I'm fairly sure if they took porn off the internet, there'd only be one website left, and it'd be called "Bring Back the Porn!"
-Dr. Cox
All these states are Small Government Freedom states!
Also the "Think about the children!" states but force birth on minors, don't give healthcare or food to kids, and vote in pedophiles.
Cons just care about the kid until they are born. Not one second longer than that.
VPN business must be so hot right now
Unfortunately they'll go after that next.
I'm legitimately surprised at the number of pro-government control comments in this thread, though. We are truly doomed because of the people in the back.
I find it funny that the same people who are against government regulations and giving more power to the state are the ones voting for this. They also seem to be so poorly informed that they think it'll stop anyone from watching this content lol.
Yeah, well that's the thing: they like the idea of being against government regulations, but if it is presented to them as a moral issue, they eat it up.
Case in point: a comment in this thread loosely trying to pose PH's response as being against states' rights -- in this case, due to the states tacitly regulating morality. I'm sure if the issue was e.g. raising state taxes, all of a sudden states' rights wouldn't matter.
The right wing learned a while ago that if you can pose anything as morality, there is a whole class of people that will simply lick the boot.
There's also websites hosted in countries that don't care about US law. We can access those even without a VPN, for now...
In addition, the porn business is hot right now! So many people just got cut off and are now paying for content.
As a Virginian, I hadn't subscribed to a VPN until our legislators decided to pull this shit.
Over the past year, Pornhub had to make the difficult decision to block access to users in numerous American states due to newly passed Age Verification laws (Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, Mississippi). In July 2024, we will unfortunately be blocking several more states who are introducing similar laws. (Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky and Nebraska.)
Pornhub should buy a VPN service. Just cut out the middle man.
The middle-man provides plausible deniability in this case. PornHub can genuinely say they don't see connections from age-verification states atm. That stops being true if they host the VPN, making them aware of actual client locations.
Wonder if a parent company could own them both.
That would be a liability, and they would go after the parent company crying foul play.
That's basically the idea behind these laws.
Conservatives want to make porn illegal, which isn't easy under traditional means, so they're taking the "Putin" approach as I put it, make viewing porn hard, unattractive or even dangerous and make delivering porn to people hard, unattractive and dangerous.
Requiring an ID from the government to view porn means the government can tell who is watching what. If one of those people happens to run for office or get a little too campaigny, their porn history can be named and shamed.
And porn providers know this, and know that will drive people away from their sites, and on top of this implementing this will likely be bureaucratic and likely expensive, so they'll stop serving an area.
And when this is applied to non porn sites that have porn like Reddit or twitter or Tumblr, well guess what's going to happen, those sites will ban porn from their site.
It's basically banning porn by making it impossible to get porn in a way that doesn't end up with you getting blackmailed. Children have nothing to do with it.
*human porn.
Google can't even block yiff with safe search, lol. AI has incredible difficulty with evaluating furry porn. Which means that Mitch McConnell is going to live out his final days looking at anthropomorphic hyenas that could benchpress a fridge and have 11 inches of freedom, lmao.
Generations of southerners and people in the central US are going to be looking at considerable amounts of yiff if conservatives have their way.
"Land of the Free" my ass
TBH I kinda agree with the states here.. I started watching porn waaayyyy too early and it's fucking me up.. without a doubt.. I shouldn't have seen all the things I looked for and now I gotta put up with it.
But I also agree with PornHubs decision. There is no way to verify age without exposing your identity. There isn't even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone's age.
There really isn't a middle ground, the only way to protect kinds (like little me) is to block the porn. But websites go on and offline every few minutes, VPNs and Tor are free and hard to blacklist.
How do we censor internet porn?? ¯\(°_o)/¯
How about less "control everyone else" and more "control your own damn kids".
My daughter didn't get unsupervised access until she proved responsible enough to trust. I want to say around 13.
Just because "I grew up with it unsupervised and it ruined me" doesn't immediately equal "everyone will have this experience". Sorry your parents didn't understand what you were doing. Sorry you saw stuff that bothered you. Don't punish everyone else for it.
I'm far from a helicopter parent... Instead, my kid has come to me for help in resolving uncomfortable or problematic interactions. We've always been clear and honest about why we've asked her to avoid certain things. Even when it made us uncomfortable. Especially then.
She's 20 now. Most cheerful kid I've ever met. No idea how that happened directly, but I know I can trust her.
I think the part these points miss is that a lot of kids don't have good or involved parents, and they shouldn't have to suffer disproportionately because of it
You are still removing others rights over a hypothetical. It doesn't miss this, it directly focuses on the point of blame. Punish the parents for exposing their kids. Irresponsibility is not excuse for harm... If a parent leaves hardcore porn laying around for a child to find and harm occurs, don't punish the uninvolved adult up the street.
Another form of media doesn't magically absolve parents from parental responsibility. Stop trying to play the "poor adults have no control over their kids!" Card.
The "but think of the children!!!" trope is tired and over abused to remove rights and privacy. Move along.
the only way to protect kinds (like little me) is to block the porn.
This is false.
Parents have a number of options available to them that do no need to involve the state.
Imagine parents actually parenting instead of blaming everyone else but themselves?
There is no "middle ground". The solution is to talk about sex. Early and when it's prompted aka when children start asking questions.
Stop treating sex as if it's something holy, special, taboo, and assigning a bunch of value to it. Trying to shield children from it is precisely the wrong thing to do. It's exactly the same with this fairy tale bullshit about relationships, marriage, and kids. Media makes it seem like the epitome of existence, that there's nothing greater than finding that one special person, and that there's only one special person forever and ever, and that it has to be of the opposite sex in order to procreate.
The more you hype something up, and that includes trying to hide it, the more it tantalizes people.
Again, answer questions honestly and truthfully that pertain to sex, attraction, relationships, and so on. Teach how to tell the real from the fake. Normalize knowledge and understanding of intimacy. It'll make for much healthier children and even healthier adults.
Education is the silver bullet.
The issue here, I'm sorry to say, is that your parents dropped the ball. They were the ones responsible for your health and the safety of your environment.
You’ll never be able to properly block it
You can just go to Reddit instead. Same thing.
There isn't even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone's age.
It depends what you mean by this. If you mean in terms of a way to trust that the third party is doing its job correctly, that's as simple as using the government itself to do the verification after seeing some proof of age.
If you mean in terms of privacy, you can't protect the privacy of the fact that someone got verified, but you can protect the privacy of their browsing after the fact. It's a neat cryptographic trick called blind signatures. The end result is a token that the user holds which they can hand over to websites that tells the website "a trusted third party has verified I'm over 18" but would not have to reveal any more information about them than that. But even if the government was that trusted third party, and they asked the websites to hand over all their logs, the government would still not be able to trace your views back to you, because the token you hold is one they never saw.
This is, in my opinion, still a bad idea. I am in no way advocating for this policy. There's still the mere fact that you have to go up to someone and basically register yourself as a porn viewer, which is fucked up. Maybe if these tokens were used in other ways, like instead of showing your licence at bars, it could be less bad (though there are other practical reasons I don't think that would work) because the tokens could be less directly associated with porn. But it's still an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Not to mention the cost that adding all this would put on the government—or, if they charge for these tokens, the people using it—for what actual gain, exactly?
I'm merely pointing out that from a purely technical perspective, this is quite different from when governments request back doors into chat encryption. This actually can be done. It just shouldn't, for non-technical reasons.
"Social media" is next and many people here already support it.
To be honest.. A lot of social media should actually be banned.
Pornhub is only pulling out to punish the states for trying to stand up to them. In classic American monopoly fashion they go on the attack as soon as any legislation targets them.
Pornhub claims the reason is because they dont to collect government ID but Pornhub collects user data and understands who their customers are. Adding government ID to their data would hardly be anymore of a privacy invasion and it's not like they are forced to store it.
Adding government ID to their data would hardly be anymore of a privacy invasion
Are you listening to yourself?
Lets put name to the IP address. Yup, that is the same as just the IP address that can be shared by multiple devices.
Imo this law is actually in a way pushing for a porn monopoly, if you by law need to provide an id, are you gonna trust some random site with that info or the big one everyone uses
OP's claim here is just BS. PornHub is in no way a monopoly or even close. It reads like someone who has literally never searched for porn on the internet. Astroturf.
PornHub is a monopoly. They own xnxx, redtube, xhamster, and several production companies such as brazzers. Their categorization system has also had some ranging impacts on actresses' ability to get work after they turn 22. I highly recommend listening to The Butterfly Effect by Jon Ronson.
ALSO so we're clear, I'm not a fan of this legislation because its dumb as fuck and doesn't help anyone, least of all sex workers. When people lose easy access to porn it usually results in WORSE conditions for sex workers because suddenly there's more demand in places without safety infrastructure.
Can you define what part of PornHub owning a lot of other porn sites makes them a monopoly? Part of being a monopoly is being anticompetitive. What has PornHub done in terms of lobbying or other anticompetitive practices which makes it more difficult for a new company sharing porn to take hold? Because there is a ton of porn online which is unrelated to PornHub.
I'm all for calling out monopolies, but I legit don't see one here. I'm open to being wrong.
I don't believe that the thing about actresses getting work after 22 is reliant on PornHub. Porn has worked that way for 50+ years my dude.
Yeah I was just in Utah for business and didn't even realise there was a block. I didn't go to pornhub but all my regular sites just worked. 🤷♂️🍆
With other industries, owning 5, 10, 15 other sites might be indicative of a monopoly. But there is a metric fuckton of porn online.
Edit: pardon me, a *metric fucktonne
Owning a dozen or so websites doesn't make them a monopoly when there are tens of thousands of porn sites available.
There are countless models over the age of 22 making bank in the porn industry. The only difference is that they have talent.
Pornhub as a monopoly??? Wow lmao. Someone never got creative with the search bar and it’s very apparent.
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