Age verification for pornography has something like a 70% approval rating. It’s not a religious extremism issue, it’s a “normies don’t want or care about their freedoms issue”.
I think there’s a lot of vague support for keeping porn away from children that evaporates in the context of the actual issue at hand where porn sites are being mandated to collect and store the IDs of every visitor.
The concept is not terrible, the implementation is. Passing this law with no secure way of proving identity is where it’s clearly just a Christo-fascist power move.
I think a law verifying your age over the internet inherently breaks the idea of a free internet, of which we are already seeing degradation of by Google and DRM/web integrity anyways.
I agree. Even internet security protocols are at risk, and the dinosaurs responsible for writing laws don’t understand basic encryption let alone the idea that it is 100% a needed concept in a free, fair, and just society.
That’s not speech. You can age limit things, but not on speech. Beyond that, the limitations on speech have to meet certain conditions where it’s in the publics best interest and doesn’t put too much burden on the public.
The only implementation I would support is one where the asking website doesn’t know your ID, and the verifying website doesn’t know what you’re trying to visit. Essentially just asking for a one-time use token that verified your age, and providing that token to the website you’re trying to visit.
Edit for a bit more detail: User authenticates to verifying website, which provides them a token with age verification (true/false) and a short (10 minute?) TTL. This token is encrypted by the verifying website. User then provides this token to the asking website (eg: pornhub). Pornhub then sends the token back to the verifying website to decrypt it. All pornhub knows about you is whether or not you’re of age, and the verifying website never knows what the token is for.
The concept is fine, but even the best known implementation is impossible without putting an unacceptable level of trust in one group.
This should be parental controls - make websites declare a rating, then let the owners lock down devices
Nothing is going to be absolute, but we have to prioritize freedom or soon our Internet will look like China’s. They’ve already been talking about banning vpns and kosa would make you tie ID to anywhere you can post - all social media is considered possible adult content by default
I like this idea. Have the W3C create a rating system that sites self-select, and then work with Microsoft, Apple, etc to adhere to those ratings in their parental-control systems. I also approve of Apple’s idea of CSAM or explicit image scanning on devices where it blurs it out for minors. All of which can be controlled by parents, not governments.
That just means that almost every politician on both “sides” are pushing a Christo-fascist power move.
The Democratic party is only better than the Republicans on this in relative terms. As a non-American looking in, both of them are right-wing parties that bow to religious interests. It’s just that one of them is waaaay off to the right wing, out in the reeds of loonieville, whereas the other has kept at least within spitting distance of center most of the time.
Not sure where stating that means there’s any difficulty in understanding anything. That’s such a naive perspective to take. No one is claiming a Texas state senator that is a Democrat is the same as a Democrat in a deep blue state. It’s all relative and only fools or liars would claim otherwise.
No, not “no one is claiming that”, because I am claiming that. Contrary to your apparent belief, large swathes of urban Texas are little different politically from a blue city anywhere else in the country. The state senator for Austin was censured for wearing a “pussy” hat during a public meeting. Does that sound Christofascist to you? Close to 40% of the State legislature are Democrats and the majority of them approved this bill. Acting like a representative for Austin and a representative for rural Texas are both Christofascists because they come from the same state is actively counterproductive to gaining a better understanding of the situation. If you’re tilting at windmills and blaming imaginary enemies you’re going to miss the real forces that are driving these decisions.
Even if they aren’t Christian, there is a stream rolling effect on “protect the kids” bills where going against it is going to get you thrown out of office. That’s the kind of political climate we are in unfortunately.
It’s not Christi-fascist, both parties - if not the entirety of the US government want a Chinese type internet. Don’t fool yourself into thinking they don’t.
The Patriotic act was never revoked was it? I mean that thing was written in advanced of 9/11 just keep that in mind. There are probably stacks of legislation that is prepared and just waiting to be pushed through on a moments notice.
It doesn’t need to stop, it needs to change. Before assuming it’s doomerism or attempts to dissuade people from voting, learn the perspective. The example above was the Patriot Act, a bill written before 9/11 even occurred, passed (and continually passes every year) with overwhelming support, and is a fundamental attack on privacy. Things like the Patriot Act don’t come from just one side.
It’s kinda tragic too. I do agree with the sentiment behind age verification, it is in the kids’ best interest that they not be using porn at that age. But there’s really no way to effectively enforce this without violating basic rights. There is no good solution. Given that dilemma, all we can do is try to better prepare parents to deal with this in their home.
Indeed, it’s often stated but seldom justified. Religion is far more dangerous than boobs on a screen, we need to protect kids from sexual abuse in church instead
Watch HealthyGamerGG on YouTube, he’s done a few videos on it. But, in short, depending on the person porn can have a lot of negative effects on the individual, including damaging one’s ability to form and keep relationships.
It is my opinion that we would all be better off without porn, but it is your right to continue using it if you like.
The Republicans are absolutely going about this the wrong way. For the record, I’ve told my representatives in government to oppose bills like this. But that doesn’t mean you and I can’t understand where their sentiment is coming from.
This sounds an awful lot like confirmation bias to me, so I went to Google Scholar for about 15 minutes.
A quick scan of meta-studies seem to indicate that teenagers watching pornography mostly leads to them having slightly more sex, which is well known to be healthy.
For certain vulnerable groups of individuals (poor social integration, weak familial bonds, high risk seeking, and high aggression) porn seems to exacerbate their traits a bit.
There’s also very tenuous results pointing to porn in pre-teens, as well as teens with low self esteem and poor social collection getting a skewed perception of sexuality.
These are the only groups who have ever been shown to be affected negatively, and only in a single study each, without reproduction.
And for the teens it reversed when they gained self esteem.
Seems we should actually have better sex education for teens so they have the support to talk and explore sexuality in a healthy manner with their peers.
A lot of the supposed “research” is religious propaganda. They’ve never given up their agenda to hold a monopoly over people’s sex lives and are very angary that it’s slipping away from them. We must resist
That’s if you watch porn and don’t have education or proper parenting along side it. If porn is used as the educative tool for the child learning about relationships and sex, sure. It’s a problem. But if it’s just used like it’s meant to be used, I don’t think it’s clear cut. It’s only a problem if a kid is sheltered from learning proper sex education and gender.
Is it really that bad if kids see a bit of porn? Like really? I grew up before the internet, but even in my day porn mags and VHS tapes got passed around when I was a teenager. Kids are always going to be curious.
Even so on the internet there are much worse things than porn that are harmful for the development of children. There are various groups of questionable morality like incels, or other mysogynistic groups, alt right stuff like neonazis, christofascists, climate deniers, … If I had children, I would be much more concerned about them falling into one of those ideological traps than them seeing some titties. Hell, even TikTok is probably more harmful for giving them a dopamine addiction and an increasingly short attention span.
So to me, it seems a bit weird to single out porn. It feels like a convenient scapegoat for parents who don’t want to spend time raising their kids and paying attention to what they are looking at on the internet.
I don’t have kids either, but my siblings and friends do, and kids today aren’t just seeing a little porn. It’s not like Playboys in the woods or a single 2 MB image downloaded for hours on dial-up. It’s pretty violent sexual activities in video, like strangling or surprise anal sex. Even twenty years ago, my first sexual partners had moves they picked up from porn, but they weren’t violent. Talking to young women today, the moves their partners are picking up and have been normalized by porn tend to be violent. Like, I never had a friend in college tell me that her boyfriend slapped her during sex and called her a dirty whore while she cried, but that seems to be a pretty common experience today.
The issue is that even older teens don’t have the life experience to contextualize what they see in porn and separate it from how you act in real life. If you’re into slapping people, that’s fine, but you’ve got to talk to your partner about it before you do to. If you’re getting your sex education from porn, then you don’t get the people skills part that’s important for successful relationships in real life.
So, yeah. I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t think it’s sending a copy of your ID to a porn site, which seems incredibly risky for other reasons. I think sex and relationship education would help a lot, but that only connects with the kids who listen. Obviously there’s a parenting component there, but I don’t know how many parents are mentally health enough to have those conversations honestly. 🙃 Probably not the ones who wrote this bill.
16? 13? Less likely that it’s “in their best interest”, because they’re now dealing with those physical and psychological changes that are very much in line with the content of porn.
Just like TV, movies, video games, books, and other forms of fantasy / entertainment, parents need to be involved, have earnest communication with, and provide education for, their kids about the porn they will be consuming.
The simple “Are you over 18? Yes/No” prompt worked just fine. If a kid lies and presses yes, who fucking cares lol. They’re not seeing it on accident at that point. We need to stop this puritan society, kids are going to explore this stuff. They always have and they always will.
Think nobody is arguing against that. I’d rather not give 1000 different private companies my government ID who get hacked all the time. The same people passing these laws had nude magazines growing up too.
The public is also on her side. “You poll this, it’s like an 85-15 issue,” explained Jon Schweppe, the policy director for the socially conservative think tank American Principles Project. Age-verification for porn is not his think tank’s only priority, but when they poll it against other priorities in swing states, age-verification blows the rest out of the water, with 77 percent in support and 15 percent opposed.
A large 70%-majority of Americans reject the idea that “nude pictures and X-rated videos on the internet provide harmless entertainment for those who enjoy it”; only 27% agree; in general, opinions about pornography have become slightly more conservative over the past 20 years. Currently 41% agree that “nude magazines and X-rated movies provide harmless entertainment for those who enjoy it,” while 53% disagree. The number saying such material is harmless has fluctuated, declining from 48% in 1987 to 41% in 1990 and then varying by no more than four percentage points thereafter. The pattern is more mixed for other values related to freedom of expression.
Note that trends in this space are getting more conservative, rather than less. This tracks with my experience with Gen Z.
Admittedly, I have not seen any polling about specific legislation. It hasn’t been long since these bills were passed, and I don’t know if it’s a priority for pollsters. But if nothing else, just look through the thread. Lemmy leans way further left that the general public, and even here most people’s problems with it are about execution rather than intent.
A lot of Gen-Z, of Gen-Y and Millennials are re-adopting 1950’s prudishness. That has the potential to really be horrible for a generation or two before the repression sparks another sexual revolution.
I do think it’s worth noting that they specifically polled swing states. It’s a bit different imo to address political stances in specifically swing states and to use that to judge the beliefs of society overall. I think it’s also worth noting exactly how they phrased the questions. These answers also make me think that these aren’t really swing states at all. I’m appalled by them.
Women’s Sports: 56 percent supported (33 percent opposed) laws to protect women’s sports at the K-12 and collegiate levels.
Sex Changes for Minors: 56 percent supported (31 percent opposed) laws banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and physical sex change surgeries for children.
Sexual Topics in Schools: 60 percent supported (34 percent opposed) laws banning instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade.
Parental Notification: 59 percent supported (30 percent opposed) laws requiring schools to notify parents if their child identifies in class as transgender.
Age Verification for Porn: 77 percent supported (15 percent opposed) laws requiring age verification for accessing online pornography.
Reining in Big Tech: 50 percent supported (36 percent opposed) laws preventing censorship of political speech by Big Tech.
Age verification for pornography has something like a 70% approval rating. It’s not a religious extremism issue, it’s a “normies don’t want or care about their freedoms issue”.
I think there’s a lot of vague support for keeping porn away from children that evaporates in the context of the actual issue at hand where porn sites are being mandated to collect and store the IDs of every visitor.
The concept is not terrible, the implementation is. Passing this law with no secure way of proving identity is where it’s clearly just a Christo-fascist power move.
I think a law verifying your age over the internet inherently breaks the idea of a free internet, of which we are already seeing degradation of by Google and DRM/web integrity anyways.
I don’t see how it doesn’t violate free speech. Imagine needing the government’s permission to talk to someone?
Edit: forgot a word
I agree. Even internet security protocols are at risk, and the dinosaurs responsible for writing laws don’t understand basic encryption let alone the idea that it is 100% a needed concept in a free, fair, and just society.
There are already age limitations that are constitutional. You can’t run for office, buy alcohol, drive a car etc.
That’s not speech. You can age limit things, but not on speech. Beyond that, the limitations on speech have to meet certain conditions where it’s in the publics best interest and doesn’t put too much burden on the public.
Restricting access to explicit material is the same as restricting alcohol or tobacco.
Tobacco is not speech.
Edit: plus one is an economic regulation .The other is not. Like, you can smoke tobacco at really any age. Just can buy it at any age.
Possession is illegal in a majority of states
https://www.cga.ct.gov/2005/rpt/2005-r-0269.htm
That was broken decades ago.
And fuck sending your driver’s license to random shady porn sites
The only implementation I would support is one where the asking website doesn’t know your ID, and the verifying website doesn’t know what you’re trying to visit. Essentially just asking for a one-time use token that verified your age, and providing that token to the website you’re trying to visit.
Edit for a bit more detail: User authenticates to verifying website, which provides them a token with age verification (true/false) and a short (10 minute?) TTL. This token is encrypted by the verifying website. User then provides this token to the asking website (eg: pornhub). Pornhub then sends the token back to the verifying website to decrypt it. All pornhub knows about you is whether or not you’re of age, and the verifying website never knows what the token is for.
The concept is fine, but even the best known implementation is impossible without putting an unacceptable level of trust in one group.
This should be parental controls - make websites declare a rating, then let the owners lock down devices
Nothing is going to be absolute, but we have to prioritize freedom or soon our Internet will look like China’s. They’ve already been talking about banning vpns and kosa would make you tie ID to anywhere you can post - all social media is considered possible adult content by default
I like this idea. Have the W3C create a rating system that sites self-select, and then work with Microsoft, Apple, etc to adhere to those ratings in their parental-control systems. I also approve of Apple’s idea of CSAM or explicit image scanning on devices where it blurs it out for minors. All of which can be controlled by parents, not governments.
Both the concept and the implementation were approved almost unanimously, with overwhelming bipartisan support. Not sure why you’re having a hard time with this.
That just means that almost every politician on both “sides” are pushing a Christo-fascist power move.
The Democratic party is only better than the Republicans on this in relative terms. As a non-American looking in, both of them are right-wing parties that bow to religious interests. It’s just that one of them is waaaay off to the right wing, out in the reeds of loonieville, whereas the other has kept at least within spitting distance of center most of the time.
Not sure where stating that means there’s any difficulty in understanding anything. That’s such a naive perspective to take. No one is claiming a Texas state senator that is a Democrat is the same as a Democrat in a deep blue state. It’s all relative and only fools or liars would claim otherwise.
No, not “no one is claiming that”, because I am claiming that. Contrary to your apparent belief, large swathes of urban Texas are little different politically from a blue city anywhere else in the country. The state senator for Austin was censured for wearing a “pussy” hat during a public meeting. Does that sound Christofascist to you? Close to 40% of the State legislature are Democrats and the majority of them approved this bill. Acting like a representative for Austin and a representative for rural Texas are both Christofascists because they come from the same state is actively counterproductive to gaining a better understanding of the situation. If you’re tilting at windmills and blaming imaginary enemies you’re going to miss the real forces that are driving these decisions.
Even if they aren’t Christian, there is a stream rolling effect on “protect the kids” bills where going against it is going to get you thrown out of office. That’s the kind of political climate we are in unfortunately.
Most democrats are Christian too. I’m not excluding them from blame here.
It’s not Christi-fascist, both parties - if not the entirety of the US government want a Chinese type internet. Don’t fool yourself into thinking they don’t.
The Patriotic act was never revoked was it? I mean that thing was written in advanced of 9/11 just keep that in mind. There are probably stacks of legislation that is prepared and just waiting to be pushed through on a moments notice.
One side is actively banning books…
This “both sides” bullshit needs to fucking stop.
It doesn’t need to stop, it needs to change. Before assuming it’s doomerism or attempts to dissuade people from voting, learn the perspective. The example above was the Patriot Act, a bill written before 9/11 even occurred, passed (and continually passes every year) with overwhelming support, and is a fundamental attack on privacy. Things like the Patriot Act don’t come from just one side.
It is literally impossible for support to be nearing %70 without support from Blue voters.
What needs to stop is this pretense that this crap is only being supported by Conservatives / Republicans.
They don’t. Christofascist do. Remember, the internet was literally invented in America.
PATRIOT ACT did expire.
It’s kinda tragic too. I do agree with the sentiment behind age verification, it is in the kids’ best interest that they not be using porn at that age. But there’s really no way to effectively enforce this without violating basic rights. There is no good solution. Given that dilemma, all we can do is try to better prepare parents to deal with this in their home.
How is it in their best interest not to consume porn?
I would have guessed that’s where the religious oppression was targeted, whatwith being overly obsessed about peoples’ sexualities.
Indeed, it’s often stated but seldom justified. Religion is far more dangerous than boobs on a screen, we need to protect kids from sexual abuse in church instead
Watch HealthyGamerGG on YouTube, he’s done a few videos on it. But, in short, depending on the person porn can have a lot of negative effects on the individual, including damaging one’s ability to form and keep relationships.
It is my opinion that we would all be better off without porn, but it is your right to continue using it if you like.
The Republicans are absolutely going about this the wrong way. For the record, I’ve told my representatives in government to oppose bills like this. But that doesn’t mean you and I can’t understand where their sentiment is coming from.
This sounds an awful lot like confirmation bias to me, so I went to Google Scholar for about 15 minutes.
A quick scan of meta-studies seem to indicate that teenagers watching pornography mostly leads to them having slightly more sex, which is well known to be healthy.
For certain vulnerable groups of individuals (poor social integration, weak familial bonds, high risk seeking, and high aggression) porn seems to exacerbate their traits a bit.
There’s also very tenuous results pointing to porn in pre-teens, as well as teens with low self esteem and poor social collection getting a skewed perception of sexuality. These are the only groups who have ever been shown to be affected negatively, and only in a single study each, without reproduction. And for the teens it reversed when they gained self esteem.
Seems we should actually have better sex education for teens so they have the support to talk and explore sexuality in a healthy manner with their peers.
A lot of the supposed “research” is religious propaganda. They’ve never given up their agenda to hold a monopoly over people’s sex lives and are very angary that it’s slipping away from them. We must resist
That’s if you watch porn and don’t have education or proper parenting along side it. If porn is used as the educative tool for the child learning about relationships and sex, sure. It’s a problem. But if it’s just used like it’s meant to be used, I don’t think it’s clear cut. It’s only a problem if a kid is sheltered from learning proper sex education and gender.
Is it really that bad if kids see a bit of porn? Like really? I grew up before the internet, but even in my day porn mags and VHS tapes got passed around when I was a teenager. Kids are always going to be curious.
Even so on the internet there are much worse things than porn that are harmful for the development of children. There are various groups of questionable morality like incels, or other mysogynistic groups, alt right stuff like neonazis, christofascists, climate deniers, … If I had children, I would be much more concerned about them falling into one of those ideological traps than them seeing some titties. Hell, even TikTok is probably more harmful for giving them a dopamine addiction and an increasingly short attention span.
So to me, it seems a bit weird to single out porn. It feels like a convenient scapegoat for parents who don’t want to spend time raising their kids and paying attention to what they are looking at on the internet.
I don’t have kids either, but my siblings and friends do, and kids today aren’t just seeing a little porn. It’s not like Playboys in the woods or a single 2 MB image downloaded for hours on dial-up. It’s pretty violent sexual activities in video, like strangling or surprise anal sex. Even twenty years ago, my first sexual partners had moves they picked up from porn, but they weren’t violent. Talking to young women today, the moves their partners are picking up and have been normalized by porn tend to be violent. Like, I never had a friend in college tell me that her boyfriend slapped her during sex and called her a dirty whore while she cried, but that seems to be a pretty common experience today.
The issue is that even older teens don’t have the life experience to contextualize what they see in porn and separate it from how you act in real life. If you’re into slapping people, that’s fine, but you’ve got to talk to your partner about it before you do to. If you’re getting your sex education from porn, then you don’t get the people skills part that’s important for successful relationships in real life.
This study touches on a lot of what I’m mentioning here, and they found a correlation between violence in teen relationships and porn viewing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6751001/
So, yeah. I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t think it’s sending a copy of your ID to a porn site, which seems incredibly risky for other reasons. I think sex and relationship education would help a lot, but that only connects with the kids who listen. Obviously there’s a parenting component there, but I don’t know how many parents are mentally health enough to have those conversations honestly. 🙃 Probably not the ones who wrote this bill.
At what age? 6? Sure.
16? 13? Less likely that it’s “in their best interest”, because they’re now dealing with those physical and psychological changes that are very much in line with the content of porn.
Just like TV, movies, video games, books, and other forms of fantasy / entertainment, parents need to be involved, have earnest communication with, and provide education for, their kids about the porn they will be consuming.
But “porn is icky”, so they won’t.
The simple “Are you over 18? Yes/No” prompt worked just fine. If a kid lies and presses yes, who fucking cares lol. They’re not seeing it on accident at that point. We need to stop this puritan society, kids are going to explore this stuff. They always have and they always will.
“Are you over 18: Yes/No”
Think nobody is arguing against that. I’d rather not give 1000 different private companies my government ID who get hacked all the time. The same people passing these laws had nude magazines growing up too.
70% approval rating but what’s the base? If it only surveyed 10 people and 7 say yes, it is 70% but means nothing.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1365965/us-adults-support-online-age-verification-by-gender/
Genuinely curious where you’re getting these numbers. I can’t seem to find any formal public opinion polls on the enacted or proposed bills
I have a source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1365965/us-adults-support-online-age-verification-by-gender/
68% of people either Strongly or Somewhat support verification mechanisms for online content.
There was a Politico article about this last week:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/08/age-law-online-porn-00110148
Here’s a Pew survey suggesting that the majority of Americans consider porn harmful:
Note that trends in this space are getting more conservative, rather than less. This tracks with my experience with Gen Z.
Admittedly, I have not seen any polling about specific legislation. It hasn’t been long since these bills were passed, and I don’t know if it’s a priority for pollsters. But if nothing else, just look through the thread. Lemmy leans way further left that the general public, and even here most people’s problems with it are about execution rather than intent.
A lot of Gen-Z, of Gen-Y and Millennials are re-adopting 1950’s prudishness. That has the potential to really be horrible for a generation or two before the repression sparks another sexual revolution.
We call them Puriteens for a reason.
I think as mainstream porn has become more extreme more people are viewing it as harmful.
I do think it’s worth noting that they specifically polled swing states. It’s a bit different imo to address political stances in specifically swing states and to use that to judge the beliefs of society overall. I think it’s also worth noting exactly how they phrased the questions. These answers also make me think that these aren’t really swing states at all. I’m appalled by them.
Women’s Sports: 56 percent supported (33 percent opposed) laws to protect women’s sports at the K-12 and collegiate levels.
Sex Changes for Minors: 56 percent supported (31 percent opposed) laws banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and physical sex change surgeries for children.
Sexual Topics in Schools: 60 percent supported (34 percent opposed) laws banning instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade.
Parental Notification: 59 percent supported (30 percent opposed) laws requiring schools to notify parents if their child identifies in class as transgender.
Age Verification for Porn: 77 percent supported (15 percent opposed) laws requiring age verification for accessing online pornography. Reining in Big Tech: 50 percent supported (36 percent opposed) laws preventing censorship of political speech by Big Tech.
https://americanprinciplesproject.org/media/new-app-poll-swing-state-voters-strongly-oppose-transgender-agenda/
This is not an objective or unbiased pollster: the American Principles Project is a far-right stack of dark money with some window dressing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Principles_Project