How the American war on porn could change the way you use the internet
How the American war on porn could change the way you use the internet
Papers please: for millions of Americans, accessing online pornography now requires a government ID. It could have global implications for the future of the web.
a survey of 1,000 young people concluded that pornography can normalise sexual violence and harmful attitudes among children.
That's irrelevant. This argument assumes that age verification laws will reduce children's consumption of porn. The war on drugs has shown us that prohibition of this kind of stuff doesn't reduce anything and only ever makes it worse. All that will happen is children (and adults) will now go to worse/less moderated websites which will on average have more CSAM and other real sexual abuse.
True. But the people advocating for these laws don't want to deal with nuance and compromise on what it would take to have a society where you educate people on sex in a healthy and positive way. These prohibitionists see the world as either bad or good - nothing in between. Good (how ever they decide to define it) must win no compromises, and the weapon that they use is unfounded fear of the bad and it works.
And the reason fear works is because it is easy and visceral and reality's complexity doesn't work for media's need for sound bites.
I think the part about IDs is what's important. They are not against porn, it's just a good excuse to account for another part of your activities. Which may be used to classify you or even blackmail you, but I think knowing your preferences is enough. It may allow secret services to predict whom you may like or may not.
Naturally it will allow to track you.
There are many factors affecting energy spent on doing something.
I personally think that this timeline is fucking bullshit and we got there by always choosing the lesser evil, so libertarian (you may make it left-libertarian, I genuinely don't care about left-right division because it's mostly traditional and imaginary) revolutions in all the civilized countries are long overdue.
Not even libertarian, maybe the Empire at War: Forces of Corruption game was onto something. Maybe the left-right and libertarian-statist distinctions are obsolete for our time just like Roman optimates-populares distinction. Maybe we need some new line, formalist-naturalist (as in formal law versus natural law) or something. Where the former part would be existing political mechanisms and the latter part would be saying "no" to fools, thieves and bandits.
If you were a teenager, back when online porn were all pay sites, and so you were using Kazaa/Limewire instead, then you know.
Pretty sure the normalization of sexual violence and harmful attitudes came from the adults in my life. If parents and teachers adequately teach kids to identify those things and know that they are unequivocally wrong, then teens who see unhealthy stuff in porn will notice and be critical of it. Probably indignant, too, since no one is more justice focused than a teen who has just learned something about the world.
The issue is backward ideas about relationships being reinforced by adults, either through active misogyny or just never talking about it. This argument boils my blood because the porn itself is not the problem. Awful attitudes about relationships and women start very early and they often come directly from parents themselves.
The word "can" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. A lot of things "can" have negative effects.
How could American politicians be so against pornography, when so many keep getting caught with prostitutes?
Typical. Rules for thee I guess.
They pander to the Christian nationalists for their votes. They just want power, they don’t actually hold those values.
Neither do Christians, it’s the Billionaires. Need to maximize reproduction of the slaves.
Because we live in a ravenous corrupt oligarchy barely able to keep the appearance of a functioning democracy.
And kids
There's probably a name for this just like the "author's barely disguised fetish". Usually when you see politicians campaigning this hard on topics like those, it's probably because they themselves are doing it
It's entirely about loyalty and institutionalized stratification. Laws are meant to constrain those outside the party, while those within the party are given a lot of latitude.
Bind, not protect, protect, but not bind.
because they're conservative, and that's a thing cons do for some reason. google "i know it when i see it" to get some history on how batshit insane it gets.
when so many keep getting caught with
prostitutessex workers?FTFY. If you've ever worked for a living, you're a prostitute - just like the rest of us.
The politicians who are against it are the vast minority, they're just extremely vocal and irritating.
You just answered it... ban pornography. It doesn't ban prostitution.
Pornography and prostitution are different.
One is information, allowing you to dream (maybe of stupid things), another is in the physical world.
I don't want to think a lot of these parallels, but I've noticed that people close to actual government bureaucracies are in general very sceptical of imagined things against physical.
Among other things, consuming pornography doesn't make you feel powerful, while a prostitute is a real human working for you.
Also 30s' propaganda had traits clearly aimed at, eh, sexually dissatisfied youth.
So maybe it's just about feeling their own power, and maybe it's about returning that device of affecting minds. I dunno
For those wondering about the upswing here:
If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it's possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.
"This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn't just about porn," says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.
Yup, and this is exactly why I plan to use a VPN once my state starts enforcing this law. There's no way I'm going to show ID to any website unless they absolutely need it. There are very few websites where that's necessary, so I'll just use a VPN to a neighboring state (or even to Canada) instead of complying with that nonsense.
I already have to worry about identity theft, I don't want to make that even easier...
i've been toying with the idea of hosting deep web porn front ends. Not sure how legal it would be. But morally, you'd be on pretty good grounds.
I mean what 13 year old is using tor browser lmao.
It's not a canary in the coal mine for censoring LGBT information and community, most of the proposed bills outright state that any LGBT related content is covered.
I'm going to link my ID and look up the most mind blowingly vile, while remaining legal, porn. If they want to talk to me about it, then I am going to make them describe each video before I "remember" what I saw, after which point I will refuse to acknowledge it as porn.
Sure, it's dumb, but it's fun dumb.
it's not a war on porn; it's a war on lgbtq people and content. the people pushing for these bills have straight up said that.
It's a war on both, but especially on LGBTQ people. The fundamentalists are anti-porn in the same way that they are anti-sex in other ways, like opposing sex education.
But it is absolutely part of their strategy to define anything LGBTQ-related as sexual or pornographic, and therefore to criminalize any public visibility of LGBTQ people.
It's a war on any free speech, they don't like. They could just add more restrictions for certain people.
Exactly. They want to know who is saying what, which is why they're making these services ask for ID. It's about control, and "protecting children" is the excuse.
It's the same reason they're trying to ban cryptocurrencies like Monero (private, non-traceable transactions), end-to-end encryption, copyright circumvention tech, etc. They want backdoors to access all the information under the guise of "security," but really it's about control.
Screw all of it. Resist at every turn, and hopefully they'll violate your rights so you can sue them (with help from groups like the ACLU) and force a policy reversal. That's the most effective tool we've got.
and also a war on porn, the war on porn is the secondary knock on effect of hating queer people.
It's not a war, it's a safari.
I mean, other than surveillance and control, this allows them to feel their power.
Going after the low hanging fruit are they?
Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.
Royce dupont on the truth about god and porn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeeR38i2QqY
From my cold, dead, lubricated hands!
Luckily we have lemmynsfw.com 🥳
Aren't they going to have the same issue though?
We will see 😁
Papers please: for millions of Americans, accessing online pornography now requires a government ID
And I imagine everyone wants a picture of your ID. Which is horrible on so many levels...
MAKE PENIS AND VAGINA ILLEGAL!!!!!
MAKE POINTY FOODS ILLEGAL
(I think it was "penis shaped" in the original version)
Armpit and foot fetishists are clearly behind this ban!
"If they removed porn from the internet, there would only be one website left and it would be called 'bringbacktheporn.com.'"
So USA slowly becoming China now? What's next VPN users will face jail time?
Too many American corporations rely on VPNs for that to happen. The last thing politicians want is to piss off their corporate masters.
They mostly use self-hosted VPNs, not your regular, everyday VPN like Mullvad or Proton VPN. So they're not going to ban the tech, but maybe they'll try to ban the public services.
I already host my own, so they'll have no power over me. Even if they successfully prevent me from making a VPN, I have other options (SOCKS proxies, SSH tunnels, etc).
Fuck that. My VPN keeps my information safe. It's a basic goddamn right. There ain't no way they are taking it without me knowing about it and saying it's ok. It may not be the best way, but it's an easy effective way to stop most people trying to scam information.
You can't hide forever and eventually you'll be cornered and will have to fight back. It's always better to have the initiative in choosing the field of battle. If you hide until you are cornered, it's your enemy who has that initiative.
VPNs don't keep anything safe, they just make you appear as if you're in a different location. Your information is secured by TLS, and that works with or without a VPN.
What VPNs do accomplish is improve your privacy. Since you appear like you're from somewhere else, and you can easily change where that somewhere else is, it's much harder to track you across sites.
I don't see how it helps with scams though. Most scams come from data breaches, and they care far more about the data you provide to that service (credit card info, login creds, etc) than where you connect from. It's more helpful to prevent tracking from the likes of Google and Meta.
Maybe our republicans will develop a strange love for China like they already have with Russia.
Why are they even in war against porn?
/j lust is just the second layer, try doing something about worse stuff like greed or gluttony
Because christians think they can make the rules for the rest of us. And they use scare tactics like, "protect the children", which they are molesting. Plus, they don't want anybody to be happy and have any fun. That's the point of christianity, to make everyone miserable, FOREVER.
That's how I try to describe growing up with it when people ask why I don't to to church or subscribe to any religion.
Aside from the many other aspects of it, even as a child, I couldn't understand why I was supposed to be so enthusiastically smug that I belonged to this thing that seemed to exist only to impose rules on everything imaginable and that those rules would invariably be against anything even remotely fun or pleasurable. Hell we couldn't even use most spices; thanks Dr Kellogg.
At age six or so I legitimately perceived it to be sinful to smile or laugh for fear I'd be punished because there would be some arbitrary rule that whatever caused me to smile or laugh was too worldly.
Fuck that. I'll be miserable and curmudgeonly on my own terms!
FUCK RELIGION
Amen
Religious extremists that work tirelessly to impose their god's laws on everybody else.
They've actually embedded themselves in US government now, over many years and much effort, and the burning embers of their religious war against the rest of us are finally starting to catch fire in a big way.
They recently took away a person's right to an abortion. Madness, I know. What will they take away next?
You can't adopt kids in Tennessee unless you're Christian. They will deny you for being Jewish.
I wish I was joking, but this is the Christian Nationalist endgame: Nazism.
Why are they even in war against porn?
First time that I heard that, and I really don't think it's a real war. Maybe a tiny quarrel :)
Well, they're the ones that know which pizza shops have pedophile sex dungeons hidden underneath. So, I guess they're fighting themselves. (As I typed that out, it occurred to me how true is a statement it was...😝)
Because they want to use antiporn laws to restrict books and other media with LGBTQ content.
Because cops like to check ID, and this allows them to check ID more often. I think they want to check my ID at every website, if they could.
A year ago, the majority of Lemmy was vehemently in support of banning porn
They tried and failed to control Internet porn in the 90s. With Trump, conservatives think they're more popular than they are, so they're trying this shit again. As with lots of things in Project 2025, they're quickly discovering that they're not as well liked as they think.
3 boats of Puritans and we still all have to suffer.
We had these kinds of debates when I myself was a minor (in the late 2000s). I would have thought it would be over by now and people would have realized that allowing teenagers to watch porn isn't actually very harmful to them at all. Seems not, humanity doesn't get smarter over time.
Idk, I think teenagers watching porn is harmful, but preventing them from watching it is more harmful. As a parent, you want your kids to come to you with any questions or problems, and locking down everything breaks every ounce of trust you might have with them.
My state is doing this crap, so I'm installing a VPN on my wifi to a state w/o these stupid laws so my kids can make their own choices.
Humanity is smart, those making such laws 1) want the information collected by identifying people, not to forbid porn, 2) just hate autistic people. Because non-autistic teenagers will find something. But then, TBH, autistic ones too.
It was already settled long ago by the Supreme Court, but evangelicals are trying to use private action as a way around it, and I bet they're hoping that one of several current lawsuits makes its way up to our new and corrupt court.
The porn landscape has changed quite a bit since the 2000s:
- Accessibility: In those days people had the "family computer" which limited the time you could access porn and had to be extra careful as to not get caught. Nowadays you can see porn on a plethora of devices and can basically see porn 24/7.
- Variety: Nowadays you can find porn for anything and it can get pretty dark. Porn addicts get bored of regular porn and go down a dark rabbit hole. Back in the day you had to make due with what you get or go through a lot of effort to find something you like more.
Mind you I am not saying that porn should be outright banned but there should be barriers in place. Example porn can only use the domain "xxx" so parents can add the filter to the parenting controls of whatever devices. Sure there are ways to circumvent that but it at least takes more effort.
Lol to the "back in the day porn was safer". Back innthe day the worst stuff was openly distributed on normal porn sites. It was actually difficult not to stumble over illegal ot really disturbing stuff when browsing those sites. And don't get me started on the stuff people send you on some irc servers unasked (that was more in the late 90s though).
Even non porn sites could be bad. Like one time I was browsing a non-porn anime site and suddenly landed on a porn site that had me scared the police might kick in my door, despite closing it immediately after it opened.
This, luckily, is a lot better regulated nowadays.
I give you accessibility though. Having a internet connected computer in you pocket 24/7 might make things much worse.
Porn addicts get bored of regular porn and go down a dark rabbit hole.
This has been disproven over and over. The only people who go to the "darker stuff" are people who are already inclined. They just work themselves up to it by going through the regular stuff.
It's the same thing with serial killers, they warm up to it with animals. Which is why someone killing animals is a massive warning sign.
No, I'm not comparing serial killers to porn addicts. I'm comparing the process of warming up to the extreme stuff by first doing the less extreme stuff.
Biggest problem is that generic production stuff too often models bad sex, a cartoon version of sex that's not healthy or pleasurable for anyone, let alone unsafe.
How the American war on porn could change the way you use the internet
looks slightly annoyed
I'm not particularly enthusiastic about such state laws, but the UK spent the last several years having committed to mandate age verification itself prior to eventually abandoning it, and I didn't see Voice of America trying to get people in the US riled up about British law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_UK_Internet_age_verification_system
With the passing of the Digital Economy Act 2017, the United Kingdom became the first country to pass a law containing a legal mandate on the provision of an Internet age verification system.
And if I recall, they had some follow-up effort, which I assume is what is briefly referenced in the article.
looks
Yeah.
Implementing the Online Safety Act: Protecting children from online pornography
This is the second of four major consultations that Ofcom, as the appointed online safety regulator, will publish as part of our work to establish the new regulations under the Online Safety Act (2023).
Currently, services publishing pornographic content online do not have sufficient measures in place to prevent children from accessing this content. Many grant children access to pornographic content without age checks, or by relying on checks that only require the user to confirm that they are over the age of 18.
The Online Safety Act is clear that service providers publishing pornographic content online must implement age assurance which is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a user is a child to prevent children from normally encountering their online pornographic content.
I didn’t see Voice of America trying to get people in the US riled up about British law.
Good. They're not supposed to.
The purpose of the VoA is to broadcast American news and perspectives to the rest of the world. Their programming is not intended for Americans and for most of its history the VoA was prohibited by law from intentionally broadcasting directly to American citizens. A lot of Americans aren't even aware the VoA exists because of this. This prohibition was eased somewhat in 2013 to make putting VoA content online easier and to allow Americans access to VoA content if we want it. ie I as an American citizen am allowed to hear what the VoA says but they're still not supposed to talk to me on purpose.
If you do hear the Voice of America trying to get people in the US riled up about anything, be sure to let us know so that we can make the responsible individuals be in trouble.
Let alone Spain has already implemented a system for this which is part of a bigger EU effort. https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-builds-porn-passport-to-stop-kids-watching-smut/
Sadly, I don't think this is going away.
Not Americans in the sense I see it. Flag pissing regressives is what they are. A minority that gerrymanders their way into power and pushes their childish backward thinking on the real Americans. Many the rot in their closets from which they only emerge every four years to crash grinder.
It's not childish. This is just the appearance because people are not afraid of "stupid" politicians as much as they should be.
In fact all these changes are consistent and all in one direction.
Information is power, and all these actions create a system where you can't avoid being identified and visible in everything you do. Then the people in power, if you somehow threaten that power, may assure that you won't anymore without any open repression, without jailing you or murdering you or even censoring you. You just won't get anywhere near visibility or power to affect the world, and it will all seem pretty natural and chaotic, so you won't even see your path being corrected so that you wouldn't affect politics.
Christofacists is my preferred term.
Sure that works as well but I myself prefer regressives. It speaks to their mindset that they want to take the country back to some imagined golden age. Where men were men and women were chattel. Where brown folks were not equals and it was okay to attack anyone who wasn't them without fear of consequences.
A side thought: what would the world look like if you needed to be 18+ to make a social media account?
I assume practically the same in terms of child safety. Teens will find a way around or a more underground alternative to hang out with each other online.
To your question: More headaches and invasion of privacy for everyone due to enforcement. How do you enforce it other than state issued ID? It would also exclude a lot of people who either don't have that ID or don't have access to it. Then there's the whole question if whether you want the government to know what media you're interacting with. For legal reasons the social media company would need to keep evidence on file of your identification, if not report it. Keeping is regardless of whether it's part of that law, CYA and all.
Define social media and then imagine a constant argument of semantics where online communities get destroyed and created based on law suites.
First they came for the porn.
And then they got distracted with all the porn they had to audit.
This should give the dems all they need.
“You do what you need to do in that voting booth, we don’t judge”.
I hope they have some disinfectant wipes at each booth...
No doubt this is all BigVPN's fault!
/s
laughs in californian
Hahaha... why? You don't think they wouldn't pass a national ban if they could muster the votes?
They would. "States' rights" is bullshit that they start with only when they fail to regulate at the national level. Every time.
Yeah, we have to stop it! Literally pussy, tits and cocks power the Internet use. I wouldn't use it if it was just reading shit.
Why wouldn't they pass that in California? California loves monitoring people. Right now it's mostly with cars (license plate readers, and now digital license plates with tracking built-in), but I really don't see why they wouldn't do this. They're already starting with social media, I would assume porn would come soon after. Yeah, they have something akin to the GDPR, but that's not at odds with tracking people, it's just a nod so people don't notice what they're up to...
Screw California, they don't care about privacy at all.
"Could" is the important word here. In other contries, we long have laws making age verification mandatory. It's just that it's a popup asking "Are you over 18?" And you can click whatever you want. Also the companies are in different jurisdictions, don't comply with local law while the internet spans the globe. I don't see any substantial difference here.
The difference is, I think, just how much of the content or there is hosted in America. If they succeed in forcing local companies to follow some new draconian measure, it'll likely have a disproportionately high effect on non-US traffic.
Sure. I think people from the US can see what our privacy regulations did to the internet. For example with the cookie consent banners. And disclosing somewhere what personal info gets shared with whom. Up until now the USA hasn't really made an effort to regulate the tech giants. Maybe that's going to change with certain topics like porn. It's definitely going to have an impact on the world. I mean lots of tech companies are located in the US. Pornhub though is from Canada as far as I know. And the second biggest porn site XVideos is based in the Czech Republic. So I'm curious how US law is supposed to be enforced here.
That was the case here in the US, but a lot of states are now passing laws that require actual verification, not just a button. The result is that PornHub is no longer accessible in my state w/o a VPN, and if more states do it, I would probably need to send in a picture of my ID or something and make an account.