of social spaces due to again - whole atomized society stuff and late stage capitalism, yadda yadda. (If you haven't heard about it yet - just read some robert putnam)
In my experience, you are correct. The incel movement (and others like it) is a targeted attempt to enflame naive and susceptible target(s) to a polarized view of the world.
This is beneficial to the manipulators for various reasons, be they financial or political.
Honestly, I think you both have a valid concern. However, these two views are not mutually exclusive.
I think you can have both the overly aggressive censoring of nudity and also at the same time have corporations aggressively pushing porn onto anyone and everyone for profit.
In my opinion, you could pretty clearly enact policy to resolve both of these issues without making it a one or the other argument or saying "something has to be done".
Why does it have to only be one "something"? Could it not be two different "somethings" that target each issue specifically?
Nothing wrong with government wanting people to wear burkas and cover up some more, it’s part of respectful and dignified society. Maybe don’t insult and denigrate modesty and other cultures next time.
> You can suck on it when you are a baby, but god forbid you ever take a look at it again before you are married.
It turns out, a mother's nipple has a far different effect on an infant than a young adult female nipple does on a teenage boy. If this is difficult for you to grasp, then you should consider stepping away from this conversation, as there is clearly nuance here that the average person can easily understand but that you can't.
> What's wrong with these people?
What's wrong with you?
> Even public nudity laws differ from city to city (e.g. in California), so clearly, people aren't aligned at all on this subject (I'm emphasizing the arbitrary nature here).
I don't think "arbitrary" means what you think it means. Just because people don't all agree on the definition of something doesn't make one person's definition arbitrary.
> Forbid and censor the things you're afraid of educating on.
"Education" has nothing to do with it. Pornography has been proven to be devastatingly harmful for many, many people. There is no world in which you can be morally consistent, for instance, in supporting an age minimum for alcohol consumption but not for pornography consumption.
> On a closing note, I do recommend supporting organizations like https://www.aanr.com/ who also provide legal help to citizens in states that'd rather have you wear a burka than show a nipple.
If your moral code drives you to make the world a better place by liberating people from restrictions on viewing pornography, then I contend that your moral code is corrupt or severely misguided.
If your moral code dictates what other people can or cannot do with their own lives in their homes then I contend that your moral code may be corrupt or severely misguided.
I'm unclear whether you're arguing that obscene/pornographic material should be accessible/distributed to minors as the distinction here is that this activity is in fact a federal crime in the US (and most of the world).
The government unequivocally has the right and obligation to enforce federal law. To what extent and by which mechanisms they should do this is a different question altogether but this issue is hardly about 'dictating what other people can do with their own lives in their homes' as was the case with other laws like anti-LGBT.
> If your moral code dictates what other people can or cannot do with their own lives
That's literally the point of law. One person writes the law, and it dictates what others can and can't do with their lives. Are you an anarchist? Or are you just not thinking clearly about what you are saying?
If thing X demonstrably causes major harm to individuals, then it is often in the purview of government to restrict adults from exposing minors to X.
I think you should reflect a little on what you actually believe and why you believe it.
An identity provider can make verified age one of the claims on an OAuth token. It removes anonymity, but at least you don't have to provide your personal details to everybody on the internet demanding age verification. You provide those details to your trusted identity provider, they provide the claim of your age to the website.
With that in place we can easily make beer, liquor, marijuana and tobacco sales on the internet possible! And porn too, I guess.
Yes, but as of now there is no punishment for letting others borrow your oauth token. So just publish your oauth and let anyone use it to sign up for services.
It may get tricky if sites limit registration to unique keys, but so long as it's purely checking with a third party and not storing your info, they're shouldn't be a way to validate an id is used more than once.
+1 for teaching lawmakers how to achieve their goals at the protocol layer.
Imagine how much better the web would be if cookie consent was a browser protocol on top of HTTP headers. This is the Obviously Correct solution, they just needed to work with browser vendors to make it happen.
I’d rather you have websites support a generic cryptographically-secure claim schema for ages (implementable in any signed token the browser can emit) than actually check everyone’s identity.
> Imagine how much better the web would be if cookie consent was a browser protocol on top of HTTP headers.
Imagine how much better the web would be if the browsers would have a built-in ability to accept or reject cookies on a per-site basis... oh, wait, they do. And had that since forever (or at least IE5). Almost no one used that because it was obnoxious to have a popup on every website. So browser vendors moved those settings to the farthest corners of the most obscure configuration dialogs... and then the politicians brought those prompts back (but in a crappy, non-standardized, not-even-working way).
Right, but to be clear the cookie consent thing was about purpose limitation, not blocking all cookies outright.
The idea was that core functionality shouldn’t break if you block unnecessary tracking, which the old cookie blockers couldn’t achieve, which was why politicians got involved in the first place. Great idea, terrible implementation.
> Imagine how much better the web would be if cookie consent was a browser protocol on top of HTTP headers. This is the Obviously Correct solution, they just needed to work with browser vendors to make it happen.
This is a great idea, and it doesn't seem like we need lawmakers to do anything about it. If browsers implemented this, websites could start using it right?
It’s a good point, I don’t know. My guess is the regulations require the website to ask for consent in a way that precludes browsers doing this, but that is a total guess.
Also the sites have a disincentive to make it easier; most people just click through because it’s annoying. The sites want you to do that; they don’t want to make it easier.
A much better solution than was suggested by PornHub:
> PornHub said that a better solution is to identify users by their device.
Fingerprinting is not and should not be the sanctioned way of identifying people. On the engineering side, it is a horrible hack. On the ethical side, it is much worse to (attempt to) fingerprint since it tells PornHub waaay more than just age.
>Fingerprinting is not and should not be the sanctioned way of identifying people.
If I understood PornHubs proposal correctly they want to only provide the content if your browser does not send a "Child-Mode" flag or something. Given that parents should introduce children to their first mobile devices and guide them, setting this flag seems not to be so hard.
Just set at account creation "minor: true" and done, or am I missing something?
Yeah I really did not understand what they were suggesting with "device verification" but it seemed both ineffective and likely to provide them with far more data than needed.
Where are you based? I can purchase alcohol from Amazon UK with no obvious age checks. Deliveroo require that riders verify your age but in reality they just ask you to type it in. And the major grocery stores deliver alcohol without any obvious checking too. I imagine teenage drinking is much easier these days thanks to the above :)
> I imagine teenage drinking is much easier these days thanks to the above
When I was in (secondary) school in the UK, we could get served beer in the pub at lunchtime while wearing school uniform! Doesn't get much easier than that!
In Holland beer and wine was allowed from 16 years of age and only spirits were 18+. Unfortunately a recent conservative government switched it all to 18+.
I'm much older but I think 16 is old enough for a beer. I didn't when I were that age but I don't begrudge them their beer.
And it's not like the law will stop it from happening anyway.
People in the US seem to be at higher risk than Europeans of catastrophic problem drinking (where alcohol use leads to a loss of employment, housing, marriage / social connections, etc).
I have seen this with several European friends who relocated to the US and found their relationship with alcohol turning dark.
My personal theory is that life in the states may be on average more stressful than in Europe, perhaps due to lack of healthcare, at-will employment, etc., and this life pressure causes people here to be more at risk of self-medication problem drinking.
We waited for the French Exchange kids to be staying with us. They all looked about 25 when we were all 15. They were always happy to buy our booze for us :-)
About a month ago I had my groceries delivered from Wholefoods and the deliver driver carded me for some non-alcoholic beer I had purchased. I tried explaining to him that he didn't have to do that, but he wouldn't unload my groceries until I let him scan my ID.
I had this a lot during the pandemic lockdown, for groceries and takeout… things that weren’t even liquid or food were mislabeled in some database as alcohol, requiring stressful social interaction when the whole point was no contact dropoff. Crazy how people aren’t allowed to use common sense but have to follow an apps instructions.
Okay, so advocate for repealing laws that age-restrict sales of alcohol, tobacco, etc. I don't think you'll find much support for your position, and until you do the company has a duty to do basic due diligence to not break the law.
False dichotomy. Basic due diligence can include asking the obviously young if they're old enough and does not need to be so heavily bureaucratized or strictly regulated. I suggest that restricting tobacco advertising and imposing high taxes on tobacco sales has done far more to limit youth consumption than any number of ID checks and retail license policing.
Most other developed countries get by just fine with a much more relaxed attitude. Demanding identification and legal documentation for every little thing is excessive and imposes a compliance burden on everyone. It's fair in the sense of being non-discriminatory, but unfair in the sense that it creates a massive aggregate burden, reduces privacy, and institutes authoritarian presumptions.
Not sure if it's everywhere yet, but where I live, QFC and Fred Meyer have started scanning IDs for every alcohol purchase, which is a bit disturbing because that block of data on the back of your ID has a lot more than your birthday on it. I have a passport card that doesn't scan but is still valid ID, but I wonder if there's any legal issue with printing your own barcode that says "mind your own business" or something and sticking it on there.
Right? Why can't you scan your ID and then be prompted what information to share with the system, like age? I scan my ID, the system asks to retrieve age information, it retrieves it, now I can proceed to scan my alcohol. No human interaction required.
If the person manning the self-checkout operations thinks you look awfully young to be buying alcohol then they can always demand to see your ID.
Stop complying with them. If they won't sell to you, take your business elsewhere and tell them why. If they whine about laws tell them to hire better lobbyists.
It harms me by making me ask permission of strangers to eat and drink what I choose. I don't think telling people to operate as mindless robots makes their job easier.
The permission is granted by your government. Either move to a libertarian paradise where 10 year olds can drink or accept that a merchant will apply measures to protect their liquor license.
Far more harmful is self-checkout without a discount for free labor or treating your customers like criminals when they leave the store with their own property.
I'm saying that regulatory requirements should be less strict, so that retailers are not turned into an extension of the government. Many developed countries establish a minimum age for alcohol purchase but don't build unwieldy infrastructures around it, relying instead on the aggregate judgement of their populace.
You seem to have missed the part where I do not want to ask permission of the government for every little thing. I'm well into middle age and do not appreciate having to seek governmental approval for what I consume. I am fine with some products like alcohol being subjected to taxes to balance out negative externalities. I am not fine with the idea of showing my papers on demand.
Actually scan. I sometimes get beer via door dash, and they quickly verify your age by scanning the barcode on your ID. It pops up green so fast that at least some of the verification must be local to the phone, but I'm sure some data gets sent back. But I had to upload my ID to Door Dash the first time, so incremental scans don't really give them anything new.
But God forbid you try to buy a kitchen knife! It used to be that you had to show ID at delivery, but now Amazon requires adding ID before the purchase.
In the Bay Area I’m also easily able to order alcohol on all the big delivery services, but they all seem pretty consistent about scanning your ID for age verification before they drop it off.
Denmark has a system like this, MitID, it support OAuth2 and OpenID Connect, so here it should be possible. The US doesn't have a country wide system for identification only, not that I know of at least. I can understand companies, like PornHub, not wanting to pay along, unless the government provides a system for age verification. Still it would also be a lot of work to integrate with every single government ID scheme around the world.
Also they normally aren't free to use, each query normally cost money, why would the porn sites want to pay for a service they didn't want anyway.
Another issue with these system: They are high value target and they tend to be just as crashy as other government IT projects.
More interesting data for the identity provider.. Leaving the filtering to the client side is a less intrusive method and puts the responsibility into the hands of parents (or work places). rtalabel.org proposes simple well-known meta tags to simplify this filtering.
I support the idea of shifting this to the client side, but RTA seems to be going about it in a rather bizarre way:
> Hit the SELECT TAG button, then copy and paste this META tag into the header section of every page on your site that includes content inappropriate for minors:
With physical goods it's probably enough to check the age of the person taking delivery. Presumably the people who deliver groceries know what to do if the groceries include a crate of beer and the person who opens the door looks as if they might be under 18. Presumably they ask to see a driving licence or for someone older to come to the door. Or the crate of beer gets sadly removed from the order and the teenager's father is disappointed when he gets back from his evening walk.
Checkbox for "I don't want to view or reply to comments by under 18s" for websites would be a plus. Think web will get somewhat better when adults stop getting into arguments with kids without knowing it. Wouldn't mind even more granularity, i.e. I don't want to interact with with anyone +/-10 my age.
Queue the full Tinderization of online interaction, I only want to see coments from X race, Y age, Z height with following list of orientations and identitites.
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.
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".
> 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.
> 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.
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/
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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!”
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds more like an argument for regulation targeting externalities surrounding sugar and artificial sweeteners than against regulation targeting pornography.
"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.
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.”
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].
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.
> 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?
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 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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".
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.
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 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 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 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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?
> "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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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'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.
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 :)
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.
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?
“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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. ~
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems that the better law would be to require sites carry some standardized nsfw/18+ tag or marker so they could easily be filtered by parental controls. Sites in violation could be fined if they did not include the marker.
There would probably still be trivial ways to work around this (e.g. content blocker to remove the marker) but it would be no more trivial than the current vpn workaround and it would be more privacy preserving.
Pornography, social media, 24/7 news... will all be looked back on in history as having profound negative mental health effects, akin to how we today view smoking in the 1950s. There is a mountain of growing evidence that this is verifiably true. The exact means that Utah is using to provide ID check may be for debate, but the concept there should be an age restriction, liable to the ISP or the content provider, should not be in dispute.
What alternative means do you see as having the potential to be effective? Is there a version that does not require unmasking everyone just to identify the children?
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.
It makes no sense to me that every physical store in a state must check IDs if you want to buy porn or alcohol, but porn websites can just let anyone in without checking ID.
There are legitimate privacy concerns with checking ID online, but I think it’s way past time that the government does something to restrict the supply of porn to minors via the internet.
The same with social media. The evidence that social media causes harm to minors is clear and compelling.
>It makes no sense to me that every physical store in a state must check IDs if you want to buy porn or alcohol, but porn websites can just let anyone in without checking ID.
So.. what, you have to enter a license number or a picture of a license to let people into a porn website? How does that prove anything other than someone has access to a license number/picture?
>There are legitimate privacy concerns with checking ID online, but I think it’s way past time that the government does something to restrict the supply of porn to minors via the internet.
First... how?
Second.. I sure as shit don't want that. Most people don't want that. Mostly religious nutjobs do, and politicians pretend like they care just to keep on good terms with religious nuts.
>The evidence that social media causes harm to minors is clear and compelling.
I'm not advocating for social media here- but no one being objective about the subject would ever speak that way. You obviously have a "PROTECT THE CHILDREN!" mentality and want to legislate everything with no respect to anything else. At least just be straight forward instead of trying to make silly arguments.
> So.. what, you have to enter a license number or a picture of a license to let people into a porn website? How does that prove anything other than someone has access to a license number/picture?
This is such a common argument for any new type of law. Yes, it turns out, you can try and commit fraud and break the law, and then you will be held accountable for it.
Banks also have to verify who you are before doing business with you. People are free to try and misrepresent who they are in order to gain access to financial services illegally.
> So.. what, you have to enter a license number or a picture of a license to let people into a porn website? How does that prove anything other than someone has access to a license number/picture?
It's still a barrier to entry and will stop some kids. Sure, kids can still get fake IDs or use their parents so this wont stop everyone but no law ever will stop everyone.
> First... how?
Don't know. Let's let the people who have the most interest here figure out a workable way around this.
> Second.. I sure as shit don't want that. Most people don't want that. Mostly religious nutjobs do, and politicians pretend like they care just to keep on good terms with religious nuts.
You may not. But I'm not a religious nut job, in fact I'm a frequent user of online porn and have for almost 20 years now. That said, I think I'm mature enough now to recognize how fucked up a lot of stuff online is. And now that I have kids, I can see that the status quo is probably not where we want to be on this issue. Not necessarily for my kids (I can put strong content filtering on my networks), but for other people who aren't nearly as tech savvy.
> I'm not advocating for social media here- but no one being objective about the subject would ever speak that way. You obviously have a "PROTECT THE CHILDREN!" mentality and want to legislate everything with no respect to anything else. At least just be straight forward instead of trying to make silly arguments.
>Don't know. Let's let the people who have the most interest here figure out a workable way around this.
You don't think people have thought about this shit since the internet started? There is literally no viable way- otherwise it probably would have already happened.
So honestly the entire argument is completely moot unless you want us to video chat with someone to verify our identity and age before we decide to search for a naughty image.
No, that is not what happened. State governments initially did put into place age verification restrictions. Those restrictions were struck down by the Supreme Court in Ashcroft v ACLU because SCOTUS believed that content filtering could be a suitable alternative. 20 years later, we know that content filtering is an abject failure. So the states are passing these laws to get before SCOTUS again to overturn Ashcroft v ACLU.
The market never did this because they never had to before, and the internet has also drastically changed since this was first brought up.
this is absolutely not the job of the government. you are responsible for your kids. this is just inviting more and more police state big brother bureaucratic bullshit and less rights, less freedom.
People don't (generally) want to stand next to a 13 year old while looking at what porn/sex toys to buy, but beyond that it's pretty much the same argument. Alcohol/drug sale restrictions are probably the more interesting half but I'm not so sure drugs and media are fungible. After all, there are valid places to draw the line beyond "no government involvement on anything whatsoever" and "government involvement on everything moral because we did it on one thing".
> People don't (generally) want to stand next to a 13 year old while looking at what porn/sex toys to buy, but beyond that it's pretty much the same argument
That is not why people don't want kids in sex shops.
You do not need it to be the government to provide a protocol for identification. In Sweden they already done this by offloading it to banks, which can be seen as a benefit or drawback based on who you ask.
Personally I would like to see something like letsencrypt to take the role of central identification authority, with multiple open protocols available to prove identification. Neither governments or banks should be the single source for identity. Trust is a hard problem to solve with technology, and neither government nor for-profit organizations tend to be very good at it.
There are about a gazillion porn websites and legislation only affects the top like 3 of them. Completely pointless unless you have an entire surveillance system like China's firewall
I never said that. I said that its unique in how wide its reach is. Yes, you can find porn on Google if you turn off SafeSearch. Yes there are other PornTube sites out there. But if you dig deep enough I bet you'd find that most of them are owned by MindGeek too. MindGeek has the lion's share of the market right now by far.
I checked wikipedia at the age of 11 (21yrs ago) and learned every kind of fetish in existence. There are enough ways for parents to educate and limit access to things.
I've never seen an adult store check age in the Netherlands. Children just aren't interested until they're ready for it. I assume a store owner is legally in the clear when serving a five year old, even if in practice they would ask for their caretaker's phone number and send them home.
Is that actually required and enforced in the USA?
Odd. Well, I suppose you're right that's unequal requirements in an equal situation, though I'd propose the solution is to remove that law rather than extending it.
Why is it that the people following the news hosted by a company focused on entrepreneurship and start-ups is surprised and arguing how weird a region is? All markets are weird in their own way.
It sounds like there's an opportunity here for someone to create (yet another?) tech company that manages this difficult problem. PornHub, gambling sites and other folks that need to verify age then pay you to do it! Laws like this are just a cost of doing business. Pass the cost of verification onto the consumers in Utah. If consumers don't like they can change the law or learn how to setup a VPN.
Doesn't this solve the problem? PornHub keeps their margins and people still have their freedom. If a kid really wants to look at porn, they'll at least have to be able to fund it or learn some valuable technical skills.
How do they block a state like this? Is there a directory where ip addresses can be looked up to see if they fall within these geographic boundaries? What about computers belonging to people visiting the state?
It’s based on IP addresses, not computers. There are “IP Geolocation” services that aggregate many different databases to try to guess where an IP address has be allocated physically. See https://whatismyipaddress.com/geolocation
It's not interesting if you are at all familiar with Mormons. The problem is people are only familiar with us from Under The Banner of Heaven saying we're all violent extremists or countless reality TV shows painting us all as polygamist.
Mastercard and Visa have been doing the same for years now. Anyone who uploads nude photos (and this includes nudism websites) must also upload government id to the website (Not to visa/Mastercard which would be the obvious). So millions of users have uploaded multiple copies of their gov id to all kinds of websites. I m sure they are secure.
This happened after some anti-sex groups went on a pr campaign. And this american pretentiousness is now imposed on everyone, worldwide.
It’s funny to see half of HN clutch pearls when a segment of society doesn’t want their kids addicted to digital porn.
No one’s stopping you; it’s to stop kids from ramping up what might be the most societally acceptable hardcore addiction.
There are elected representatives that push for these changes, this is how the society in the US is structured. If you want a different set of rules, get elected or change states.
I don’t know if the legislation here is misguided or not, but I do find it fascinating the number of users who, whenever a thread focused on the potential dangers of pornography (or violent media content) pops up, insist that it’s completely harmless and there is no way it could have an affect on people’s behaviors or personalities.
Advertising is close to a $1T industry. Many people here work for some of the most powerful corporations in the world, whose empires are built on advertising. The content we see and hear affects us. I think we would be wise to treat all kinds of media consumption, particularly novel forms such as the unlimited access to limitless amounts of porn at the touch of a button which has only been widely available 20 years at best, with some hesitancy and skepticism before we declare it as perfectly harmless.
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?
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.
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.
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.
In the old days parents would have this responsibility. And this doesn't necessarily mean that the parents would prohibit it! But I guess if parents aren't parenting the way you want them to, you need to pass a law. (which I disagree with)
Before, parents oversaw things in the home and strangers/other parents extended that reach to the streets and the public square. These days parents barely have control over things at home due to how things can be circumvented, never mind outside the home.
It’d be like comparing an old style police stakeout and telling everyone surveillance is no different today because it’s just the police (ignoring the part where technology changes the calculus).
Just mentioning, this post at the time of my comment, has 856 comments. That's roughly 3 times the next highest post at this moment, and at least 8 times the average, and I'm being generous.
In short, hacker news users have quite a bit to say about porn on the internet, while another "popular" post about Google's DeepMind CEO's belief about impending general artificial intelligence remains at 35 comments. lol
This law is so nonsensical. There is no way to block all the porn in the world behind "legitimate and law-abiding" porn providers. The right way to approach this problem (if you even see it as a problem) is to filter on the device.
Just make content tagging mandatory and make a device level filter that can be turned on by parents and locked with a password.
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)
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".
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 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.
> One state is a democracy, the other is an undemocratic clerical state.
> Now, close your eyes and try to guess which is which.
Utah is the democracy? Doesn't seem too tough. Their elected officials passed a law, we assume with the will of the people. You disagreeing with the law doesn't change their status as a democracy.
> Pornhub forced to block Utah, but not Iran.
One has enforcement mechanisms that can actually hurt Pornhub, and the other is Iran. Big ole shrug here too.
Yes, its always surprising that the set of people thar believe that the populace at large should have control of policy overlaps with the set that have strong opinions about the content of policy.
I mean, except that that’s really not even a little bit surprising.
(Neither, really, is the fact—which seems more relevant here—that people raised in the context where liberal democracy is idealized often have trouble separating out the “liberal” and “democratic” elements of that system, and frequently confuse the construct as “democracy” and view democratic illiberalism as “undemocratic”.)
The answer to your riddle is: Utah is the democracy. Plain and simple. The democratically-elected representatives of Utah are passing legislation that represents the interests of the majority of its population.
Good riddance for Utah. Evil company that ruined lives of many people both users and the "actors" Also super pathetic to be a user of this - watching pixels to fool your brain to release dopamine to get even more pleasure than what the pleaure driven economy of the first world offers 24/7 already.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think a good way to combat pornography companies is to smother them in liability problems. Absolute many children and adults have had negative externalities due to the spread of pornography in society and specially use of it on phones and in computers. It is not healthy or normal or good for so much of growing teens’ attention to be focused and spent on these deeply harmful things. I know growing up that pornography led me as a minor to engaging in sexual conversations and sending nudes to adults and other minors, helped by apps like Kik, Snapchat, Reddit, etc. absolutely these companies all need to be held more accountable for the effects of NSFW activity on their platforms.
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.
Way late to this, but to me this ultimately comes down to:
"How do we handle the negative externalities that access to the worlds information at our fingertips has caused?"
In theory parents are responsible for general outcomes of their children.
However, do you expect non-tech, and realistically, non security/networking people to have the toolset to understand how to set up their networks and their devices to block access to this content? It's already a hard problem to solve in enterprise, or at least non Gov/Defense enterprises (hello Bluecoat?).
A company has no incentive to block users from their content like this unless their is a negative effect from letting someone view it who shouldn't. They say "you're the parent block it". It's almost as if a child walked into a bar and said "give me a beer" and the bartender did. Then didn't get in trouble because "the parent should have stopped it".
> They say "you're the parent block it". It's almost as if a child walked into a bar and said "give me a beer" and the bartender did. Then didn't get in trouble because "the parent should have stopped it".
no, this is more like dad bringing home beers, the kids get into it, and they try to go after the store or beer manufacturer.
I mean it's still happening generally under a parents roof, likely in their own homes and I'm there's already plenty of tools out there to block shit like this, at least on WiFi and I'm sure mobile devices could also block it. This ban is more about the states' religious undertones than anything.
I literally sit in cybersecurty chat channels where people who know tons still cannot get the "plenty of tools" to block this to work correctly. The ones that do have spent thousands on equipment and monitoring capabilities. You don't even come in with examples of how to do it properly, let alone for non-swe/network engineer/ families to do it. Just hand-waving away "i'm sure mobile devices could".
It's nothing like a parent bringing home the beers. In order to participate in education and social life your kids need access to the internet and devices. You parents are giving you a tool to do a job that comes with a negative externality of being able to access adult websites (and anything else on the internet).
It's not ridiculous for parents to vote for representatives who will put legal blocks in place to force a change since there's no way to vote with your dollar here, even if the source is religion where making children is a core tenant.
I'm very familiar with living with LDS. I'm in Idaho.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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…
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
It starts off with arbitrary definitions of what pornography is (https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/static/SB0287.html): "nipple of the female breast"
You can suck on it when you are a baby, but god forbid you ever take a look at it again before you are married. What's wrong with these people?
Even public nudity laws differ from city to city (e.g. in California), so clearly, people aren't aligned at all on this subject (I'm emphasizing the arbitrary nature here).
Forbid and censor the things you're afraid of educating on.
This trend reminds tangentially of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority.
On a closing note, I do recommend supporting organizations like https://www.aanr.com/ who also provide legal help to citizens in states that'd rather have you wear a burka than show a nipple.