What amazes me is that this article fails to mention that the slippery slope is already underway. Multiple states have some variation on the "App Store Accountability Act" that requires you present ID just to download apps, including Texas (SB 2420) and Louisiana (HB 570), with several more underway. Then there's the various acts that try to regulate social media by demanding you present ID to be able to post (or else gimp your site to fit one of the carve-outs they have which conveniently ensures that users cannot engage in public posting of any kind towards one another) such as Texas's HB 186 (from 2024).
Put simply: You've all been asleep at the switch while the US-side Internet has been systematically under attack by pornscolds trying to implement Chinese-style censorship, this article's author included.
We haven’t been asleep. We’ve been saying no at every turn. But they’re using propaganda, and they will continue until something sticks. It’s an endless fight and we are losing, despite our efforts.
What gets me is that people keep voting in favor of this stuff?
It's clear that the HN crowd is a bit of an echo chamber. Somehow, these messages of warning are not getting to people who need to hear them in order to stop voting against their own interests.
Well, now I think about it, people vote against their own interests on all kinds of issues. So I suppose this one doesn't have to be any different?
I'll be honest. Many of us in the US are tired of fighting with people that vote against their own interests time and again. It's like having a family member that keeps letting a burglar in the back door, over and over again. At some point you start thinking it might be easier to just find somewhere else to live...
I’ve given up utterly. The US is on track to degrade into oligarchy (we’re already there minds just haven’t caught up to reality), a return to official religions, and a very obvious and strong desire to bring back chattel slavery. We’re already a police state.
Apparently not, since you're posting such funny stuff here. Remember that you've still got a potential career in stand-up!
Henchman21 says "Tell me, what’s even worth saving?"
What a hoot! This thread is going off the rails with comedy: "US ...degrade into oligarchy...", "we're already there..." , "chattel slavery", "official religions", "police state". Bwahahahaaaaah....!
As long as I can read HN I'll still have great laughs!
>And to be clear: I’d happily die for a cause to give my life some meaning.
It's not a bad cause, allowing children to watch pronographie's, but may I suggest some causes one might find more satisfying? 1) cancer 2) cheap and pollutionless energy 3) reliable food supply
This isn't actually true. What is true is that there's nothing we can do that is effective, spectacular, and will yield rapid change. But history shows that there's a lot we can do. Even recent history. The people in power now are a specific and stark example of that. Nothing about their rise to power was sudden or accidental, it's the fruit of decades of determined, hard work. And it worked. So look long term. You build the future one brick at a time.
There are lots of ways to fight. Certainly many ways that I suspect you would consider pointless or misguided, such as joining up with like-minded people and agitating, lobbying, etc., or getting involved with the local government, joining the school board, whatever. Also many ways that just aren't your thing. All of that is normal and good.
You don't have to be an activist of any variety in order to stand up. Just living your life as best and honestly as you can, becoming a part of your community in whatever facet you can, and avoiding supporting (financially and otherwise) companies and other organizations that use their wealth and power in ways you disagree with is, honestly, also standing up and fighting. Maybe even the most important way, on the whole.
"Whatever you do in life will be insignificant but it is very important that you do it because you can't know [its real meaning]."
The way feel and then vote is a result of the information they are given, which is selected in order to produce the intended result, or “the engineering of consent” as it's put by Bernays.
People don't vote for this. Politicians do. People need to be made aware of what their politicians are up to in their name and encouraged to punish politicians for their acts of treachery at the polls, including the credible threat of a recall election. That, however, would require organizations that aren't a clownshow. I've been singularly unimpressed by the actions of NetChoice (who recently got slammed for handing in "expert testimony" that clearly was written by ChatGPT) and Free Speech Coalition (who clearly are the porn lobby and invariably approach every problem with an approach guaranteed to lose in court). The EFF seems content to wag their finger while doing nothing substantial. The FSF is utterly silent in the face of app store regulations that, if you read them carefully, would ensnare them and anyone else distributing software online, to say nothing of making it impossible to manufacture a PC or operating system that doesn't implement these child-detection controls.
TL;DR We appear to be seriously lacking in leadership and organization.
If we're honest, this is exactly what it will take for the bots to evaporate into the void. I have always been against 'having a license to internet', but I am very interested in seeing what will happen to all the bots if it does (temporarily) succeed. No bot should be able to pass an ID check, and if one does, its pure legal fuel to sue the system.
That's beyond naive. Nothing will happen to bots because they're not human (and/or) individuals from first world nations. Bot farm runners can either print IDs, post from unrestricted locations, or through bulk posting APIs offered behind doors. Social media operators has less issues with cooperative spams than actually organically trending posts because contents are less original.
IANAL, if there is a very clear legal requirement to identify every user in the system to determine their age, and the bots remain unfazed, then the ID verification mechanism is clearly broken. If the ID mechanism is clearly broken (wontfix situation), then the social media entity has willingly ignored their legal obligation to ID children. Someone will very likely sue the social media company for that.
This advocates a:
( ) technical
(*) legislative
( ) market-based
( ) vigilante
...solution to control explicit or controversial content online. It won’t work. Here’s why:
Why it fails:
(*) Can be bypassed with basic tools (VPNs, mirrors, alt accounts)
(*) Users and creators won’t tolerate the restrictions
(*) Requires unrealistic global cooperation
(*) Censors legitimate content (art, education, etc.)
(*) Lawmakers don’t understand the tech they’re regulating
(*) Platforms may quietly ignore or undermine it
(*) Trolls and bots will weaponize it
What you didn’t consider:
(*) Jurisdiction conflicts across countries
(*) Encrypted and decentralized content sharing
(*) Abuse of takedown/reporting systems
(*) Privacy and free expression concerns
(*) Content filters are always one step behind
And finally:
(*) Sorry, it just doesn’t work.
( ) This idea causes more harm than good.
( ) You're solving a symptom, not the problem
I agree, there already is a lot of leaked IDs, enough to feed into AI to generate any ID you wish with any name on it. The ID verification system via a picture is dead on arrival.
I feel like this narrative is counterproductive. Sure, it is true that some people advocating for this are doing it out of ulterior motives, but it certainly isn't true for all of them. Telling the people with legitimate concerns that they don't actually care about children is going to push them into the camp of the people who want to take advantage of their concern. In order to actually prevent the kind of damage that these censorship systems can inflict, there probably needs to be an actual discussion about the problem these systems are ostensibly designed to address.
People have to remember this is a political issue and politics is about coalition building. Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.
> Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.
This seems to be working okay for the current administration? Among the issues Trump ran on was demonizing a large swath of the population and vowing some nebulous form of revenge.
> Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.
On the contrary! Look at Qanon. They've essentially taken over the Republican party. They not only insulted the bulk of the population, Qanons want them dead. It worked fine.
The narrative is necessary because governments advocating for the safety of children are almost always doing so with an ulterior motive, and because people with legitimate concerns are often useful idiots for what turns out to be just another way to ratchet up surveillance and censorship and harass undesirables riding another fever wave of social panic and Christian moralizing.
And large swaths of the general population are nefarious liars who don't actually care about children. If building coalitions requires ignoring that fact, then we're not going to build coalitions. The real world isn't HN, where you're expected to assume good faith at all times, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
We have had age restrictions on physical pornography (magazines, dvd/vhs) and XXX movie theaters for a century, and it didn't threaten the book publishing industry or Hollywood.
As an adult I can’t remember ever having to put my face into a permanent database and be tracked every time I browsed in a bookstore. So this is not a helpful analogy.
Of course some kind of untraceable verification could exist (e.g., a perfectly implemented zero-knowledge proof protocol), and some things might even use it. But if any online age verification in actual use results in traceable identifiable access, then my point stands.
Can you provide an example of how an age verification system wouldn’t require providing some identifying information to the government or a company when accessing content?
An example is the EU Digital Identity Wallet that the EU is in the midst of implementing. This is a system to allow you to store a copy of your ID documents on a device you own that included a secure element. Most people will use their smartphone.
The agency that issues your documents can give you a digital copy that is cryptographically bound to the secure elements in your device.
When you want to prove your age to a web site it uses a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) based protocol to prove to the site that the documents bound to your secure element show that age. Nothing but the fact that they show that age and that they are bound to your element is disclosed to the site.
The ZKP proof protocol communication is just between your device the site. The government that issued your ID is not involved, so they don't know where you have used the ID or even if you have used the ID.
BTW, this is not limited to age. It can be used with any data on your ID. For example if German political forum wanted to verify you were German before allowing you to post you could use this system to disclose to them that your ID has "Germany" in the country field and that would be all that is disclosed.
For those outside the EU, Google has released an open source library for implementing things like this [1].
The EU Digital Identity Wallet is such a system and is currently undergoing testing in a pilot program. They are on track to finish testing this year and member states are expected to start deploying to the public in 2026.
The internet includes porn, but is not limited to porn. Likewise the Internet allows the consuming of content, but also allows the production of content. This is where your analogy breaks down. The end user is both consumer and producer. Take this HN comment for example.
Internet censorship in Russia started around 10 years ago under the pretense of "protecting children". The initial law was kinda funny and relatively innocent: it banned information about drugs and suicide. Because if this information remains freely available, you know, children would get high and kill themselves.
Today the internet in Russia is utterly broken. A VPN or a DPI bypass tool isn't something nice to have — it's an absolute necessity, especially if you communicate with people in other countries.
There are things that are already illegal on the internet. Pirated media is generally illegal, which is meant to protect corporate profits. Most people are okay with such restrictions. But when it's actually about protecting children and forcing these shady companies to enforce their terms of service, it's censorship and control?
The ironic thing is many people who decry forcing these companies to verify age, would be fine with such age verification restrictions on Insta or TikTok.
They are going to start restricting VPN usage as well [1] and I can't even click on a Reddit profile without getting age verification pop up because they commented on a dating advice subreddit once. At the same time I can go on Google images, type "porn" and click filter off without any problems.
I don't know, I just can't get fired up about this, I'm sorry. I don't think children have an absolute right to VPNs. There are a ton of things children can't have access to. They don't have full rights as adults, so I feel a bit ambivalent.
As someone with kids I care deeply about the harmful stuff my children will get exposure to. And I'm worried about this as a negative influence, especially to boys, much more than I'm worried about smoking, vaping, drugs, guns, and most other things. This can absolutely wreck your relationships, and it's just not practical to control on a family level. Over 25% of teenagers have ED and it's going up. That can't be good. And for girls it can lead to risky or overall degenerate behavior due to changing expectations and influence.
So many people here pretend like there's no problem.
My point ultimately is that this is a non-solution (websites that don't have verification) (keep in mind they never solved piracy) that is causing collateral damage (non-pornographic content).
The smart children will figure it out if they haven't already, and then go and tell the less acute children how to do it properly, without an app and account. Then we're back to basics of domains and ports instead of apps and accounts.
Stupid question: is there a reason they did not mandate every ISP in the UK to allow the blocking of porn as an opt-in feature? (and make it the default for mobile subscribers under 18yo)
The topic at hand was non-existential threats, so my comment was oriented toward that.
But, I think my comment stands with regard to existential threats, as well, but at scale (so, education and social movements are key).
Resilience and coping skills to better deal with the compromises and hardships required, be it refraining from things we enjoy because it fights climate change or dealing with violence from the state to make our voices heard.
Introspection to strengthen our beliefs, ethics, behaviors, and understanding of the world and different viewpoints.
Ingenuity to come up with solutions to these existential risks.
These are all vitally important at scale.
Stronger people brings smarter choices and less vulnerability to external influences (especially the malicious kinds).
Our operating systems are being locked down to the point where you will need an online tracked ID in order to log on. Systems like Recall will be used to track user behavior and drive analytics and control mechanisms designed to maximize compliance to the chosen narrative.
Check the 2023 keynote for Microsoft's Ignite AI conference. Microsoft plans to move ALL compute into the Azure cloud, meaning that they are planning for a future where even your OS in a cloud server.
The GOV's of the world will be on the heels behind the curtain making sure this all passes.
Only if your OS is windows... There are plenty of other ones. OSX is much less aggressive, and I honestly can't see something like one of the BSDs getting features like this.
As a platform owner I’m dreading the future. People only talk about agriculture on mine, but I’m afraid I’ll run into these silly, expensive requirements just as well.
Related video about the need to control AI with a global ID system to control "misinformation and disinformation" as it will be imposable to tell what is real and what is fake.
We are getting hit from all sides. You will be tracked and it will be used against you.
In fairness, you are already tracked. And it will already be used against you.
It's just that right now, though everyone is tracked, only a few people get watched. So even today, the algorithm is already picking out the people who should be watched. It's just that currently the government doesn't always do it on the up and up.
I don't have proof but I have a felling this is the work of Palantir. After Trump made the announcement that they would be working on solving the ID crisis in America not a month later everywhere all at once started pushing for online IDs.
What's not going to help is focusing on the suffering of pornographers, when porn is being used as a pretense in order to monitor and restrict communication in general. Most people don't care about the suffering of pornographers. Even the consumers of porn: enough has been made already, it can be copied and preserved forever with no quality loss, we're on the verge of being able to magic it up with AI to match our personal scripts, nobody needs more.
Focusing on how it makes pornographers almost as poor as average workers is almost an advertisement for internet censorship; I may have to call my rape a "grape," but at least a pornographer will have a bad day.
Being against porn is an issue for the base, politicians don't actually care. When you swallow their arguments whole, you've already lost.
I agree with Harry in the linked comments. Especially considering who ran the survey. If the results somehow didn't support the intended conclusion, to support what's mentioned in the last three paragraphs, you would never hear about it.
"In the 2000s, AEI was the most prominent think tank associated with American neoconservatism.[5] Irving Kristol, widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism, was a senior fellow at AEI and the AEI issues an 'Irving Kristol Award' in his honour.[58][59] Paul Ryan has described the AEI as "one of the beachheads of the modern conservative movement"
I think that might have been an own goal on that link. The comment on the article sums it up nicely. Also can you trust the data source - a government body that wants to enact more control?
If there's independent studies great, especially world wide (the US can be a bit insular), but as someone in the UK I dont see anything but disdain for ID checking age-gating.
Even other political parties are saying they'll roll it back if they get in power, which if they're betting the farm on that policy, must have considerable public influence.
> I wish these sites would voluntarily try to put some age-gating, but considering that a huge percentage of their traffic is underage, they have no incentive to do so.
That mandating a self-identification system (of the site, not the user) would solve 90% of the underage user problem exposes these governments' user-identification campaigns as pretext.
Where is the evidence that it is bad for children?
Where is the evidence that it is addictive?
Where is the evidence that it causes ED?
These things are commonly believed by "traditionally-minded" people, but I have yet to see a reputable study that shows any of this. Indeed, recent studies have shown that "porn addiction" is effectively a myth: it's basically just people who think that using porn is bad, still using porn (because they have normal, healthy, human urges), and feeling guilty about it.
As a parent, you have the right to control and configure the devices used by your children, so do it. Don't expect others to do it for you at a higher level, and don't ever think that you have the right to take away what other people can do to themselves.
As a homeowner you have a right to put locks on your door. Don't expect others to protect you and don't ever think you have the right to take away what others can do to your neighborhood and public school
Your problem is that you're trying to put locks on other people's doors, prohibiting even them from getting in. That's just not how things are supposed to work.
There is just no analog because there is no conceivable way in which other people having access to websites is going to make you unsafe. You are always free to restrict your own access yourself.
Forcing someone to not do something that affects only their personal life is not why I pay taxes. The government has grown to be too intrusive, and it's getting worse, now risking the termination of the internet. As it is, the government doesn't do much real work that actually improves people's lives, and now it wants to make their lives worse by taking away their freedoms.
The liberal democratic argument is that the websites themselves are the ones imposing these harmful effects on their users, therefore by a JS Mill 'harm principle' argument it's fine for the government to intervene and regulate the websites, same justification for regulating, say, the sale of tobacco or knives.
Real harm in this world comes not from these websites, but from government policies that inflict worsening pollution and poverty upon people. The government willingly does nothing about the serious problems, even going in the opposite direction by conspiring with those causing these problems, and instead attacks unsubstantiated pseudo-problems such as what you listed, to appease an uneducated religious minority voter class.
Let's for instance count the number of people that these websites have killed versus the number that guns kill. The counts are about 0 and 40,000+ per year respectively. There is no statistical sense in which the government has their priorities straight.
That's so obviously false because you're forcing adults to divulge their ID. They do not want to be tracked in this way.
> Things change when you actually have children
The issue is that this change extends to result in further blocks that have absolutely nothing to do with access to adult content. Already VPNs have been blocked, and this has a 1000x destructive impact.
If you care so much about your children, do the parental thing which is to restrict their devices, rather than expecting the world to restrict theirs.
> That's so obviously false because you're forcing adults to divulge their ID. They do not want to be tracked in this way
That depends on how age verification is done. If it is "upload a photo of your ID documents" then yes, ID is divulged. If it is done the way Europe will be doing it with the EU Digital Identity wallet your ID is not divulged. All this is divulged to the site is that you are older than their age threshold.
If there is a central provider, the risk there is worse if the central provider will now have information of your use of the site. I guess it depends on how it's implemented.
It is possible to implement it so that the central provider (e.g., whatever state agency issues your driver's license or state ID) can issue you a digital copy of your ID which is cryptographically bound to some secure hardware you own such as a smartphone or a stand-alone security device.
When you want to prove your age to a site there are protocols to allow you to prove to the site that you have such a bound ID on your device and that it shows that you are old enough for the site without revealing anything else from your ID to the site.
There are such systems currently being tested in the EU as part of their EU Digital Identity Wallet project, which is expected to start becoming available to the public in 2026.
Note that the central provider's involvement is just when your ID is issued. They have no idea when, if, or with whom you subsequently use that ID. The sites you use it with only get the age information so even if they are cooperating with the central provider to try to out you they can't provide anything useful. All they can tell the central provider is that someone with an ID that came from that provider and that was over their age threshold visited the site at a particular time.
I think the people objecting to age verification really should also as a back up plan try to make it so if age verification is implemented it uses such a scheme.
I acknowledge, but overall, it's simpler for an adult to set up filtering for their family. It is disturbing to expect the government to force it not only for oneself, but on everyone. It should be the parents responsibility to set up filtering on the devices used by their children.
"One of the most important patterns of conservative message-making is projection. Projection is a psychological notion; it roughly means attacking someone by falsely claiming that they are attacking you. Conservative strategists engage in projection constantly."
The steel man is that the vast increase in production and availability of porn has never been higher and has created a generation of porn addicts who have unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex. These unhealthy ideas often manifest as anti-social behaviors which lead to loneliness and depression.
Throughout the 20th century we went from drawings of the intimate and obscene to photos, followed by video, then with sound, then delivered by mail, then down the street, and finally right in your pocket. All the while women’s right have been largely improving while actual violent crime has been decreasing.
The world population also exploded in almost every corner from hundreds of millions a to billions.
Relationships, procreation, gender views, and such also depend heavily on economic outlooks and have tracked that rather than porn in every comparison I can find.
I disagree with your assessment that porn causes those things anymore than violent video games cause violence.
As always when it comes to these ("obviously") destructive behaviors, I feel like we don't quite know for sure if the porn addiction comes from people feeling loneliness and depression, rather than the other way around. People tend to jump quickly to the latter theory, but AFAIK there really isn't any consensus that's actually so.
In this case, we actually know (from some recent studies) that "porn addiction" doesn't actually involve any more usage of porn than a control group—what it does involve is guilt around the usage of porn.
I'm not saying unfettered access to an insane amount of porn is healthy, but how does it lead to anti-social behavior. No one is chatting up a person in a cafe then trying to have unprotected anal sex right there in the cafe. I could see it creating unrealistic expectations for men and women, but what's the connection to anti-social behavior?
A lot of pornography is misogynistic. Not all, but a lot. It depicts women as objects to be used, it normalizes sexual violence and degradation, and it focuses mainly on male pleasure. You watch enough of it and you start to internalize these attitudes.
I've seen women complain about men putting their hands around their necks during sex because the men saw a man do it in porn. It's a rather upsetting trend.
No arguments from me on porn being misogynistic and aimed at men. However, it's not like men weren't creeps before porn was invented (saying this as a man). Look at history and there's endless examples of old men marrying 13 year olds, of sexual assault and harassment, etc... Perhaps I am wrong, but I don't see modern porn doing much in making that any better or worse. In fact, as porn has proliferated over the last 50 years, we have made progress in the things that people say porn degrades. Obviously correlation does not equal causation but it's worth thinking about.
Fair points, but the main difference with the state of 'modern' porn is that its accessible to young men during puberty (and earlier), via the internet.
Finding a Playboy magazine in the bushes wont radicalize a 13 year old, but watching BDSM or CNC at an age where you're beginning to form your sexual ideologies can't be healthy.
I completely agree that the intensity of porn that can be accessed at a young age is deeply concerning. I have two sons. If I found a playboy in their room at age 13 we would have a discussion but I wouldn't really care. However, if I walked in on them watching extremely hard core pornography I would be pretty concerned.
> who have unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex
Yeah, we should go back in time to when good men used to regularly beat up and rape their wife just like god wanted. Where anything not cis and hetero was not tolerated. Where relationships where based on dominance and very seldom on love.
Nope. As sad as that may be, in terms of having healthy ideas about sex, we are probably at the peak since the neolithic revolutions. Times have never been better, especially in progressive Western nations.
For porn to have ruined anything where would need to be something to ruin in the first place. Young men had unhealthy ideas about sex long before porn existed. They probably have a little bit more of a clue now.
Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely willing to entertain the idea that porn and especially over consumption of porn is problematic in many aspects. However it is not a major societal issues. And I absolutely abhor the idea of the state censoring porn to enforce personal and specifically sexual morality. There is good reason civilized countries don't do this.
Long before modern porn, there were laws that a man could not be charged with raping his wife. Society largely looked the other way when a man beat his wife. There was a time when underage women could be trafficked by their parents into marriage against their will. There was a time when a woman who accused a man of rape would basically end up on trial herself while his lawyer dragged out every single romantic or sexual relationship she had in graphic detail so that the jury would believe "she was asking for it."
I am under the impression that "unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex" have been with us for a very, very long time. If we observe that porn addicts have such unhealthy ideas, are we confusing correlation with causation?
At least in the U.S. the equality of women in society (and in law) has slowly risen over the last 100 years. Over that same period the availability of pornographic images has also slowly risen (from magazines, to VHS, to the Internet, to streaming videos, to VR).
So if we're looking at correlation, doesn't the data imply that _more_ porn is associated with _more_ rights for women?
(Conversely, the vast majority of people calling for and enacting policies for more restrictions on pornography are also rolling back rights for women.)
Eh, not quite steel. "A generation of" is kind of slippery language, as is "has never been higher". How many people? How much more available is porn vs 10 years ago? You seem to imply many/most born during a certain period are porn addicts, and that they wouldn't have been 10, 15 years ago because porn wasn't as available. Not sure either is arguable.
Your great-grandpappy (and mine) ruined the world, paying for their peep shows and burlesque dances. The Great Depression, WWII, 9/11 - modern researchers cannot prove that these things would have happened had porn not been invented. Historians weep imagining what human utopias might have been had we never commodified our petty urge to reproduce.
This only seems like porn because we live in a culture founded on Judeo-Christian taboos against sex and the female form. I wouldn't assume it was in any way pornographic in its own time and context.
It's literally just an example of how long we have been horny. Your definition of porn is way more narrow and modern than what i'm talking about. Use a different word for it if you want but explicit imagery that people masterbate too is what I mean.
Sorry but if you think Christians invented objectification you are sorely mistaken.
There are 34000 years of other examples to choose from. It's an example to illustrate how long we have been into depecting explicit forms, for pleasure, for art, or otherwise.
I didn't say anything about objectification, I was referring to pornography.
Pornography as a concept in Western societies was entirely invented by Christians. The same concept does not exist elsewhere in the same form except where the influence of Western colonizing powers forced it upon native cultures, and I guarantee it did not exist 46,000 years ago when the Venus of Hohle Fels was created.
While there is a lot of things that are ugly about porn I really do not believe it is 5% of the problems recent younger generations face today.
Porn is just the new TV or video games, the scapegoat hidding the real taboo of our society: Parents are happy to believe the society, the government has to take care of their children.
In the 80s they were leaving their children in front of the TV all day long and were blaming the TV programming.
Then they bought them video game consoles and games and complained the games were too violent.
Now they buy them full HD porn streaming devices with unlimited data and access to the internet to get rid of them and blame porn or tik tok.
Correct, and it's to put the genii back in the bottle so to speak. Great video on how AI is being actively used to break the internet. Cause a problem, provide the solution.
No, it will not.
I live in the UAE, and I appreciate that my children do not have access to pornography or illegal websites, as these are blocked by the service providers.
I'm sure you don't. Feel free to disconnect from the internet though, I don't mind. Also, I wouldn't compare the freedom to have porn with the freedom to have slaves, but it's a cultural difference, right?
This issue raises one of those odd dynamics where people concerned with the welfare of humanity brush against the people arguing for the longevity of public infrastructure. And against them both are the string-pulling hands who have an advantage if either interest prevails.
Or maybe it’s not that odd and this is a common conflict.
I stand on the side of those indifferent to the material consequences of this censorship on pure moral grounds.
And the funny thing is that there are people who seek to mean well and who find the material trade-off intolerable for their own reasons.
Society as a whole is kept in quite the quagmire by the string of these aforementioned hands, ain’t they?
Maybe. I am still not sold on the idea that porn should be so freely available to children, and we can't depend on parental controls - everyone reading this should know that by now. So we either keep our children off the internet, closely monitor their usage, or let them have at it.
As for destroying the internet? No. It may, in fact, make the internet a little better. Less bandwidth usage. Less intrusive advertisements, maybe even less spam.
Age verification for pornography is not the hill to die on. A national internet identification number is the hill to not only die on, but riot.
What amazes me is that this article fails to mention that the slippery slope is already underway. Multiple states have some variation on the "App Store Accountability Act" that requires you present ID just to download apps, including Texas (SB 2420) and Louisiana (HB 570), with several more underway. Then there's the various acts that try to regulate social media by demanding you present ID to be able to post (or else gimp your site to fit one of the carve-outs they have which conveniently ensures that users cannot engage in public posting of any kind towards one another) such as Texas's HB 186 (from 2024).
Put simply: You've all been asleep at the switch while the US-side Internet has been systematically under attack by pornscolds trying to implement Chinese-style censorship, this article's author included.
We haven’t been asleep. We’ve been saying no at every turn. But they’re using propaganda, and they will continue until something sticks. It’s an endless fight and we are losing, despite our efforts.
What gets me is that people keep voting in favor of this stuff?
It's clear that the HN crowd is a bit of an echo chamber. Somehow, these messages of warning are not getting to people who need to hear them in order to stop voting against their own interests.
Well, now I think about it, people vote against their own interests on all kinds of issues. So I suppose this one doesn't have to be any different?
I'll be honest. Many of us in the US are tired of fighting with people that vote against their own interests time and again. It's like having a family member that keeps letting a burglar in the back door, over and over again. At some point you start thinking it might be easier to just find somewhere else to live...
I’ve given up utterly. The US is on track to degrade into oligarchy (we’re already there minds just haven’t caught up to reality), a return to official religions, and a very obvious and strong desire to bring back chattel slavery. We’re already a police state.
Tell me, what’s even worth saving?
Henchman21 says "I’ve given up utterly. "
Apparently not, since you're posting such funny stuff here. Remember that you've still got a potential career in stand-up!
Henchman21 says "Tell me, what’s even worth saving?"
What a hoot! This thread is going off the rails with comedy: "US ...degrade into oligarchy...", "we're already there..." , "chattel slavery", "official religions", "police state". Bwahahahaaaaah....!
As long as I can read HN I'll still have great laughs!
Giving up just guarantees all this stuff gets locked in. Never give up. Particularly when it seems like continuing to fight is pointless.
Put a weapon in my hand and show me where I can start fighting the good fight and I’m in.
I can’t do it alone and I wouldn’t try alone. We need to stand the fuck up and start fighting for our lives, our futures, out world.
But until that day comes? There’s literally nothing for me to do.
And to be clear: I’d happily die for a cause to give my life some meaning. Because as it stands working the rat race is meaningless.
>And to be clear: I’d happily die for a cause to give my life some meaning.
It's not a bad cause, allowing children to watch pronographie's, but may I suggest some causes one might find more satisfying? 1) cancer 2) cheap and pollutionless energy 3) reliable food supply
> There’s literally nothing for me to do.
This isn't actually true. What is true is that there's nothing we can do that is effective, spectacular, and will yield rapid change. But history shows that there's a lot we can do. Even recent history. The people in power now are a specific and stark example of that. Nothing about their rise to power was sudden or accidental, it's the fruit of decades of determined, hard work. And it worked. So look long term. You build the future one brick at a time.
There are lots of ways to fight. Certainly many ways that I suspect you would consider pointless or misguided, such as joining up with like-minded people and agitating, lobbying, etc., or getting involved with the local government, joining the school board, whatever. Also many ways that just aren't your thing. All of that is normal and good.
You don't have to be an activist of any variety in order to stand up. Just living your life as best and honestly as you can, becoming a part of your community in whatever facet you can, and avoiding supporting (financially and otherwise) companies and other organizations that use their wealth and power in ways you disagree with is, honestly, also standing up and fighting. Maybe even the most important way, on the whole.
"Whatever you do in life will be insignificant but it is very important that you do it because you can't know [its real meaning]."
In the US? Where else have you even been looking?
The way feel and then vote is a result of the information they are given, which is selected in order to produce the intended result, or “the engineering of consent” as it's put by Bernays.
People don't vote for this. Politicians do. People need to be made aware of what their politicians are up to in their name and encouraged to punish politicians for their acts of treachery at the polls, including the credible threat of a recall election. That, however, would require organizations that aren't a clownshow. I've been singularly unimpressed by the actions of NetChoice (who recently got slammed for handing in "expert testimony" that clearly was written by ChatGPT) and Free Speech Coalition (who clearly are the porn lobby and invariably approach every problem with an approach guaranteed to lose in court). The EFF seems content to wag their finger while doing nothing substantial. The FSF is utterly silent in the face of app store regulations that, if you read them carefully, would ensnare them and anyone else distributing software online, to say nothing of making it impossible to manufacture a PC or operating system that doesn't implement these child-detection controls.
TL;DR We appear to be seriously lacking in leadership and organization.
If we're honest, this is exactly what it will take for the bots to evaporate into the void. I have always been against 'having a license to internet', but I am very interested in seeing what will happen to all the bots if it does (temporarily) succeed. No bot should be able to pass an ID check, and if one does, its pure legal fuel to sue the system.
That's beyond naive. Nothing will happen to bots because they're not human (and/or) individuals from first world nations. Bot farm runners can either print IDs, post from unrestricted locations, or through bulk posting APIs offered behind doors. Social media operators has less issues with cooperative spams than actually organically trending posts because contents are less original.
It only hurts real users.
IANAL, if there is a very clear legal requirement to identify every user in the system to determine their age, and the bots remain unfazed, then the ID verification mechanism is clearly broken. If the ID mechanism is clearly broken (wontfix situation), then the social media entity has willingly ignored their legal obligation to ID children. Someone will very likely sue the social media company for that.
Just because the social media entity knows who someone is doesn't mean they have to truthfully surface this information to the end user.
I've dusted off the old form. Here you are:
I think the second to last one should also be checked. Most implementations include Government Sponsored Identity Theft.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I agree, there already is a lot of leaked IDs, enough to feed into AI to generate any ID you wish with any name on it. The ID verification system via a picture is dead on arrival.
Porn is just the excuse to build the infrastructure. Then they expand their scope to censor and control everything they don't want.
This was never about "protecting children." It never is. It's always about censorship and control.
The only time politicians ever see children is when they can use them as a soapbox to push an agenda.
>This was never about "protecting children."
I feel like this narrative is counterproductive. Sure, it is true that some people advocating for this are doing it out of ulterior motives, but it certainly isn't true for all of them. Telling the people with legitimate concerns that they don't actually care about children is going to push them into the camp of the people who want to take advantage of their concern. In order to actually prevent the kind of damage that these censorship systems can inflict, there probably needs to be an actual discussion about the problem these systems are ostensibly designed to address.
People have to remember this is a political issue and politics is about coalition building. Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.
> Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.
This seems to be working okay for the current administration? Among the issues Trump ran on was demonizing a large swath of the population and vowing some nebulous form of revenge.
> Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.
On the contrary! Look at Qanon. They've essentially taken over the Republican party. They not only insulted the bulk of the population, Qanons want them dead. It worked fine.
The narrative is necessary because governments advocating for the safety of children are almost always doing so with an ulterior motive, and because people with legitimate concerns are often useful idiots for what turns out to be just another way to ratchet up surveillance and censorship and harass undesirables riding another fever wave of social panic and Christian moralizing.
And large swaths of the general population are nefarious liars who don't actually care about children. If building coalitions requires ignoring that fact, then we're not going to build coalitions. The real world isn't HN, where you're expected to assume good faith at all times, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
We have had age restrictions on physical pornography (magazines, dvd/vhs) and XXX movie theaters for a century, and it didn't threaten the book publishing industry or Hollywood.
As an adult I can’t remember ever having to put my face into a permanent database and be tracked every time I browsed in a bookstore. So this is not a helpful analogy.
There's no reason that online age verification has to require any of that, so your attempted proof that their analogy is not helpful fails.
Of course some kind of untraceable verification could exist (e.g., a perfectly implemented zero-knowledge proof protocol), and some things might even use it. But if any online age verification in actual use results in traceable identifiable access, then my point stands.
Can you provide an example of how an age verification system wouldn’t require providing some identifying information to the government or a company when accessing content?
An example is the EU Digital Identity Wallet that the EU is in the midst of implementing. This is a system to allow you to store a copy of your ID documents on a device you own that included a secure element. Most people will use their smartphone.
The agency that issues your documents can give you a digital copy that is cryptographically bound to the secure elements in your device.
When you want to prove your age to a web site it uses a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) based protocol to prove to the site that the documents bound to your secure element show that age. Nothing but the fact that they show that age and that they are bound to your element is disclosed to the site.
The ZKP proof protocol communication is just between your device the site. The government that issued your ID is not involved, so they don't know where you have used the ID or even if you have used the ID.
BTW, this is not limited to age. It can be used with any data on your ID. For example if German political forum wanted to verify you were German before allowing you to post you could use this system to disclose to them that your ID has "Germany" in the country field and that would be all that is disclosed.
For those outside the EU, Google has released an open source library for implementing things like this [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457390
>There's no reason that online age verification has to require any of that
You are correct.
That said, please tell me which online age verification mechanism doesn't store such PII and/or is immune to hacks/breaches/data thefts.
Please only reference those mechanisms that are actually in use, not hypothetical or experimental mechanisms that are not used for such a purpose.
No rush. I'll wait. Although the actuaries say I'll likely only live another twenty years or so.
The EU Digital Identity Wallet is such a system and is currently undergoing testing in a pilot program. They are on track to finish testing this year and member states are expected to start deploying to the public in 2026.
To rephrase, the best example of such a system that you could come up with does not exist yet.
The internet includes porn, but is not limited to porn. Likewise the Internet allows the consuming of content, but also allows the production of content. This is where your analogy breaks down. The end user is both consumer and producer. Take this HN comment for example.
You want the internet to work like book purchases at cash registers? It isn't. There is no real-world analog for what we've built.
We will never get our privacy once this is widespread. Laws are too easy.
Naw I actually think there are orgs who really DO advocate for this stuff because of porn.
Internet censorship in Russia started around 10 years ago under the pretense of "protecting children". The initial law was kinda funny and relatively innocent: it banned information about drugs and suicide. Because if this information remains freely available, you know, children would get high and kill themselves.
Today the internet in Russia is utterly broken. A VPN or a DPI bypass tool isn't something nice to have — it's an absolute necessity, especially if you communicate with people in other countries.
Or traffic them to the private island of one of their best friends.
[flagged]
The fact that parent was ambiguous but _you_ immediately thought of Epstein is pretty telling - probably best not to forget.
They’re quoting what Donald Trump said when asked about him recently
Man, posting on the internet becomes increasingly difficult without paying attention to whatever Trump is currently doing.
> The only time politicians ever see children is when they can use them as a soapbox to push an agenda.
That’s not true. Sometimes they see kids for sex. I mean, isn’t this what Epstein is all about?
There are things that are already illegal on the internet. Pirated media is generally illegal, which is meant to protect corporate profits. Most people are okay with such restrictions. But when it's actually about protecting children and forcing these shady companies to enforce their terms of service, it's censorship and control?
The ironic thing is many people who decry forcing these companies to verify age, would be fine with such age verification restrictions on Insta or TikTok.
They are going to start restricting VPN usage as well [1] and I can't even click on a Reddit profile without getting age verification pop up because they commented on a dating advice subreddit once. At the same time I can go on Google images, type "porn" and click filter off without any problems.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo
> They are going to start restricting VPN usage as well [1]
From your own source:
> A government spokesperson said VPNs are legal tools for adults and there are no plans to ban them.
Restrict != ban. "She wants ministers to explore requiring VPNs "to implement highly effective age assurances to stop underage users from accessing pornography.""
@bko:
Because children are the only ones who use VPNs?
I don't know, I just can't get fired up about this, I'm sorry. I don't think children have an absolute right to VPNs. There are a ton of things children can't have access to. They don't have full rights as adults, so I feel a bit ambivalent.
As someone with kids I care deeply about the harmful stuff my children will get exposure to. And I'm worried about this as a negative influence, especially to boys, much more than I'm worried about smoking, vaping, drugs, guns, and most other things. This can absolutely wreck your relationships, and it's just not practical to control on a family level. Over 25% of teenagers have ED and it's going up. That can't be good. And for girls it can lead to risky or overall degenerate behavior due to changing expectations and influence.
So many people here pretend like there's no problem.
> So many people here pretend like there's no problem.
Or maybe they think that the proposed solutions are worse than the problem.
My point ultimately is that this is a non-solution (websites that don't have verification) (keep in mind they never solved piracy) that is causing collateral damage (non-pornographic content).
And right on cue as expected, the push for age verification to use VPNs in the UK
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo
The smart children will figure it out if they haven't already, and then go and tell the less acute children how to do it properly, without an app and account. Then we're back to basics of domains and ports instead of apps and accounts.
And then what, age verification to get a VDS?
Meanwhile weapons are being sent to Israel to bomb children because they really care about the lives of others. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
Easy to rationalize from their side, similarly to how Israeli settlers are justifying their actions: They are animals, we are humans.
And every article about it flagged.
Stupid question: is there a reason they did not mandate every ISP in the UK to allow the blocking of porn as an opt-in feature? (and make it the default for mobile subscribers under 18yo)
its not about porn, its about the visceral reaction to porn being exploited in order to drive support for absolute deanonymization.
Instead of "$x is destroying us", I wish we would focus more on personal resilience, introspection, coping skills, and ingenuity.
No matter how many $x's you conquer, there's always another $x around the corner.
You can't "individual resiliency" your way out of systemic problems.
Which "systemic problems" are you referring to?
Not who you were responding to, but here are some:
How does “personal resilience, introspection, coping skills, and ingenuity” help solve any of those??The topic at hand was non-existential threats, so my comment was oriented toward that.
But, I think my comment stands with regard to existential threats, as well, but at scale (so, education and social movements are key).
Resilience and coping skills to better deal with the compromises and hardships required, be it refraining from things we enjoy because it fights climate change or dealing with violence from the state to make our voices heard.
Introspection to strengthen our beliefs, ethics, behaviors, and understanding of the world and different viewpoints.
Ingenuity to come up with solutions to these existential risks.
These are all vitally important at scale.
Stronger people brings smarter choices and less vulnerability to external influences (especially the malicious kinds).
consider a future internet that consists of numerous index torrent links that serve HTML and CSS files
Our operating systems are being locked down to the point where you will need an online tracked ID in order to log on. Systems like Recall will be used to track user behavior and drive analytics and control mechanisms designed to maximize compliance to the chosen narrative.
Check the 2023 keynote for Microsoft's Ignite AI conference. Microsoft plans to move ALL compute into the Azure cloud, meaning that they are planning for a future where even your OS in a cloud server.
The GOV's of the world will be on the heels behind the curtain making sure this all passes.
The future is sneaker net.
Only if your OS is windows... There are plenty of other ones. OSX is much less aggressive, and I honestly can't see something like one of the BSDs getting features like this.
The future is VPN drop boxes.
Wasn't ZeroNet something like this before the developer vanished off the face of the Earth?
yes it was
https://github.com/HelloZeroNet
https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet
perhaps it was too good?
> While these laws are outwardly about preventing minors from accessing porn sites
Take a look at the Australian age verification law. Mainstream websites aren't even collateral damage, they are explicitly the target.
As a platform owner I’m dreading the future. People only talk about agriculture on mine, but I’m afraid I’ll run into these silly, expensive requirements just as well.
I mean, if you will peddle that cornography...
yes perhaps if minors somehow learn to cultivate cannabis, or mushrooms, etc. from something on your site, you may have liability ?
Related video about the need to control AI with a global ID system to control "misinformation and disinformation" as it will be imposable to tell what is real and what is fake.
We are getting hit from all sides. You will be tracked and it will be used against you.
https://youtu.be/-gGLvg0n-uY
In fairness, you are already tracked. And it will already be used against you.
It's just that right now, though everyone is tracked, only a few people get watched. So even today, the algorithm is already picking out the people who should be watched. It's just that currently the government doesn't always do it on the up and up.
I don't have proof but I have a felling this is the work of Palantir. After Trump made the announcement that they would be working on solving the ID crisis in America not a month later everywhere all at once started pushing for online IDs.
The beauty behind that is if they can get all the rest of the world to do it then they can point to that to push it here at home.
Break the narrative abroad and after the frogs are acclimated turn up the heat at home.
We are all bots now.
thats a feature, not a bug
Funny how porn always points the way in tech, one way or another.
I mean there are apps now that realistically declothe people. No amount of legislation is going to stop digitally naked people from existing lol.
What's not going to help is focusing on the suffering of pornographers, when porn is being used as a pretense in order to monitor and restrict communication in general. Most people don't care about the suffering of pornographers. Even the consumers of porn: enough has been made already, it can be copied and preserved forever with no quality loss, we're on the verge of being able to magic it up with AI to match our personal scripts, nobody needs more.
Focusing on how it makes pornographers almost as poor as average workers is almost an advertisement for internet censorship; I may have to call my rape a "grape," but at least a pornographer will have a bad day.
Being against porn is an issue for the base, politicians don't actually care. When you swallow their arguments whole, you've already lost.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
Sure it's problem but one that doesn't need a state nanny.
Kids could always get jazz mags from friends, find VHS tapes, be told stories, see topless women etc.
The difference here is that it's easier, but that's partly caused by indifference and technical illiteracy.
If it was a serious enough problem to warrant government intervention the larger public would be championing this cause.
They aren't.
That's not even withstanding that soft porn is often just people showing their bodies, which should never be a problem.
> If it was a serious enough problem to warrant government intervention the larger public would be championing this cause.
> They aren't.
Nearly 70% of Americans support tougher laws restricting children’s access to adult content online—up from 65% in 2013.
Six in ten young men (ages 18–29) support stricter online restrictions for adult content, a shift from an even split in 2013
You gotta get out of your bubble
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/jul/10/young-men-b...
I agree with Harry in the linked comments. Especially considering who ran the survey. If the results somehow didn't support the intended conclusion, to support what's mentioned in the last three paragraphs, you would never hear about it.
"In the 2000s, AEI was the most prominent think tank associated with American neoconservatism.[5] Irving Kristol, widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism, was a senior fellow at AEI and the AEI issues an 'Irving Kristol Award' in his honour.[58][59] Paul Ryan has described the AEI as "one of the beachheads of the modern conservative movement"
I think that might have been an own goal on that link. The comment on the article sums it up nicely. Also can you trust the data source - a government body that wants to enact more control?
If there's independent studies great, especially world wide (the US can be a bit insular), but as someone in the UK I dont see anything but disdain for ID checking age-gating.
Even other political parties are saying they'll roll it back if they get in power, which if they're betting the farm on that policy, must have considerable public influence.
I agree with everything you wrote. Including
> I wish these sites would voluntarily try to put some age-gating, but considering that a huge percentage of their traffic is underage, they have no incentive to do so.
That mandating a self-identification system (of the site, not the user) would solve 90% of the underage user problem exposes these governments' user-identification campaigns as pretext.
[citation needed]
Where is the evidence that it is bad for people?
Where is the evidence that it is bad for children?
Where is the evidence that it is addictive?
Where is the evidence that it causes ED?
These things are commonly believed by "traditionally-minded" people, but I have yet to see a reputable study that shows any of this. Indeed, recent studies have shown that "porn addiction" is effectively a myth: it's basically just people who think that using porn is bad, still using porn (because they have normal, healthy, human urges), and feeling guilty about it.
Your entire argument rests on that "I think so".
[flagged]
As a parent, you have the right to control and configure the devices used by your children, so do it. Don't expect others to do it for you at a higher level, and don't ever think that you have the right to take away what other people can do to themselves.
As a homeowner you have a right to put locks on your door. Don't expect others to protect you and don't ever think you have the right to take away what others can do to your neighborhood and public school
Your problem is that you're trying to put locks on other people's doors, prohibiting even them from getting in. That's just not how things are supposed to work.
Sure I want a safe neighborhood. Wait until you learn about HOAs...
There is just no analog because there is no conceivable way in which other people having access to websites is going to make you unsafe. You are always free to restrict your own access yourself.
Forcing someone to not do something that affects only their personal life is not why I pay taxes. The government has grown to be too intrusive, and it's getting worse, now risking the termination of the internet. As it is, the government doesn't do much real work that actually improves people's lives, and now it wants to make their lives worse by taking away their freedoms.
The liberal democratic argument is that the websites themselves are the ones imposing these harmful effects on their users, therefore by a JS Mill 'harm principle' argument it's fine for the government to intervene and regulate the websites, same justification for regulating, say, the sale of tobacco or knives.
Real harm in this world comes not from these websites, but from government policies that inflict worsening pollution and poverty upon people. The government willingly does nothing about the serious problems, even going in the opposite direction by conspiring with those causing these problems, and instead attacks unsubstantiated pseudo-problems such as what you listed, to appease an uneducated religious minority voter class.
Let's for instance count the number of people that these websites have killed versus the number that guns kill. The counts are about 0 and 40,000+ per year respectively. There is no statistical sense in which the government has their priorities straight.
[flagged]
> You're not forcing someone to not do something.
That's so obviously false because you're forcing adults to divulge their ID. They do not want to be tracked in this way.
> Things change when you actually have children
The issue is that this change extends to result in further blocks that have absolutely nothing to do with access to adult content. Already VPNs have been blocked, and this has a 1000x destructive impact.
If you care so much about your children, do the parental thing which is to restrict their devices, rather than expecting the world to restrict theirs.
> That's so obviously false because you're forcing adults to divulge their ID. They do not want to be tracked in this way
That depends on how age verification is done. If it is "upload a photo of your ID documents" then yes, ID is divulged. If it is done the way Europe will be doing it with the EU Digital Identity wallet your ID is not divulged. All this is divulged to the site is that you are older than their age threshold.
If there is a central provider, the risk there is worse if the central provider will now have information of your use of the site. I guess it depends on how it's implemented.
Indeed the implementation is important.
It is possible to implement it so that the central provider (e.g., whatever state agency issues your driver's license or state ID) can issue you a digital copy of your ID which is cryptographically bound to some secure hardware you own such as a smartphone or a stand-alone security device.
When you want to prove your age to a site there are protocols to allow you to prove to the site that you have such a bound ID on your device and that it shows that you are old enough for the site without revealing anything else from your ID to the site.
There are such systems currently being tested in the EU as part of their EU Digital Identity Wallet project, which is expected to start becoming available to the public in 2026.
Note that the central provider's involvement is just when your ID is issued. They have no idea when, if, or with whom you subsequently use that ID. The sites you use it with only get the age information so even if they are cooperating with the central provider to try to out you they can't provide anything useful. All they can tell the central provider is that someone with an ID that came from that provider and that was over their age threshold visited the site at a particular time.
I think the people objecting to age verification really should also as a back up plan try to make it so if age verification is implemented it uses such a scheme.
I acknowledge, but overall, it's simpler for an adult to set up filtering for their family. It is disturbing to expect the government to force it not only for oneself, but on everyone. It should be the parents responsibility to set up filtering on the devices used by their children.
[flagged]
"One of the most important patterns of conservative message-making is projection. Projection is a psychological notion; it roughly means attacking someone by falsely claiming that they are attacking you. Conservative strategists engage in projection constantly."
Source: " What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?", by Philip E. Agre. (https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/conservatism.html)
Sorry, but what on the internet is not already censored?
Misinformation
More like porn destroyed a generation.
The flood of AI content, social media, and confused articles is destroying the internet.
How did porn destroy a generation?
Porn has always been around.
It will easily outlast the idiots writing these laws.
> The Wheel: 6000 years old
> Porn: 42,000 years old (Hohle Fels “Venus”)
The steel man is that the vast increase in production and availability of porn has never been higher and has created a generation of porn addicts who have unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex. These unhealthy ideas often manifest as anti-social behaviors which lead to loneliness and depression.
Throughout the 20th century we went from drawings of the intimate and obscene to photos, followed by video, then with sound, then delivered by mail, then down the street, and finally right in your pocket. All the while women’s right have been largely improving while actual violent crime has been decreasing.
The world population also exploded in almost every corner from hundreds of millions a to billions.
Relationships, procreation, gender views, and such also depend heavily on economic outlooks and have tracked that rather than porn in every comparison I can find.
I disagree with your assessment that porn causes those things anymore than violent video games cause violence.
As always when it comes to these ("obviously") destructive behaviors, I feel like we don't quite know for sure if the porn addiction comes from people feeling loneliness and depression, rather than the other way around. People tend to jump quickly to the latter theory, but AFAIK there really isn't any consensus that's actually so.
In this case, we actually know (from some recent studies) that "porn addiction" doesn't actually involve any more usage of porn than a control group—what it does involve is guilt around the usage of porn.
I'm not saying unfettered access to an insane amount of porn is healthy, but how does it lead to anti-social behavior. No one is chatting up a person in a cafe then trying to have unprotected anal sex right there in the cafe. I could see it creating unrealistic expectations for men and women, but what's the connection to anti-social behavior?
A lot of pornography is misogynistic. Not all, but a lot. It depicts women as objects to be used, it normalizes sexual violence and degradation, and it focuses mainly on male pleasure. You watch enough of it and you start to internalize these attitudes.
I've seen women complain about men putting their hands around their necks during sex because the men saw a man do it in porn. It's a rather upsetting trend.
No arguments from me on porn being misogynistic and aimed at men. However, it's not like men weren't creeps before porn was invented (saying this as a man). Look at history and there's endless examples of old men marrying 13 year olds, of sexual assault and harassment, etc... Perhaps I am wrong, but I don't see modern porn doing much in making that any better or worse. In fact, as porn has proliferated over the last 50 years, we have made progress in the things that people say porn degrades. Obviously correlation does not equal causation but it's worth thinking about.
Fair points, but the main difference with the state of 'modern' porn is that its accessible to young men during puberty (and earlier), via the internet.
Finding a Playboy magazine in the bushes wont radicalize a 13 year old, but watching BDSM or CNC at an age where you're beginning to form your sexual ideologies can't be healthy.
I must be old, I don't even know what CNC is!
I completely agree that the intensity of porn that can be accessed at a young age is deeply concerning. I have two sons. If I found a playboy in their room at age 13 we would have a discussion but I wouldn't really care. However, if I walked in on them watching extremely hard core pornography I would be pretty concerned.
"Computer Numerical Control"!
> who have unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex
Yeah, we should go back in time to when good men used to regularly beat up and rape their wife just like god wanted. Where anything not cis and hetero was not tolerated. Where relationships where based on dominance and very seldom on love.
Nope. As sad as that may be, in terms of having healthy ideas about sex, we are probably at the peak since the neolithic revolutions. Times have never been better, especially in progressive Western nations.
For porn to have ruined anything where would need to be something to ruin in the first place. Young men had unhealthy ideas about sex long before porn existed. They probably have a little bit more of a clue now.
Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely willing to entertain the idea that porn and especially over consumption of porn is problematic in many aspects. However it is not a major societal issues. And I absolutely abhor the idea of the state censoring porn to enforce personal and specifically sexual morality. There is good reason civilized countries don't do this.
Long before modern porn, there were laws that a man could not be charged with raping his wife. Society largely looked the other way when a man beat his wife. There was a time when underage women could be trafficked by their parents into marriage against their will. There was a time when a woman who accused a man of rape would basically end up on trial herself while his lawyer dragged out every single romantic or sexual relationship she had in graphic detail so that the jury would believe "she was asking for it."
I am under the impression that "unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex" have been with us for a very, very long time. If we observe that porn addicts have such unhealthy ideas, are we confusing correlation with causation?
At least in the U.S. the equality of women in society (and in law) has slowly risen over the last 100 years. Over that same period the availability of pornographic images has also slowly risen (from magazines, to VHS, to the Internet, to streaming videos, to VR).
So if we're looking at correlation, doesn't the data imply that _more_ porn is associated with _more_ rights for women?
(Conversely, the vast majority of people calling for and enacting policies for more restrictions on pornography are also rolling back rights for women.)
Eh, not quite steel. "A generation of" is kind of slippery language, as is "has never been higher". How many people? How much more available is porn vs 10 years ago? You seem to imply many/most born during a certain period are porn addicts, and that they wouldn't have been 10, 15 years ago because porn wasn't as available. Not sure either is arguable.
"created a generation of porn addicts"
Not to be rude but, this is a lazy analysis that is filled with assumptions, moralizing, over identification, and magical thinking.
you are falling into a causation coorelation trap
[dead]
Your great-grandpappy (and mine) ruined the world, paying for their peep shows and burlesque dances. The Great Depression, WWII, 9/11 - modern researchers cannot prove that these things would have happened had porn not been invented. Historians weep imagining what human utopias might have been had we never commodified our petty urge to reproduce.
> Porn: 42,000 years old (Hohle Fels “Venus”)
This only seems like porn because we live in a culture founded on Judeo-Christian taboos against sex and the female form. I wouldn't assume it was in any way pornographic in its own time and context.
It's literally just an example of how long we have been horny. Your definition of porn is way more narrow and modern than what i'm talking about. Use a different word for it if you want but explicit imagery that people masterbate too is what I mean.
Go off on your liberal arts dissertation though.
[dead]
Sorry but if you think Christians invented objectification you are sorely mistaken.
There are 34000 years of other examples to choose from. It's an example to illustrate how long we have been into depecting explicit forms, for pleasure, for art, or otherwise.
I didn't say anything about objectification, I was referring to pornography.
Pornography as a concept in Western societies was entirely invented by Christians. The same concept does not exist elsewhere in the same form except where the influence of Western colonizing powers forced it upon native cultures, and I guarantee it did not exist 46,000 years ago when the Venus of Hohle Fels was created.
[dead]
While there is a lot of things that are ugly about porn I really do not believe it is 5% of the problems recent younger generations face today.
Porn is just the new TV or video games, the scapegoat hidding the real taboo of our society: Parents are happy to believe the society, the government has to take care of their children.
In the 80s they were leaving their children in front of the TV all day long and were blaming the TV programming. Then they bought them video game consoles and games and complained the games were too violent. Now they buy them full HD porn streaming devices with unlimited data and access to the internet to get rid of them and blame porn or tik tok.
Correct, and it's to put the genii back in the bottle so to speak. Great video on how AI is being actively used to break the internet. Cause a problem, provide the solution.
https://youtu.be/-gGLvg0n-uY?si=KDEVLayU5ToEEmpL
No, it will not. I live in the UAE, and I appreciate that my children do not have access to pornography or illegal websites, as these are blocked by the service providers.
This should be adopted by many other countries
would you prefer to implement your own policies for your own household, rather than subscribe to the values endorsed by your service provider?
> I live in the UAE
I'm sure you don't. Feel free to disconnect from the internet though, I don't mind. Also, I wouldn't compare the freedom to have porn with the freedom to have slaves, but it's a cultural difference, right?
This issue raises one of those odd dynamics where people concerned with the welfare of humanity brush against the people arguing for the longevity of public infrastructure. And against them both are the string-pulling hands who have an advantage if either interest prevails.
Or maybe it’s not that odd and this is a common conflict.
I stand on the side of those indifferent to the material consequences of this censorship on pure moral grounds.
And the funny thing is that there are people who seek to mean well and who find the material trade-off intolerable for their own reasons.
Society as a whole is kept in quite the quagmire by the string of these aforementioned hands, ain’t they?
Maybe. I am still not sold on the idea that porn should be so freely available to children, and we can't depend on parental controls - everyone reading this should know that by now. So we either keep our children off the internet, closely monitor their usage, or let them have at it.
As for destroying the internet? No. It may, in fact, make the internet a little better. Less bandwidth usage. Less intrusive advertisements, maybe even less spam.
Age verification for pornography is not the hill to die on. A national internet identification number is the hill to not only die on, but riot.