As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.
Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
Archive: http://archive.today/uZB13
If this doesnt make people stop using those sites, nothing will. :)
And yeah, like others have said, its of course a system that will be used to control people and remove semi-anonymity from the web.
The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent. This is an easy first step due to the longstanding controversy surrounding pornography.
It’s all about control.
The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent.
in 7 days, that’s what australia will have.
I hope to Darwin social media ends up requiring ID. I believe it would do wonders for democratic discourse. It was only last week, a number of large US right-wing accounts were revealed to be driven from outside the US. Is it healthy for democracies that so many people pay heed to foreign actors?
If you write an op-ed for a newspaper, the newspaper need to identify you as there is an editor who is responsible for what gets written in the paper. This ensures there’s someone who can stand to account for any libellous statements.
With social media we immediately reneged on this and allowed them to wash their hands; “we are just a channel” is a pretty bleak statement to make when the discourse on social media destroys the lives of minorities, encourages suicide, undermines our democracy with AI and troll farm bots.
And we can do this is a privacy preserving way - of course the social media companies feeds the opposite narrative because they don’t want to implicated in the piles of shit they shovel on top of our democracy.
If social media was required to ensure they could tie an account to a real person, which they needn’t reveal unless forced to by a court order, we would know that we were engaging with a real opinion, not something coughed up by a Putin-run AI bot or a Chinese troll farm.
The system required isn’t that complex.
A social media
- a social media company is opening a new account.
- it sends the person opening the account to any of the multitude of ways we can already verify identity online.
- the person is identified and issued an identity token, which gets sent to the social media company.
- the social media company says “great, this person is real and we can, if required by a court order, work with the identity company to reveal who this person is is”. Right now, all the social media company has is a token.
- the account is opened.
In a system likes this, the identity company doesn’t know who the person is; that sits with the social media company.
Nor does the identity service know which account is actually posting for this real person, all they know is they verified someone as part of an account opening process.
Social media should be treated like the press - make them accountable for what gets posted and allow them to place this accountability on a real person by labelling posts “op-eds” if, and only if, they know who is doing the posting.
We are letting large, anonymous money-men ruin our democracy behind the veil of “free discourse”. It’s not free to the many people who gets harmed by it.
I’m not going to give up my privacy over your fear of foreign bogeymen.
It’s all fun and games until the government decides that it really doesn’t like dissenting opinions. We’ve already seen serious erosion of 1A rights in the U.S.
It would be one thing to have this in a world with benevolent leadership. But that isn’t the world we are living in.
Never thought I would live to see this day. Utterly pathetic. I remember even 20 years ago online censorship was extremely taboo.
Making it easy for normies to get online was a massive blunder.
Blame folks like Jobs and Gates for this and all other tech giants who made technology extremely user friendly instead of educating the masses how to actually understand and use your computer safely. Now they are just sheeps.
🤔 I’m not sure that lawmakers really understand what they’re up against. If most VPN locations all eventually require government ID for porn, then some people will likely seek porn from places/networks that are… Less legitimate.
you mean more obscure, there are non-PH affiliate sites, most of them have the pre- sanatized PH content as well.
Freedom! Fuck yeah!
The death of freedoms by the day.
They can applaud because they have both hands free
those aren’t claps you’re hearing. might just be the half that can still watch porn…
I wouldn’t care if 1% of the population watched it. The truth is that enough of the population watches it that it is a useful tool to track and dox the population. People in power don’t care who you fuck or don’t fuck, they care how they can use who you fuck against you.
plus republicans are probably one of the largest audience for porn
Watch them retreat once Grindr states that due to increasing safeguards and transparency, all of their files will be released to the public.
When I read about this I’m always brought back to the conversation of “internet as a public utility”. I hope it’s cool if we can take a tangent.
See unlike any of our other utilities like natural gas electricity water and sewage, the only thing that could potentially give any meaningful information about us is our sewage, and the government already tests sewage for diseases. If we allow the government to “sell” us our internet they would basically be able to know everyone we are “talking too”. Also how could we ever have enough regulatory oversight to protect everyone on the internet. Symmetrically if the government wants to have so much regulatory control over our internet it should maybe pay for it.
Like I wouldn’t mind even paying another 50 bucks a month extra for “private internet” just so the government can have their free and regulated “public internet”. Or would I (・–・)ゞ?
Like I wouldn’t mind even paying another 50 bucks a month extra for “private internet” just so the government can have their free and regulated “public internet”.
That’s basically how cable TV started. Over-the-air TV stations were ad-supported and public broadcast was largely supported by public funds. Cable TV got off the ground by marketing itself as a commercial-free way to watch.
And then once everyone had switched to cable, they went “hey, why don’t we introduce commercials anyways? I bet people will keep paying for our service if we just gatekeep the media that people have gotten hooked on…” And that’s exactly what happened. They pivoted away from the “commercial free TV” sales pitch, and moved towards “gatekeep media and force people to pay for it” model instead.
Every benefit goes to providers, we get higher bills and they get subsidies
That almost feels analogous to the world burning… like this is going to sound a little macabre but are you really expecting 2026 to be better? If so can you articulate why??
Is there any organized fight against this? I feel like open access to porn is something people can get behind (pun intended).
People could literally put porn in everything until it’s reversed and put their red state into porn overload. They could slip porn between the pages of the newspaper,or drop a copy of bad babysitters 5 in every DVD player in best buy at the same time. They could mass mail stills from 2 girls 1 cup, goetse, and blue waffle to their Congress people. They can wear the raunchiest t-shirts they can find and pack a town hall. These assholes already created a climate where woman are (understandably) even more afraid to have sex, now they want to lock down porn too. I’m not a degenerate because I watch porn; I’m a degenerate because I in ironically enjoyed Spongknob Squarenuts. But degenerate or not, I believe freedom of inquiry is important and I want to know exactly what she If you are gonna strip people of their economic output, abuse workers, stifle culture and art, etc, you at least have to give people a blowoff valve somehow. Reading the Bible after a double shift at work isn’t gonna get anyone hard except maybe JD Vance and it probably still comes second to furniture warehouse ads.
Fuck these assholes.
drop a copy of bad babysitters 5 in every DVD player in best buy
Soooooo, 0 dvd players? Best Buy stopped carrying physical media years ago.
What? They still sell DVD players: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/blu-ray-dvd-players/dvd-players/abcat0102005.c?id=abcat0102005
As someone who hasn’t been in a Best Buy in over 15 years… What the fuck do they sell then?
Computer hardware & accessories, networking equipment, and appliances. Physical media and hatdware specifically for playing it has been on a decline because of the prevalence of streaming.
Consumer electronics / appliances?
The one near me got torn down this year…so not a whole lot I guess.
Organized? You mean like The Pirate Bay? We have had the tools for decades, my friend.
Fight against what? I’m on coomer and nothing is blocked. Looks good to me.
I’ll end up becoming an artist and drawing my own porn before I give my ID to a website to view it.
Luckily enough I have a rich imagination and I can wank without any porn.
Local jogging track is great for expanding my imagination
All this actually does is push people to porn sites outside of Missouri’s jurisdiction and/or sites that don’t give a fuck about being “legitimate businesses” or whatever. It’s effectively prohibition and the outcome will be the same.
This shit never actually makes anyone safer, it just draws more normal users to seedier parts of the internet.
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Can’t stop my imagination GoVeRnMeNt! I’ll masturbate to all those geriatric fucks.
I’m waiting for huge spike of trojan-infected computers from people trying to bypass the law by torrenting their porn from unknown sources.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they wind up hitting the very people who thought these laws were good in the first place.
Those folks aren’t looking up “two adults having sex,” we’ve seen the contents of computers and it’s ALWAYS an R screaming about porn with 7 year olds in a folder on the desktop.
I mean…by that logic their ramblings make sense. Porn to them is child porn. So if all porn is child porn (in their minds) then blocking access to porn isn’t a bad idea.
The whole thing falls apart however if they were to realize that most people DO look at porn, but most people DON’T look at child porn.
I watch porn most days. I’ve never in my life had any desire to restrict others ability to watch porn.
But then again, porn for me is a woman fucking a dude in the ass, or 4 women standing around another woman who’s tied up and they’re tickling her until she screams bloody murder.
You know. Normal shit. Harmless shit. Fill in the blank of your own kinks, but at no point do kids come into play in my mind.
If I equated “porn” to “child porn” then yeah, I’d be trying to pass those laws too. But that says more about the way they think than anything.
Especially when you consider that schools are one of the most common places for public shootings, but you don’t see them racing out to pass common sense gun reform laws.
It’s such a hard problem to tackle, when you’re self defeating in your attempts. No other country has this issue.
Black hats will accidentally pop around the other side by attacking Windows 11 security in ways that hinder the reporting back to Microsoft. So their trojans and such have a better chance of survival.
For anyone curious, the privacy video is in their latest(?) blog post on their site. It should be viewable anywhere as it’s outside the NSFW area and before the 18+ notice.
(Just bear in mind that while it should be SFW, it is still under a porn-site’s domain.)
Haha not if you use a VPN or international websites or pirate that shit.
The problem is that these kinds of laws are becoming widespread. When they become the norm, simply VPN’ing to a different country won’t save you, because there won’t be any “safe” countries.
Shit like this is why I unironically considered spinning up a NSFW Jellyfin instance. At least if I save the degen content like a data hoarder, they can’t legislate away my access.
@mic_check_one_two @fodor move all the internet over tor
Yes I would agree. But one big issue on tor. Do not try and lookup nsfw. In minutes you find shit you absolutely dont want…
If you VPN into the UK or Australia, you’ll run into the same restrictions.
As more countries pass this kind of legislation, VPNs become less and less of a solution, and they were only ever a solution for people who can afford them.
they are going after vpn next, there are several states talking about that. Considering that microsoft is working on their super ai windows, we can bet they are gonna be reporting everything you do to big brother.
Don’t forget to bring your copy of Chairman Trump’s little thin-blue-line book when you leave the house, patriot! Otherwise the little 'murica-guards will get you!
*half of the us requires you to “visit” iceland to watch porn
Still allowed for now. 6 months tops?
Right right, block the VPNs and destroy corporate infrastructure and WfH, and then everyone will just use more torrent clients or stream from international servers. It’s all good, my friend.
Then I start renting private vpses out as vpns to coomers.
