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How the American war on porn could change the way you use the internet
looks slightly annoyed
I’m not particularly enthusiastic about such state laws, but the UK spent the last several years having committed to mandate age verification itself prior to eventually abandoning it, and I didn’t see Voice of America trying to get people in the US riled up about British law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_UK_Internet_age_verification_system
With the passing of the Digital Economy Act 2017, the United Kingdom became the first country to pass a law containing a legal mandate on the provision of an Internet age verification system.
And if I recall, they had some follow-up effort, which I assume is what is briefly referenced in the article.
looks
Yeah.
Implementing the Online Safety Act: Protecting children from online pornography
This is the second of four major consultations that Ofcom, as the appointed online safety regulator, will publish as part of our work to establish the new regulations under the Online Safety Act (2023).
Currently, services publishing pornographic content online do not have sufficient measures in place to prevent children from accessing this content. Many grant children access to pornographic content without age checks, or by relying on checks that only require the user to confirm that they are over the age of 18.
The Online Safety Act is clear that service providers publishing pornographic content online must implement age assurance which is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a user is a child to prevent children from normally encountering their online pornographic content.
I didn’t see Voice of America trying to get people in the US riled up about British law.
Good. They’re not supposed to.
The purpose of the VoA is to broadcast American news and perspectives to the rest of the world. Their programming is not intended for Americans and for most of its history the VoA was prohibited by law from intentionally broadcasting directly to American citizens. A lot of Americans aren’t even aware the VoA exists because of this. This prohibition was eased somewhat in 2013 to make putting VoA content online easier and to allow Americans access to VoA content if we want it. ie I as an American citizen am allowed to hear what the VoA says but they’re still not supposed to talk to me on purpose.
If you do hear the Voice of America trying to get people in the US riled up about anything, be sure to let us know so that we can make the responsible individuals be in trouble.
Let alone Spain has already implemented a system for this which is part of a bigger EU effort. https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-builds-porn-passport-to-stop-kids-watching-smut/
Sadly, I don’t think this is going away.
Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.
Royce dupont on the truth about god and porn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeeR38i2QqY
If I was a teenager, I would find a way.
probably just need a VPN. Or a website not hosted in the US lol
PornHub is run by a Canadian company, and the guy looking to be our next PM wants to do the same ID thing. So that might be out too, lol
PornHub is already unavailable in my state because they refuse to comply (at least last I checked), but it’s totally available in the datacenter in the next state over. :)
Papers please: for millions of Americans, accessing online pornography now requires a government ID
And I imagine everyone wants a picture of your ID. Which is horrible on so many levels…
“Could” is the important word here. In other contries, we long have laws making age verification mandatory. It’s just that it’s a popup asking “Are you over 18?” And you can click whatever you want. Also the companies are in different jurisdictions, don’t comply with local law while the internet spans the globe. I don’t see any substantial difference here.
The difference is, I think, just how much of the content or there is hosted in America. If they succeed in forcing local companies to follow some new draconian measure, it’ll likely have a disproportionately high effect on non-US traffic.
Sure. I think people from the US can see what our privacy regulations did to the internet. For example with the cookie consent banners. And disclosing somewhere what personal info gets shared with whom. Up until now the USA hasn’t really made an effort to regulate the tech giants. Maybe that’s going to change with certain topics like porn. It’s definitely going to have an impact on the world. I mean lots of tech companies are located in the US. Pornhub though is from Canada as far as I know. And the second biggest porn site XVideos is based in the Czech Republic. So I’m curious how US law is supposed to be enforced here.
Huh, didn’t realize that. I understand a lot of the physical servers for those kinda companies are in the upper Midwest, but I never thought about where thire HQ is at; you make some excellent points.
There is definitely a fight brewing over who has final say in regards to what happens on the Internet. Gonna be interesting seeing how this plays out.
For sure. That’s going to be interesting. I mean at first the internet was for academics, students and smart people. Then it was the wild west. Now it’s long become integral part of society and everybody is on the internet. I think as of now it’s mainly big companies who “own” the place. My issue with that is mainly that they do with our personal info as they please. And their business tactics. Like Spotify ripping off artists, YouTube not really caring about the creators and their well-being. Everything is about ads and commercialized to the extreme. And the internet wasn’t always like this. But all of that is a slightly different story.
In the end, we have to apply our laws also to the online world. We can’t have that be a separate space. But laws are for single countries and have borders. The internet doesn’t. I sometimes see people wanting to introduce borders into the internet and make it more national. I think that’d break everything. The internet is supposed to connect us. And our world is globalized.
But we’re also not making an effort in the first place. Gambling, porn and all that unwelcome stuff is just hosted abroad. Doesn’t matter if 100% of the customers are somewhere, the company is just allowed to be ran from some small island and then it’s fine. We could just ban that in my opinion. I’m not a big fan of DNS blocking or messing with internet traffic, so we’d have to come up with a good technical solution. And I think the USA, the EU and Canada would be able to agree on some consensus regarding the protection of minors and that’d spread and affect most of the world.
Or we just go for their money. You can’t circumvent and run one of the largest online platforms without money. If all American and European comanies wouldn’t be allowed to advertise there, that’d solve the issue pretty quick. And we already had that. I think Visa or some other payment provider said they’d have to cease service if they continue not doing anything against revenge porn and exploitation and copyright infringement. That lead to all major porn platforms making account verification for the actresses mandatory and removing lots of amateur stuff and pirated videos. So that definitely works.
In a world where Monero exists, there is no way to stop the flow of money.
Yeah, we’ll have to see about that. In reality even paying with regular money is to cumbersome for people. They rather watch ads.
Let alone starting with crypto, installing software, getting a wallet, money exchanged, … The majority of people isn’t going to do that just to watch porn.So in theory this might be an idea to circumvent that. In practice, it’s never going to happen. At least as I see it. Or are there any successful companies who rely on Monero to have their goods payed? And I don’t mean like 0.5% of their turnover, but a substancial amount.
That was the case here in the US, but a lot of states are now passing laws that require actual verification, not just a button. The result is that PornHub is no longer accessible in my state w/o a VPN, and if more states do it, I would probably need to send in a picture of my ID or something and make an account.
That all happened this year, right? And PH does the blocking from their side. I mean it’s not some DNS blocking that internet service providers are required to do? And what’s with the next biggest porn sites? Do you still have access to xvideos .com and xhamster?
The law passed either last year or the year before, I can’t remember, and it’s going into effect this year or last. There’s also a social media ID law as well, but I don’t think it has gone into effect yet (I don’t use SM aside from Lemmy, so I haven’t noticed, but occasionally follow Twitter links).
I just checked, and xvideos works fine, but xhamster has a “start verification” pop-up upon page load that requires uploading my ID, or logging in if I’ve already verified myself. Pornhub just refuses to load with a protest screen with the following text:
Dear user,
As you may know, your elected officials in Utah are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.
In addition, mandating age verification without proper enforcement gives platforms the opportunity to choose whether or not to comply. As we’ve seen in other states, this just drives traffic to sites with far fewer safety measures in place. Very few sites are able to compare to the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place. To protect children and user privacy, any legislation must be enforced against all platforms offering adult content.
The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the best and most effective solution for protecting children and adults alike is to identify users by their device and allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that identification. Until a real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Utah.
Please contact your representatives before it is too late and demand device-based verification solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy.
The checks are all on the service side, not the ISP, and Pornhub lays out the rest of the problems here. I assume Utah would sue noncompliant companies.
So the simplest solution for people in Utah is just to use a VPN in Colorado, our next door neighbor, which adds minimal latency (like 10-20ms). I’m in the process of setting that up for my Wi-Fi network so nobody in our network needs to show ID.
3 boats of Puritans and we still all have to suffer.
Why are they even in war against porn?
/j lust is just the second layer, try doing something about worse stuff like greed or gluttony
Why are they even in war against porn?
First time that I heard that, and I really don’t think it’s a real war. Maybe a tiny quarrel :)
Well, they’re the ones that know which pizza shops have pedophile sex dungeons hidden underneath. So, I guess they’re fighting themselves. (As I typed that out, it occurred to me how true is a statement it was…😝)
Religious extremists that work tirelessly to impose their god’s laws on everybody else.
They’ve actually embedded themselves in US government now, over many years and much effort, and the burning embers of their religious war against the rest of us are finally starting to catch fire in a big way.
They recently took away a person’s right to an abortion. Madness, I know. What will they take away next?
You can’t adopt kids in Tennessee unless you’re Christian. They will deny you for being Jewish.
I wish I was joking, but this is the Christian Nationalist endgame: Nazism.
Because christians think they can make the rules for the rest of us. And they use scare tactics like, “protect the children”, which they are molesting. Plus, they don’t want anybody to be happy and have any fun. That’s the point of christianity, to make everyone miserable, FOREVER.
That’s how I try to describe growing up with it when people ask why I don’t to to church or subscribe to any religion.
Aside from the many other aspects of it, even as a child, I couldn’t understand why I was supposed to be so enthusiastically smug that I belonged to this thing that seemed to exist only to impose rules on everything imaginable and that those rules would invariably be against anything even remotely fun or pleasurable. Hell we couldn’t even use most spices; thanks Dr Kellogg.
At age six or so I legitimately perceived it to be sinful to smile or laugh for fear I’d be punished because there would be some arbitrary rule that whatever caused me to smile or laugh was too worldly.
Fuck that. I’ll be miserable and curmudgeonly on my own terms!
It’s nice to be free of all of that. No one should be allowed to join a religion until they are 21.
Amen
FUCK RELIGION
Because they want to use antiporn laws to restrict books and other media with LGBTQ content.
A year ago, the majority of Lemmy was vehemently in support of banning porn
They tried and failed to control Internet porn in the 90s. With Trump, conservatives think they’re more popular than they are, so they’re trying this shit again. As with lots of things in Project 2025, they’re quickly discovering that they’re not as well liked as they think.
Because cops like to check ID, and this allows them to check ID more often. I think they want to check my ID at every website, if they could.
Don’t care I just generate my own anyway
A system that needs ID verification to access a site is a problem. What if it’s used for other websites as well?
Then I won’t browse to them any more
Yeah, that could work; however, it would be a hassle. Just remember to save everything important locally.
One step ahead of you, I’m actively replacing all of my online accounts with self-hosted alternatives. My state passed both porn ID and social media ID laws, and I assume they’ll try to add this to anything with age gates (e.g. streaming sites).
So I’m moving my stuff to my personal cloud:
- Jellyfin - I’m going back to buying Blurays and DVDs and adding them to my own streaming service
- NextCloud/ownCloud - still playing with it, but I got Collabora set up for docs and spreadsheets, at it supports calendar sync as well
- Vaultwarden - working on switching from the hosted Bitwarden
- Actual Budget - I switched from Mint -> TillerHQ (hosted at Google Docs), and this is the next step (it integrates with SimpleFIN for bank sync)
All of this is available both over my self-hosted VPN, and over the internet with certain services exposed over my domain (all use LetsEncrypt certificates). So I can access whatever I want wherever I am. I do offsite backups with Backblaze B2 ($6/month/TB), and I sync important stuff to my phone w/ syncthing.
It’s a bit of a pain, but there’s no way my state can take any of that away from me. I’ll be adding more services as I find time, and I’ve got a good system now where a new service only takes a few minutes to spin up. Basically, my setup process is:
- add subdomain for the service to my DNS - could use a wildcard, but I like control and ability to move things around
- add haproxy config at my VPS - just copy/paste like a dozen lines of config
- update Caddyfile on my NAS to handle the new service - again, copy like 5 lines
- add and configure container in my compose.yml
docker compose up -d(to build the new service) followed bydocker compose restartto get Caddy to reload the config
Caddy fetches the TLS certificates, and docker handles setting up the service. Unless I make a mistake. Since everything is in docker, I don’t need any ports exposed except 80 and 443, which is managed by Caddy.
I wouldn’t have bothered if Netflix had kept reasonable rates for ad-free watching, but here we are. And now my state is being a pain, so I’ll probably configure my WIFI with a VPN out of state so I don’t have to deal with the stupid ID verification crap.
This is fantastic. Hopefully, crazy politics will at least have a side effect of all of this self hosted software becoming easier. It’s gotten to the point where companies like Hetzner will maintain nextcloud services for a monthly fee but Caddy is already more intuitive compared to what came before it.
Yup. I’m thinking of making a blog series or something about my setup. It’s a little complex, but the individual pieces are pretty simple, so anyone with time and interest could totally replicate it. Mine would focus on Linux, but since everything is in containers, it could easily be replicated on Windows as well.
Oh, and I’m working from the worst possible setup, I’m behind CGNAT, so I have to go through an outside server to make my internal stuff public. A lot of people can just use their router IP instead, which eliminates the VPN entirely (just port forwards from your router).
A side thought: what would the world look like if you needed to be 18+ to make a social media account?
I assume practically the same in terms of child safety. Teens will find a way around or a more underground alternative to hang out with each other online.
To your question: More headaches and invasion of privacy for everyone due to enforcement. How do you enforce it other than state issued ID? It would also exclude a lot of people who either don’t have that ID or don’t have access to it. Then there’s the whole question if whether you want the government to know what media you’re interacting with. For legal reasons the social media company would need to keep evidence on file of your identification, if not report it. Keeping is regardless of whether it’s part of that law, CYA and all.
Define social media and then imagine a constant argument of semantics where online communities get destroyed and created based on law suites.
From my cold, dead, lubricated hands!
For those wondering about the upswing here:
If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.
“This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.
I’m going to link my ID and look up the most mind blowingly vile, while remaining legal, porn. If they want to talk to me about it, then I am going to make them describe each video before I “remember” what I saw, after which point I will refuse to acknowledge it as porn.
Sure, it’s dumb, but it’s fun dumb.
It’s not a canary in the coal mine for censoring LGBT information and community, most of the proposed bills outright state that any LGBT related content is covered.
Yup, and this is exactly why I plan to use a VPN once my state starts enforcing this law. There’s no way I’m going to show ID to any website unless they absolutely need it. There are very few websites where that’s necessary, so I’ll just use a VPN to a neighboring state (or even to Canada) instead of complying with that nonsense.
I already have to worry about identity theft, I don’t want to make that even easier…
I don’t think there’s any website where it is necessary, excluding ones that adhere to unjustified laws.
I had to post a pic of it to a dispo’s website in DC to buy legal weed there.
I’ve had to submit it for remote work authorization, travel on a cruise line (not required, but strongly recommended), and to prove my identify for a web host when their automated check failed (that was the fastest way). So yeah, pretty rare, but still a thing.
i’ve been toying with the idea of hosting deep web porn front ends. Not sure how legal it would be. But morally, you’d be on pretty good grounds.
I mean what 13 year old is using tor browser lmao.
“If they removed porn from the internet, there would only be one website left and it would be called ‘bringbacktheporn.com.’”
MAKE PENIS AND VAGINA ILLEGAL!!!
MAKE POINTY FOODS ILLEGAL
(I think it was “penis shaped” in the original version)
Armpit and foot fetishists are clearly behind this ban!
How could American politicians be so against pornography, when so many keep getting caught with prostitutes?
Typical. Rules for thee I guess.
Doublethink is a core tenant
Tenet
And that tenet lives in their heads rent-free.
That filthy dirty freeloading communist tenant tenet!
The politicians who are against it are the vast minority, they’re just extremely vocal and irritating.
They’re against pornography, not prostitutes. There’s a difference, I guess.
They are also against prostitutes. Sex work is work! Criminalizing it only serves to endanger those who are most at risk.
And yet they love the man you cheated on his wife with a porn star.
I suppose that’s one way to generalize an entire country.
Just the people who are enacting these laws
They pander to the Christian nationalists for their votes. They just want power, they don’t actually hold those values.
Neither do Christians, it’s the Billionaires. Need to maximize reproduction of the slaves.
You just answered it… ban pornography. It doesn’t ban prostitution.
Pornography and prostitution are different.
One is information, allowing you to dream (maybe of stupid things), another is in the physical world.
I don’t want to think a lot of these parallels, but I’ve noticed that people close to actual government bureaucracies are in general very sceptical of imagined things against physical.
Among other things, consuming pornography doesn’t make you feel powerful, while a prostitute is a real human working for you.
Also 30s’ propaganda had traits clearly aimed at, eh, sexually dissatisfied youth.
So maybe it’s just about feeling their own power, and maybe it’s about returning that device of affecting minds. I dunno
There’s probably a name for this just like the “author’s barely disguised fetish”. Usually when you see politicians campaigning this hard on topics like those, it’s probably because they themselves are doing it
when so many keep getting caught with
prostitutessex workers?FTFY. If you’ve ever worked for a living, you’re a prostitute - just like the rest of us.
Because we live in a ravenous corrupt oligarchy barely able to keep the appearance of a functioning democracy.
It’s entirely about loyalty and institutionalized stratification. Laws are meant to constrain those outside the party, while those within the party are given a lot of latitude.
Bind, not protect, protect, but not bind.
And kids
because they’re conservative, and that’s a thing cons do for some reason. google “i know it when i see it” to get some history on how batshit insane it gets.
First they came for the porn.
And then they got distracted with all the porn they had to audit.
