As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.
Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
Archive: http://archive.today/uZB13
Not downplaying that this is real dumb, but “half the US” is meant to be misleadingly attention-grabbing. The states that are doing this are not the most populous states. No law like this exists in NY or CA, for example.
I don’t know the amount of the population living under these laws, but it is not nearly half, even if half the states have passed such laws.
half of states does not equal half of americans
I can’t possibly see how this ends poorly.
All the public restrooms and back streets are going to packed with trafficked people.
I dont understand
in the 70s and early 80s there was a lot of public sex. when the internet came out people just did whatever in their homes.
Yeah, I will never show my ID to a fucking porn site, get real
fucking porn site
No need to be redundant
Then you can’t offend god by watching it and masturbating, like we intended!
-The Puritans pushing this legislation.
I’m not against proper age verifications as such, it would be like carding people in a store or a bar. But I just haven’t seen an implementation of it that isn’t prone to being a privacy nightmare and surveillance state shit.
I know there’s some systems that generate a token that verify that you are 18 and you give that to the site, so neither side directly meet so to say. The site knows only that you have a valid token for being 18 and the app or service you use to generate the token knows just that you wanted to token for something. I think Spain was figuring out a system like that.
Clearly, no-one involved in making these laws has ever heard of OAuth. Not every single site needs to manage your identity / credentials. The government already has this info, they can be the identity provider and use OAuth to grant access to age-gated resources without giving any personal data to the platform. Someone mentioned id.me, and I’m pretty sure that’s how that platform works, though they’re a private entity if I understand their site correctly.
I know most politicians are comically tech-illiterate, but it’s so frustrating to see them constantly implement terrible solutions to already solved problems without asking a single expert who knows how this shit works.
That being said, California passed a bill with a not perfect, but better approach. User age is configured on the OS level when a user account is set up, and then it will tell platforms what age category the user belongs to, and nothing more:
(a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user:
(A) Under 13 years of age.
(B) At least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age.
© At least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age.
(D) At least 18 years of age.
(3) Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title and shall not share the digital signal information with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.
I think iOS already does this, actually.
The US government already uses a clearing house service, id.me, for it’s own verification systems. Why is this not used for this purpose as well instead of forcing the site owners to collect and protect that data? It’s stupid and unnecessary. There is literally already a system in place that they aren’t even considering using.
Also the fact no companies are ever held liable for losing all your personal info, I sure as hell don’t trust this, it can backfire at all.
Incompetence is one big reason why current style systems are just a no-go for me.
Same.
the easiest thing would be making the internet as a whole 18+.
under 18 would be restricted to a firewalled version and age info would be part of the cellphone or internet plan. on a family plan…? under 18s get a firewalled plan. home internet? have a family and home internet? owner of the service gets a pin to disable the firewall. when everyone in the house hold is over 18, the service is unlocked.
the truth is that none of this is actually about porn or kids, its about the new world lifestyle of surveillance state getting a foot in the door. thats why all this bullshit aligns with other aspect of modern political and business tech agendas
When you are carded at a club the staff doesn’t scan your card and keep it on file. They simply look at it and return it.
As someone who worked similar jobs and would have had to look at tons of IDs every day I can assure, I dont have the time or interest in remembering all of them.
That’s really what the whole rest of my reply was about. We need a system more like carding and less like giving them copy of your passport.
NoFx - “Vanilla Sex” hits hard after all these years
ITT: People who don’t realize the advanced nature of fingerprinting that makes VPNs nearly useless in an authoritarian environment
I just don’t want some company having a picture of me in my dressing gown getting ready for a big wank.
All it takes is Firefox with some tweaking. Or simply use it with chameleon (browser plugin) that throws fingerprinting off big time.
The VPN is not supposed to protect you from an authoritarian government, it’s meant to bypass the ID requirement, which it does very well.
That’s not the issue though, as long as my IP can teleport to a normal country, I can view whatever I want.
Does DNS and having a privacy focused browser work?
It can. Some built in ad blockers like on brave will even skip YouTube ads.
Usually it helps but not as much as most people think. Very few people actually use a privacy focused browser, so that in and of itself is surprisingly identifying.
I would like to dispute the primary supposition here that pornography is harmful. The use of pornography is nearly universal, and most of the harms that it supposedly causes are symptoms of other issues, or are invented to impose control of sexuality. The ability to reach out with the power of the law to impose religious edicts or project sexual hangups is one of the most esoteric, yet effective, forms of political control available other than violence. If you can control the way that people express their sexuality, you can probably also control their views through the monetization and restriction of sex.
Sexuality and privacy are human rights, and the creation of and access to pornography is protected by the first and fourth amendments under which so-called “age verification” is an unnecessary and excessive burden. If the idea is to prevent access to children, ask yourself why now all adults must now have their access prevented or interrupted.
Furthermore, it is not the state’s role to control childhood sexual development, and the idea that porn is harmful to minors is debatable at best and dubious at worst. Access to objectionable material is solely at the discretion of parents. The fact that they cannot effectively manage this is a symptom of another problem.
When Meta shows teenage girls makeup ads after they delete their selfies, or streaming apps are flooded with violent movies that are easily accessible to minors, this is acceptable. But when I want to watch porn it’s now my job to “protect minors” by compromising my privacy and security?
The real “danger” here is the availability of ideas that do not align with state power.
Feels like half the country wants to outlaw gay marriage and reimplement sodomy laws, so we’re not exactly coming at this issue from a great place right now.
I think i agree for the most part.
These energies would be better spent ensuring that porn stars aren’t being exploited and have access to appropriate support.
No offence to anyone, but this post strikes me as coming straight from a spokeperson for Aylo (formerly MindGeek). A mix of baseless claims and straight up misinformation, that happen to align with the company’s business model.
You speak as if porn sites are analogous to social media and it’s perfectly normal to record your experiences and post them online. Which it absolutely isn’t, anywhere in the world. ‘Expressing your sexuality’ and porn are entirely separate and have very little to do with each other.
It is widely known and confirmed that pornographic content comes with a broad spectrum of negative effects, especially for children and adolescents. The latter really should be common sense in 2025. Watching porn isn’t always bad and can be beneficial in some ways (as some sources below even highlight), but those cases represent a small minority.
Below are some quotes and just a few out of countless sources providing much more reliable information on the topic of pornography’s effects. I strongly recommend reading at least some, because this comment is like ignoring decades of scientific literature and traveling in time back to the 1700s.
Prolonged exposure to pornography is known to lead to habituation, resulting in blunted processing of pleasurable stimuli and greater sensitivity to negative stimuli (21). Continuous use of pornography impairs emotional processing capacity and flattens affect, reducing emotional connection to real-life sexual experiences.
Source: Impact of pornography consumption on children and adolescents
Research shows that frequent porn use hijacks the brain’s reward system and changes the brain’s structure, much like addictive substances.
This means that prolonged pornography use can weaken natural pleasure responses and reinforce compulsive behavior.
A 2014 study found that heavy porn users showed significantly reduced activity in critical areas of the brain responsible for motivation and impulse control, suggesting long-term neurological rewiring.
Source: The Hidden Cost of Pornography: How It Shapes Your Brain and Behavior
Age of first exposure was significantly associated with reported need for longer stimulation and more sexual stimuli to reach orgasm when using pornography, decrease in sexual satisfaction, and quality of romantic relationship, neglect of basic needs and duties due to pornography use, and self-perceived addiction in both females and males. (…) In the opinion of most of the surveyed students, pornography may have adverse effects on human health, although access restrictions should not be implemented.
Additional sources:
Assuming what you’re saying about the harms of consuming pornography, is it the state’s responsibility? Is it a top priority? Do we trust conservatives to implement a solution in good faith?
The answer to all of those I think is no.
There’s no analogous ID check for violent media, so far as I know.
There could be a raging wildfire and I would hesitate if a Republican said “let me deal with it”. They are fundamentally untrustworthy.
That’s on top of the deep irony of the same party that goes on about “small government” and “parents rights” is typically the same one pushing draconian anti-porn laws. It’s a joke. “A government small enough to fit in your bedroom”. Their motivations are so corrupt I am extremely skeptical of anything they propose.
And on the flip side, occasional SEO fuckups cause random terms to show porn image results
For example, I was searching for millimetre wave cell towers on duckduckgo a while back, I typed “MM wave cell tower” and saw a whole bunch of massive tiddies on the standard filtering setting. They fixed this a week after me discovering it however, so if you were hoping to see tits from searching telco infrastructure, I suppose you’re outa luck.
Not to mention that half of all subreddits is porn. So easy to access.
Whole lot of unmoderated ones too, so there’s lots of unfiltered porn
But in other news, VPNs are now really popular for some reason.
I wouldn’t put it past these lawmakers to be investors in VPN companies, so they can make money off of these laws.
Why not also the company that does the IDs?
And hell, also the porn site?
Its all a big money making scheme. Security theater bullshit.
Children browsing the ugliest part of the dark web in 3… 2… 1…
Fortunately lawmakers think all internet porn is on PornHub and that you find it by going to w-w-w dot yahoo dot com and typing “sex video” or “naked ladies” in the search thing.
The only porn they have experience with are polaroid photos that they got from a friend who knows a guy who makes tasteful art for clients with “particular tastes.”
Don’t kid yourself. Anti-porn lawmakers know that there are like 4 big porn sites and if you can shut down access to those ones, it is a huge step towards their goals.
Lawmakers don’t watch porn. They prefer to get it straight from the source, right at Little Saint James.
The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent. This is an easy first step due to the longstanding controversy surrounding pornography.
It’s all about control.
Social media has mostly divided and isolated us. Twitter and some other platforms have been useful communications channels during unrest. But there could be other forms of communication just for that, since it’s all owned by billionaires now anyway, we need to stop imagining them as reliable tools.
The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent.
in 7 days, that’s what australia will have.
I hope to Darwin social media ends up requiring ID. I believe it would do wonders for democratic discourse. It was only last week, a number of large US right-wing accounts were revealed to be driven from outside the US. Is it healthy for democracies that so many people pay heed to foreign actors?
If you write an op-ed for a newspaper, the newspaper need to identify you as there is an editor who is responsible for what gets written in the paper. This ensures there’s someone who can stand to account for any libellous statements.
With social media we immediately reneged on this and allowed them to wash their hands; “we are just a channel” is a pretty bleak statement to make when the discourse on social media destroys the lives of minorities, encourages suicide, undermines our democracy with AI and troll farm bots.
And we can do this is a privacy preserving way - of course the social media companies feeds the opposite narrative because they don’t want to implicated in the piles of shit they shovel on top of our democracy.
If social media was required to ensure they could tie an account to a real person, which they needn’t reveal unless forced to by a court order, we would know that we were engaging with a real opinion, not something coughed up by a Putin-run AI bot or a Chinese troll farm.
The system required isn’t that complex.
A social media
- a social media company is opening a new account.
- it sends the person opening the account to any of the multitude of ways we can already verify identity online.
- the person is identified and issued an identity token, which gets sent to the social media company.
- the social media company says “great, this person is real and we can, if required by a court order, work with the identity company to reveal who this person is is”. Right now, all the social media company has is a token.
- the account is opened.
In a system likes this, the identity company doesn’t know who the person is; that sits with the social media company.
Nor does the identity service know which account is actually posting for this real person, all they know is they verified someone as part of an account opening process.
Social media should be treated like the press - make them accountable for what gets posted and allow them to place this accountability on a real person by labelling posts “op-eds” if, and only if, they know who is doing the posting.
We are letting large, anonymous money-men ruin our democracy behind the veil of “free discourse”. It’s not free to the many people who gets harmed by it.
I’m not going to give up my privacy over your fear of foreign bogeymen.
It’s all fun and games until the government decides that it really doesn’t like dissenting opinions. We’ve already seen serious erosion of 1A rights in the U.S.
It would be one thing to have this in a world with benevolent leadership. But that isn’t the world we are living in.
It would be one thing to have this in a world with benevolent leadership. But that isn’t the world we are living in.
So, Fantasyland, then. The closest anyone gets to benevolent leadership is their own parents, and that’s only maybe 50-50.
Bogeymen are imaginary. Political troll farms are real.
That’s the point.
You, as a common citizen, should not have to. But the moment you feel like to share your thought or opinion, you should be identifiable and made responsible for it.
The current social media outlets shield behind the argument they act solely as channels while at the same time fostering and allowing for “anonymous” groups or individuals to spout whatever views they want, often views that deter from advancing social and civilizational progress. Hence the current state of the world, with authoritarianism on a rise and hight like there wasn’t in nearly 70 years.
When the internet was made of individual websites, the person behind it was automatically made responsible for whatever they put on it. That was fair and reasonable.
Pushes like this, is assigning suspition/guilt before any wrong doing.
I will grant the overall facilitated acess to pornography is damaging the kids. There are already enough studies showing how the early access to porn is related to bad interpersonal relations on social, emotional and sexual level.
But this does not imply you should be identifying yourself to access adult content or anything on the web. Just impose curation. If it’s available to the public, you’re responsible for it.
Old school “dirty” books and magazines stores had controlled access and the really hardcore stuff was well out of reach of who should not get to it. Free porn is nice but there are things available that should be behind pay walls or at least registry, with identity verification.
You can still hold up a picture of Norman Reedus to bypass age checks right?
Never thought I would live to see this day. Utterly pathetic. I remember even 20 years ago online censorship was extremely taboo.
Making it easy for normies to get online was a massive blunder.
Making it easy for normies to get online was a massive blunder.
Finally we’re starting to connect the dots.
Once the Disney-crowd enters the picture, it’s all over.
Blame folks like Jobs and Gates for this and all other tech giants who made technology extremely user friendly instead of educating the masses how to actually understand and use your computer safely. Now they are just sheeps.
Their problem is that they served private interests by making sure most computer users are beholden to a company instead of the community.
People might disagree with this, but Gates was way worse than Jobs. The entire windows ecosystem never should have existed.
Sure but one of those has been dead for over a decade and the other hasn’t been been active in the industry for even longer. There are more useful people to blame.
