All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should), there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18 without sending picture of your ID off to random 3rd parties, or giving actual personal details. I don’t want to give this data, and websites shouldn’t want to shoulder the responsibility for it.
It seems like this could work much like Apple Pay, just without the payment. A prompt comes up, I use some biometric authentication on my phone, and it sends a signal to the browser that I’m 18+. Apple has been adding state IDs into the Wallet, this seems like it could fall right in line. The same thing could be used for buying alcohol at U-Scan checkout.
People should also be able to set their browser/computer to auto-send this for single-user devices, where it is all transparent to the user. I don’t have kids and no one else’s uses my devices. Why should I need to jump through hoops?
It’s a W3C spec led by Okta, Apple and Google based on an ISO standard and it is being rolled out as we speak.
This part
other iOS applications that have registered themselves as an Identity Document Provider.
Has some fun history: California went with an independent contractor for its mDL implementation, which ultimately pressured Apple into integrating open(-ish) standards to interoperate.
This is interesting, but I’d like to go a step further. I watched the first quarter of the video on where they go over how it works. The site requests data from your ID and they get that data. The site chooses which data it needs and if it will store it or it or not. Sites these days have a tendency to ask for more than what they need, and to store it for profiling purposes. The user can deny the request, but then can’t use the site. They are then left with a dilemma. Give up this personal information or not have access at all? Companies are betting on users giving up privacy in exchange for access.
What I’d like to see is for the site’s request to contain their access rules. Must be over 18, must be in country X, etc. Then on-device it checks my ID against that rule set, and simply returns a pass/fail result from those checks. This way the site would know if I’m allowed to be there, but they don’t get any specific or identifiable information about me. Maybe I’m 18, maybe I’m 56… they don’t know, they both simply send a pass. For a simple age check, a user’s exact birthday, name, address, etc are irrelevant, but I bet companies will get greedy and try to pull it anyway.
I see the monkey paw of the ID spec as leading to more companies seeking to get all our data, when they really don’t need it, and have shown they can’t be trusted with it.
I already see this with Apple Pay. When buying a digital item, some companies are awesome and simply take the payment with no other data. Others pull name, address, email, etc to make a payment when none of that is required.
The spec is being implemented by Apple, who is sensitive to privacy issues.
The intent of the ISO spec is to allow you to request fine-grained data, like birth year only, but if you read the W3C standard, they explicitly call out privacy as a complex thing that maybe should be regulated.
The spec spells out the complexity: some ID verification processes actually need a lot of info! But some, like an alcohol age check, do not. The spec can do both, but it’s hard to differentiate these technically. The spec does lay out what user agents should do to make it clear which information is going where.
A bad scenario would be designing an API that is too hobbled to replace the invasive “photo of an ID” companies, which this spec seeks to do.
I’d prefer an open web standard that can be abused (with user consent) to a closed App Store-only API or the status quo
> The intent of the ISO spec is to allow you to request fine-grained data, like birth year only, but if you read the W3C standard, they explicitly call out privacy as a complex thing that maybe should be regulated.
Aren't the regulations the problem here? If not for that nobody would be getting pressured to divulge this personal information to every shady app and website in the first place.
Suppose I want to make a service that verifies your age by asking you questions about what life was like before 9/11. Can I do that? And if I can't, is the problem the standards, or the law?
Yes, they are! but also because the law sets the standard, it can also provide a new one. For example:
a) you are still legally required to age verify online alcohol purchases but
b) it’s illegal to use information collected for that purpose for other purposes and
c) Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents
Maybe something around only collecting minimal data, too.
Some of the first eager customers are banks with onerous KYC requirements – they want one click account creation! Good luck changing financial disclosure laws, though, my bank knows quite a bit about me.
> but also because the law sets the standard, it can also provide a new one.
If the people writing the law cared about privacy they wouldn't have passed that one, and anybody who does would be repealing it rather than trying to find the best shade of lipstick for the pig.
> Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents
This is the part you don't need a law in order to do because the user can choose their user agent. Or if they can't, you should stop talking about any of this and go fix your antitrust problem.
> you are still legally required to age verify online alcohol purchases but
By conceding this you've already lost, because:
> it’s illegal to use information collected for that purpose for other purposes
This is the part which is hopeless. If they have the information, you're already screwed, because once they have it it's almost impossible for you or the government to know what they're doing with it, which makes those laws nearly impossible to enforce. And on top of that, a large part of the problem is what criminals or governments do once there is a legally-mandated database of all of that stuff, and those entities aren't constrained by laws.
Which is why anybody who really cares about this knows that the only solution is to not have the law requires that data to be collected.
> Good luck changing financial disclosure laws, though
"Slippery slope is a fallacy", they said. "It's just one inch", they said.
I don’t see my primary care doctor selling my health data, due in part to data privacy laws like HIPAA. Consumer companies take COPPA seriously.
You absolutely cannot control what companies do with data, so you want to prevent its collection in the first place – but you can penalize them when they do something wrong, which does influence their beyavior. The jury is still out on the effectiveness of the GDPR, but to say it had no effect would be an odd claim.
I think most age verification ranges from silly to chilling to speech. But I don’t think we can somehow punt these problems to the quiz from the beginning of Leisure Suit Larry (which never stopped 10 year old me).
Requiring someone to have a government ID isn't anywhere near 100% effective because people will just borrow one from dad's wallet while he's not looking or use a device already signed in as someone else or the high school freshmen will get one from the high school seniors etc.
If we're admitting solutions that aren't 100% effective, why can't we admit solutions that aren't 100% effective but are much better at preserving privacy?
The slippery slope from here to banning under 18s looking at websites discussing suicidal thoughts, transgender issues, homosexually and onto anything some group of middle age mothers decide isn't appropriate seems dangerously anti-fallacitical.
While I completely understand the slippery slope concept, we ban all kinds of things for under 18s based on morals. Why couldn't these be any different? How else does a society decide as a whole what they are for or against. Obviously, there should be limits.
The question is always “whose morals”. I think society as a whole is in agreement that minors are better off without access to pornography, for example. But the arrangement OP is outlining is one where a minority are able to force their morality on a broader population that doesn’t agree with it.
> The grandparent post didn't say "transgender treatments" they said "transgender issues."
You don't think that transgender treatments is a transgender issue? If you think it is then my response is perfectly on-topic.
> Do you believe that the mere concept of questioning your gender identity or expression is something that should be kept from the minds of minors?
Depending on your jurisdiction, there are messages you can't target to kids. Why should there be a special exemption for this?
Besides, my belief on this is irrelevant; the only transgender issue that has gotten pushback en-masse from the clear majority of people world wide has been transgender treatments on minors.
IOW, this (treatment for persons unable to give informed consent) is a very unpopular position.
> Depending on your jurisdiction, there are messages you can't target to kids. Why should there be a special exemption for this?
Because the idea that the only acceptable gender norms a kid is allowed to be exposed to and express is the one tied to their genes is frankly a ridiculous concept.
There's nothing wrong with boys wearing dresses and playing with dolls. If you don't believe that harmless message should reach the ears of kids, then why? What is in that sort of message that you're afraid of?
This isn't an "I believe..." / "Do you believe..." kind of issue though. This is "Will the American State and Federal government impose an increasingly stringent moral compass on the wider internet, over time"
Which... the VISA-Mastercard duopoly, backed by American soft power and with an American moral compass, already rather proves that point for anyone that's ever tried to pay for erotica outside the mainstream
> This isn't an "I believe..." / "Do you believe..." kind of issue though.
I asked because I wanted to get a sense on if he conflating the two by accident, or if it was an attempt to steer the conversation away from free speech concerns.
Yes, but since when do we allow the majority to dictate what healthcare options are available?
The mode for treating trans kids is puberty blockers until they’re 18 and then they can choose their own treatment - but that pathway is being blocked by more and more laws and fear mongering about kids being transitioned against their will
"Transitioned against their will" is a very crude way of articulating the tradeoffs of prescribing puberty blockers. The core issue at hand is that absent puberty blockers, somewhere between 60-80% do not persist with a cross-sex gender identity after going through their natal puberty. Psychologists attempted to predict which patients would persist in a cross sex gender identity and which would not, but they were never able to do so.
When patients are given puberty blockers, desistence rates are miniscule, in the single digits. Proponents of hormonal intervention insist that this is proof that doctors are selecting kids that would persist in a cross sex gender absent blockers. But that's hard to reconcile with psychologists previous failures to predict persistence. While they're billed as giving "time to think", it's pretty much impossible to deny that blockers are causing patients who would have desisted in their cross sex gender identity if they went through their natal puberty.
It's not just conservative American States that are changing course on blockers for children: Finland, Sweden, the UK, Italy, Denmark, and Norway have all stopped prescription of blockers in children. Plenty of other countries never allowed it in the first place.
> Yes, but since when do we allow the majority to dictate what healthcare options are available?
We've always done so - popular opinion as reflected by the voters dictate that you aren't getting a prescription for arsenic (anymore? Or crack cocaine, for that matter.)
The government, for good or bad, regulates all healthcare, and that government is guided by its voters.
The majority of voters don't see this as a bigger problem than the issue they are currently voting on.
> We've always done so - popular opinion as reflected by the voters dictate that you aren't getting a prescription for arsenic (anymore? Or crack cocaine, for that matter.)
That began in 1906; it's hardly something we've "always done".
Blocking puberty until eighteen is a harmful intervention in itself, but even worse than that is girls who think they're supposed to be boys are being given double mastectomies, with some victims of this medical malpractice being as young as twelve years old.
Many later detransition, but the damage is already done by that point. That states are now banning this as a form of child abuse, is a welcome move in the right direction.
> Blocking puberty until eighteen is a harmful intervention in itself
For a trans kid, going thru the wrong puberty is harmful. The best thing would be hormones at puberty. But given issues around informed consent, puberty blockers are a valid compromise.
Calling them harmful without considering the harm of the alternative is not honest.
Puberty is a stage of natural maturation of the body. There is only one, as per your sex, and you can't go through the wrong one. The puberty of the opposite sex is not an option.
This conception of the "wrong puberty" as something that needs to be blocked is as absurd as all that "born in the wrong body" ideological nonsense.
Most importantly, children can't meaningfully consent to having their sexual function permanently damaged.
The way you experience puberty is (to some extent) a result of the hormones in your body. Generally the hormones in your body are a result of your sex, however, it is possible to stop your body from producing certain hormones, and replace them with different hormones. In this way, one can have a puberty more similar to a different sex than one’s own.
Why do you think you can’t experience the wrong one? Also, unless you are saying there is only one sex, how could there only be one puberty?
I think this question concedes that there is some possibility that one could experience an incorrect puberty.
Given the definition of maturity is being fully grown, this comes across as an inherently unhelpful thing to ask. If we say “only once someone is fully grown they are able to determine if they experienced the incorrect puberty” then this makes it impossible to help children who are going to experience the incorrect puberty. Unless we have some way to determine a child is trans without any input from them, there becomes no way to help them.
All the studies among gender dysphoric children who are not prescribed puberty blockers show desistence rates over 70%
There are studies that show very low desistence rates - many in the single digits. But those are studies among children that are given puberty blockers.
That ~1% figure is unlikely to reflect the full picture of regret. That paper defines regret very narrowly: only including the patients who made an appointment with their original medical team to discuss regret, and only if they regret surgical removal of their sex organs. Plus, a large number of their total cohort were lost to follow-up.
> So majority chooses what healthcare options are available?
You sound surprised, so maybe you really don't know this: this state of affairs is how it's always been, and is likely to continue well into the future.
The government regulates all medicines, all medical procedures, and all medical practices.
It's literally one of the many jobs of government.
Government run did not always mean majority ruled. Many times rights of the minority have been ruled to be important, as in cases like abortion. In today’s US, we’re trending toward enforcing minority opinions about e.g. vaccines.
> Government run did not always mean majority ruled.
Right.
> Many times rights of the minority have been ruled to be important, as in cases like abortion.
Correct, but it was with the agreement of the majority of voters! IOW, the majority opinion still prevailed.
We are not talking about tyranny of the minority by the majority; your example is literally the majority agreeing that those specific minorities rights be granted to them.
TBH, the opposition that we are seeing is opposition to medical intervention on minors who by definition alone cannot give informed consent.
Stop fighting that battle and I guarantee that this entire "issue" turns into a nothing-burger.
There is no reason to argue for medical interventions on someone who is unable to consent.
I'm going to assume you're asking in good faith, and the short answer is yes — this is already happening!
Before engaging in what could be a huge discussion here, I suggest you do some quick searching about legal risks of performing life-saving abortion procedures, gender-affirming care for prison inmates, and workplaces choosing whether the health insurance they provide employees covers gender-affirming care as starting points to learn about the sad state of affairs.
Many businesses in the US check ID at the door. If you are underage, they don't let you in.
On the surface it seems reasonable to ask for an equivalent ID check online.
But. The bouncer doesn't photocopy my ID and store it in a poorly secured back room that is regularly raided by criminal enterprises or outright sold by unscrupulous owners of the establishment. Similarly, they don't check in with the government in a manner that leaves a record.
I'm fine with an ID check, but I think it is also reasonable to demand the same level of privacy that one gets when visiting a bar, casino, burlesque club, or similar establishment.
The slope isn't slippery, it's paved with a Starbucks on the way. This process is outlined in detail in Project 2025 to get around 1A being used as a defense because the aim is to define anything as lgbt related as pornography.
The current administration has collected nearly all the pieces of Exodia to be able to legally criminalize homosexuality and transgenderism without ever writing a law that says those exact words and have it be held up as constitutional. I'd say it was clever if it wasn't awful.
This is a slippery slope towards democracy I tell you! Before you know it they'll be asking for representation.
Seriously, isn't this sort of par for the course? We've always regulated what minors can access on the internet. Facebook didnt even formally allow children on their site (I don't know if that's still the case). I think it's a much larger issue that we haven't been enforcing those rules, since we apparently think they are a good idea.
I bet that in practice, at scale, these zero knowledge proofs end up being a lot more than zero.
Not to mention that you're almost certainly going to have to tie this stuff to specific accounts that will then forever and ever keep your habits collected. One day somebody enterprising is going to add all that data together too.
> I bet that in practice, at scale, these zero knowledge proofs end up being a lot more than zero.
Zero knowledge proof is not a marketing term, its a math term. Maybe sometimes they are implemented wrong, but if they are implemented correctly its pretty rock solid. Certainly more rock solid than much cryptography which rests on sketchy foundations.
VPNs and zero knowledge proof systems are vulnerable to traffic analysis (based on packet size and timestamps) and there's almost no cure.
Mullvad is the only VPN I know of that has a mode that normalizes all packets to the same size (going into the VPN) and sends fake packets that don't get sent as real traffic. But that's only obfuscation and, at low traffic or high bandwidth (videos) or with sufficient heuristics, it can be beaten.
The US has basically zero regulation on selling this data. I can imagine a world where within a couple decades the US has one of the largest blackmail crisis ever seen, as foreign governments target civil workers. Or, I guess, at this point, the US government against the "undesirable" party within this administration.
I'm just saying that if age verification is done via a "smart card" then it shouldn't be hard to just add that to the phone.
Unless of course they're planning on making us go to some facility to ensure our phones get the digital components of the IDs get loaded into the secure enclave? Which sounds dystopian as heck given the scenes coming out of the US right now.
At the same time they seem pragmatic about putting their mark on standards. It seems to me like we’re at a confluence: a regulatory tipping point where there really is pressure to bring laws to bear on online harms affecting kids; and a socio-technological moment where “gotta distinguish kids from adults” can realistically happen separately from “…by handing over personal info directly to shady random counterparts.”
Individual smartphones with biometrics are these days a whole-of-society norm, technologists have developed a mature body of cryptographic work to assert ZKPs, the US population seem to have lost their aversion to centralized ID systems… and the periodic moral panic about the kids seems to be at a high tide.
In the same way that Apple don’t prevent, say, Safari from being used for prurient purposes, or Final Cut Pro from being used to edit naughty bits, I don’t see why they wouldn’t want an opinionated implementation as a concept develops of a generic “digital tool to assert your age, and only that.” Especially since Android is doing it and leaning into the privacy angle.
I expect Apple will implement a general privacy-preserving arbitrary attribute proof, with age proof just one of the things it could be used for, probably using something similar to the library that Google recently released [1].
Zero knowledge proof smart contract verification called by the site interested in your age. You provide your public key wallet with its government issued soul bound NFT of your identification.
This can be done, its not that crazy, it just requires a bunch of people to get their heads out of their sand in regards to tech and blockchain, which admittedly might be a harder problem.
——
Additonal thought- if you don’t understand what I’m saying or have a negative reaction just plug the comment + thread context into an LLM and see what it says / ask for a clearer explanation.
It existed only on the edges, usually in softer pragmatic forms, and stopped a lot of bad ideas as a pressure group.
Characterizing the entire development of software and the internet in 90s-2000s as based on libertarian techno-utopinanism is largely manufactured narrative though. One I keep seeing pop up more and more. Largely by people trying to push poorly though out authoritarian gov-controlled internet by spinning the present internet (and parenting) as a product of some ideological radicalism.
The “freedom” of the early internet was bullshit, because it just meant “freedom to make money” and “freedom from having to deal with the consequences of your products on regular people.”
It most decidedly did not mean “freedom from corporate hegemony” which is how we are where we are now, where children are matched with pedophile groomers[1] and delivered endless advertisements for freelance porn practitioners for profit.
This version of freedom isn’t a free internet at all. That was just a PR pitch. And it wasn’t really a great idea to begin with, since it ends up leading to where we are now.
> which is how we are where we are now, where children are matched with pedophile groomers[1] and delivered endless advertisements for freelance porn practitioners for profit.
Yes, which is why we are not in the early internet anymore and fully into surveillance capitalism, algorithmic social media.
Exactly. And the early internet lead directly here. Which is why going back makes about as much sense as picking up your baby and dropping it on the floor again.
All of those changes were choices. Like setting icann as a for profit entity at the behest of a corrupt libertarian faction. We didn’t have to destroy peer to peer communication. We didn’t have to cede email to google. None of those things were inevitable. Could have become anything really.
I got us 4chan and 8chan. It got us mass shootings and endless "they are just trolling, they are just teenagers, they are just ironic" chorus constantly bad faith defending the far right.
Are you saying that the early web only existed in the USA? I did not witness a growth in mass shootings here in Europe from that time. Those things did not happen until Web 2.0.
4chan is not emblematic of the Internet Wild West. It was spawned by users ejected from a traditional forum, a scant half-year before Facebook was launched; it was, in fact, a sort of mirror to Facebook's response to that old internet, moot and Zuck being two sides of the same upper middle class white boy script kiddie coin.
And, as with Facebook, the main issue was the ways in which each platform perpetuated old social ills, not the ways in which they freed users.
Lastly, the tragedy of each is that it would have been entirely possible for ethical actors to takeover or fork each platform to scrub them of the ills and to promote the good. Bluesky is making a try of it vis a vis Twitter, and while my hopes aren't high that it will be an ultimate solution, I appreciate that there's finally been at least an attempt.
Society gave us mass shootings. 4chan and other anonymous boards gave us protected speech. We've had mass shootings long before 4chan and they didn't start kicking off until they reached a critical threshold of interest due to social media and the almighty algorithm, not 4chan. Conflating these things is either ignorant or dishonest.
So now that we've arrived at the far right, it's time to stop decentralized dissent and prevent the pendulum from swinging back? This seems like a terrible idea.
And personally I'd say mass shootings are primarily encouraged by corporate mass media (including social media) glorifying the events and the shooters, rather than anonymous message board speech.
"Arrived" because any further and we're into the far reich. "Swinging back" because I have to be an optimist that as the blatant autocratic authoritarianism rises there will be mass pushback.
I do know how deep the sophomorically-justified rabbit hole goes, in that I've read a fair amount of dark enlightenment material. I actually credit Moldbug's writing for helping me go from defaulting to fundamentalist-axiomatic analysis (rightist) to leftist-constructive-qualitative analysis (leftist) - top down hierarchy is utterly incapable of responding to the complexity of the world, and only sounds so appealing post-facto when a singular coherent narrative has been written.
> All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
Kind of unfortunate that PICS[1][2] and POWDER[3][4] never really took off: it allowed web sites to 'self-label' and then browsers (and proxies?) could use the metadata and built-in rules/filters to determine if the content should be displayed.
PICS and ICRA were not adopted by many due to complexity. RTA [1][2] is a more generic header that can be used on any adult site or site that allows user contributed content and is easier to implement. There needs to be a law that requires clients to look for this header if parental controls are enabled. Not perfect, nothing is. Teens will easily get around it but most small children will not which should be the spirit of the ID verification movement. It's better than what we have today. The centralized ID verification sites will push many small sites to Tor and bigger sites to island nations and tax evasion in my opinion. More browsers are natively supporting .onion domains.
Congress critters should be opposed to the centralized ID verification systems as their browsing habbits will be exposed to the world when those sites ooopsie dooopsie "leak" the data or just openly sell it or an employee turns that data into a summarized online spreadsheet of who is into what. The kickbacks and lobbying they may be potentially receiving will not be worth it.
I am never providing my ID to anyone who can store it indefinitely. I am an adult and have no problem showing it in a shop if required as it isn't stored. Unless it can be proven it wont be stored (i.e. the bytes are never sent from my laptop) I will not provide it.
Your ID is effectively stored by the issuer indefinitely. What’s the difference between one and two entities? What’s the difference between two and a hundred?
The more people you give your personal information to, the less personal it becomes.
The servers storing this information have been hacked in the past and it will happen again in the future. The fewer places your ID lives, the lower the risk of it leaking.
Even if you don’t view the data as sensitive, it still associates a person with a website. Depending on the site, that can have negative ramifications in a person’s life. This is especially true when certain websites get associated with various political leaning and when the data leaks, the people who happened to be registered (for whatever their reason) get attacked.
Where I'm from we sorted this out with laws. It's not hard to figure out if one of your workers are associating with a union, but you're not allowed to treat them differently based on that. Laws make sure you don't, even though you technically could.
The tricky part is proving you’re being treated differently and that’s the reason why. Trying to legislate human behavior at that level doesn’t seem to work well.
My company has rules against retaliation. Good luck proving that’s the reason you didn’t get promoted, or were left off of a project. People get left off projects and don’t get promoted all the time. Keeping your job because the company is legally obligated to sounds like an uncomfortable working environment.
Thinking about client vs server, wouldn't it be even less wide-ranging, less costly to enforce, and more appropriately targeted if such mandates are one-time and on the client side - only on device manufacturers and OEM-shipped OS? Suppose new mass market devices are defaulted to parental controls on, until unlocked by an adult at point-of-sale or afterwards through a form of validation? The KYC of who unlocked it could be anonymized or the PII-proving side of the log if it needs keeping could be on-device only (high bar for criminal investigations). There should be a clear exemption threshold for low volume indie products, build your own PC, and open source self-install like Linux - since the purpose is to protect ignorant/apathetic consumers.
Are you ok with all devices considering the user hostile and coming with heavy encryption and locked bootloaders?
> There should be a clear exemption threshold for low volume indie products, build your own PC, and open source self-install like Linux - since the purpose is to protect ignorant/apathetic consumers.
Then everyone will just follow a YouTube tutorial to reinstall their operating system and bypass restrictions. There were TikTok videos teaching kids how to steal cars, would there not be easy to follow instructions to bypass whatever client side filtering is implemented?
I get where you're coming from, but mandated client side filtering has been tried and has been ridiculed as a complete failure every time. Attempts have been made to market and provide filtering products to parents with little effect, with them either being easy to bypass or difficult to use.
It's actually kind of interesting to see the people who were fighting against client side filtering are now advocating for it, because server side restrictions are the next logical step.
This would actually be an effective way to teach kids about technology. If they learn enough to install their own OS, let them have their smut.
I’m hearing more and more how younger generations don’t have what people used to call basic computer skills, because everything just kind of works now. Putting up some road blocks that require research and hands on tinkering to solve, is an invaluable part of the learning process.
> Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
They won't have to, most websites will use 3rd party age verification. This is basically what Doordash and Uber Eats use to verify your age before delivering alcohol or THC to your apartment.
Rife for abuse? Absolutely. Will these databases get leaked and increase the chances of your identity getting stolen? Yes. But isn't a small increase to an already-existing problem.
Because 'online' is the entire planet, including sellers in foreign countries. Would you like to have "digital borders" between countries, where data has to show some sort of passport to cross the border?
> Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids.
I mean, they are. But I've never seen a similar reaction on HN or any forum when social media require age verification. Actually, I think most HN users would cheer if the government required Facebook to only allow users over 18.
I feel the general opinion about something on the internet basically comes down to this simple rule: !(do American Christians want that thing?), no matter what that thing is.
There was a thread on reddit asking the other day what about the modern world bothers you the most
I actually considered this question and after thinking about it, despite everything going on, I think it boils down to lack of privacy as my biggest gripe in the modern world
It’s such a tough concept to explain to the if you don’t have anything to hide crowd, but if someone wants to disappear, I don’t care if for good or bad reasons, they should be able to
If you don’t want the government on you, if you don’t want people you know to find you, if you just want to reinvent yourself, it doesn’t matter why - you should be able to do this. It just “feels” like an innate right. Normally I don’t like to argue using “vibes” as justification, but this to me is just part of my value system/morals which is inherently arbitrary to begin with
Encroaching on this privacy encroaches on a bunch of other rights, like free speech as you’ve mentioned
The fact that this is the case makes it even clearer to me that privacy is a basic fundamental primitive
Would love to hear alternative perspectives and other justifications for or against privacy
Either so few people appreciate the freedom that privacy confers or the perceived conveniences for trading it away are too compelling because of just how little society has done to protect privacy.
I only imagine it changing after a significant cultural change in which the economic value is not held as higher than the value of privacy, but would be delighted to be wrong in this regard.
I don't feel as strongly about privacy because "community" is what holds civilisation together.
Its nice to have a little space, and to have your own thoughts and opinions, but not at the expense of civilisation.
People should not be able to use privacy to evade responsibility or debts.
We always need to balance freedoms with responsibility.
Final thought is that this is precisely why government and politics is not a joke and needs to be taken seriously. We need small transparent governments we can trust and that are a held accountable.
If you don't trust your government, you've got bigger problems than your privacy.
> We always need to balance freedoms with responsibility.
Sure, but is this a measure that appropriately balances it?
I think the traditional view is that the balance should be: your rights end where they start stepping on another person's rights.
We aren't really talking about someone else being harmed, we are talking about (at worst) someone harming themselves. There is no other person being harmed.
On the other hand, porn habits are a great way to blackmail people. When the identity data gets leaked, it will very easily ruin lives.
From a balance perspective, i don't really think it follows that the benefits are worth the potential harms. I think civilization is best preserved by not doing this.
> I don't feel as strongly about privacy because "community" is what holds civilisation together.
Dude I'm sure most people are okay with their neighbors knowing their names and addresses. We're talking about the governments and megacorps here. Theses are not "communities" in any traditional sense.
> small transparent governments
No developed country has that. Not EU and definitely not the US.
The EU is both pro-privacy and anti-privacy. In many ways, they're ahead of the US - you can opt out of more telemetry, more advertising, more tracking. Good. But then the encryption stuff - bad.
Informed consent laws - good. Laws about third-party tracking - good. So it's some good, some bad.
But, on the topic of encryption, it's not like the US is pure here either.
It is very much not clear to me that you should have privacy from governments or cops. Aren't the whole point of the government and cops that they are the institutions we have created to entrust with this access?
These are Authoritarian Christo-fascists. They do not care. They will demonize everyone involved in anything related to online sex. They are coming for the sex workers, and all of porn too - they stated they would do this in "Project 2025". "Think of the children" is how they justify it.
At this point I think accusing conservatives of hypocrisy is blase and yesterday's news.
Of course conservatives are hypocrites. All they care about are their end goals, and they will say and do whatever they need to say and do in order to achieve them.
One of those goals involves enshrining Christian values into law. Christian values themselves are often hypocritical and contradictory. And inconsistent: ask 10 Christians to weigh in on a thorny moral issue and you'll get 15 different answers.
And on top of that, the conservatives in power have a fetish for using those power structures to enrich themselves and their cronies, under the guise of "small government" and "free markets".
I don't think exposing conservative hypocrisy is a winning or useful strategy anymore. Conservatives are masters at cognitive dissonance, and at hand-waving away inconsistencies in their views, or the very real, very negative consequences of their policy plans. I'm not sure what the right strategy is, though. And perhaps this is why liberals fail to win hearts and minds when it matters.
Whenever anyone has economic woes, there are still plenty of people out there who will reflexively say "maybe we needs some Republicans in charge for a bit, they're more fiscally responsible and will help small businesses" etc etc.
And Republicans will happily run on those ideas.
And then not execute them.
So someone needs to be hammering home the fact that it's lies - that Republicans will only help the wealthy and giant corporations, that they don't care a whit for the deficit, that they will spend spend spend on their pet issues and crony projects - until it stops being an effective campaign soundbite.
Birthday attack: most places punch the eight digits MMDDYYYY into the keypad. You think you're safe, but that's 1 in over 20,000 uniqueness practically. Each store has how many local regulars? Sure sometimes there's overlap in birthdays, but it's unique enough.
In some states stores are required to scan IDs. I'd be surprised if e.g. Kroger weren't storing that information. All of these porn laws I've read at least ban any storage. As far as I know digital ID standards are also at least designed to allow only sharing "over18" without other identifying information.
Kroger is most definitely storing this information. I rarely shop any Kroger store, but when they started doing IDs scans, I shop there less and no longer buy anything that requires my ID.
You don't actually provide it to the porn site. Everything goes through a 3rd party escrow. The site you're trying to access only gets a message from the trusted ID partner that you are indeed the age you say you are.
Now, I still hate the idea that any corporation is storing my ID, but it's not every Tom Dicken' Harry porn site you might be viewing.
How could they be separate issues when the submission of an ID image obviously enables both the subsequent storage of the ID and also the presentment of the ID to others.
We know that very few organizations are capable of effectively controlling confidential information that they're legally bound to keep confidential. Requiring things that are going to lead to large stores of ID images is asking for trouble.
When you show your ID in a store, the clerk generally doesn't retain a copy of it, and if they do, it's apparent because they take the card to scan it... regardless, they can't take the scanned copy and present it at another store, because the other store will detect that it's not an original.
Most of us alive in the US today never had a right to buy liquor anonymously, unless you’re making a natural rights argument independent of contrary constitutional or statutory law. The 21st Amendment gives lots of authority to states to regulate or prohibit alcohol sales, including the right to require ID.
With that said, even now, it’s normal that liquor stores only look at IDs without transmitting or recording the information anywhere (in the absence of fraud concerns), so if the purchase itself is made with cash, it has most (not quite all) of the same data privacy and security consequences as a true anonymous purchase.
This is very different from the online porn age verification proposals.
> why did you give up your right to buy liquor anonymously?
That's not entirely true - once you look old enough most places will stop asking for ID.
As for why: because there is (or at least, was) no other system to identify whether someone is underage and, by extension, more likely to underestimate the consequences of their actions, make worse choices under the effect of alcohol, and suffer its effects more strongly. Same reason why the legal system makes a difference between minors and adults.
> If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should), there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18 without sending picture of your ID off to random 3rd parties, or giving actual personal details.
But there won't be.
Because the ultimate purpose of laws like this isn't really to prevent minors from accessing porn. Ultimately, it's to
1) outlaw porn for everyone, because it's "sinful", and
2) outlaw discussions and depictions of queer—and more specifically, nowadays, especially trans—issues, because according to them, anything queer is automatically pornographic, no matter how tame the actual content is.
You’re getting downvoted, likely because the people downvoting you dont realize that Project 2025 explicitly calls for the complete outlawing of pornography and the imprisonment of anyone who produces it. They also frame transgender ideology and LGBTQ+ educational materials as falling under “pornography”, essentially calling for these to be banned.
> Transgender people will see their existence denied and their rights stripped away under Project 2025. The authors equate "transgender ideology" to pornography, calling for it to be outlawed. While the far-right policy agenda cannot directly ban transgenderism, it aims to do so indirectly by labeling it as pornography, and then outlawing pornography itself - effectively erasing transgender identity from the U.S.
And when they've banned all of those, they'll be banning r/pastorarrested for pointing out what everyone already knows about these fine upstanding moralists.
> They also frame transgender ideology and LGBTQ+ educational materials as falling under “pornography”, essentially calling for these to be banned.
Close, but it's worse than that -- they don't want LGBTQ+ material merely banned; they want LGBTQ+ people dead, or at the very least banned from all public life. The next step is where they call for the death penalty for child abuse (also in Project 2025). So according to them LGBTQ+ is pornographic -> pornography is child abuse -> child abuse is punishable by death -> therefore existing as a queer person is punishable by death.
No, they very much realize that. The people down voting them want these things. HN isn't some bastion of progressive thinkers or the libertarian hacker-minded anymore. It's chock full of wealthy tech-bro neocons who dote on figures like Elon Musk.
Just see how any criticism of dear leader gets flagged in mere minutes now.
Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.
I run a pi-hole that blocks ads and porn, but that’s way beyond the technical capability of probably 95% of people. There are some commercial products but they are expensive and also take time and at least a little tech ability to set up.
… and of course any phone with 5G/LTE gets around this. Cellular is impossible to police.
> parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device
Tough luck, I say. If you’re going to bring humans into this world, you better do a great job at it and not externalize responsibility or create a nuisance for others.
> Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.
I'm going to have to upload 3D models of my face and pictures of my ID just to use the internet because... some people don't like the idea of other people's kids using the internet?
This is a good point of course but that's always the issue, no? You may try to hide violence from your children, but if they see gang violence around them it doesn't matter. You can try to hide sexual content from your kids but if they have friends who share the content, hear people talking about it, or live in an area where prostitution occurs, you can't stop them from being exposed to it.
These were problems from before the age of devices. If anything car oriented development has made it easier to control your children's experience diet by controlling their physical proximity.
Fundamentally I think you just need to trust your kids beyond a certain point. Do your best to build constructive consumption habits with them (including restricting access to devices as needed), help build good moral frameworks, but always remember that the world is messy and it's your child's job to synthesize their upbringing with their experiences. We all did the same while growing up
It takes less than 5 minutes to set up NextDNS with the same functionality and it costs $2 a month for unlimited DNS calls. If you download the app it absolutely can police cellular.
If these legislators cared about keeping kids safe, they’d be focused on getting them off social media, not stopping adults from exercising free speech.
> but that’s way beyond the technical capability of probably 95% of people.
It really isn’t, and even if it were an ISP could offer it. Indeed I believe most ISPs do (I chose one which is unfiltered, I do my own filtering at a router and dns level, the biggest threat is DoH)
It is very hard for parents who aren’t tech savvy or are busy (single parents or both work) to police this stuff.
I’m playing devils advocate because if we pretend this isn’t a problem eventually governments will force onerous regulation. It is a problem. We need to come up with better solutions if we don’t want worse ones.
It’s devils advocate because I think while kids shouldn’t be looking at porn the brain rot shit is at least as bad and possibly worse. Kids YouTube is a lobotomy.
Sounds like marketing is the problem. In fact, I'd say 90% of the Internet's more problematic aspects disappear once you get rid of marketing/monetization. We had a good thing. We let mercantilism and surveillance capitalism ruin it.
Sorry you're experiencing a bunch of downvotes over a counterpoint from your own experience.
Even though I could predict what side HN would stand on any sort of internet freedom post, reading through all the reasonable yet greyed-out comments in this thread feels like HN's last dying breath as a place for genuine debate.
The replies here are disturbing for their lack of concern or even awareness of the fact that some parents have, you know, economic pressures? Like they have to work long hours or multiple jobs? Both parents have to work?
This site can be really gross sometimes. I want to think it's just that the site skews young and people just don't know. I might have said similar things when I was 20.
It’s not gross to want parents to only parent their kids, and to leave the kids of other parents out of it. It’s your responsibility what your kid does on devices that you permit them to have. If you can’t control your kid when they’re not in your presence, or can’t trust them when they’re left to their own devices (pun intended), that’s an issue, but it isn’t a technological problem, but rather a parenting problem.
>Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.
May be such inept people who don't care that much about their kids as to setup parent control shouldn't have kids in the first place? Why we all should take a hit to our rights/business/etc. just because of such careless and irresponsible parents?
Your kids is your personal responsibility. It the same story again and again - why can't these conservative people own their personal responsibilities without hoisting its costs onto the others?
In this day and age lack of knowledge is no excuse.
Especially when everyone who would have this particular "problem" has access to various search tools and video websites that would explain "solutions".
I feel like, to say that, you haven't tried helping many older adults — or even middle-aged adults — use technology.
If my older family member was scammed by something online, and someone said "lack of knowledge is no excuse," I think they'd really be missing the mark. Or if they shouldn't reproduce because they aren't good with technology.
It's a very HN take but it's one that lacks a lot of humanity.
>> I feel like, to say that, you haven't tried helping many older adults — or even middle-aged adults — use technology.
I have actually. And do so pretty regularly.
But the comment I was replying to was presumably not about older adults, and more so about younger parents of minor children, whom I wouldn't normally class as "older adults", and for the most part I would think know basic skills like using a search engine and/or Youtube (or some other video sharing app)
This is a barrier put in place so that children are less likely to casually access these sites while they're browsing around.
As an adult, no-one is forcing you to view pornographic websites. If you don't want to provide your ID as per these laws, simply refrain from viewing. It really is that straightforward a choice.
Right, so you're admitting what we already know to be true: it's censorship.
Now, I can get behind some censorship if it's for very good reasons. As soon as it's for moralistic reasons, you've lost me. This is a morality law. Morality laws are bad, period. We need real, concrete reasons for blocking content and enforcing censorship - not morality.
Why not? Because morals change from person to person and throughout history. What an evangelical thinks is moral is different from what I think is moral.
If the internet existed during times of slavery, would they have censored websites addressing freedom because it is "immoral"? In my mind, yes. That's a problem with the entire thought process. So, we should throw the thought process out.
I don't know what the future holds in 10 years, 20 years, 30. I don't want to be bound to laws that rely solely on morality. That's just asking for trouble.
I mean, even just the word "pornography" is a moral footgun. Who defines that? Because a large portion of the US believes anything containing homosexuals is automatically pornographic, regardless of the material.
Proving one's age is required for many other activities that are considered unsuitable for children, such as purchasing alcohol and drugs, and watching age-restricted films in the cinema.
Of course this means that any adult, when challenged, who refuses to show ID as proof of age, will be denied service. But again that refusal is their choice. They voluntarily refrained from complying with the access requirements.
How is this substantially different to an adult refusing to show ID to access an age-restricted website?
The internet is already blocked by age. In order to order internet service, you must be an adult, and you must prove it by showing papers, such as residence and pay stubs.
Once the service or good is sold, all bets are off. The clerk at the corner store might ask for your ID to buy alcohol, yes. But they do not follow you home to ensure you don't give wine to your kid.
And, if they did, would you be comfortable with that? I think no. Why not? Privacy. I don't want a random clerk watching me every time I decide to drink or smoke. It's a violation of my privacy.
So, privacy - there's your answer, that's the difference.
The internet is not blocked by age. Any child with a laptop or phone, or any other device that can connect to a wifi hotspot, can access it.
Do you refuse to watch age-restricted films in the cinema because the owner of the cinema might have a record of what you've watched? Age-restricted websites are no different. You can comply with the access requirement, or refrain from using the service. It's your freedom of choice.
No-one is forcing you to watch 18-rated films at the cinema, or purchase alcohol or drugs, or view pornographic material online. If you don't like the requirement to prove your age by presenting some form of ID, then all you need to do is voluntarily refrain from these and any other age-restricted activities.
> Do you refuse to watch age-restricted films in the cinema because the owner of the cinema might have a record of what you've watched?
For me, no. For others, yes.
But this is a different degree of privacy to what we're talking about. It's not the same, and you cannot make the jump for free.
What I mean is, just because I am okay with this degree of privacy violation, does not mean I consent to all privacy violations which may ever exist. Again, you might be fine with an R-rated movie - but you, yourself, would not be fine with a store clerk living at your house to ensure you don't give kids alcohol. So you, yourself, understand and live by the principle.
> Any child with a laptop or phone, or any other device that can connect to a wifi hotspot, can access it.
Similarly, any child living in my house can access my scotch.
It is up to me, the person who purchased the good or service, to ensure that doesn't happen. It is not up to a third-party like the store clerk. If I am a business, it is then up to me that the internet I provide is adequately censored. Which is what happens in practice.
Public wifi near universally implements porn blocks in the first place. I can't imagine there would be much chagrin about promoting that into a law.
> Do you refuse to watch age-restricted films in the cinema because the owner of the cinema might have a record of what you've watched?
I can't imagine that there aren't many people who refrain from watching all sorts of content in public out of privacy concerns.
>If you don't like the requirement to prove your age by presenting some form of ID, then all you need to do is voluntarily refrain from these and any other age-restricted activities.
I certainly don't, and I would definitely oppose this being made into law.
Many public WiFi hotspots have content filters. Kids are not going to be seeing porn at the library.
The issue here is there's a difference between a mainstream service, like a cinema, and a tiny author website which probably gets a few hundred hits a months at most.
And the ultimate ideological aim is to take all erotica offline. Especially any kind of queer erotica.
This is using ID issues for ideological censorship, not trying to set up an ID system to streamline access to adult material by adult consumers.
> Give me your ID or stop posting on HN. No one is forcing you to post on HN. If you don't want me to know your name and address and age and driver's license number and keep a record of everything you say that I sell to anybody I want and store in an unencrypted hard drive, you don't have to post.
Others have said this, I'm sure, but this will move past porn _quickly_. Once there is agreed-up age verification for pornography, much of the professional internet will require identity verification to do _anything_. This is one of the bigger nails in the coffin for the free internet, and this true whether or not you're happy with all the pornography out there.
Nothing is going to be "regulated properly" for at least the next 3.5 years, and we'll all be dealing with backwards decline for decades after. That's best case, but i'm guessing It'll be even worse than the "radicals" are shouting about.
You won't though. Malicious actors will find a way around this - either purchasing or stealing whatever form of ID is used for this. The only people who will suffer are law-abiding citizens simply trying to browse the Internet.
No idea why you’re getting downvoted when there’s a slow but unstoppable migration of everything into discord or other walled, somewhat LLM-proof gardens.
GAN style training is only going to get cheaper and easier. Detection will collapse to noise. Any ID runes will be mishandled and the abuse will fly under the radar. Only the space of problems where AI fundamentally can't be used, such as being at a live event, will be meaningfully resistant to AI.
Another way for it all to unfold is maybe 98% of online discourse is useless in a few years. Maybe it's useless today, but we just didn't have the tools to make it obvious by both generating and detecting it. Instead of AI filtering to weed out AI, a more likely outcome is AI filtering to weed out bad humans and our own worst contributions. Filter out incessant retorting from keyboard warriors. Analyze for obviously inconsistent deduction. Treat logical and factual mistakes like typos. Maybe AI takes us to a world where humans give up on the 97% and only 1% that is useless today gets through. The internet's top 2% is a different internet. It is the only internet that will be valuable for training data to identify and replace the 1% and converge onto the spaces that AI can't touch.
People will have to search for interactions that can't be imitated and have enough value to make it through filters. We will have to literally touch grass. All the time. Interactions that don't affect the grass we touch will vanish from the space of social media and web 2.0 services that have any reason to operate whatsoever. Heat death of the internet has a blast radius, and much of what humans occupy themselves with will turn out to be within that blast radius.
A lot of people will by definition be disappointed that the middle standard deviation of thought on any topic no longer adds anything. At least at first. There used to be a time when the only person you heard on the radio had to be somewhat better than average to be heard. We will return to that kind of media because the value of not having any expertise or first-hand experience will drop to such an immeasurable low that those voices no longer participate or appear to those using filters. Entire swaths of completely replaceable, completely redundant online "community" will just wither to dust, giving us time to touch the grass, hone the 2%, and make sense of other's 2%.
Callers on radio shows used to be interesting because people could have a tiny window into how wildly incorrect and unintelligent some people are. Pre-internet media was dominated by people who were likely slightly above average. Radio callers were something like misery porn or regular-people porn. You could sometimes hear someone with such an awful take that it made you realize that you are not in the bottom 10%. The internet has given us radio callers, all the time, all of them. They flooded Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. They trend and upvote themselves. They make YouTube channels where they talk into a camera with higher quality than commercial rigs from 2005. There is a GDP for stupidity that never existed except as the novelty object of a more legitimate channel. When we "democratized" media, it wasn't exclusively allowing in thoughts and opinions that were higher quality than "mainstream".
The frightening conclusion is possibly that we are living in a kind of heat death now. It's not the AIs that are scary. Its the humans we have platformed. The bait posts on Instagram will be out-competed. Low quality hot takes will be out-competed. Repetitive and useless comments on text forums will be out-competed. Advertising revenue, which is dependent on the idea that you are engaging with someone who will actually care about your product, will be completely disrupted. The entire machine that creates, monetizes, and foments utterly useless information flows in order to harness some of the energy will be wrecked, redundant, shut down.
Right now, people are correct that today's AI is on an adoption curve that would see more AI spam if tomorrow's AI isn't poised to filter out not just spam but a great mass of low-value human-created content. However, when we move to suppress "low quality slop" we will increasingly be filtering out low-quality humans. When making the slop higher quality so that it flies under the radar, we will be increasingly replacing and out-competing the low-quality content of the low-quality human. What remains will be of a very high deductive consistency. Anything that can be polished to a point will be. Only new information outside the reach of the AI and images of distant stars will be beyond the grasp of this convergence.
All of this is to say that the version of the internet where AI is the primary nexus of interaction via inbound and outbound filtering and generation might be the good internet we think we can have if we enact some totalitarian ID scheme to fight against slop that is currently replacing what the bottom 10% of the internet readily consumes anyway.
I don’t agree, at least as far as legal obligation goes. The average voter is far more worried about porn and other explicit content and not so much about anything else.
This doesn't really track with widespread and normalized use of pornographic materials, including written descriptions, by most adults in this country. There's a pretty wide gulf between "I don't think kids should be able to access this stuff" and "I think we need to supercharge the surveillance state and destroy the first amendment"
I still don't see any reason erasing bots and captchas from my online experience is bad. I hate bots and captchas. They add absolutely no value to my life. Conversely there is lots to be gained if imagine if something like X or reddit or whatever can anonymously verify that a user is a person and over 18 or 21 or 30 even (whatever) without having to directly handle identities. It's could be all the benefits of a bouncer checking for a pulse and valid ID without the privacy invasion. If done correctly it can also make fraud more difficult.
This doesn't sound so bad. I would much prefer to have discussions about politics, technology, or religion safe in the knowledge that I am not inadvertently communicating with a minor.
I had very passionate talks online about all 3 categories before I turned 18, and I got a lot of feedback, from older folk I didn't previously know, that I shaped opinions and formed new perspectives - and a lot of the talks sure as shit did the same for me. I cannot say I would have nearly the same current passion that I do for technology, aspects of politics, and philosophy (including that of religion) without such exposures during my adolescent years, and I'm sure you'd be hard-pressed to find others young enough that wouldn't say the same - provided they have an adequate baseline of introspection.
On that note, out of all the examples you could have given for discussion categories that are unbecoming to have with minors, you chose 3 relatively benign ones, lol.
> In fact, under the laws that the Supreme Court just upheld, prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site.
> It's unlikely these interstate prosecutions would happen...
It might wind up being uncommon, but definitely not unlikely - it's basically assured that it will happen eventually, especially if the judge finds the text in question particularly or personally offensive.
I guess now is a great time to start a KYC company.
If an state AG tries to prosecute an entity that has no ties to the state other than content being passively accessible, that's probably another supreme court case if it doesn't get immediately decided in favor of the defendant in the lower courts. You open a big can of worms if entities are required to proactively comply with regulations in states they have zero presence in.
If Texas wants to block content from entities that have nothing to do with Texas, they can build their own great firewall.
> You open a big can of worms if entities are required to proactively comply with regulations in states they have zero presence in.
It’s true, it would cause a great deal of chaos if suddenly every person and business had to comply with fifty-plus different and sometimes contradictory state laws.
As far as I understand it (IANAL), this ruling decides that the speech restrictions imposed by the Texas ID verification law are compliant with the 1st amendment. It didn't touch on whether or not Texas can enforce its laws on entities that don't do business in Texas.
IANAL, but it seems like things are already moving in this direction. For example, FL has a similar state law regarding pornography, and the response from many porn sites has been to comply or block FL IPs rather than fight it up to the supreme court. I guess someone will do it eventually, but I suspect there is an assumption that they'd be wasting their time and money to do so.
Yeah I don't think a business is going to try to force the issue when a geoblock is simple to implement. If it happens, it's probably going to be some kind of advocacy group pushing it.
Technically anything is possible with the Calvinball Supreme Court, but states can choose not to extradite their citizens. E.g. NY has a shield law for abortion doctors.
This feels helpful, but puts a big burden on the person targeted. I live in California; let's say I run afoul of this Tennessee law and am criminally prosecuted.
California decides this is bullshit and won't extradite me to Tennessee. Great. The article mentions that 20-odd states are implementing similar laws (though most offer only civil penalties, not criminal). Let's say I want to visit friends in New York. I get on a plane, and the plane flies over one of those other states with shitty laws. They've decided to help Tennessee with their shitty-law enforcement, see that my name is on a passenger list of a flight crossing that state's airspace, and they require my plane divert to a local airport so they can arrest me.
Ok, maybe states can't do that? But I still have to be careful how I fly; I have to only take direct flights, or be very careful as to which connecting airports I allow in my itineraries. I have to hope that all my flights go smoothly, and that my flights never have issues that require them to divert to an airport in a state with shitty laws.
This still sucks for people who don't have to live in states with these garbage laws.
Why is it everyone else's responsibility to keep it out of the hands of 10 year olds by being 24/7 surveilled by the government, instead of the parents' responsibility to regulate internet access for their 10-year old?
Not that gay erotica seems that harmful, even for a 10 year old. They probably don't seek it out as much as you thing they do. If they do, it is probably a beneficial step in their development given what they learn about themselves in a safer environment than the probable alternative.
That comment was unacceptable and I replied to them to say so, but it's also not OK to comment like this on HN, no matter what you're replying to. If we want others to be better we need to be better ourselves.
Because just like the argument with social media in my opinion it’s better to have governmental regulation on these things so millions of households don’t have to have the same argument with their kids and kids not on social media platforms don’t get left out of a significant percentage of teenage life effectively socially stunting them.
Millions of households talking about this stuff with their kids, setting rule and boundaries and punishments, is exactly what should happen. That is literally what parenting is, and every parent must do it. Pushing that responsibility to the state is not only lazy, it's anathema to a free society. Your children will grow up to be robots who only know how to do what an authority figure tells them to do.
In my opinion it shouldn’t. If 75% of kids are using social media it’s very hard to make the argument that your kid shouldn’t have a smartphone since your kid will argue that you are making them a social pariah (and rightfully so).
As a society we collectively tell kids they can’t have destructive, addictive substances until they’re a certain age and I believe social media and smartphones belong in that category.
But that is US law, as of literally just this week!
> "In fact, under the laws that the Supreme Court just upheld, prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site."
No, that's not the law in the U.S. That's the article writer fearmongering about an imagined state of the law that doesn't exist in the U.S., and still wouldn't exist even after this SCOTUS ruling.
I think that's the point of the article. The Supreme Court has Ruled:
"prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines
and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-
explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states,
facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on
my dinky little free WordPress site."
So, while I agree that this feels foreign and wrong to me as someone who has experienced "The Internet" for so long, I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works.
I'm asking this in good faith.
Given that:
1. The Internet is not an optional subscription service today the way it was in 1995. Every kid and adult has 1,000 opportunities to get online including on the multiple devices every one of their peers owns, which a single set of parents has no control over. So "Just keep them off the Internet/control their devices" seems like a silly "Just" instruction.
2. The Internet is nearly infinite. The author of this editorial says "then install a content blocker on your kids’ devices and add my site to it". This is a silly argument since the whole point is that no one has ever heard of him/her and it's obviously impossible for a filter (let's just assume filters can't be bypassed) can "just" enumerate every inappropriate site even if it employed a full-time staff who did nothing but add new sites to the list all day long.
So given all of that, how do we justify how the Internet must operate on different rules than the offline world does? One can't open a "Free adult library" downtown and allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn. I'd have to check IDs and do my best to keep kids out. It also seems like it would be gross to do so. If you agree with that, why should the Internet operate on different rules?
I'd also like to separate the logistics from the morality here. If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! But then the focus should be on finding a good privacy-respecting solution, not just arguing for the status quo.
An age verification requirement might stop your 12-year-old from accessing a porn site headquartered or hosted in the US, but it will do nothing to keep your kid from finding porn on any of the thousands (tens of thousands? more?) of websites hosted in various other countries who don't care about this sort of thing.
These sites are (or will be, if US-based sites become inaccessible) just as easy to find, and just as hard to block with normal parental-controls style content blocking.
Requiring age verification in the US doesn't solve the problem. It just stifles free speech and turns us even more into a Christian nanny-state. The people pushing these laws don't care about children, in reality. They care about banning pornography in the US, and this is one step on that road.
> If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true!
That's not the issue. The issue is that it's impossible to achieve the stated goal (making it impossible or even hard for children to access adult content), period. Whether or not the age-verification is done in a privacy-preserving manner is irrelevant.
There are two ways to "solve" this problem. One is better parental controls, but this will always be a cat-and-mouse game, and will never be perfect. The other is to accept that your kids will sometimes see things that you don't want them to see. That's how the world has always worked, and will continue to always work. Be there for them to provide context and support when they run across these things by accident and are confused or upset, and punish when they seek it out against the rules and boundaries you've set for them. You know... be a parent, and parent them.
Are they actually just as hard to block though? e.g. I don't see much reason to allow traffic to any Russian or Chinese IPs for any reason from my network. To be honest a default blacklist to any non-American IP seems like it'd not cause much trouble for my family, and then if there were some educational or FOSS or whatever sites in Europe, those could be whitelisted on a case by case basis.
Similarly the only expected VPN traffic in my network would be inbound to my wire guard server/router. Everything else can be banned by default.
How so? Why would I not default filter e.g. Iran or Chad or El Salvador or most of the world on my home network? I can always unblock a specific IP if needed, but chances are that will never happen.
My kids aren't old enough for computers yet, but I'm mostly of the mindset that a whitelist or curated offline cache (at least for anything on the web) is the sanest approach for younger kids. Outside of .gov, .edu, a handful of discussion forums, and stuff not relevant to them like shopping/banking, there's honestly not a lot of utility to the web. If they end up interested in programming, reference material can be kept offline, libraries downloaded through a proxy repository, etc.
> I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works.
From a different angle: many people went into the web in disagreement with how the physical world is managed.
Those who were good at politics also tried to improve the offline rules, but not everyone can.
From that POV, opposing the application of irl biggotery into the online world isn't some illogical or whimsical move. They tried to make a better world for the likes of them, and in a way you're using the success of the platform to explain why they're not welcome anymore.
I'd be sympathetic to your logic if it was for the betterment of the online world, but IMHO it surely isn't and we're looking at bullies expanding irl power to crush other platforms as well.
I think the point they were making is that a child can walk into a library, pick up any book, and open it. All without any adults being in the loop. They can do that today.
RE Point 1. All it takes is one of those other peers' parents to allow them to view pornography and then that kid just becomes the porn-distributor for the school, just like some kids in my day passed around porno mags. In essence, nothing changes for the kids, but every single adult is at best inconvenienced and at worst at risk of government invasion of their privacy. Not worth doing, imo.
RE Point 2. They could just use a whitelist instead of a blacklist/filter. They exist already, after all. Fill it up with sites showing the wholesome version of the world you want your child exposed to and they can only visit those places.
> I'd also like to separate the logistics from the morality here. If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! But then the focus should be on finding a good privacy-respecting solution, not just arguing for the status quo.
I like this point. I feel like the tech community just figured politicians would forget about the issue. Instead of working together to develop a solution.
No. The tech community absolutely has the right to refuse to provide technical means and argue any views they want.
However we're seeing what happens next. Politicians write laws anyway forcing the tech community to do what they want.
I am just saying that in hindsight a bit of cooperation may have resulted in a less privacy invasive solution. I guess with the supreme court ruling it's too late now. The politicians have already won.
The fundamental problem—and it's a big one—is that in the physical world, age verification does not result in a centralized log of when and where I was, and what I did. If I buy cigarettes I show my paper id to some dude and then buy smokes. It's transient with no record (except the fallible memory of the bloke doing the ID check).
This is not true for the proposed age verification schemes for the internet and that is a big problem. Unless this is solved, these schemes deserve every level of resistance we can muster.
Pot shops in legal states are compiling databases with their compliance CRM systems.
Pot industry needs to anonymize their customer records or stop using SaaS packaged solutions.
Now if China hacks Meadows or something, they have customer and purchase lists which may include security cleared personnel who can now be blackmailed.
If you run a pot shop, or an SaaS solution for them like Meadows, you really have to figure out how to divorce customer PII from purchases.
I am back to the black market in Oregon for this reason!
That's not even universally true, though. I've been to bars where they scan the barcode on my drivers' license. I assume that's more convenient than reading the data off it, so maybe they're just doing it for convenience and aren't storing the data anywhere, but who knows, maybe they are. Maybe there's a database somewhere with a list of name, date, time, location tuples for some of my bar visits from years ago. Creepy.
If we cannot handle age verification then WTF are we doing as an industry? Seriously? Everyone else is able to figure it out! Why are all the genius innovators so powerless to build a working system? They're either stupid or greedy IMO.
Age verification is easy. Age verification that leaves no record, is anonymous, and not circumvent-able is difficult. In the physical world it relies on the fallibility of human memory. No such luck with replicated databases.
You can get an anonymous, cryptographically signed, certified legal bearer token confirming your age only, or identity or whatever by a centralized service, be it government or high trust private organizations who need to verify your identity anyway like banks. With some smarts you can probably make such a token yourself so the root bearer token issuer doesn’t have the one you use to browse pornhub.
Doesn’t really matter surely, you only need to trust the identity provider not to leak your identity and your porn provider not to have a key that your identity provider can link to.
> allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn
As far as I'm aware, online sites generally don't let children wander in either. One of the reasons being they will make a mess of the cabling.
That's obviously in jest, but the point is that physical presence is the entire crux here. When entering a physical space, you do so with a physical body that society has demanded be able to be identified. And age can often be determined without even fully verifying identification, which is why our society has been so accepting of age checks.
The Internet has flourished precisely because of the foundation where one does not need to be identified. In fact one does not even need to be human, nor accessing a digital service the way the publisher intends. Separation of concerns. This has worked for what, 30 years at this point? An entire generation? If parents are still buying their kids hardcore pornography terminals these days, they've got no one to blame but themselves. And no, I do not care that "everybody else is doing it".
Ultimately, the "logistics" cannot be separated from the "morality" - it is a different type of space, and the moral thing to do is engage with it as it is, instead of demanding centralizing authoritarian changes.
These demands are from a narrow contingent of people that could straightforwardly build their own desired environment (the content blocking you've referenced as a straw man, or more accurately kid-friendly content curation), but yet have not done so. Because ultimately these types of calls are never actually about "the kids" but rather a general desire to insert themselves as morality police into everyone's business.
I would say the best option, if there absolutely must be age verification etc., would be to have a registry of sites that comply with all regulations and by default devices shouldn't access sites off that list. Basically a giant allolist for verified good sites. The internet is already effectively shrunk to less than a dozen sites for regular users, so this won't impact them, and the rest of us can have real free speech and unregulated internet back by switching DNS servers or some similar trivial change.
Or we move everything not meant for the sanitised internet to TOR hidden services.
> Republicans are now labeling anything and everything that has to do with sex, and LGBT+ issues, as “pornography” and “obscene” and “harmful to minors.”
The pornography ban is a red herring. These people will never actually ban pornography, because they consume pornography. Any "ban" they may impose will always conveniently ignore their consumption of pornography they deem personally acceptable.
The real goal is (re)criminalizing the LGBTQ+ demographic. SCOTUS has been chipping away at those old laws for decades, much to the chagrin of people whose power comes from harming LGBTQ+ persons/treating them as scapegoats. It's why these newer laws are so vague, and why they allow cross-state civil actions: it's to criminalize LGBTQ+ people wholesale, and shove them all back into a closet somewhere.
If this was actually about porn on the internet, they'd be demanding Playboy get shut down, or PornHub. They're not, because it's not about pornography. It's about sharing HRT tips with trans youth, it's about saying "gay is okay" on a personal website. It's about associating anything other than heterosexuality with "porn", criminalizing it, and thus criminalizing the populace.
One of the key tenants of fasicsm is laws that protect the in group, but does not bind them, and laws that bind the out group but does not protect them.
A tenant is somebody who has a lease, for example to an apartment or one of those big metal sheds for a supermarket, and by analogy, customers of something like Microsoft's "Entra ID" (what was "Azure Active Directory" at least the new name is less confusing)
A tenet is a belief or principle that you believe in absolutely, I think we'd say that this "protects but does not bind / binds but does not protect" idea isn't a tenet of Fascism but instead an observable trait.
Thank you for that, I've been looking for a decent pre-AI/Non-wikipedia summary like that. Unsurprisingly but depressingly, at least 13 out of 14 points are a perfect match.
> These people will never actually ban pornography, because they consume pornography.
Banning porn won't affect them: mainstream porn will find a way (dealing with rulings will just be a cost of business).
And more than anything, making it technically illegal allows for selective enforcement, which means a lot more power for them to decide who wins and who loses.
Bible as a whole should be banned, same as religion or at least the “old” religion. Worshiping things. This is what I legitimately don’t understand in 2025
Nope. Phyllis Schlafly's son Andrew (Phyllis is the woman who more or less single handedly ensured the ERA didn't pass, persuading American women that somehow they didn't even want equality) ran (still runs maybe?) a web site where among other things he "re-translates" the Bible so that e.g. Jesus's preaching is "Properly" translated to mean whatever it is suits his worldview.
Religion is about believing things you have no evidence for, that's its whole thing.
Let's state it even more plainly: It's about being able to criminalize anything they don't like. Laying infrastructure for surveillance and censorship; an effort which has taken many forms and attempts through the decades.
Ironically, it's the same right wing folks who so vehemently resist effective computerization of gun registration info, because of how they believe such systems can be abused.
They never banned abortions for themselves, just made it more difficult to get if you’re not getting an “acceptable” one (i.e. have the money to go where it’s legal or have a private family doctor who can make Bastard Fetus go bye-bye).
You can see how this model worked in Ireland for example.
Historically Abortion was literally prohibited constitutionally in the Republic. That changed†, one of my friends lived there at the time and she's got a picture somebody made (painted? sketched?) on her wall of the group watching the results come in. But for most of my life, abortion was absolutely illegal in the Republic of Ireland.
So, if you were poor, too bad no abortions, they're illegal. But if you're wealthy you just decide to "go on holiday", maybe a long weekend somewhere nice - and miraculously while abroad you stop being pregnant. No problem
Of course not. Pornhub blocked these IP because they knew it was going to be (and is now) illegal in those states, at least at its current form. I see it no different from said states banning Pornhub.
That you have it backwards, because you do. Pornhub preemptively blocked states that were considering implementing ID rules, and states are not actively blocking Pornhub.
> These people will never actually ban pornography
> Not sure how one can say that with a straight face when there are US states that literally block pornhub, but okay
You then say, well actually they weren't blocked by the states, they were blocked by the sites themselves to protest a bill that passed.
The issue is this clarification is totally irrelevant given the context of the above comment.
The root comment claims in this domain, the right wing is targeting "anything other than heterosexuality". Not sure what their evidence of that claim is. I would think anyone with even a basic familiarity re the right-wing American culture warrior would know this isn't the case. They are simply following the standard far right modus operandi, which is to start their cultural attack on the most vulnerable at the margins where it is easiest.
Similarly, passing age verification is essentially a strategy to enact an effective ban, because it is a demand that cannot be met and is easier to pass than an outright ban. So the comment suggesting it's not serious to suggest this is simply or _only_ about "anything other than heterosexuality" is correct, or at least, not impeached by your conclusion they have it backwards by essentially hyperfocusing on some rather irrelevant pornsite protest tactic which entirely misses the point. If anything, the fact they passed the bills after the self initiated “bans” simply bolsters the rejoinder to the root comment.
I get it and yes, you are technically correct that they are not "literally blocking" it. I just hope you can also see where I'm coming from. In context of the larger comment thread your reply felt like a nitpick that missed the point, and focused on that nitpick to the detriment of the larger point of that OP, which imo has some merit. Or at least some merit you didn't address. But I understand you are correct on this particular point. As a suggestion, maybe next time you could reply more as providing context rather than seeming to suggest their entire take was "backwards". Thanks for replying.
Note that pornography is not banned here in Texas at least. You just have to provide age verification, and PH elected not to participate in that process. It doesn’t seem like that wild a thing at face value.
> I implore you to do some reading from actual medical professionals and groups on this.
Reading their comment charitably, one might want the trans youth to also get their information from actual medical professionals and groups rather than random internet strangers.
Analogously, sharing information about DIY at-home abortions with people on the internet is also dangerous as hell and will hurt people. In the world we currently live in it may be better than the alternative, but in a better world both of those are not pieces of information that anyone should need to find online.
> he child can't consent to medical procedures without a parent, today, and if the parent says no, the decision is deferred until the age of majority.
What does the parent's opinion have to do with it? Their opinion is equally ignored when it comes to statutory rape, no?
This is not a "this is a private matter between the child and the parent" scenario. Some things are, but a clear majority of people do not feel that this should be one of those things.
Convincing and teaching minore to synthesize hormones which will chemically castrate themselves / make them infertile and cause permanent non reversible damage to their bodies, how to use those hormones, how to hide it from their parents. These are all bad things, and the people who do so should be in prison. If I taught kids how to make weapons secretly and told them to use them, I would go to jail.
Putting aside that MDs trained in medical ethics should be the ones to decide the end-all debate of HRT for those under 18y/o (or maybe 24 by your standard) -- I would imagine "tips" here is mostly about logistics of navigating the US health system and filling in health-effect anecdotes where science has yet to affirm/study (which encompasses more areas of health than you might think). Also, "Invasive" and "non-invasive" are usually reserved for surgical contexts so I'm not sure I would apply that here.
Nobody should be sharing insulin “tips” with other people’s children?
Do you apply this rule to all medications, or just ones you’re offended by?
Setting aside trans issues - plenty of non-trans kids are in hormones or puberty blockers for a wide variety of reasons. Should they be blocked from discussing them online?
One treatment saves lives, other “treatment” essentially shortens your lifespan, and most likely causing you to never have kids again. How are people ok with this I don’t get it and how are people ok with letting KIDS making such life changing decision is I don’t get too.
Given how many trans kids commit suicide when prevented from transitioning, i’d say both save lives. And that’s why i’m ok with it. Because going on puberty blockers until you’re 18 seems like a very non-invasive way to thread the needle of patient care for minors
The recent UK Cass Review concluded "It has been suggested that hormone treatment reduces the elevated risk of death by suicide in this population, but the evidence found did not support this conclusion."
Not the person you were replying to, but the Cass review was quite clearly bunk. Its main thrust is essentially: "there are no double blind studies on the effects of affirming care for minors, so we should stop prescribing it immediately". Aside from the fact that the conclusion does not follow from the premise, how exactly could one do a double blind study on puberty blockers? So the report throws out essentially the entire body of research for failing to meet an impossible to meet standard.
I always wonder if these arguments are ever made in good faith. Comparing a treatment for diabetes to HRT. But there are people who really are off the deep end. So who knows.
I agree, but it can go too far as well. It's not healthy for children to be limited to knowing only their parents' and the government's opinions on serious topics. There has to be a balance between avoiding indoctrination and being aware of brain development schedule.
You’re right that they consume porn, but plenty of them still want to ban it, and not just because of LGBTQ. It’s all about moralistic virtue signaling by immoral people.
From "Data Finds Republicans are Obsessed with Searching for Transgender Porn"[1]:
> So far in 2022, more than 300 anti-LGBT bills have been proposed across 36 states – at least one third of which are directed at trans youth. This surge, especially in anti-trans legislation from Republicans, stands in stark contrast to a startling fact.
> Republicans love transgender porn, a lot.
> With more than 4.7 Million transgender porn related Google searches each month (per Ahrefs.com), do Republicans represent those searching most? The answer seems to be a clear yes.
I urge all American software engineers not just to completely ignore these unconstitutional laws, but to actively create, distribute and maintain technologies which defend Americans' rights to publish obscene filth without government oversight.
The Supreme Court considered internment camps and segregation constitutional, until it didn’t.
There are also people who disagree with the Supreme Court’s interpretations. Including members of the Supreme Court! Both current (dissents) and not (overturning past rulings.)
Not really. The Supreme Court believes some rulings to be wrong the day they were decided:
> “The dissent’s reference to Korematsu, however, affords this Court the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: *Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided*, has been overruled in the court of history, and to be clear ‘has no place in law under the Constitution,’” Roberts said, quoting Justice Jackson’s 1944 dissent.
A bit of a rant on the topic of digital supervision and age verification:
Speaking personally, parent supervision was detrimental to my development as a child. I recently reached the liberation of legal adulthood. While my parents are often sweet, their intents did not always have the desired consequences given how they were enforced. Until I was around 15, I didn't have any computer I was able to freely tinker with, which wasn't constantly supervised and constantly logged my every action. I wasn't allowed to touch a shell. This was troublesome for me, because I was a computer science enthusiast, and my parent did not want me to learn about programming. If I had developer tools open, or if it seemed like I was running a script, I would get questions. I was pretty much restricted to using Scratch (which has a fantastic underground community!). Yes, I spent quite a bit of time on my computer. In my defense, I didn't have any friends where I lived. Not that I didn't want any, I had tried, but at this point I was torted by bad experiences. My computer was my safe haven and where I had my friends. I did try to explain this, but my parent wasn't sympathetic. Expecting a joyous and present individual who should be out playing with friends, I was a failure. My parent never understood my need for digital freedom, even as it in hindsight was all I craved. This is the type of scenario I see playing out again every time I am reached by bills/news/opinions like these. If my parent had put half of the energy they use to keep me bound into supporting my personal development and our relation, things could have been very different. Instead, I became very good at avoiding filters, supervision and going unnoticed. It's quite a sore to me. I sympathise deeply with all the children who had a similar upbringing, who are going to suffer under the regulations in development, both in the US and in the EU.
I think people are putting far too much of an ideological lens on this ruling. As a "matter of law" this seems like the right decision. The supreme court is not a board of dictators making societal decisions based on their flavor of the day. Their job is too see if the ruling is consistent with all other laws we have and the normal function of a modern society. Pushing the envelope one way or another is not their job even if they end up doing that. At the end of the day the (elected) state governments have decided to create a policy that reflects what their constituents want. The supreme court job is not to question the logic of that. They did not run for office or win elections. They just need to make sure that what being done is reasonable and not violating any existing laws. As a tech guy I think these laws are stupid but this case was not the right hill to die on. What needs to happen is that these laws get enacted, costs and unintended consequences happen and THOSE parties sue on the supreme court on that basis
> (a) Pubic hair, vulva, vagina, penis, testicles, anus, or nipple of a human body
Naked bodies do not harm anyone. This is US puritanism at its peek. Glad the author also pointed out the hypocrisy of treating nudity as more obscene than violence.
Interestingly (and I suppose fairly?) the law doesn't seem to make a distinction between male and female nipples. So an image of a shirtless man violates this just as much as an image of a shirtless woman.
More specifically here is what is considered obscene:
The criteria were:
1. whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
2. whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, as specifically defined by applicable state law;
3. whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
The third criterion pertains to judgment made by "reasonable persons" of the United States as a whole, while the first pertains to that of members of the local community. Due to the larger scope of the third test, it is a more ambiguous criterion than the first two.
Community standards vary by community, both physically and digitally. The community standards of a rural town in Utah or ChristianDating.net are likely to be wildly different than the community standards of a major city on the coastlines or PornHub users. This wrinkle is exactly why there's renewed efforts to define what obscenity legally is [1], so that it's inclusive of as much "porn" as possible.
Additionally, you're conveniently ignoring what the author spends most of their piece decrying: the fact that these laws permit "ambulance chasing" attorneys to sue across state lines. That's the real issue, especially given the fact that some state laws can allow civil action to lead to prison time for conviction. Even ignoring the potential outcomes however, these lawsuits are instantly bankrupting for a majority of Americans, and the laws so (intentionally) broadly written that even genuinely innocent parties are likely to fork over money to make it go away given the cost of mounting a defense.
Put simply: obscenity lacks a firm legal definition, the definition of porn is nebulous and variable from person to person, and these laws are written to maximize harm to a maximal population size. The intent is to criminalize as many undesirables as possible, and the current administration and political parties have been transparent that anyone not rich, white, straight, Christian, and cisgendered male are emphatically undesirable.
As an ambulance chaser, I can assure you that suing out of state defendants for out of state activity has become nearly impossible. See Daimler AG v. Bauman (2014), BNSF Railway Co. v. Tyrrell (2017), Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court (2017), Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District (2021), Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co. (2023)
Sounds like the article isn’t incorrect? The first two criteria depend on which community is doing the judging. New Yorkers will have à different norm than people from say a quaint 5k-person town where there’s an 8:1 church:supermarket ratio. The third criteria is vague, but vagueness cuts both ways.
Who defines an artistic work? If I produce a porn film, why isn't that my artistic commentary on sex? Laws cant be this subjective because subjectivity implies subjectivity in ruling which is objectively awful.
The article would seem correct since "obscene" could be twisted to mean whatever they want. As the people making the ruling can say the average person believes x.
Same as it ever was. The government has been congenitally unable to strike a rational balance between free speech vs indecency statutes. "I know it when I see it" has been a meme since 1964 when it was written by the Supreme Court. In handing control of that balance over to the states, the federal government is just giving up. But it won't work. The issue still needs to be resolved. We're going to see many, many, many more Supreme Court cases on indecency vs free speech.
That is because the false balance is complete bullshit. Free speech means free speech. Obscenity is just special pleading "but it is icky!". The same thing has been happening for centuries. They came across a good idea as a foundational principle and the dumb fuckers wearing dresses we call judges refuse to see it. They then prove that they are all lawyers by constructing elaborate rationalizations. They also did the same thing to the Fourteenth ammendment's equal protection under the law working as grounds barring corruption and injustice.
We've had kids accessing an Internet without any working age barriers for over 30 years now.
There have been problems, be that grooming, Facebook parties and maybe addiction to TikTok.
But being able to access adult content be that sexual or violent in nature doesn't really seem to have had much negative consequences.
Sure I wouldn't want my 10 year old to see 2 girls 1 cup - but I reckon it wouldn't be the end of the world if he did.
It's good that we have content recommendations. But we shouldn't try to actually enforce them.
Again: with all the options kids have had for accessing porn online in the last couple of decades, if it was actually THAT bad, we'd be having an epidemic. Yet we don't. The kids are alright
Its really sad to see this getting attacked, now, after all that's transpired, after so many years. You'd think if it was that dire, again maybe 10 years in there would have been more action. But again its not genuine, so its really about the ulterior motives. Not even to mention the 1st amendment issues, which again don't just magically dissapear when a bunch of people stick to party lines.
Alas, we are in an age of hyper over-regulation though and this is just another example. I could come up with countless others in wildly different fields which have one astonishing commonality. That business has been running fine for ages and all of a sudden, we need to regulate.
Content restrictions should just be an option with the ISP: to make the entire modem/phone disable adult content and/or require age verification. This, I would disable (presuming `on` by default).
>2 girls 1 cup
I still remember showing that to curious ladies in grad school (who'd heard about it); some of my favorite reaction footage.
Let's blind all kids. Anyone who is opposed must believe that a non-zero chance of a child seeing two women have sex and eat turds is normal and healthy.
If it wasn't for your fine taste in ketchup I wouldn't have any qualms about writing you off as an imbecile.
I want to believe that your lack of discernment in one area betrays what suggests sound judgment in another. Unless the latter holds true only on occasions that satisfy your gullet.
I saw that when I was little and it was just gross; I’m fine lol. My generation was the one watching cartel executions at that same time and that’s probably worse.
Anything you experience may push you in a direction with some magnitude, but we tend to overestimate the magnitude and mispredict the direction because we’re worried about the wellbeing of kids. Think “violent video games create school schootings.” In reality, kids have to deal with a lot of real things in life that are hard, an abusive parent or bullies at school, but those realities are harder to deal with so we distract ourselves worrying about violent video games. At the end of the day, it’s a recording on a screen, which is very different from a traumatic reality because you can just turn it off.
In some cases, like violent video games, they assuage traumas. Whether it's a recording on a screen or not, can our brains tell the difference?
Something is going on, spooky and subtle in the mind that makes whatever is on the screen meaningful to us.
I don't want to get us trapped in this false interpretation that in the year 2025 there is a difference between how human beings are affected in the physical and digital world. To be frank, it's stupid to think like this, meaning that it's an insult to the intelligence of the person who thinks this way and it needs to be called out as such in order to encourage them to think critically about the matter.
If this whole interaction is just some woopdy doo, willy nilly, be that as it may sort of engagement with media, what compels us then to entertain the things that we don't (or don't want to) attribute to the hard things in life?
I'm going to assume your gender and your age to some degree here:
Middle-aged men have a tendency to Wednesday Night Sitcom Dad their way out of confronting things that bring their own vulnerabilities into question and collectively make them accountable for figuring out what to do about these things, especially if it comes at the cost of comfort that they're trying to preserve that are the accessories to their vulnerabilities.
What we're discussing isn't as simple as the "close your eyes to avoid cyberbullying" quips of yore: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tyler-the-creators-cyber-bull... (in which I make a more blatant attempt at guessing which generation you belong to and consequently expose my own).
Our brains can’t tell the difference, but that’s not what I said. What I said is that it can be turned off. Social media cyberbullying comes along with entanglements that keep you on the site. For a shock video, I think the suburban dad has a point. To be clear, if someone came up to me and said they had really struggled with what they’d seen in a shock video as a kid and that it was really messing with them, I wouldn’t dismiss that or make fun of them or something. It’s just that the opposite has been my experience and the experience of those who I’m close to.
My friend (we're friends now, and that makes you middle-aged by association):
I hope it didn't seem like I was advancing premises that you never proposed outright. I was derived that premise on my own. I take full ownership of the words that you put in my mouth by the virtue of what you did say being thought-provoking.
And I ask you, if our brains can't tell the difference then what does turning it off actually achieve? If your self esteem or your sheer will to live is broken offline, going online does not solve this problem on its own. I'm speaking unconditionally and not in a way that can be made subject to circumstance.
If you feel ugly, or feel like dying, or feel anything, in a way that resonates with you at the very core of your being (and I know, I know, who's to say a supernatural "core of being" exists right?) then it's a wrap for you. It's going to take about as much effort to redeem yourself as it would if you were physically harmed in the street.
At the end, I don't think that what I'm saying is spectacular for anyone who has basic qualities of self-awareness and empathy (and I'm not saying that you're not one of them) or psychology (of which I am no savant and would even follow your lead to some extent if you have any trails to offer).
The point of contention is a matter of belief—ideologically and morally—and the depths that we're willing to go to scrutinize what gives us pleasure and why. In a way I think that this runs counterintuitive to the notions of "civil liberty" that pervade modern thought and any attempt to distinguish right from wrong on a scale greater than the individual makes the powder-wigged patriot in us quiver in our britches.
It doesn't - rather, it attacks the preposition at it's source. Pornography is bad, supposedly, but is it actually? It seems to me we all moved on without actually answering that question.
We know it's bad for moral reasons, but moral reasons are stupid and I don't trust them. But is it actually bad - like in the real world, with tangible effects, not made-up ones? I don't know, and it looks like you don't know, and OP doesn't know, and the people who are pushing this age verification don't know either.
Sure, two girls one cup is disgusting. It's vile. It's immoral. But is it harmful? That's a different question.
That's a huge problem. You see, we're attempting to solve a problem which we haven't proved even exists.
Getting shot at school is far worse than seeing a vagina, but according to the people doing the censoring a movie featuring a vagina is a bigger problem than a violent random death.
As moral positions go, it's actually quite eccentric.
I have a feeling that this is going to turn into one of those exchanges where we capoeira around theory and definitions and what "real" is and what "real" isn't in a way I have to think that either you've lived a sheltered life, or are in denial or have some kind of resentment toward the disgusting, vile and immoral things that you've witnessed that were "harmful" to you (I'm not a therapist).
Moral reasons are stupid and you don't trust them.
Go find a ten-year-old and show them the video yourself. Then see if they feel up to letting you stick around them long enough for you to figure out whether there were any real-world, tangible effects.
If I drive a car without a seatbelt, that has real-world effects. I can get ejected and die, as well as hurting other people.
But pornography doesn't split my skull. It doesn't crush my fingers. It doesn't make me poorer. It doesn't make me sicker. It doesn't hurt me physically, or financially, or even socially.
I know, or at least I figured that's what you meant.
I'm not a proponent of the discipline per say, and maybe because of this, my impression that the entire field of psychology is meant to partially address the real-word, tangible effects of things that do not cause apparent physical harm is naive.
If I'm accustomed to women getting indiscriminately reamed and pinned and prodded at my own discretion—even casually—I am at a detriment.
I'm going to leave out a more accessible or agreeable example because I want to give you the benefit of the doubt that you can come up one on your own.
I don't mean to be condescending, but I want to assume that you're arguing in good faith.
Have you, or any one who you know, seen something disgusting, vile or immoral that didn't cause physical harm but had a negative consequence on how you feel about yourself or the world around you?
Why are we quick to champion the value of the "good" things that don't offer any material benefit (i.e., physically, financially, socially) but criticizing the "bad" requires graphs and groups and variables and peer reviews?
I know, and I figure that you know too. "Good" and "bad" exist in quotations marks and only count among the people who don't need them to use them with each other.
> Why are we quick to champion the value of the "good" things that don't offer any material benefit (i.e., physically, financially, socially) but criticizing the "bad" requires graphs and groups and variables and peer reviews?
To answer this, it's because of how modern societies view rights. Namely, you can do whatever you want, until we can prove it's to a detriment to other people. Before doing something, we need not prove it is good.
On an individual level, it is a very good idea to have some guarantee something is good before we do it. But on a societal level, we don't do this, and for good reason. Before we censor or restrict, we must assure we have good reasons for doing so.
> If I'm accustomed to women getting indiscriminately reamed and pinned and prodded at my own discretion—even casually—I am at a detriment.
I might agree, but sexuality and sex is very complex.
I can argue that it's not that simple, and sex exists beyond the bounds of what you do - it's part of who you are, and not much in your control.
For example, I am a homosexual, I'm gay. Naturally my sex involves anal intercourse with other men. To many, this is disgusting. Gross, unsanitary, distasteful.
My life would certainly be easier if I did not have this affliction, but simultaneously I cannot control it. I've tried, as has every gay man or boy at some point in their lives. And, I do not know what has caused it. If I never viewed pornography, ever, I am 100% confident I would still be gay.
I do not know how it works for heterosexuals, but I imagine, to some degree, their sexual proclivities are, too, not under their control. I don't think removing pornography would remove those sexual proclivities.
I bet they would have found cakefarts.com hilarious! At least it delivered what the url promised, unlike expertsexchange.com, penisland.com, and therapistfinder.com.
Solution: build technologies which make government statute effectively irrelevant. It must be uncensorable even by a nation-state adversary, and must hide its users and their activities. The future is software technology designed to thwart the ability of prosecutors to introduce evidence into a court. We must fight against the state's War on Crime with everything we have; the state has abused that war for centuries to justify its expansion. Courts should only bless victims taking revenge or retribution, offer an optional institution of rehabitation and recompense that the convict can voluntarily ascend to, else if the convict chooses to be free then he's at the mercy of the victim and whatever the victim chooses to do to the convict. Court cases should not result in involuntary imprisonment but only voluntary, incentivized by not being assaulted/killed in public as an outlaw. (Elected oath taking office holders excepted, prison should be a real possibility.)
It matters more to restrain and limit the state than it does to punish bad behavior. Furthermore the state has committed countless crimes in its treatment of the customers they chose to condemn, and ought to be dissolved entirely down to the office clerk. Unfortunately, the only way that happens is law of the guillotine.
> conservative Christians are trying to eliminate ALL sexually-related speech online
I don’t really appreciate this framing. Despite being a very conservative Christian (at least in many ways, if not others) I don’t approve of or agree with the scope of SCOTUS’ current ruling, nor do I approve of all the age- verification laws as written. It seems futile to attempt to make everybody everywhere do this and create a locked-down “second internet” for minors.
But I do understand the impetus. As a zoomer, I’ve heard the problems particularly young men addicted to pornography have caused with some gal friends of mine they’ve dated. I’ve seen the normalization of what I view as degenerate sex acts as the treadmill of endlessly-escalating erotic-novelism spins without ceasing. I’ve watched people become more absorbed in their strange autosexual fixations than their spouses. It doesn’t seem good, or healthy, or sustainable, and I resent the contributions the proliferation of online pornography has made to these issues.
At some level I see this like sixties versus modern marijuana, where a more mild herb (or dad’s playboys beneath the mattress) has been supplanted by THC distilled and bottled into vapes (endlessly-available presence of any outlandish fetishistic stuff.) I wouldn’t like my child exposed to either but I can live with one.
Of course, I see it as primarily the parent’s responsibility to inculcate the virtue to disdain both. The state can’t nanny its way out of this one. But it’s always easier to pick a scapegoat that can’t vote (tax the corporations/rich, make the corporations implement age-filtering, etc.) than to tell people to take a hike and learn to parent.
You might not be pushing for it, but certainly your fellow conservative Christians are.
The problem with moralistic thinking is that it's stupid and it blows up, and we've known this for hundreds of years. What you view as moral means fuck-all. I don't particularly care if you think something is degenerate, and in fact by using a term like degenerate I respect you less as a person.
So when morals are used as the sole reason to justify law, we have a problem. Morals were used to justify slavery. To justify a lack of suffrage. To justify legal domestic abuse.
What's changed since then? Time. The passage of time. But time does not stop. Where will we be in 10 years, or 20? Progressing forward, ideally, but that's not a guarantee. We're laying the ground work for abuse.
For a large part of the American constituency, anything containing homosexuals is degenerate pornography. Right now. So if "it's pornography" is our justification, we have a problem.
I think we agree that said laws are bad, but why they're bad matters. The wider-scale implication is that moralistic law making is bad. Listening to Christians and having them come up with laws based on their personal beliefs is bad. Appealing to the American purity culture is bad. This is all ripe for abuse.
No, some of them are. More evangelicals than my crowd.
Morality bears directly on what we consider to be a just society, so I don’t care if you don’t care. You’re broadening the scope beyond this particular issue, where I’m guessing I agree with you.
It’s not virtuous to act right because the state makes you, but the question of what we require and preclude is defined by our moral frameworks at some level.
I’m not sure with whom you’re arguing about the homosexuals point. I view a lot of things of degenerate I wouldn’t ban. Most adults I see are fat, thus gluttons, thus are committing a sin. It’s just not particularly my business to meddle in what’s between them and God and Satan. I didn’t suggest we “retvrn to Comstock” or something.
I don’t see how you can ignore the massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men, particularly if you think about the marijuana analogy and how it’s increased in strength and availability. Novel hyperstimuli are a big issue. Just like supernormal stimuli tend to increase obesity and cause metabolic dysfunction.
A ton of lawmaking is moralistic. Eg the way I grew up I think it’s fine for two guys to settle something with a fight provided it’s clean and nobody’s kicking someone when he’s down. A bunch of people with different morals (“all violence is wrong”) told the cops to start arresting people for that sort of thing. I think stealing is wrong and vote to tell the cops to arrest people for that, while others (because of their morality) say that “it’s systemic factors” and turn people loose for sub-$1k or so, or sometimes don’t believe in property rights the same way I do. I don’t believe that income tax is just, nor federally-administered welfare, but a ton of people voted to tell the feds to take money and do just that.
I’m not sure how you can suddenly flip to “moralistic legislation is wrong actually” in such a selective sense just because it’s movitated by Christianity or right-wing ideology for once.
Come one man, it would be trivial for me to credibly argue that your religion has given scores of young men an absolutely dysfunctional relation to sexuality, woman, their own body, etc. Anyone could make that case as easily as your case about pornography (arguably with more proof in my case). Should we legislate both the same way?
Yes, but "his religion" is over 2000 years old and has found ways to reform itself many times to re-centre itself towards the core teachings of Jesus Christ, namely compassion and piety. The Christians who sold indulgencies are not the Christians who burned witches are not the Christians who help those in need. It has existed for twenty centuries across continents and anyone who can corrupt it effectively wields the power of God. Of course it has been used as justification for heinous acts. Pretty much anything that has existed that long and is that powerful has been used that way.
It is irrational to hate the entire religion because of select elements, past or present. You are in effect committing the same act of hatred you are accusing Christians of.
> I don’t see how you can ignore the massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men
I ignore it because I've only ever gotten responses of morality. Which, as I've said, I think are stupid.
My point about morality is that it's the same morality that oppresses homosexuals, or previously black people and women. It's not a different morality - it's the same reasoning.
Some thing is immoral because of our beliefs, so we censor it or restrict actions. Throughout history, this has only gone poorly - no exceptions. I have no reason to believe it will work out this time.
You might say, "well it hasn't always gone poorly, what about murder?" Yes, murder has morality argument, but it doesn't only have morality arguments. It has real-world effects. It denies someone of their unalienable rights, mainly by ending their lives.
Pornography only has moral arguments, which is why I reject them.
I don’t need a source to back up what I’ve consistently observed with my own eyes, and given the speed at which research sometimes move (and particularly since any concern over perceived “sexual liberation” attacks one of the sacred cows of progressivism) being a young guy who can see this firsthand gives me a pretty good perspective.
I’ve read research on this in the past that suggests it can happen. Hard to get people to fess up to that kind of thing for obvious reasons so measuring scope as a research endeavor is a little harder.
I know the research is there and has been if you’re actually interested, but I’m traveling without a laptop for the next bit and so don’t have it saved. If you’d just like to take a cheap shot because my reply (which talked about what I have observed) wasn’t eighteen peer-reviewed studies, go ahead, I guess.
Did something I wrote read like I disagreed with this? What children do in their private time is their parents’ business. What children do can sometimes be the business of the state; there’s tons of precedent for it acting in loco parentis. I just don’t find this to be the best solution.
I come from a small town and know many conservative Christians. They are pushing for this. Like you said, it is easier to blame external sources than to accept you need to do better as parent.
Many of them are. I just don’t see any reason to say “I disagree with the conservative Christians pushing this” rather than “I disagree with the people who support this.” There are secular folks who also support such legislation. It hints at a generalized animus towards religion and likely in particular towards Christianity, kind of like Fox News boomers complaining Obama wouldn’t say “radical Islamic terrorism”.
I understand what you're saying but when you have Trump and his cohorts fake praying in the oval office with the support of conservative Christians who abandon all of Jesus' teachings of love and compassion and embrace Trump's hate, you might understand why people take a specific issue with that.
Not only are you in denial about Project 2025, but also evolution, and the origin and age of the Earth and other planets and stars, and even the idea that slavery is wrong, if you actually believe what your bible says, which you're supposed to.
You, as a believer, should be policing and reforming your own religion instead of defending and evangelizing it and leaving it to us to clean up the damage to society done by your religion.
How about petitioning the Pope to amend the 10 Commandments to include a prohibition against slavery? Did you ever think of that, or wonder why there wasn't already one? Because your bible says slavery is A-OK, and I don't appreciate this framing of slavery as permissible by your bible.
How about you do something about that, since you're the one who believes it? Or are you cool with slavery since the bible condones it in so many ways, and you appreciate that framing?
Oh but apparently it's much more important to prevent people from worshiping other gods, so that certainly deserved its own Commandment, to justify all those wars and inquisitions you fought against other religions.
There are many more slaves today than ever before in history. What are you doing about adding another commandment against Slavery to your Holier Than Thou Bible, when you're not so busy defending Christianity online?
Has it ever occurred to you that a religion whose bible supports slavery is morally bankrupt and definitely not the word of God, and so are you for not either changing it or renouncing that religion? It's all made up and rewritten by people anyway, and even if you believe in God, it's not like he couldn't add an anti-slavery commandment to the bible tomorrow if he wanted to.
Something being normal doesn’t make it right. Obesity is normal. Shoplifting has become normal in many places. People getting drunk is normal. Normalcy doesn’t equal moral rectitude.
Why do the opinions of my ancestors bear on that, and which ones are you talking about? Most of the ones I can think of, unless you run back to the days of tribal europe, would see the culture today as hideously liberalized. Regardless a lot of my ancestors probably did a lot of things I don’t think are right. Heck, I’ve done plenty of things I don’t think are right. None of that effects what actually is and isn’t morally good.
If I’m not running around telling off couples who leave the bar together, what do you care?
Alright, you seem receptive to arguments so I'll take a crack at this.
> I don’t approve of or agree with the scope of SCOTUS’ current ruling, nor do I approve of all the age- verification laws as written. It seems futile to attempt to make everybody everywhere do this and create a locked-down “second internet” for minors.
That's not the intent. The intent from the get-go has been to "Baptise" the internet as "God's creation", and to shove out anyone not worthy of God's salvation - as determined by religious leaders. When the initial argument of "the internet is a creation of Satan" didn't work out, the religious leaders in the USA pivoted towards calling it a gift from God and demonizing anyone who "sullied" that gift in their eyes.
> I’ve heard the problems particularly young men addicted to pornography have caused with some gal friends of mine they’ve dated. I’ve seen the normalization of what I view as degenerate sex acts as the treadmill of endlessly-escalating erotic-novelism spins without ceasing. I’ve watched people become more absorbed in their strange autosexual fixations than their spouses. It doesn’t seem good, or healthy, or sustainable, and I resent the contributions the proliferation of online pornography has made to these issues.
Your observations are completely valid. As someone who creates smut (let's just call it what it is), there's a very real problem with people in general getting caught up in fantasies and ignoring reality. However, my observations suggest that pornography is just the convenient scapegoat for a society that constantly markets escapism as entertainment and penalizes anything that doesn't involve spending money. All forms of entertainment have been perverted to maximize chemical responses in humans, in order to sell more stuff. Your beef isn't with pornography so much as it is with the present consumerist hellscape, and a society that demands both spouses work full-time to have a chance at survival rather than balance the needs of the family by allowing every couple to have a spouse stay at home and make the house, if they so choose. Which brings me to your next point...
> At some level I see this like sixties versus modern marijuana, where a more mild herb (or dad’s playboys beneath the mattress) has been supplanted by THC distilled and bottled into vapes (endlessly-available presence of any outlandish fetishistic stuff.) I wouldn’t like my child exposed to either but I can live with one.
That's...man, I want to argue this, but I got nothing. You're basically describing what I did up above, with the proper analogy. As a cannabis user myself, you're entirely correct about the potency and convenient availability being an issue, and I'd absolutely like to see more penalties for physical distribution of these things to minors while also de-glamorizing some of this stuff. Sell the product, not the experience, basically.
> Of course, I see it as primarily the parent’s responsibility to inculcate the virtue to disdain both.
That's where we align - the avowed democratic socialist and the conservative Christian agreeing that, at the end of the day, it's the parent's responsibility to parent, and it's the individual's responsibility to make better choices - including seeking help for problems they're having. Where we may disagree on approach, however (I dunno, this is kinda speculating here based on other CC's I know/lived with/attended Church with), is that I believe the steps towards minimizing or eliminating harms is destigmatizing these things in the first place. It means getting over our societal aversion to SEX, a natural biological thing we've been doing as a species for millennia. It means getting over our disdain for addicts, and offering help.
If these ghouls (passing the laws) actually cared about children, families, or humans in general, they'd be supporting rehabilitation instead of penalizing consenting adults. They'd be penalizing exploitative employers and creating a tax structure that rewards stay-at-home partners while enabling every couple to have one such partner.
That's not what's happening, though, and I resent being denigrated as some sort of sick degenerate by a government that won't even feed its fucking kids.
A more effective solution would be to implement HTML tags for explicit sexual content (or any other kind of child-sensitive content) and allow the OS or browser to authenticate the user before showing that content, if parental controls are enabled.
Legal obligations and responibilities become very clear: the site has tags - it's ok. No tags - guilty.
It also allows for very fine-grained delimitation of sexual content. No need to forbid access to an entire site for one page, or one paragraf of sexual content. Just blur/censor the <adult> ... </adult> content.
I like this, already got face ID built into our devices including PCs these days... tap into that. That curbs the whole issue of sending your identifying information to third party websites.
I feel so bad for the teenager whose mom is parading him around as a permanently defective ruined form of life. Could that be damaging to a kid do you think?
I worry that young people across the political spectrum increasingly no longer see free speech as a foundational value. Both sides pay lip service and deploy it strategically but are quick to sacrifice it when it conflicts with other values and goals.
The ACLU won our expansive free speech protections defending the KKK in the 1950s. But today, the ACLU has become short-sighted. They are more concerned with social progressivism than the liberal foundations of our democracy which allow social progressives to continue fighting. Young progressives are happy to sacrifice free speech protections to prevent hate speech.
On the other hand, social conservatives have always been eager to curtail speech they consider obscene or liscentious, and now Trump is using executive powers to punish protesters, creating an authoritarian atmosphere unlike anything we've experienced since perhaps the McCarthy era.
There are organisations like FIRE and EFF that give me some hope, but it increasingly feels like all sides would rather cement themselves in power than continue the infinite game of liberal democracy.
> But today, the ACLU has become short-sighted. They are more concerned with social progressivism than the liberal foundations of our democracy which allow social progressives to continue fighting.
Quite the opposite. I stopped donating to the ACLU after a few years of the last trump administration because I could no longer stomach it given the clear direction trumpism is taking the country. I still support the mission ideologically but can't back it up with my money. Seeing trump this time around I'm glad I haven't wasted the money - the constitution is dead.
The GOP under Trump has considerably changed from the GOP under Bush. There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives. Perhaps a shift might be coming with the next economic downturn, which seems inevitable given the risk-off investment climate across most industries stemming from Trump’s erratic, unpredictable trade and economic policy. Things don’t look bad just yet, but it takes a while for the full impact of such enormous changes in sentiment to ripple down through the entire economy.
Reagan and Bush were constrained by much more liberal supreme court justices of the previous era. The current Supreme Court justices were clerks and lawyers during Reagan and Bush presidency. If Reagan and Bush had the current justices in their bench I can almost guarantee they’d be pulling the same stunts.
> There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives.
There is, they just don’t like it for aesthetic and/or historical reasons.
The faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush.
If the centrists and moderate conservatives could make common cause, they would easily shut out both the far left and far right wings of American politics. The demographics are there.
I think the main wedge preventing this unification is still abortion, and to a lesser extent LGBTQ rights. But it’s so weird to see two political factions that agree on 90% of policy get shellacked and overruled by their respective extreme wings. Real tail wagging the dog stuff.
> it’s so weird to see two political factions that agree on 90% of policy get shellacked and overruled by their respective extreme wings
These parties have primaries and Republicans are choosing—by a majority—the crazies over the “traditional” wing. They aren’t extremists. They are the party views.
> These parties have primaries and Republicans are choosing—by a majority—the crazies over the “traditional” wing.
Elections are by and large not contests of policy, and I think it’s likely that most American voters (across the spectrum, not just the GOP) aren’t voting in their own self-interest anymore.
Libertarian and Democratic parties ought to feel right at home for any refugees from the GOP who have conservative principles. Democratic party is right of center.
> There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives
That's funny, considering Bush II effectively established the coalition of business interests, religious zealots, and neofascist militias, which then expanded to be the backbone of Trump's support. Cautionary tale about consequences of one's political choices? I wish.
Neither of the two parties is very much in favor of free speech. The left has cancel culture and policing pronouns while the right has blocking books with gay characters and age verification laws.
There are two common definitions of the phrase "free speech" that I think you are conflating:
1. The Constitutional right to free speech under the first amendment (i.e. specifically that the government may not use its authority to limit or punish its peoples' expression of ideas)
2. The vague notion that others should not be able to criticize you for something you've said or written
In this thread we are more concerned with the former. No one on the left is trying to enact laws to punish anyone's impolite use of pronouns. At worst, maybe someone has asked you to be considerate in some non-official setting (which has little to do with the first amendment).
There is a massive difference between other people reacting to your speech and choosing not to associate with you or propagate what you say, and the government banning your speech and prosecuting you for it. You can exercise your freedom of speech, and other people can exercise their freedom of association to want nothing to do with you.
Cancel Culture is actually just the free market, the invisible hand, at work.
What is a boycott but cancel culture? The idea of the free market is that good behaviors and products emerge because consumers "vote" with their wallet. If a company has bad values I don't support then I don't shop there. Enough people do that and the company collapses. So, what remains is an economy where every company acts virtuously.
Theoretically. Then enters propaganda and the GOP. They tell you this invisible hand is bad, and companies should be able to do anything. At a glance this appears to be free speech, but it's not - it's the exact opposite.
You see, they can say anything they want, but we can't. We may not criticize them. Our opinions are not valid, they're "Cancel Culture".
A lynch mob is a boycott, especially when they aren't lynching. Lynch mob used to mean something literally, when people did lynching. Now it just means "a bunch of people don't like someone and don't financially support them".
I point out to self-described "classic liberals" that what they call "cancel culture" was instead described by John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty" as an essential component of liberty:
"We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement."
No, but it is endemic to American colleges and universities which are government or government-funded institutions.
Furthermore, spend a little time on BlueSky and you will find huge support for the hate speech laws found in other countries.
Finally, the distinction between government regulation of speech and private regulation of speech is key in the court of law, but it is almost irrelevant from the point of view of a philosophy that values open inquiry, debate, and dissent as indispensible to human dignity and progress.
"The primary weakness in the record of past restrictions is the lack of specific causation findings with respect to any discrete instance of content moderation."
I've noticed that cancel culture and policing pronouns is far stronger on the right. What Democrat has been canceled as much as Liz Cheney by Republicans? Certainly not the sex pest Andrew Cuomo, heartily supported by the Democratic Party leadership.
What Democratic president has issued an executive order anywhere equivalent to Trump's order requiring pronouns match the gender "at conception", and the anti-scientific claim that gender is a male-female binary?
The right also wants to block books which have nothing to do with gay characters, including “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, “Maus”, “The Handmaid's Tale“, “Of Mice and Men“ and “Brave New World”.
I'm genuinely curious. The parent buys the phone/laptop. And when little Timmy logs in to his phone the account should be in a family/group as a child account.
What's with the obsession with actually verifying identity? Just make a web API available to determine if the current user is configured as a child account. Why isn't that enough to gate-keep access to adult content?
It's a matter of time before the US system crumbles if these assaults on the federal system and civil liberties continue.
I live in state with a population of 40 million who gives $83 billion more to the federal government than gets back. It's absolutely insane we have to be ruled by afar by what is effectively a small minority. This will come to a head not only in Censorship, Immigration, Tariffs, Abortion access (banning abortion medication federally), Industrial policy, etc.
At a certain point California is going to say, "No Thanks" and peace out.
Hopefully someone kept a snapshot of the country's configs before this year began. I feel like we're going to need it. This is ludicrous - as so much is lately.
Is there anything we can actually do to combat this?
Im short of ideas, tho the 33% rule can be potentially worked around by generating loads of fake content similar to a previous poster who generates fake content for scrapers to eat
Im in the UK and they recently passed a similar law banning any explicit _imagery_, which I already thought was bad but the land of freedom beats us out again, the literally surveillance state, at least that's that's enforced top down by ofcom instead of an army of injury lawyers so it works at ofcom's speed
> The public library in rural Donnelly, Idaho, at only 1,024 square feet, had no practical way to create an enforceable “adults only” section and no budget to defend against lawsuits. Therefore, to comply with the law, they decided to make the entire library for adults only. The library has banned minors from entering the library (even to use the bathroom) unless they are accompanied by an adult, or holding a waiver from their parents.
This is absurd. It does look like they're suing, with help from a lot of publishers, at least.
I spent a lot of time after school in the library to avoid my abusive cult guardians at home. If this avenue hadn't been available to me in my small town, I'd likely have committed suicide. But, I'm an atheist, so me committing suicide would probably be seen as a win for these evangelical freaks.
Yeah, me too. It’s very chilling to see the resurgence of a very broad conception of parental rights, which can in some cases permit the wholesale physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children without recourse.
It’s hard to talk about it without being accused of hyperbole, but some of these proposed laws come very close to making children the property of their parents. As someone who grew up in an abusive household, that makes me exceedingly uncomfortable.
I shared this experience before on a recent thread about the role librarians play in counterculture and a user made a throwaway account in order to tell me to kill myself all sorts of creative ways and that he's glad I was abused, etc. etc.
I've talked to enough people who explicitly believe that children are chattel (sometimes in the same breath as complaining about abuse they suffered from their own parents) to know this isn't hyperbole.
An ADA compliant bathroom is almost 200sqft. And they will need at least 2 of them. So now that 1000sqft is now 600sqft. And they still need a place to store and process books, reading rooms, etc.
Also there's a big difference between a general "children's room" and strictly enforced "adults only" and "for children" section, with risk of costly lawsuits if some extremist parent thinks the kid saw something "obscene". My library had a children's section and even some toys, but I could walk in and go anywhere.
Since I'm not American I don't have a good idea of what 1024 sq feet is: it's about 95m². I laughed out loud when I realised just how small it is. To suggest this is large enough for a strictly separated adult and children section is profoundly unserious.
I've lived in several houses that had 2 bedrooms, a bathroom (with tub/shower), a kitchen, and laundry closet that were 8-900 sq ft, so to me it seems profoundly unserious to suggest you can't fit a small adult only room (think more like a walk in closet) in that space.
Ignoring that, they don't even need a room. They just can't let kids access it. A locked armoire near the checkout ought to suffice.
> The ADA Standards, on the other hand, do not address the number of toilet rooms or fixtures required for a facility, but instead specify which ones must be accessible where provided.
For what it's worth, chatgpt and random reddit comments claim you'd need closer to 50sqft for a compliant bathroom. Maybe that's nonsense.
In any case, their Facebook page is full of recent pictures of children in the library, so it seems that they were indeed unsurprisingly just posturing.
Unfortunately, these laws are working exactly as intended. If they discourage all forms of sexually-explicit material, the laws are working as intended. They are not really about "protecting the children." They use that as an excuse to make it too legally risky to publish pornographic/sexual material under any circumstances.
If I was a publisher, would I trust an age-verification system to protect me from 15 years in prison or an "investigation" that results in nothing but destroying my life? Nope. So eventually the legitimate website operators just give up.
Or how about the ISP who now simply refuses to do business with any website that publishes sexual material just to avoid legal consequences for themselves?
The Supreme Court is eroding the credibility of the institution of law faster than they can make laws. They really want to see how the public reacts to overreach?
This article doesn't really go into any detail about the Supreme Court decision it discusses, instead reserving its detailed discussion for the laws this decision permits. Anyone have a link to the opinion, or an article discussing it specifically?
If sex writing means so much to you then you should feel obliged to be persecuted and maimed in the streets and corridors for its sake, no?
If pornography is the spirit of mass media to the detriment of our youth, would you not feel that it is your civic duty to be persecuted and maimed in the streets and corridors for their sake, even more so?
So no bounty because it's not a security problem. But the MV3 API they are deleting, they say...is being deleted for security reasons. Not at all to hobble ad blockers.
I'm still wrapping my head around the consequences of this, which almost seem too big to believe. It sounds like there are hundreds of millions if not billions to be made on filing these kinds of lawsuits, which means change is coming hard and fast. What if anything prevents the following?
1. Lawsuits against content "normalizing LGBTQ+ identity," which many conservatives claim is harmful to minors. This creates opportunities for conservative groups to file frivolous but expensive-to-defend lawsuits targeting LGBTQ+ advocacy online. Will this sort of thing get sued out of existence?
2. Lawyers will first go after the largest targets. Does this mean that e.g. large health websites will have to take down articles on sex education? Might they even do do preemptively?
3. Relatedly, will all major US porn websites go behind age gates soon? Has this already happened?
That has always been the problem with advocating free speech - that eventually you have to protect the rights of the writers of nazi furry slash fiction and similar fellows. And are really soft and fluffy target.
The government is just another religion, another church. Sometimes they are right, but usually they are just dangerous like any other group of religious bigots.
FTA: "In fact, under the laws that the Supreme Court just upheld, prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site."
No, they can't. That's not how jurisdiction works in the U.S. If states could do stuff like that, GOP prosecutors would be charging out-of-state Democratic politicians with made-up-crimes all the time. They're not doing that. It's not because they don't want to; it's because they can't. (And also, the legal justification that would allow them to go after their political enemies like this would allow politically-opposed prosecutors to do the same to them.)
States are already trying to police abortions outside of state lines. If you helped someone get an abortion in another state, they want to be able to arrest you for it.
This is insane. Literally goes against the first amendment. What recourse is there for this nonsensical decision? Mass disobedience? Leaking verified IDs until they stop this?
One of the goals in Project 2025 is to make teachers, librarians, etc. that purvey "pornography" into felons, and jail them for a long time. That starts with labeling things as pornography.
Before you know it, anything that mentions LGBTQ+ topics will be labeled as porn.
They don't, of course. These laws aren't here to protect children. They're just a step on the road to one of their (conservative Christian) goals: banning pornography entirely in the US.
While we do produce a lot of porn, remember that the pre-US colonies were founded by conservative religious people who were too conservative even for Europe at the time.
Most people's associations with the US were fanciful and unrealistic to begin with. It's just that now the reality has diverged so far from their mental images that they're forced to acknowledge the disparity.
I mean, I think my fellow lefties have gotten too comfortable with having a center-left Supreme Court coming up with reason after reason to liberally give broad rights.
This is an issue of the legislature. There have been publishing restrictions on pornography for centuries, then in the last 20 years, we decided porn for everyone all the time. The conservatives were always going to push back. And I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable.
I’m a liberal. I generally agree with the principle, not the premise.
My point again is that these “rights” you’re talking about are built on our social contract. There is no premise that “porn is free speech,” in fact, quite the opposite, again, for centuries.
The existence of porn on the internet was the result of legislation, not right. That legislation is changing, we need to organize to make sure it remains legal.
I'll acknowledge that you mentioned "leftists" here and they do quite a bit of purity testing in their circles, but what laws did they pass to limit speech?
Meh they can take the bottom 64bits of your IP address and then put your biometrics in there. Why do you think they made the address space so big in the first place. I've been saying that's what it was for for at least a decade.
A bit off base. He's basically having a meltdown over what's actually a pretty narrow ruling about age verification.
First, he claims the Court "nullified the First Amendment" for sex writing, but that's just not what happened. The Court explicitly said adults still have the right to access this stuff—they just need to show ID first, like buying beer. That's not "nullification."
Second, Ellsberg acts like any sex scene anywhere triggers these laws, but H.B. 1181 only hits commercial websites where over a third of the content is sexually explicit material that's harmful to minors. His personal blog with some raunchy stories? Probably doesn't qualify.
Third, the whole "fifteen years in prison" hysteria ignores that these are civil penalties, not criminal prosecutions for most violations. And interstate prosecution for a California blogger? Extremely unlikely.
Age verification requirements do create real burdens and privacy concerns. But Ellsberg's "the sky is falling" rhetoric makes it impossible to have a serious conversation about the actual trade-offs between protecting kids and preserving adult access to legal content. The Court tried to balance these competing interests—it didn't burn down the First Amendment.
Dismissing this as a “meltdown” ignores the real First Amendment stakes. Requiring ID to access legal adult content isn’t like buying alcohol. It introduces surveillance and self-censorship, especially with vague thresholds like “one-third explicit” or “harmful to minors.” That legal ambiguity alone forces smaller publishers to self-censor to avoid risk. Unlike alcohol, speech is a constitutionally protected right, not a regulated commodity. Buying beer doesn’t create a permanent record of your interests or route through third-party identity brokers.
Whether or not speech is the explicit target, the chilling effect is the outcome and likely the intent. Lawmakers know these rules shrink the space for controversial content online. The burden and fear do the censoring for them. That’s not hysteria it’s how digital speech is throttled.
The "chilling effect" argument here is pretty weak. You're basically saying that because some small publishers might get confused about legal requirements, the whole system is unconstitutional. That's not how First Amendment analysis works. Courts don't strike down laws just because some people might overreact to them.
If this really created such massive chilling effects, we'd see data showing widespread site shutdowns or self-censorship. (Checks pornhub). Instead, we mostly see compliance.
Chilling effects are settled doctrine, not hand-waving. SCOTUS struck the CDA (Reno v. ACLU, 1997) and COPA (Ashcroft v. ACLU, 2004) precisely because vague “indecent/harmful” standards plus stiff penalties make rational speakers self-censor. Courts don’t wait for carnage. The predictable chill itself is the constitutional flaw.
We already have hard evidence of chill. Pornhub, one of the few players with the budget to fight, has geoblocked Utah, Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Montana, and about ten other states. Sixteen in total as of mid-2025 rather than risk strict-liability fines. That’s exit, not “compliance.” Smaller publishers just disappear quietly. Their absence isn’t a data gap, it’s the effect you’re denying.
You flipped the First Amendment burden. For content-based rules, the state must prove narrow tailoring and minimal speech impact under strict scrutiny. Demanding that speakers first produce a body count of shuttered sites inverts that standard and dodges the real constitutional test.
That’s why your “show me shutdowns” line doesn’t work: the shutdowns are already happening, and the law not the speakers has the burden to justify them.
It's funny that stuff like this flies under the radar, while HN users are still splitting hairs over cookie banners and Manifest V3. A week-old ruling comes as imminent surprise to the Hackers and their cohorts.
Just looking at HN's frontpage, you'd have no idea that anyone here cares about privacy or freedom.
You must be hurting from patting yourself in the back. You should first remember that front page is a matter not only of interest to the community, but timing, luck and moment. It's meaningless that it took a week to be in the front page. It's there now and we are discussing it. And it also doesn't diminish the value of other discussions that is dear to HN readers.
If you feel like antagonizing an entire community, maybe you should consider just leaving it and finding your own group. It'll be hard for us but we'll make it here without you.
Exposure != Accumulated comments, especially if you aren't counting distinct authors.
Dig a little deeper, and you'll see that particular submission ("US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law") was visible on the front page for barely five minutes [0] before something abruptly exiled it to to the end of the second page and a slide into obscurity.
In contrast, I randomly picked something from several pages down today that which looks bland with triple-digit comments, and got "A Typology of Candianisms." Turns out that has even more comments (327!) and was visible on the front page for about twenty hours [1].
Quite a difference, isn't it? I'm not against the idea that HN needs to guard its content-mix, but we should not live in denial about it happening.
It's kind of funny to be whining about this in a frontpage post here, but that aside, this doesn't add anything to discussion. You should probably keep these things to yourself.
That's because we're hackers and we're too cool to be bothered with pesky politics. /s
On a more serious note: HN tries hard to stay in its lane, but there are quite a few people on here that are engaging in political activism, but that every now and then make a (sometimes even useful) tech comment to avoid the activism ban hammer.
Personally I don't really see the difference between 'curious conversation' vs 'click bait' and 'rage bait'. Examples abound, but the balance as it is struck right now picks a reasonable median between 400 hour work weeks for the people involved and some kind of manageable work/life balance. It works, but barely and it is still worth reading but I find myself getting more and more cynical reading HN. Oh, and of course we really don't do humor.
And some people here really do care about both privacy and freedom, and some people are not absolutists but rather see that there are reasonable limits to both of these. Another thing to remember is that HN is global, you're going to find a predominantly English speaking audience here but so many people around the world manage to express themselves reasonably well in English that you will find all kinds of cultures represented here, including ones that have entirely different ideas on subjects such as freedom and privacy. And then there are the tech bros who want freedom and privacy for themselves and less of both of those for the rest of us.
There are many, many, many examples of every previous round of censorship in the name of "Think of the Children" being used against anything disliked by people in power, and filtered through the lens of the most conservative backwards puritans. Take a look at any banned book list.
This is not a slippery slope fallacy, it's basic pattern recognition.
> There are many, many, many examples of every previous round of censorship in the name of "Think of the Children" being used against anything disliked by people in power
> In practice this is going to be utilized to shut down sex education and other content deemed "harmful to children".
Many of the books on the lists I linked, and many other such lists, are in fact educational in a variety of ways. Often they're banned precisely because they cover topics that people in power don't want there to be any education on.
(And, to be clear, this comment should not be interpreted as in any way supporting the idea that a book should need to be "educational", or have any other redeeming quality, in order to not be banned.)
"Sex education" is not so narrow as to only include an approved/mandated textbook (though those and their content do get affected by these attitudes as well). Having e.g. healthy relationships (or for that matter unhealthy relationships) depicted or described in fiction is part of a well-rounded education.
It's also remarkable, and ironic, how often depictions of dystopias, particularly dystopias that restrict books and other access to information, get banned.
And, frankly, banning something misses the opportunity to contextualize it and talk about it, and instead makes it more appealing.
All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should), there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18 without sending picture of your ID off to random 3rd parties, or giving actual personal details. I don’t want to give this data, and websites shouldn’t want to shoulder the responsibility for it.
It seems like this could work much like Apple Pay, just without the payment. A prompt comes up, I use some biometric authentication on my phone, and it sends a signal to the browser that I’m 18+. Apple has been adding state IDs into the Wallet, this seems like it could fall right in line. The same thing could be used for buying alcohol at U-Scan checkout.
People should also be able to set their browser/computer to auto-send this for single-user devices, where it is all transparent to the user. I don’t have kids and no one else’s uses my devices. Why should I need to jump through hoops?
You mean like this?
https://webkit.org/blog/16993/news-from-wwdc25-web-technolog...
It’s a W3C spec led by Okta, Apple and Google based on an ISO standard and it is being rolled out as we speak.
This part
Has some fun history: California went with an independent contractor for its mDL implementation, which ultimately pressured Apple into integrating open(-ish) standards to interoperate.This is interesting, but I’d like to go a step further. I watched the first quarter of the video on where they go over how it works. The site requests data from your ID and they get that data. The site chooses which data it needs and if it will store it or it or not. Sites these days have a tendency to ask for more than what they need, and to store it for profiling purposes. The user can deny the request, but then can’t use the site. They are then left with a dilemma. Give up this personal information or not have access at all? Companies are betting on users giving up privacy in exchange for access.
What I’d like to see is for the site’s request to contain their access rules. Must be over 18, must be in country X, etc. Then on-device it checks my ID against that rule set, and simply returns a pass/fail result from those checks. This way the site would know if I’m allowed to be there, but they don’t get any specific or identifiable information about me. Maybe I’m 18, maybe I’m 56… they don’t know, they both simply send a pass. For a simple age check, a user’s exact birthday, name, address, etc are irrelevant, but I bet companies will get greedy and try to pull it anyway.
I see the monkey paw of the ID spec as leading to more companies seeking to get all our data, when they really don’t need it, and have shown they can’t be trusted with it.
I already see this with Apple Pay. When buying a digital item, some companies are awesome and simply take the payment with no other data. Others pull name, address, email, etc to make a payment when none of that is required.
The spec is being implemented by Apple, who is sensitive to privacy issues.
The intent of the ISO spec is to allow you to request fine-grained data, like birth year only, but if you read the W3C standard, they explicitly call out privacy as a complex thing that maybe should be regulated.
The spec spells out the complexity: some ID verification processes actually need a lot of info! But some, like an alcohol age check, do not. The spec can do both, but it’s hard to differentiate these technically. The spec does lay out what user agents should do to make it clear which information is going where.
A bad scenario would be designing an API that is too hobbled to replace the invasive “photo of an ID” companies, which this spec seeks to do.
I’d prefer an open web standard that can be abused (with user consent) to a closed App Store-only API or the status quo
> The intent of the ISO spec is to allow you to request fine-grained data, like birth year only, but if you read the W3C standard, they explicitly call out privacy as a complex thing that maybe should be regulated.
Aren't the regulations the problem here? If not for that nobody would be getting pressured to divulge this personal information to every shady app and website in the first place.
Suppose I want to make a service that verifies your age by asking you questions about what life was like before 9/11. Can I do that? And if I can't, is the problem the standards, or the law?
Yes, they are! but also because the law sets the standard, it can also provide a new one. For example:
a) you are still legally required to age verify online alcohol purchases but
b) it’s illegal to use information collected for that purpose for other purposes and
c) Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents
Maybe something around only collecting minimal data, too.
Some of the first eager customers are banks with onerous KYC requirements – they want one click account creation! Good luck changing financial disclosure laws, though, my bank knows quite a bit about me.
> but also because the law sets the standard, it can also provide a new one.
If the people writing the law cared about privacy they wouldn't have passed that one, and anybody who does would be repealing it rather than trying to find the best shade of lipstick for the pig.
> Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents
This is the part you don't need a law in order to do because the user can choose their user agent. Or if they can't, you should stop talking about any of this and go fix your antitrust problem.
> you are still legally required to age verify online alcohol purchases but
By conceding this you've already lost, because:
> it’s illegal to use information collected for that purpose for other purposes
This is the part which is hopeless. If they have the information, you're already screwed, because once they have it it's almost impossible for you or the government to know what they're doing with it, which makes those laws nearly impossible to enforce. And on top of that, a large part of the problem is what criminals or governments do once there is a legally-mandated database of all of that stuff, and those entities aren't constrained by laws.
Which is why anybody who really cares about this knows that the only solution is to not have the law requires that data to be collected.
> Good luck changing financial disclosure laws, though
"Slippery slope is a fallacy", they said. "It's just one inch", they said.
I figured I’d get this response, but:
I don’t see my primary care doctor selling my health data, due in part to data privacy laws like HIPAA. Consumer companies take COPPA seriously.
You absolutely cannot control what companies do with data, so you want to prevent its collection in the first place – but you can penalize them when they do something wrong, which does influence their beyavior. The jury is still out on the effectiveness of the GDPR, but to say it had no effect would be an odd claim.
I think most age verification ranges from silly to chilling to speech. But I don’t think we can somehow punt these problems to the quiz from the beginning of Leisure Suit Larry (which never stopped 10 year old me).
Requiring someone to have a government ID isn't anywhere near 100% effective because people will just borrow one from dad's wallet while he's not looking or use a device already signed in as someone else or the high school freshmen will get one from the high school seniors etc.
If we're admitting solutions that aren't 100% effective, why can't we admit solutions that aren't 100% effective but are much better at preserving privacy?
Personally i'd be much more excited about something like https://zkpassport.id/
The slippery slope from here to banning under 18s looking at websites discussing suicidal thoughts, transgender issues, homosexually and onto anything some group of middle age mothers decide isn't appropriate seems dangerously anti-fallacitical.
While I completely understand the slippery slope concept, we ban all kinds of things for under 18s based on morals. Why couldn't these be any different? How else does a society decide as a whole what they are for or against. Obviously, there should be limits.
The question is always “whose morals”. I think society as a whole is in agreement that minors are better off without access to pornography, for example. But the arrangement OP is outlining is one where a minority are able to force their morality on a broader population that doesn’t agree with it.
You might be wrong there. While the majority does not oppose homosexual relationships they are against affirmative transgender treatments for minors.
> transgender treatments
The grandparent post didn't say "transgender treatments" they said "transgender issues."
Do you believe that the mere concept of questioning your gender identity or expression is something that should be kept from the minds of minors?
> The grandparent post didn't say "transgender treatments" they said "transgender issues."
You don't think that transgender treatments is a transgender issue? If you think it is then my response is perfectly on-topic.
> Do you believe that the mere concept of questioning your gender identity or expression is something that should be kept from the minds of minors?
Depending on your jurisdiction, there are messages you can't target to kids. Why should there be a special exemption for this?
Besides, my belief on this is irrelevant; the only transgender issue that has gotten pushback en-masse from the clear majority of people world wide has been transgender treatments on minors.
IOW, this (treatment for persons unable to give informed consent) is a very unpopular position.
> Depending on your jurisdiction, there are messages you can't target to kids. Why should there be a special exemption for this?
Because the idea that the only acceptable gender norms a kid is allowed to be exposed to and express is the one tied to their genes is frankly a ridiculous concept.
There's nothing wrong with boys wearing dresses and playing with dolls. If you don't believe that harmless message should reach the ears of kids, then why? What is in that sort of message that you're afraid of?
This isn't an "I believe..." / "Do you believe..." kind of issue though. This is "Will the American State and Federal government impose an increasingly stringent moral compass on the wider internet, over time"
Which... the VISA-Mastercard duopoly, backed by American soft power and with an American moral compass, already rather proves that point for anyone that's ever tried to pay for erotica outside the mainstream
> This isn't an "I believe..." / "Do you believe..." kind of issue though.
I asked because I wanted to get a sense on if he conflating the two by accident, or if it was an attempt to steer the conversation away from free speech concerns.
Yes, but since when do we allow the majority to dictate what healthcare options are available?
The mode for treating trans kids is puberty blockers until they’re 18 and then they can choose their own treatment - but that pathway is being blocked by more and more laws and fear mongering about kids being transitioned against their will
"Transitioned against their will" is a very crude way of articulating the tradeoffs of prescribing puberty blockers. The core issue at hand is that absent puberty blockers, somewhere between 60-80% do not persist with a cross-sex gender identity after going through their natal puberty. Psychologists attempted to predict which patients would persist in a cross sex gender identity and which would not, but they were never able to do so.
When patients are given puberty blockers, desistence rates are miniscule, in the single digits. Proponents of hormonal intervention insist that this is proof that doctors are selecting kids that would persist in a cross sex gender absent blockers. But that's hard to reconcile with psychologists previous failures to predict persistence. While they're billed as giving "time to think", it's pretty much impossible to deny that blockers are causing patients who would have desisted in their cross sex gender identity if they went through their natal puberty.
It's not just conservative American States that are changing course on blockers for children: Finland, Sweden, the UK, Italy, Denmark, and Norway have all stopped prescription of blockers in children. Plenty of other countries never allowed it in the first place.
It seems like you're referring to a specific study, could you link it?
A multitude of studies, not just one. This is the review covering the outcomes of gender dysphoric children who aren't given blockers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44546443
> Yes, but since when do we allow the majority to dictate what healthcare options are available?
We've always done so - popular opinion as reflected by the voters dictate that you aren't getting a prescription for arsenic (anymore? Or crack cocaine, for that matter.)
The government, for good or bad, regulates all healthcare, and that government is guided by its voters.
The majority of voters don't see this as a bigger problem than the issue they are currently voting on.
> We've always done so - popular opinion as reflected by the voters dictate that you aren't getting a prescription for arsenic (anymore? Or crack cocaine, for that matter.)
That began in 1906; it's hardly something we've "always done".
Blocking puberty until eighteen is a harmful intervention in itself, but even worse than that is girls who think they're supposed to be boys are being given double mastectomies, with some victims of this medical malpractice being as young as twelve years old.
Many later detransition, but the damage is already done by that point. That states are now banning this as a form of child abuse, is a welcome move in the right direction.
> Blocking puberty until eighteen is a harmful intervention in itself
For a trans kid, going thru the wrong puberty is harmful. The best thing would be hormones at puberty. But given issues around informed consent, puberty blockers are a valid compromise.
Calling them harmful without considering the harm of the alternative is not honest.
Puberty is a stage of natural maturation of the body. There is only one, as per your sex, and you can't go through the wrong one. The puberty of the opposite sex is not an option.
This conception of the "wrong puberty" as something that needs to be blocked is as absurd as all that "born in the wrong body" ideological nonsense.
Most importantly, children can't meaningfully consent to having their sexual function permanently damaged.
The way you experience puberty is (to some extent) a result of the hormones in your body. Generally the hormones in your body are a result of your sex, however, it is possible to stop your body from producing certain hormones, and replace them with different hormones. In this way, one can have a puberty more similar to a different sex than one’s own.
Why do you think you can’t experience the wrong one? Also, unless you are saying there is only one sex, how could there only be one puberty?
This is presupposing without evidence. The research does not support your statements:
https://apnews.com/article/uk-transgender-health-care-childr...
[flagged]
And who decides if a puberty is "wrong"? The child itself certainly isn't mature enough.
I think this question concedes that there is some possibility that one could experience an incorrect puberty.
Given the definition of maturity is being fully grown, this comes across as an inherently unhelpful thing to ask. If we say “only once someone is fully grown they are able to determine if they experienced the incorrect puberty” then this makes it impossible to help children who are going to experience the incorrect puberty. Unless we have some way to determine a child is trans without any input from them, there becomes no way to help them.
> Many later detransition
[Citation needed]
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8039393/
All the studies among gender dysphoric children who are not prescribed puberty blockers show desistence rates over 70%
There are studies that show very low desistence rates - many in the single digits. But those are studies among children that are given puberty blockers.
A simple web search could have given you the citation.
“The Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria Study (1972–2015): Trends in Prevalence, Treatment, and Regrets” (DOI: 10.1016/j.jsxm.2018.01.016).
The word “many” is misleading – it’s less than 1 %. It’s not nothing, but it’s low.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29463477/
This isn't the desistence rate of children, this is the regret rate of adults who transition.
That ~1% figure is unlikely to reflect the full picture of regret. That paper defines regret very narrowly: only including the patients who made an appointment with their original medical team to discuss regret, and only if they regret surgical removal of their sex organs. Plus, a large number of their total cohort were lost to follow-up.
So majority chooses what healthcare options are available?
> So majority chooses what healthcare options are available?
You sound surprised, so maybe you really don't know this: this state of affairs is how it's always been, and is likely to continue well into the future.
The government regulates all medicines, all medical procedures, and all medical practices.
It's literally one of the many jobs of government.
But what if they ban something like robbery? Then the robbers won’t be able to rob things, thus depriving them of their right to choose robbery.
Government run did not always mean majority ruled. Many times rights of the minority have been ruled to be important, as in cases like abortion. In today’s US, we’re trending toward enforcing minority opinions about e.g. vaccines.
> Government run did not always mean majority ruled.
Right.
> Many times rights of the minority have been ruled to be important, as in cases like abortion.
Correct, but it was with the agreement of the majority of voters! IOW, the majority opinion still prevailed.
We are not talking about tyranny of the minority by the majority; your example is literally the majority agreeing that those specific minorities rights be granted to them.
TBH, the opposition that we are seeing is opposition to medical intervention on minors who by definition alone cannot give informed consent.
Stop fighting that battle and I guarantee that this entire "issue" turns into a nothing-burger.
There is no reason to argue for medical interventions on someone who is unable to consent.
I'm going to assume you're asking in good faith, and the short answer is yes — this is already happening!
Before engaging in what could be a huge discussion here, I suggest you do some quick searching about legal risks of performing life-saving abortion procedures, gender-affirming care for prison inmates, and workplaces choosing whether the health insurance they provide employees covers gender-affirming care as starting points to learn about the sad state of affairs.
What content are you thinking of that is banned for under 18? Idk if I can think of anything besides porn.
Many businesses in the US check ID at the door. If you are underage, they don't let you in.
On the surface it seems reasonable to ask for an equivalent ID check online.
But. The bouncer doesn't photocopy my ID and store it in a poorly secured back room that is regularly raided by criminal enterprises or outright sold by unscrupulous owners of the establishment. Similarly, they don't check in with the government in a manner that leaves a record.
I'm fine with an ID check, but I think it is also reasonable to demand the same level of privacy that one gets when visiting a bar, casino, burlesque club, or similar establishment.
They just take a picture with a phone or tablet. The reason you don't see people using photocopiers because there are better options.
I've never encountered a bouncer taking pictures of an ID. They check it, using a flashlight if needed, and wave you in.
I take you never been to alcohol/tobacco websites
The hilarious part is this only regulates American speakers. If you want to sell Americans porn and ignore the age gate, publish from abroad.
It's only hilarious until they criminalize even looking at such content.
How will you sell them porn when VISA and Mastercard ban you?
Anti-fallacitical?
The slope isn't slippery, it's paved with a Starbucks on the way. This process is outlined in detail in Project 2025 to get around 1A being used as a defense because the aim is to define anything as lgbt related as pornography.
The current administration has collected nearly all the pieces of Exodia to be able to legally criminalize homosexuality and transgenderism without ever writing a law that says those exact words and have it be held up as constitutional. I'd say it was clever if it wasn't awful.
For example, banning sites that criticize the religion of the mother.
This is a slippery slope towards democracy I tell you! Before you know it they'll be asking for representation.
Seriously, isn't this sort of par for the course? We've always regulated what minors can access on the internet. Facebook didnt even formally allow children on their site (I don't know if that's still the case). I think it's a much larger issue that we haven't been enforcing those rules, since we apparently think they are a good idea.
And we could call this way… zero-knowledge proof! :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof
I bet we could even get a major phone OS vendor to support such a thing…
https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...
I bet that in practice, at scale, these zero knowledge proofs end up being a lot more than zero.
Not to mention that you're almost certainly going to have to tie this stuff to specific accounts that will then forever and ever keep your habits collected. One day somebody enterprising is going to add all that data together too.
> I bet that in practice, at scale, these zero knowledge proofs end up being a lot more than zero.
Zero knowledge proof is not a marketing term, its a math term. Maybe sometimes they are implemented wrong, but if they are implemented correctly its pretty rock solid. Certainly more rock solid than much cryptography which rests on sketchy foundations.
VPNs and zero knowledge proof systems are vulnerable to traffic analysis (based on packet size and timestamps) and there's almost no cure.
Mullvad is the only VPN I know of that has a mode that normalizes all packets to the same size (going into the VPN) and sends fake packets that don't get sent as real traffic. But that's only obfuscation and, at low traffic or high bandwidth (videos) or with sufficient heuristics, it can be beaten.
The US has basically zero regulation on selling this data. I can imagine a world where within a couple decades the US has one of the largest blackmail crisis ever seen, as foreign governments target civil workers. Or, I guess, at this point, the US government against the "undesirable" party within this administration.
> VPNs and zero knowledge proof systems are vulnerable to traffic analysis
Zero knowledge proofs are not vulnerable to traffic analysis the same way VPNs are.
Yet then again how hard is it to just grab your parents' ids while they're not looking and add it to your phone wallet?
Gate it in the touch id secure enclave. Then only the biometrics of the adult can provide the proof that they are over 18.
I'm just saying that if age verification is done via a "smart card" then it shouldn't be hard to just add that to the phone.
Unless of course they're planning on making us go to some facility to ensure our phones get the digital components of the IDs get loaded into the secure enclave? Which sounds dystopian as heck given the scenes coming out of the US right now.
Do we expect Apple to implement a special, privacy-preserving age proof for porn viewers? Apple hates porn, when it's on websites like Tumblr.
At the same time they seem pragmatic about putting their mark on standards. It seems to me like we’re at a confluence: a regulatory tipping point where there really is pressure to bring laws to bear on online harms affecting kids; and a socio-technological moment where “gotta distinguish kids from adults” can realistically happen separately from “…by handing over personal info directly to shady random counterparts.”
Individual smartphones with biometrics are these days a whole-of-society norm, technologists have developed a mature body of cryptographic work to assert ZKPs, the US population seem to have lost their aversion to centralized ID systems… and the periodic moral panic about the kids seems to be at a high tide.
In the same way that Apple don’t prevent, say, Safari from being used for prurient purposes, or Final Cut Pro from being used to edit naughty bits, I don’t see why they wouldn’t want an opinionated implementation as a concept develops of a generic “digital tool to assert your age, and only that.” Especially since Android is doing it and leaning into the privacy angle.
I expect Apple will implement a general privacy-preserving arbitrary attribute proof, with age proof just one of the things it could be used for, probably using something similar to the library that Google recently released [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457390
Zero knowledge proof smart contract verification called by the site interested in your age. You provide your public key wallet with its government issued soul bound NFT of your identification.
This can be done, its not that crazy, it just requires a bunch of people to get their heads out of their sand in regards to tech and blockchain, which admittedly might be a harder problem.
——
Additonal thought- if you don’t understand what I’m saying or have a negative reaction just plug the comment + thread context into an LLM and see what it says / ask for a clearer explanation.
ZKP is all you need. The NFT or blockchain stuff is unnecessary can be discarded.
Eh. So now I'm forced to have all my IDs stored at an advertising behemoth. Not really a great situation either.
You're practically forced to have a Google/Apple account and a google/apple smartphone to even exist in today's world.
This goes against the very ethos of the early web. We should not be normalizing any form of this extreme moral overreach.
The early web died when everything went behind the walled gardens.
Its also to little, to late- the smut is in the LLMs now and they can generate whatever the user wants - locally. So good luck censoring that.
How did widespread adoption of the libertarian techno-utopianism of the early web work out for society as a whole?
not at all? because it didn't even get to a point where it could have worked out for society as a whole?
It existed only on the edges, usually in softer pragmatic forms, and stopped a lot of bad ideas as a pressure group.
Characterizing the entire development of software and the internet in 90s-2000s as based on libertarian techno-utopinanism is largely manufactured narrative though. One I keep seeing pop up more and more. Largely by people trying to push poorly though out authoritarian gov-controlled internet by spinning the present internet (and parenting) as a product of some ideological radicalism.
The “freedom” of the early internet was bullshit, because it just meant “freedom to make money” and “freedom from having to deal with the consequences of your products on regular people.”
It most decidedly did not mean “freedom from corporate hegemony” which is how we are where we are now, where children are matched with pedophile groomers[1] and delivered endless advertisements for freelance porn practitioners for profit.
This version of freedom isn’t a free internet at all. That was just a PR pitch. And it wasn’t really a great idea to begin with, since it ends up leading to where we are now.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-06/instagram...
it depends on which early free internet you're talking about. mine strictly forbid commercial usage at all - and it was lovely.
> which is how we are where we are now, where children are matched with pedophile groomers[1] and delivered endless advertisements for freelance porn practitioners for profit.
Yes, which is why we are not in the early internet anymore and fully into surveillance capitalism, algorithmic social media.
Exactly. And the early internet lead directly here. Which is why going back makes about as much sense as picking up your baby and dropping it on the floor again.
All of those changes were choices. Like setting icann as a for profit entity at the behest of a corrupt libertarian faction. We didn’t have to destroy peer to peer communication. We didn’t have to cede email to google. None of those things were inevitable. Could have become anything really.
I got us 4chan and 8chan. It got us mass shootings and endless "they are just trolling, they are just teenagers, they are just ironic" chorus constantly bad faith defending the far right.
Are you saying that the early web only existed in the USA? I did not witness a growth in mass shootings here in Europe from that time. Those things did not happen until Web 2.0.
4chan is not emblematic of the Internet Wild West. It was spawned by users ejected from a traditional forum, a scant half-year before Facebook was launched; it was, in fact, a sort of mirror to Facebook's response to that old internet, moot and Zuck being two sides of the same upper middle class white boy script kiddie coin.
And, as with Facebook, the main issue was the ways in which each platform perpetuated old social ills, not the ways in which they freed users.
Lastly, the tragedy of each is that it would have been entirely possible for ethical actors to takeover or fork each platform to scrub them of the ills and to promote the good. Bluesky is making a try of it vis a vis Twitter, and while my hopes aren't high that it will be an ultimate solution, I appreciate that there's finally been at least an attempt.
Society gave us mass shootings. 4chan and other anonymous boards gave us protected speech. We've had mass shootings long before 4chan and they didn't start kicking off until they reached a critical threshold of interest due to social media and the almighty algorithm, not 4chan. Conflating these things is either ignorant or dishonest.
Twitter is worse than 4chan now, at least 4chan is moderated.
Lmao, if there's anything that powers up the far-right is precisely algorithmic social media, not uncensored old-school message boards.
So now that we've arrived at the far right, it's time to stop decentralized dissent and prevent the pendulum from swinging back? This seems like a terrible idea.
And personally I'd say mass shootings are primarily encouraged by corporate mass media (including social media) glorifying the events and the shooters, rather than anonymous message board speech.
"arrived" and "swinging back"? You sound like an optimist; the dark-enlightenment Neo-Reactionary folk behind this are only just getting started.
"Arrived" because any further and we're into the far reich. "Swinging back" because I have to be an optimist that as the blatant autocratic authoritarianism rises there will be mass pushback.
I do know how deep the sophomorically-justified rabbit hole goes, in that I've read a fair amount of dark enlightenment material. I actually credit Moldbug's writing for helping me go from defaulting to fundamentalist-axiomatic analysis (rightist) to leftist-constructive-qualitative analysis (leftist) - top down hierarchy is utterly incapable of responding to the complexity of the world, and only sounds so appealing post-facto when a singular coherent narrative has been written.
> All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
Kind of unfortunate that PICS[1][2] and POWDER[3][4] never really took off: it allowed web sites to 'self-label' and then browsers (and proxies?) could use the metadata and built-in rules/filters to determine if the content should be displayed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...
[2] https://www.w3.org/PICS/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...
[4] https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/
PICS and ICRA were not adopted by many due to complexity. RTA [1][2] is a more generic header that can be used on any adult site or site that allows user contributed content and is easier to implement. There needs to be a law that requires clients to look for this header if parental controls are enabled. Not perfect, nothing is. Teens will easily get around it but most small children will not which should be the spirit of the ID verification movement. It's better than what we have today. The centralized ID verification sites will push many small sites to Tor and bigger sites to island nations and tax evasion in my opinion. More browsers are natively supporting .onion domains.
Congress critters should be opposed to the centralized ID verification systems as their browsing habbits will be exposed to the world when those sites ooopsie dooopsie "leak" the data or just openly sell it or an employee turns that data into a summarized online spreadsheet of who is into what. The kickbacks and lobbying they may be potentially receiving will not be worth it.
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
[2] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-R... [dont follow the links, NSFW]
I am never providing my ID to anyone who can store it indefinitely. I am an adult and have no problem showing it in a shop if required as it isn't stored. Unless it can be proven it wont be stored (i.e. the bytes are never sent from my laptop) I will not provide it.
Your ID is effectively stored by the issuer indefinitely. What’s the difference between one and two entities? What’s the difference between two and a hundred?
The more people you give your personal information to, the less personal it becomes.
The servers storing this information have been hacked in the past and it will happen again in the future. The fewer places your ID lives, the lower the risk of it leaking.
Even if you don’t view the data as sensitive, it still associates a person with a website. Depending on the site, that can have negative ramifications in a person’s life. This is especially true when certain websites get associated with various political leaning and when the data leaks, the people who happened to be registered (for whatever their reason) get attacked.
Where I'm from we sorted this out with laws. It's not hard to figure out if one of your workers are associating with a union, but you're not allowed to treat them differently based on that. Laws make sure you don't, even though you technically could.
The tricky part is proving you’re being treated differently and that’s the reason why. Trying to legislate human behavior at that level doesn’t seem to work well.
My company has rules against retaliation. Good luck proving that’s the reason you didn’t get promoted, or were left off of a project. People get left off projects and don’t get promoted all the time. Keeping your job because the company is legally obligated to sounds like an uncomfortable working environment.
What's the difference between a state agency issuing a document, and sending that document to 100 random websites. This is your question, correct?
Thinking about client vs server, wouldn't it be even less wide-ranging, less costly to enforce, and more appropriately targeted if such mandates are one-time and on the client side - only on device manufacturers and OEM-shipped OS? Suppose new mass market devices are defaulted to parental controls on, until unlocked by an adult at point-of-sale or afterwards through a form of validation? The KYC of who unlocked it could be anonymized or the PII-proving side of the log if it needs keeping could be on-device only (high bar for criminal investigations). There should be a clear exemption threshold for low volume indie products, build your own PC, and open source self-install like Linux - since the purpose is to protect ignorant/apathetic consumers.
Are you ok with all devices considering the user hostile and coming with heavy encryption and locked bootloaders?
> There should be a clear exemption threshold for low volume indie products, build your own PC, and open source self-install like Linux - since the purpose is to protect ignorant/apathetic consumers.
Then everyone will just follow a YouTube tutorial to reinstall their operating system and bypass restrictions. There were TikTok videos teaching kids how to steal cars, would there not be easy to follow instructions to bypass whatever client side filtering is implemented?
I get where you're coming from, but mandated client side filtering has been tried and has been ridiculed as a complete failure every time. Attempts have been made to market and provide filtering products to parents with little effect, with them either being easy to bypass or difficult to use.
It's actually kind of interesting to see the people who were fighting against client side filtering are now advocating for it, because server side restrictions are the next logical step.
This would actually be an effective way to teach kids about technology. If they learn enough to install their own OS, let them have their smut.
I’m hearing more and more how younger generations don’t have what people used to call basic computer skills, because everything just kind of works now. Putting up some road blocks that require research and hands on tinkering to solve, is an invaluable part of the learning process.
I'm not sure bribing kids with smut to learn computer skills is good branding.
The pre-red-tape internet was glorious. Only way to get that back is to decentralize everything.
> Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
They won't have to, most websites will use 3rd party age verification. This is basically what Doordash and Uber Eats use to verify your age before delivering alcohol or THC to your apartment.
Rife for abuse? Absolutely. Will these databases get leaked and increase the chances of your identity getting stolen? Yes. But isn't a small increase to an already-existing problem.
If you need an id to buy porn irl why wouldn't you need one to buy it online?
Because 'online' is the entire planet, including sellers in foreign countries. Would you like to have "digital borders" between countries, where data has to show some sort of passport to cross the border?
Again, if I want to import pron from Japan I need to not only prove I'm 18 to the border censors but make sure the pron is legal locally.
Plenty of people have been arrested for importing things legal in Japan that are illegal in the West.
Plenty of countries have laws on the books that make it a felony to even look at what's on the average Japanese store bookshelf while you're in Japan.
Why should the laws be different just because you're moving electrons instead of atoms?
I mean if the alternative is complete lawlessness, then I suppose I do want digital borders. AMA.
Challenge accepted
How old are you?
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The irony here being that the same people who want this are the ones screaming from the rooftops about the government indoctrinating their kids.
*Also, I can’t wait for the first lawsuit over a breastfeeding page, because you know it’s coming.
> Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids.
I mean, they are. But I've never seen a similar reaction on HN or any forum when social media require age verification. Actually, I think most HN users would cheer if the government required Facebook to only allow users over 18.
I feel the general opinion about something on the internet basically comes down to this simple rule: !(do American Christians want that thing?), no matter what that thing is.
yeah my thoughts are that this is largely a User Experience problem than an onerous liability problem
The blog owner doesn't need to implement an ID check, the browser or OS just needs to tap into a service that has checked ID
There was a thread on reddit asking the other day what about the modern world bothers you the most
I actually considered this question and after thinking about it, despite everything going on, I think it boils down to lack of privacy as my biggest gripe in the modern world
It’s such a tough concept to explain to the if you don’t have anything to hide crowd, but if someone wants to disappear, I don’t care if for good or bad reasons, they should be able to
If you don’t want the government on you, if you don’t want people you know to find you, if you just want to reinvent yourself, it doesn’t matter why - you should be able to do this. It just “feels” like an innate right. Normally I don’t like to argue using “vibes” as justification, but this to me is just part of my value system/morals which is inherently arbitrary to begin with
Encroaching on this privacy encroaches on a bunch of other rights, like free speech as you’ve mentioned
The fact that this is the case makes it even clearer to me that privacy is a basic fundamental primitive
Would love to hear alternative perspectives and other justifications for or against privacy
Either so few people appreciate the freedom that privacy confers or the perceived conveniences for trading it away are too compelling because of just how little society has done to protect privacy.
I only imagine it changing after a significant cultural change in which the economic value is not held as higher than the value of privacy, but would be delighted to be wrong in this regard.
The cultural change will only come after society bears a significant cost.
I don't feel as strongly about privacy because "community" is what holds civilisation together.
Its nice to have a little space, and to have your own thoughts and opinions, but not at the expense of civilisation.
People should not be able to use privacy to evade responsibility or debts.
We always need to balance freedoms with responsibility.
Final thought is that this is precisely why government and politics is not a joke and needs to be taken seriously. We need small transparent governments we can trust and that are a held accountable.
If you don't trust your government, you've got bigger problems than your privacy.
> We always need to balance freedoms with responsibility.
Sure, but is this a measure that appropriately balances it?
I think the traditional view is that the balance should be: your rights end where they start stepping on another person's rights.
We aren't really talking about someone else being harmed, we are talking about (at worst) someone harming themselves. There is no other person being harmed.
On the other hand, porn habits are a great way to blackmail people. When the identity data gets leaked, it will very easily ruin lives.
From a balance perspective, i don't really think it follows that the benefits are worth the potential harms. I think civilization is best preserved by not doing this.
> I don't feel as strongly about privacy because "community" is what holds civilisation together.
Dude I'm sure most people are okay with their neighbors knowing their names and addresses. We're talking about the governments and megacorps here. Theses are not "communities" in any traditional sense.
> small transparent governments
No developed country has that. Not EU and definitely not the US.
> If you don't trust your government
No one should 100% trust their government.
That's literally what EU privacy laws are about and guess what...
Anti government folk from the USA hated them and decided they were government overreach.
Please, the EU is trying to ban encryption at this very moment, to say the that EU is pro privacy is a bit of a joke really.
Privacy from companies maybe, privacy from governments and cops, certainly not.
> the EU is trying to ban encryption at this very moment, to say the that EU is pro privacy is a bit of a joke really.
The EU is not a monolith. There are many people pushing in many different directions. Sometimes the result is good, sometimes less so.
The EU is both pro-privacy and anti-privacy. In many ways, they're ahead of the US - you can opt out of more telemetry, more advertising, more tracking. Good. But then the encryption stuff - bad.
Informed consent laws - good. Laws about third-party tracking - good. So it's some good, some bad.
But, on the topic of encryption, it's not like the US is pure here either.
> privacy from governments and cops
It is very much not clear to me that you should have privacy from governments or cops. Aren't the whole point of the government and cops that they are the institutions we have created to entrust with this access?
What did your MEP say when you complained to them about it?
Mine said the party was taking it very seriously and it's clearly something that is important to me. I trust them to do exactly nothing.
Us techbros like it when Bezos and Zuck and Musk have all the information, because you can “vote with your dollar” and avoid them.
Ah yes, lock you up for Facebook posts UK is the bastion of privacy.
To be fair to OP I don’t think the UK is in the EU
Firstly, the UK is not in the EU. That's what Brexit was.
Secondly, incitement to violence is illegal in most countries. If you think it's not in yours, why not try it and see where you end up?
> Secondly, incitement to violence is illegal in most countries. If you think it's not in yours, why not try it and see where you end up?
By all means, if that's the way you want to represent the issue, then there is no discussion to be had.
I will, however, represent it this way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingd...
I can be compelled in a few situations in this incomplete list were of the "deserved" type. But you can't convince me on all of them.
I appreciate your emotions, but can you explain how it impacts you in practice?
VPN.
Oh, don't you worry, they'll come after VPNs next. After all, this makes them accomplices to felony acts.
These are Authoritarian Christo-fascists. They do not care. They will demonize everyone involved in anything related to online sex. They are coming for the sex workers, and all of porn too - they stated they would do this in "Project 2025". "Think of the children" is how they justify it.
Conservatives are awfully fond of government meddling and regulation for being so purportedly anti-government meddling and regulation.
At this point I think accusing conservatives of hypocrisy is blase and yesterday's news.
Of course conservatives are hypocrites. All they care about are their end goals, and they will say and do whatever they need to say and do in order to achieve them.
One of those goals involves enshrining Christian values into law. Christian values themselves are often hypocritical and contradictory. And inconsistent: ask 10 Christians to weigh in on a thorny moral issue and you'll get 15 different answers.
And on top of that, the conservatives in power have a fetish for using those power structures to enrich themselves and their cronies, under the guise of "small government" and "free markets".
I don't think exposing conservative hypocrisy is a winning or useful strategy anymore. Conservatives are masters at cognitive dissonance, and at hand-waving away inconsistencies in their views, or the very real, very negative consequences of their policy plans. I'm not sure what the right strategy is, though. And perhaps this is why liberals fail to win hearts and minds when it matters.
And yet...
Whenever anyone has economic woes, there are still plenty of people out there who will reflexively say "maybe we needs some Republicans in charge for a bit, they're more fiscally responsible and will help small businesses" etc etc.
And Republicans will happily run on those ideas.
And then not execute them.
So someone needs to be hammering home the fact that it's lies - that Republicans will only help the wealthy and giant corporations, that they don't care a whit for the deficit, that they will spend spend spend on their pet issues and crony projects - until it stops being an effective campaign soundbite.
I expect a liquor store to check ID, why not a porn store?
Do booze shops in the US store peoples id's after they've flashed them (pun intended)?
Birthday attack: most places punch the eight digits MMDDYYYY into the keypad. You think you're safe, but that's 1 in over 20,000 uniqueness practically. Each store has how many local regulars? Sure sometimes there's overlap in birthdays, but it's unique enough.
In some states stores are required to scan IDs. I'd be surprised if e.g. Kroger weren't storing that information. All of these porn laws I've read at least ban any storage. As far as I know digital ID standards are also at least designed to allow only sharing "over18" without other identifying information.
Kroger is most definitely storing this information. I rarely shop any Kroger store, but when they started doing IDs scans, I shop there less and no longer buy anything that requires my ID.
And if I provide it how do they prove they aren't storing it other than their word, which is untrustable for many reasons?
You don't actually provide it to the porn site. Everything goes through a 3rd party escrow. The site you're trying to access only gets a message from the trusted ID partner that you are indeed the age you say you are.
Now, I still hate the idea that any corporation is storing my ID, but it's not every Tom Dicken' Harry porn site you might be viewing.
Many bars and casinos store your ID forever.
It seems to me that age verification via ID submission online and the subsequent storage of IDs are separate issues.
How could they be separate issues when the submission of an ID image obviously enables both the subsequent storage of the ID and also the presentment of the ID to others.
We know that very few organizations are capable of effectively controlling confidential information that they're legally bound to keep confidential. Requiring things that are going to lead to large stores of ID images is asking for trouble.
When you show your ID in a store, the clerk generally doesn't retain a copy of it, and if they do, it's apparent because they take the card to scan it... regardless, they can't take the scanned copy and present it at another store, because the other store will detect that it's not an original.
Because they are. You do not have to store the ID for verification: storage it’s just one way to implement such a system.
I agree with you that systems that store those IDs are ticking bombs.
Booze shops are state licensed and regulated. If they mess around with my PII, I have direct recourse options.
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Interesting, why did you give up your right to buy liquor anonymously? And you also seem to be willing to give up your right to anonymous porn. Why?
Most of us alive in the US today never had a right to buy liquor anonymously, unless you’re making a natural rights argument independent of contrary constitutional or statutory law. The 21st Amendment gives lots of authority to states to regulate or prohibit alcohol sales, including the right to require ID.
With that said, even now, it’s normal that liquor stores only look at IDs without transmitting or recording the information anywhere (in the absence of fraud concerns), so if the purchase itself is made with cash, it has most (not quite all) of the same data privacy and security consequences as a true anonymous purchase.
This is very different from the online porn age verification proposals.
> why did you give up your right to buy liquor anonymously?
That's not entirely true - once you look old enough most places will stop asking for ID.
As for why: because there is (or at least, was) no other system to identify whether someone is underage and, by extension, more likely to underestimate the consequences of their actions, make worse choices under the effect of alcohol, and suffer its effects more strongly. Same reason why the legal system makes a difference between minors and adults.
> If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should), there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18 without sending picture of your ID off to random 3rd parties, or giving actual personal details.
But there won't be.
Because the ultimate purpose of laws like this isn't really to prevent minors from accessing porn. Ultimately, it's to
1) outlaw porn for everyone, because it's "sinful", and
2) outlaw discussions and depictions of queer—and more specifically, nowadays, especially trans—issues, because according to them, anything queer is automatically pornographic, no matter how tame the actual content is.
Don't forget about sex education and literature in general
Knowledge is power.
You’re getting downvoted, likely because the people downvoting you dont realize that Project 2025 explicitly calls for the complete outlawing of pornography and the imprisonment of anyone who produces it. They also frame transgender ideology and LGBTQ+ educational materials as falling under “pornography”, essentially calling for these to be banned.
Here's the quote about their plans for transfolk:
> Transgender people will see their existence denied and their rights stripped away under Project 2025. The authors equate "transgender ideology" to pornography, calling for it to be outlawed. While the far-right policy agenda cannot directly ban transgenderism, it aims to do so indirectly by labeling it as pornography, and then outlawing pornography itself - effectively erasing transgender identity from the U.S.
Source: https://doctorsoftheworld.org/blog/project-2025-lgbtq-rights...
And when they've banned all of those, they'll be banning r/pastorarrested for pointing out what everyone already knows about these fine upstanding moralists.
> They also frame transgender ideology and LGBTQ+ educational materials as falling under “pornography”, essentially calling for these to be banned.
Close, but it's worse than that -- they don't want LGBTQ+ material merely banned; they want LGBTQ+ people dead, or at the very least banned from all public life. The next step is where they call for the death penalty for child abuse (also in Project 2025). So according to them LGBTQ+ is pornographic -> pornography is child abuse -> child abuse is punishable by death -> therefore existing as a queer person is punishable by death.
No, they very much realize that. The people down voting them want these things. HN isn't some bastion of progressive thinkers or the libertarian hacker-minded anymore. It's chock full of wealthy tech-bro neocons who dote on figures like Elon Musk.
Just see how any criticism of dear leader gets flagged in mere minutes now.
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Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.
I run a pi-hole that blocks ads and porn, but that’s way beyond the technical capability of probably 95% of people. There are some commercial products but they are expensive and also take time and at least a little tech ability to set up.
… and of course any phone with 5G/LTE gets around this. Cellular is impossible to police.
> parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device
Tough luck, I say. If you’re going to bring humans into this world, you better do a great job at it and not externalize responsibility or create a nuisance for others.
With all due respect to parents that overscheduled themselves: Tough. Raise your kids. Don't try to raise mine.
> Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.
I'm going to have to upload 3D models of my face and pictures of my ID just to use the internet because... some people don't like the idea of other people's kids using the internet?
This is a good point of course but that's always the issue, no? You may try to hide violence from your children, but if they see gang violence around them it doesn't matter. You can try to hide sexual content from your kids but if they have friends who share the content, hear people talking about it, or live in an area where prostitution occurs, you can't stop them from being exposed to it.
These were problems from before the age of devices. If anything car oriented development has made it easier to control your children's experience diet by controlling their physical proximity.
Fundamentally I think you just need to trust your kids beyond a certain point. Do your best to build constructive consumption habits with them (including restricting access to devices as needed), help build good moral frameworks, but always remember that the world is messy and it's your child's job to synthesize their upbringing with their experiences. We all did the same while growing up
It takes less than 5 minutes to set up NextDNS with the same functionality and it costs $2 a month for unlimited DNS calls. If you download the app it absolutely can police cellular.
If these legislators cared about keeping kids safe, they’d be focused on getting them off social media, not stopping adults from exercising free speech.
Comcast’s Xfinity service doesn’t let you change DNS in their router and blocks queries to other DNS providers if you are using their router.
That really should be illegal. It looks like there might be workarounds, but that defeats the point of being easy to use.
None of my non-technical relatives have Comcast, so I’m not sure how it would work out. It works fine on ATT, Verizon, Cox and Spectrum though.
> but that’s way beyond the technical capability of probably 95% of people.
It really isn’t, and even if it were an ISP could offer it. Indeed I believe most ISPs do (I chose one which is unfiltered, I do my own filtering at a router and dns level, the biggest threat is DoH)
That still seems better than the proposed cure. Connected devices are overrated.
What happens when their friends have them?
It is very hard for parents who aren’t tech savvy or are busy (single parents or both work) to police this stuff.
I’m playing devils advocate because if we pretend this isn’t a problem eventually governments will force onerous regulation. It is a problem. We need to come up with better solutions if we don’t want worse ones.
It’s devils advocate because I think while kids shouldn’t be looking at porn the brain rot shit is at least as bad and possibly worse. Kids YouTube is a lobotomy.
Sounds like marketing is the problem. In fact, I'd say 90% of the Internet's more problematic aspects disappear once you get rid of marketing/monetization. We had a good thing. We let mercantilism and surveillance capitalism ruin it.
To some extent, Section 230 is to blame.
> parents that are too busy
If you are too busy to parent, then you shouldn't be one in the first place.
Then they shouldn't let their kids have connected devices. It's that simple.
doesnt realize theyre the problem
Sorry you're experiencing a bunch of downvotes over a counterpoint from your own experience.
Even though I could predict what side HN would stand on any sort of internet freedom post, reading through all the reasonable yet greyed-out comments in this thread feels like HN's last dying breath as a place for genuine debate.
The replies here are disturbing for their lack of concern or even awareness of the fact that some parents have, you know, economic pressures? Like they have to work long hours or multiple jobs? Both parents have to work?
This site can be really gross sometimes. I want to think it's just that the site skews young and people just don't know. I might have said similar things when I was 20.
It’s not gross to want parents to only parent their kids, and to leave the kids of other parents out of it. It’s your responsibility what your kid does on devices that you permit them to have. If you can’t control your kid when they’re not in your presence, or can’t trust them when they’re left to their own devices (pun intended), that’s an issue, but it isn’t a technological problem, but rather a parenting problem.
>Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.
May be such inept people who don't care that much about their kids as to setup parent control shouldn't have kids in the first place? Why we all should take a hit to our rights/business/etc. just because of such careless and irresponsible parents?
Your kids is your personal responsibility. It the same story again and again - why can't these conservative people own their personal responsibilities without hoisting its costs onto the others?
Not the parent commenter, but they just said that most parents don't have the technical aptitude to do so.
Implying that they don't care about their kids, or shouldn't have kids as a result, is a pretty awful thing to say.
In this day and age lack of knowledge is no excuse.
Especially when everyone who would have this particular "problem" has access to various search tools and video websites that would explain "solutions".
I feel like, to say that, you haven't tried helping many older adults — or even middle-aged adults — use technology.
If my older family member was scammed by something online, and someone said "lack of knowledge is no excuse," I think they'd really be missing the mark. Or if they shouldn't reproduce because they aren't good with technology.
It's a very HN take but it's one that lacks a lot of humanity.
>> I feel like, to say that, you haven't tried helping many older adults — or even middle-aged adults — use technology.
I have actually. And do so pretty regularly.
But the comment I was replying to was presumably not about older adults, and more so about younger parents of minor children, whom I wouldn't normally class as "older adults", and for the most part I would think know basic skills like using a search engine and/or Youtube (or some other video sharing app)
Maybe parents shouldn't buy their kids technology they don't know how to use?
Middle aged adults are millennials. This isn't the 90s anymore when middle aged people were raised on type writers.
This is a barrier put in place so that children are less likely to casually access these sites while they're browsing around.
As an adult, no-one is forcing you to view pornographic websites. If you don't want to provide your ID as per these laws, simply refrain from viewing. It really is that straightforward a choice.
Right, so you're admitting what we already know to be true: it's censorship.
Now, I can get behind some censorship if it's for very good reasons. As soon as it's for moralistic reasons, you've lost me. This is a morality law. Morality laws are bad, period. We need real, concrete reasons for blocking content and enforcing censorship - not morality.
Why not? Because morals change from person to person and throughout history. What an evangelical thinks is moral is different from what I think is moral.
If the internet existed during times of slavery, would they have censored websites addressing freedom because it is "immoral"? In my mind, yes. That's a problem with the entire thought process. So, we should throw the thought process out.
I don't know what the future holds in 10 years, 20 years, 30. I don't want to be bound to laws that rely solely on morality. That's just asking for trouble.
I mean, even just the word "pornography" is a moral footgun. Who defines that? Because a large portion of the US believes anything containing homosexuals is automatically pornographic, regardless of the material.
Proving one's age is required for many other activities that are considered unsuitable for children, such as purchasing alcohol and drugs, and watching age-restricted films in the cinema.
Of course this means that any adult, when challenged, who refuses to show ID as proof of age, will be denied service. But again that refusal is their choice. They voluntarily refrained from complying with the access requirements.
How is this substantially different to an adult refusing to show ID to access an age-restricted website?
The internet is already blocked by age. In order to order internet service, you must be an adult, and you must prove it by showing papers, such as residence and pay stubs.
Once the service or good is sold, all bets are off. The clerk at the corner store might ask for your ID to buy alcohol, yes. But they do not follow you home to ensure you don't give wine to your kid.
And, if they did, would you be comfortable with that? I think no. Why not? Privacy. I don't want a random clerk watching me every time I decide to drink or smoke. It's a violation of my privacy.
So, privacy - there's your answer, that's the difference.
The internet is not blocked by age. Any child with a laptop or phone, or any other device that can connect to a wifi hotspot, can access it.
Do you refuse to watch age-restricted films in the cinema because the owner of the cinema might have a record of what you've watched? Age-restricted websites are no different. You can comply with the access requirement, or refrain from using the service. It's your freedom of choice.
No-one is forcing you to watch 18-rated films at the cinema, or purchase alcohol or drugs, or view pornographic material online. If you don't like the requirement to prove your age by presenting some form of ID, then all you need to do is voluntarily refrain from these and any other age-restricted activities.
There are infinite levels of privacy.
> Do you refuse to watch age-restricted films in the cinema because the owner of the cinema might have a record of what you've watched?
For me, no. For others, yes.
But this is a different degree of privacy to what we're talking about. It's not the same, and you cannot make the jump for free.
What I mean is, just because I am okay with this degree of privacy violation, does not mean I consent to all privacy violations which may ever exist. Again, you might be fine with an R-rated movie - but you, yourself, would not be fine with a store clerk living at your house to ensure you don't give kids alcohol. So you, yourself, understand and live by the principle.
> Any child with a laptop or phone, or any other device that can connect to a wifi hotspot, can access it.
Similarly, any child living in my house can access my scotch.
It is up to me, the person who purchased the good or service, to ensure that doesn't happen. It is not up to a third-party like the store clerk. If I am a business, it is then up to me that the internet I provide is adequately censored. Which is what happens in practice.
Public wifi near universally implements porn blocks in the first place. I can't imagine there would be much chagrin about promoting that into a law.
> Do you refuse to watch age-restricted films in the cinema because the owner of the cinema might have a record of what you've watched?
I can't imagine that there aren't many people who refrain from watching all sorts of content in public out of privacy concerns.
>If you don't like the requirement to prove your age by presenting some form of ID, then all you need to do is voluntarily refrain from these and any other age-restricted activities.
I certainly don't, and I would definitely oppose this being made into law.
Many public WiFi hotspots have content filters. Kids are not going to be seeing porn at the library.
The issue here is there's a difference between a mainstream service, like a cinema, and a tiny author website which probably gets a few hundred hits a months at most.
And the ultimate ideological aim is to take all erotica offline. Especially any kind of queer erotica.
This is using ID issues for ideological censorship, not trying to set up an ID system to streamline access to adult material by adult consumers.
> Give me your ID or stop posting on HN. No one is forcing you to post on HN. If you don't want me to know your name and address and age and driver's license number and keep a record of everything you say that I sell to anybody I want and store in an unencrypted hard drive, you don't have to post.
Do you see the problem yet?
Sgould I say "Cambridge Analytica" now or later?
> Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids.
This is simplistic. I think you'll find parents are not a uniform bloc in favor of this kind of overreach.
Others have said this, I'm sure, but this will move past porn _quickly_. Once there is agreed-up age verification for pornography, much of the professional internet will require identity verification to do _anything_. This is one of the bigger nails in the coffin for the free internet, and this true whether or not you're happy with all the pornography out there.
I’d rather have this regulated properly before cloudflare becomes the defacto standard of id checks.
Nothing is going to be "regulated properly" for at least the next 3.5 years, and we'll all be dealing with backwards decline for decades after. That's best case, but i'm guessing It'll be even worse than the "radicals" are shouting about.
What issues do you have with Cloudflare becoming the defacto standard that wouldn't also apply to whatever would come of regulating it 'properly'?
And honestly, with the advent of AI spam everywhere, I'd be quite happy to visit a version of the internet where everyone is a certified real person
You won't though. Malicious actors will find a way around this - either purchasing or stealing whatever form of ID is used for this. The only people who will suffer are law-abiding citizens simply trying to browse the Internet.
"Workarounds?" Malicious actors will just operate out of different countries like they always have.
No idea why you’re getting downvoted when there’s a slow but unstoppable migration of everything into discord or other walled, somewhat LLM-proof gardens.
Walled gardens are only LLM-proof until some AI company makes an offer for the data.
I don’t care about that. I care about the number of DMs I get from ”superhorni420” offering me her nudes
I don’t really see a future where Discord would let an AI company post the kind of 24/7 porn+crypto+scams you get in your email spam folder
But that's already been happening in discord for years.
The parent’s point is that identity verification would stop that.
WhatsApp does this. I get added to scam channels
be careful what you ask for.
GAN style training is only going to get cheaper and easier. Detection will collapse to noise. Any ID runes will be mishandled and the abuse will fly under the radar. Only the space of problems where AI fundamentally can't be used, such as being at a live event, will be meaningfully resistant to AI.
Another way for it all to unfold is maybe 98% of online discourse is useless in a few years. Maybe it's useless today, but we just didn't have the tools to make it obvious by both generating and detecting it. Instead of AI filtering to weed out AI, a more likely outcome is AI filtering to weed out bad humans and our own worst contributions. Filter out incessant retorting from keyboard warriors. Analyze for obviously inconsistent deduction. Treat logical and factual mistakes like typos. Maybe AI takes us to a world where humans give up on the 97% and only 1% that is useless today gets through. The internet's top 2% is a different internet. It is the only internet that will be valuable for training data to identify and replace the 1% and converge onto the spaces that AI can't touch.
People will have to search for interactions that can't be imitated and have enough value to make it through filters. We will have to literally touch grass. All the time. Interactions that don't affect the grass we touch will vanish from the space of social media and web 2.0 services that have any reason to operate whatsoever. Heat death of the internet has a blast radius, and much of what humans occupy themselves with will turn out to be within that blast radius.
A lot of people will by definition be disappointed that the middle standard deviation of thought on any topic no longer adds anything. At least at first. There used to be a time when the only person you heard on the radio had to be somewhat better than average to be heard. We will return to that kind of media because the value of not having any expertise or first-hand experience will drop to such an immeasurable low that those voices no longer participate or appear to those using filters. Entire swaths of completely replaceable, completely redundant online "community" will just wither to dust, giving us time to touch the grass, hone the 2%, and make sense of other's 2%.
Callers on radio shows used to be interesting because people could have a tiny window into how wildly incorrect and unintelligent some people are. Pre-internet media was dominated by people who were likely slightly above average. Radio callers were something like misery porn or regular-people porn. You could sometimes hear someone with such an awful take that it made you realize that you are not in the bottom 10%. The internet has given us radio callers, all the time, all of them. They flooded Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. They trend and upvote themselves. They make YouTube channels where they talk into a camera with higher quality than commercial rigs from 2005. There is a GDP for stupidity that never existed except as the novelty object of a more legitimate channel. When we "democratized" media, it wasn't exclusively allowing in thoughts and opinions that were higher quality than "mainstream".
The frightening conclusion is possibly that we are living in a kind of heat death now. It's not the AIs that are scary. Its the humans we have platformed. The bait posts on Instagram will be out-competed. Low quality hot takes will be out-competed. Repetitive and useless comments on text forums will be out-competed. Advertising revenue, which is dependent on the idea that you are engaging with someone who will actually care about your product, will be completely disrupted. The entire machine that creates, monetizes, and foments utterly useless information flows in order to harness some of the energy will be wrecked, redundant, shut down.
Right now, people are correct that today's AI is on an adoption curve that would see more AI spam if tomorrow's AI isn't poised to filter out not just spam but a great mass of low-value human-created content. However, when we move to suppress "low quality slop" we will increasingly be filtering out low-quality humans. When making the slop higher quality so that it flies under the radar, we will be increasingly replacing and out-competing the low-quality content of the low-quality human. What remains will be of a very high deductive consistency. Anything that can be polished to a point will be. Only new information outside the reach of the AI and images of distant stars will be beyond the grasp of this convergence.
All of this is to say that the version of the internet where AI is the primary nexus of interaction via inbound and outbound filtering and generation might be the good internet we think we can have if we enact some totalitarian ID scheme to fight against slop that is currently replacing what the bottom 10% of the internet readily consumes anyway.
I don’t agree, at least as far as legal obligation goes. The average voter is far more worried about porn and other explicit content and not so much about anything else.
This doesn't really track with widespread and normalized use of pornographic materials, including written descriptions, by most adults in this country. There's a pretty wide gulf between "I don't think kids should be able to access this stuff" and "I think we need to supercharge the surveillance state and destroy the first amendment"
Age verification seems like a subset of human verification so if it gets rid of both bots and captchas then why not?
Pretty sure you can guess a few.
Guess a few what?
Reasons why not.
I still don't see any reason erasing bots and captchas from my online experience is bad. I hate bots and captchas. They add absolutely no value to my life. Conversely there is lots to be gained if imagine if something like X or reddit or whatever can anonymously verify that a user is a person and over 18 or 21 or 30 even (whatever) without having to directly handle identities. It's could be all the benefits of a bouncer checking for a pulse and valid ID without the privacy invasion. If done correctly it can also make fraud more difficult.
This doesn't sound so bad. I would much prefer to have discussions about politics, technology, or religion safe in the knowledge that I am not inadvertently communicating with a minor.
I had very passionate talks online about all 3 categories before I turned 18, and I got a lot of feedback, from older folk I didn't previously know, that I shaped opinions and formed new perspectives - and a lot of the talks sure as shit did the same for me. I cannot say I would have nearly the same current passion that I do for technology, aspects of politics, and philosophy (including that of religion) without such exposures during my adolescent years, and I'm sure you'd be hard-pressed to find others young enough that wouldn't say the same - provided they have an adequate baseline of introspection.
On that note, out of all the examples you could have given for discussion categories that are unbecoming to have with minors, you chose 3 relatively benign ones, lol.
Parent said identity verification, not age verification.
> In fact, under the laws that the Supreme Court just upheld, prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site.
> It's unlikely these interstate prosecutions would happen...
It might wind up being uncommon, but definitely not unlikely - it's basically assured that it will happen eventually, especially if the judge finds the text in question particularly or personally offensive.
I guess now is a great time to start a KYC company.
If an state AG tries to prosecute an entity that has no ties to the state other than content being passively accessible, that's probably another supreme court case if it doesn't get immediately decided in favor of the defendant in the lower courts. You open a big can of worms if entities are required to proactively comply with regulations in states they have zero presence in.
If Texas wants to block content from entities that have nothing to do with Texas, they can build their own great firewall.
> You open a big can of worms if entities are required to proactively comply with regulations in states they have zero presence in.
It’s true, it would cause a great deal of chaos if suddenly every person and business had to comply with fifty-plus different and sometimes contradictory state laws.
But it seems like that’s where we’re headed?
As far as I understand it (IANAL), this ruling decides that the speech restrictions imposed by the Texas ID verification law are compliant with the 1st amendment. It didn't touch on whether or not Texas can enforce its laws on entities that don't do business in Texas.
IANAL, but it seems like things are already moving in this direction. For example, FL has a similar state law regarding pornography, and the response from many porn sites has been to comply or block FL IPs rather than fight it up to the supreme court. I guess someone will do it eventually, but I suspect there is an assumption that they'd be wasting their time and money to do so.
Yeah I don't think a business is going to try to force the issue when a geoblock is simple to implement. If it happens, it's probably going to be some kind of advocacy group pushing it.
Isn't this covered by the "full faith and credit" clause? [0]
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S1-1/AL...
Technically anything is possible with the Calvinball Supreme Court, but states can choose not to extradite their citizens. E.g. NY has a shield law for abortion doctors.
https://ag.ny.gov/resources/organizations/police-departments...
This feels helpful, but puts a big burden on the person targeted. I live in California; let's say I run afoul of this Tennessee law and am criminally prosecuted.
California decides this is bullshit and won't extradite me to Tennessee. Great. The article mentions that 20-odd states are implementing similar laws (though most offer only civil penalties, not criminal). Let's say I want to visit friends in New York. I get on a plane, and the plane flies over one of those other states with shitty laws. They've decided to help Tennessee with their shitty-law enforcement, see that my name is on a passenger list of a flight crossing that state's airspace, and they require my plane divert to a local airport so they can arrest me.
Ok, maybe states can't do that? But I still have to be careful how I fly; I have to only take direct flights, or be very careful as to which connecting airports I allow in my itineraries. I have to hope that all my flights go smoothly, and that my flights never have issues that require them to divert to an airport in a state with shitty laws.
This still sucks for people who don't have to live in states with these garbage laws.
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We've banned this account.
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Or now is a good time to build privacy tools into everything.
Unfortunately, this is the law we're talking about. Privacy tools don't do much to mitigate the hardships of life as a fugitive.
> especially if the judge finds the text in question particularly or personally offensive.
Pro-censorship advocates will venue shop to find a sympathetic court
This is presently happening in China with homosexual literature: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c056nle2drno
Rural police departments decide that a piece of text 'harmed' one of their residents and prosecute the author.
Judges are not the people that prosecute crimes
True, but it's a given that prosecutors will do it since that's their job.
There was a NYT article a couple weeks ago about Chinese morality police doing mass arrests of erotica authors,
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/world/asia/china-boys-lov... ("Chinese Police Detain Dozens of Writers Over Gay Erotic Online Novels") [note article contains large images of erotica novel covers]
But you'd *expect* that of the PRC; the US, wow, has it ever fallen fast and fallen hard.
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With random lawsuits as a sort of offhand censorship of <thing you dont personally like>..??
Its the parents job to curate access to the inernet. I say that as a father of three.
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Yes, I believe that ten year olds should only have parent-supervised interactions with the internet.
Why is it everyone else's responsibility to keep it out of the hands of 10 year olds by being 24/7 surveilled by the government, instead of the parents' responsibility to regulate internet access for their 10-year old?
Not that gay erotica seems that harmful, even for a 10 year old. They probably don't seek it out as much as you thing they do. If they do, it is probably a beneficial step in their development given what they learn about themselves in a safer environment than the probable alternative.
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> I pray that you will find God and recover from whatever trauma you have been through.
This is not an acceptable comment on HN, as it's a disguised personal attack. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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> Fucking troll.
That comment was unacceptable and I replied to them to say so, but it's also not OK to comment like this on HN, no matter what you're replying to. If we want others to be better we need to be better ourselves.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Because just like the argument with social media in my opinion it’s better to have governmental regulation on these things so millions of households don’t have to have the same argument with their kids and kids not on social media platforms don’t get left out of a significant percentage of teenage life effectively socially stunting them.
Millions of households talking about this stuff with their kids, setting rule and boundaries and punishments, is exactly what should happen. That is literally what parenting is, and every parent must do it. Pushing that responsibility to the state is not only lazy, it's anathema to a free society. Your children will grow up to be robots who only know how to do what an authority figure tells them to do.
In my opinion it shouldn’t. If 75% of kids are using social media it’s very hard to make the argument that your kid shouldn’t have a smartphone since your kid will argue that you are making them a social pariah (and rightfully so).
As a society we collectively tell kids they can’t have destructive, addictive substances until they’re a certain age and I believe social media and smartphones belong in that category.
We have to implement a stronger surveillance state because... you don't like the idea of other people's kids using the internet?
No, it is not better for children to grow up in a fucking Orwellian dystopia just because you have hang-ups about sex.
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But that is US law, as of literally just this week!
> "In fact, under the laws that the Supreme Court just upheld, prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site."
No, that's not the law in the U.S. That's the article writer fearmongering about an imagined state of the law that doesn't exist in the U.S., and still wouldn't exist even after this SCOTUS ruling.
I think that's the point of the article. The Supreme Court has Ruled:
So, while I agree that this feels foreign and wrong to me as someone who has experienced "The Internet" for so long, I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works.
I'm asking this in good faith.
Given that:
1. The Internet is not an optional subscription service today the way it was in 1995. Every kid and adult has 1,000 opportunities to get online including on the multiple devices every one of their peers owns, which a single set of parents has no control over. So "Just keep them off the Internet/control their devices" seems like a silly "Just" instruction.
2. The Internet is nearly infinite. The author of this editorial says "then install a content blocker on your kids’ devices and add my site to it". This is a silly argument since the whole point is that no one has ever heard of him/her and it's obviously impossible for a filter (let's just assume filters can't be bypassed) can "just" enumerate every inappropriate site even if it employed a full-time staff who did nothing but add new sites to the list all day long.
So given all of that, how do we justify how the Internet must operate on different rules than the offline world does? One can't open a "Free adult library" downtown and allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn. I'd have to check IDs and do my best to keep kids out. It also seems like it would be gross to do so. If you agree with that, why should the Internet operate on different rules?
I'd also like to separate the logistics from the morality here. If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! But then the focus should be on finding a good privacy-respecting solution, not just arguing for the status quo.
Flip it on its head.
An age verification requirement might stop your 12-year-old from accessing a porn site headquartered or hosted in the US, but it will do nothing to keep your kid from finding porn on any of the thousands (tens of thousands? more?) of websites hosted in various other countries who don't care about this sort of thing.
These sites are (or will be, if US-based sites become inaccessible) just as easy to find, and just as hard to block with normal parental-controls style content blocking.
Requiring age verification in the US doesn't solve the problem. It just stifles free speech and turns us even more into a Christian nanny-state. The people pushing these laws don't care about children, in reality. They care about banning pornography in the US, and this is one step on that road.
> If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true!
That's not the issue. The issue is that it's impossible to achieve the stated goal (making it impossible or even hard for children to access adult content), period. Whether or not the age-verification is done in a privacy-preserving manner is irrelevant.
There are two ways to "solve" this problem. One is better parental controls, but this will always be a cat-and-mouse game, and will never be perfect. The other is to accept that your kids will sometimes see things that you don't want them to see. That's how the world has always worked, and will continue to always work. Be there for them to provide context and support when they run across these things by accident and are confused or upset, and punish when they seek it out against the rules and boundaries you've set for them. You know... be a parent, and parent them.
Are they actually just as hard to block though? e.g. I don't see much reason to allow traffic to any Russian or Chinese IPs for any reason from my network. To be honest a default blacklist to any non-American IP seems like it'd not cause much trouble for my family, and then if there were some educational or FOSS or whatever sites in Europe, those could be whitelisted on a case by case basis.
Similarly the only expected VPN traffic in my network would be inbound to my wire guard server/router. Everything else can be banned by default.
Blocking every country outside the US is simply admitting failure here.
How so? Why would I not default filter e.g. Iran or Chad or El Salvador or most of the world on my home network? I can always unblock a specific IP if needed, but chances are that will never happen.
My kids aren't old enough for computers yet, but I'm mostly of the mindset that a whitelist or curated offline cache (at least for anything on the web) is the sanest approach for younger kids. Outside of .gov, .edu, a handful of discussion forums, and stuff not relevant to them like shopping/banking, there's honestly not a lot of utility to the web. If they end up interested in programming, reference material can be kept offline, libraries downloaded through a proxy repository, etc.
> I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works.
From a different angle: many people went into the web in disagreement with how the physical world is managed.
Those who were good at politics also tried to improve the offline rules, but not everyone can.
From that POV, opposing the application of irl biggotery into the online world isn't some illogical or whimsical move. They tried to make a better world for the likes of them, and in a way you're using the success of the platform to explain why they're not welcome anymore.
I'd be sympathetic to your logic if it was for the betterment of the online world, but IMHO it surely isn't and we're looking at bullies expanding irl power to crush other platforms as well.
Nitpick: currently in the US, most public libraries do not regulate anyone, of any age, from reading “adult” books.
They wont allow minors to take out porn. Simply, they wont and it would be illegal for them.
I think the point they were making is that a child can walk into a library, pick up any book, and open it. All without any adults being in the loop. They can do that today.
You can read a book without taking it out.
What public libraries have porn?
Or is it the pearl clutching where a novel with a same-sex kiss is smut? What about all of the graphic acts that happen in the Bible?
10 year old me definitely checked out the Clan of the Cavebear books and similar from my local library, no one cared.
My idea of a hot date was looking up dirty words in the unabridged dictionary.
RE Point 1. All it takes is one of those other peers' parents to allow them to view pornography and then that kid just becomes the porn-distributor for the school, just like some kids in my day passed around porno mags. In essence, nothing changes for the kids, but every single adult is at best inconvenienced and at worst at risk of government invasion of their privacy. Not worth doing, imo.
RE Point 2. They could just use a whitelist instead of a blacklist/filter. They exist already, after all. Fill it up with sites showing the wholesome version of the world you want your child exposed to and they can only visit those places.
> I'd also like to separate the logistics from the morality here. If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! But then the focus should be on finding a good privacy-respecting solution, not just arguing for the status quo.
I like this point. I feel like the tech community just figured politicians would forget about the issue. Instead of working together to develop a solution.
Are you assuming the "tech community" doesn't have the right to argue this on morality and thus refuse to provide technical means ?
No. The tech community absolutely has the right to refuse to provide technical means and argue any views they want.
However we're seeing what happens next. Politicians write laws anyway forcing the tech community to do what they want.
I am just saying that in hindsight a bit of cooperation may have resulted in a less privacy invasive solution. I guess with the supreme court ruling it's too late now. The politicians have already won.
The fundamental problem—and it's a big one—is that in the physical world, age verification does not result in a centralized log of when and where I was, and what I did. If I buy cigarettes I show my paper id to some dude and then buy smokes. It's transient with no record (except the fallible memory of the bloke doing the ID check).
This is not true for the proposed age verification schemes for the internet and that is a big problem. Unless this is solved, these schemes deserve every level of resistance we can muster.
Pot shops in legal states are compiling databases with their compliance CRM systems.
Pot industry needs to anonymize their customer records or stop using SaaS packaged solutions.
Now if China hacks Meadows or something, they have customer and purchase lists which may include security cleared personnel who can now be blackmailed.
If you run a pot shop, or an SaaS solution for them like Meadows, you really have to figure out how to divorce customer PII from purchases.
I am back to the black market in Oregon for this reason!
That's not even universally true, though. I've been to bars where they scan the barcode on my drivers' license. I assume that's more convenient than reading the data off it, so maybe they're just doing it for convenience and aren't storing the data anywhere, but who knows, maybe they are. Maybe there's a database somewhere with a list of name, date, time, location tuples for some of my bar visits from years ago. Creepy.
Yeah, grocery stores swipe ids too. Thankfully I’m too old, they don’t ask. Have to teach kids to not allow it. Definitely stored.
If we cannot handle age verification then WTF are we doing as an industry? Seriously? Everyone else is able to figure it out! Why are all the genius innovators so powerless to build a working system? They're either stupid or greedy IMO.
Age verification is easy. Age verification that leaves no record, is anonymous, and not circumvent-able is difficult. In the physical world it relies on the fallibility of human memory. No such luck with replicated databases.
An id card is a bearer token.
You can get an anonymous, cryptographically signed, certified legal bearer token confirming your age only, or identity or whatever by a centralized service, be it government or high trust private organizations who need to verify your identity anyway like banks. With some smarts you can probably make such a token yourself so the root bearer token issuer doesn’t have the one you use to browse pornhub.
Which inevitably can be deanonymized after a simple law change, mandating the required data to be reported.
Site generates random key
Key and verification passed to verifier
Verified list is published
Site pulls list and checks its number has been verified
Site doesn’t know who it is, and verifier doesn’t know which site was verified against
How do you prove that the generated key by the site is actually randomly generated? I certainly don't trust a random porn site to do this right.
If the verified list is tied against identity, there is only a simple law change required to de-anonymize everything.
Doesn’t really matter surely, you only need to trust the identity provider not to leak your identity and your porn provider not to have a key that your identity provider can link to.
We can’t do it because our priority as an industry is to get data to monetise. Anonymity is a bug, not a feature.
...Who is accurately and reliably doing age verification online?
How can you guarantee that the credential you're getting belongs to the actual person on the other side of the screen?
> allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn
As far as I'm aware, online sites generally don't let children wander in either. One of the reasons being they will make a mess of the cabling.
That's obviously in jest, but the point is that physical presence is the entire crux here. When entering a physical space, you do so with a physical body that society has demanded be able to be identified. And age can often be determined without even fully verifying identification, which is why our society has been so accepting of age checks.
The Internet has flourished precisely because of the foundation where one does not need to be identified. In fact one does not even need to be human, nor accessing a digital service the way the publisher intends. Separation of concerns. This has worked for what, 30 years at this point? An entire generation? If parents are still buying their kids hardcore pornography terminals these days, they've got no one to blame but themselves. And no, I do not care that "everybody else is doing it".
Ultimately, the "logistics" cannot be separated from the "morality" - it is a different type of space, and the moral thing to do is engage with it as it is, instead of demanding centralizing authoritarian changes.
These demands are from a narrow contingent of people that could straightforwardly build their own desired environment (the content blocking you've referenced as a straw man, or more accurately kid-friendly content curation), but yet have not done so. Because ultimately these types of calls are never actually about "the kids" but rather a general desire to insert themselves as morality police into everyone's business.
I would say the best option, if there absolutely must be age verification etc., would be to have a registry of sites that comply with all regulations and by default devices shouldn't access sites off that list. Basically a giant allolist for verified good sites. The internet is already effectively shrunk to less than a dozen sites for regular users, so this won't impact them, and the rest of us can have real free speech and unregulated internet back by switching DNS servers or some similar trivial change.
Or we move everything not meant for the sanitised internet to TOR hidden services.
As the OP gets at halfway through:
> Republicans are now labeling anything and everything that has to do with sex, and LGBT+ issues, as “pornography” and “obscene” and “harmful to minors.”
The pornography ban is a red herring. These people will never actually ban pornography, because they consume pornography. Any "ban" they may impose will always conveniently ignore their consumption of pornography they deem personally acceptable.
The real goal is (re)criminalizing the LGBTQ+ demographic. SCOTUS has been chipping away at those old laws for decades, much to the chagrin of people whose power comes from harming LGBTQ+ persons/treating them as scapegoats. It's why these newer laws are so vague, and why they allow cross-state civil actions: it's to criminalize LGBTQ+ people wholesale, and shove them all back into a closet somewhere.
If this was actually about porn on the internet, they'd be demanding Playboy get shut down, or PornHub. They're not, because it's not about pornography. It's about sharing HRT tips with trans youth, it's about saying "gay is okay" on a personal website. It's about associating anything other than heterosexuality with "porn", criminalizing it, and thus criminalizing the populace.
Full stop.
One of the key tenants of fasicsm is laws that protect the in group, but does not bind them, and laws that bind the out group but does not protect them.
In other words, rules for thee, but not for me.
Everyone needs to be familair with the 14 points of fascism. https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
Tenets.
A tenant is somebody who has a lease, for example to an apartment or one of those big metal sheds for a supermarket, and by analogy, customers of something like Microsoft's "Entra ID" (what was "Azure Active Directory" at least the new name is less confusing)
A tenet is a belief or principle that you believe in absolutely, I think we'd say that this "protects but does not bind / binds but does not protect" idea isn't a tenet of Fascism but instead an observable trait.
Thank you for that, I've been looking for a decent pre-AI/Non-wikipedia summary like that. Unsurprisingly but depressingly, at least 13 out of 14 points are a perfect match.
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In agreement, just to nitpick a single point:
> These people will never actually ban pornography, because they consume pornography.
Banning porn won't affect them: mainstream porn will find a way (dealing with rulings will just be a cost of business).
And more than anything, making it technically illegal allows for selective enforcement, which means a lot more power for them to decide who wins and who loses.
The obscene things in the Bible should be banned as well. Have their cake and eat it. Scan an ID that you are 18 to view the Bible.
Bible as a whole should be banned, same as religion or at least the “old” religion. Worshiping things. This is what I legitimately don’t understand in 2025
It happened a few times https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65794363
The Great Bible Battle
https://archive.md/60QZV
This is not the gotcha people think it is. Bible thumpers only pay attention to a few sections of the new testament anyways.
Indeed. They prefer the brutal Old Testament God instead.
Which is funny because Biblical scholars have been pretty clear that the coming of Jesus wipes out all that stuff. It is called the New Covenant.
They would be really mad if they actually read the statements Jesus said about greed.
Nope. Phyllis Schlafly's son Andrew (Phyllis is the woman who more or less single handedly ensured the ERA didn't pass, persuading American women that somehow they didn't even want equality) ran (still runs maybe?) a web site where among other things he "re-translates" the Bible so that e.g. Jesus's preaching is "Properly" translated to mean whatever it is suits his worldview.
Religion is about believing things you have no evidence for, that's its whole thing.
Let's state it even more plainly: It's about being able to criminalize anything they don't like. Laying infrastructure for surveillance and censorship; an effort which has taken many forms and attempts through the decades.
Ironically, it's the same right wing folks who so vehemently resist effective computerization of gun registration info, because of how they believe such systems can be abused.
> much to the chagrin of people whose power comes from harming LGBTQ+ persons/treating them as scapegoats.
To their "chagrin?" Huh? The meaning of the word is the opposite of whatever you're trying to communicate, I think.
These people will never actually ban pornography,
That's what I used to say about Roe v. Wade. "They'll never give up that wedge issue."
They never banned abortions for themselves, just made it more difficult to get if you’re not getting an “acceptable” one (i.e. have the money to go where it’s legal or have a private family doctor who can make Bastard Fetus go bye-bye).
You can see how this model worked in Ireland for example.
Historically Abortion was literally prohibited constitutionally in the Republic. That changed†, one of my friends lived there at the time and she's got a picture somebody made (painted? sketched?) on her wall of the group watching the results come in. But for most of my life, abortion was absolutely illegal in the Republic of Ireland.
So, if you were poor, too bad no abortions, they're illegal. But if you're wealthy you just decide to "go on holiday", maybe a long weekend somewhere nice - and miraculously while abroad you stop being pregnant. No problem
†https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-sixth_Amendment_of_the_...
> These people will never actually ban pornography
Not sure how one can say that with a straight face when there are US states that literally block pornhub, but okay.
> If this was actually about porn on the internet, they'd be demanding Playboy get shut down, or PornHub. They're not
...
You have it backwards, Pornhub preemptively blocked access based on geolocation before the bills even passed.
So Pornhub hates money and traffic?
Of course not. Pornhub blocked these IP because they knew it was going to be (and is now) illegal in those states, at least at its current form. I see it no different from said states banning Pornhub.
Pornhub did it in protest[1], hope this helps.
[1] https://www.abc4.com/news/tech-social-media/pornhub-blocks-a...
The bills still passed so what's your point? The protest failed.
That you have it backwards, because you do. Pornhub preemptively blocked states that were considering implementing ID rules, and states are not actively blocking Pornhub.
You don't seem to grasp the argument.
From above:
> These people will never actually ban pornography
> Not sure how one can say that with a straight face when there are US states that literally block pornhub, but okay
You then say, well actually they weren't blocked by the states, they were blocked by the sites themselves to protest a bill that passed.
The issue is this clarification is totally irrelevant given the context of the above comment.
The root comment claims in this domain, the right wing is targeting "anything other than heterosexuality". Not sure what their evidence of that claim is. I would think anyone with even a basic familiarity re the right-wing American culture warrior would know this isn't the case. They are simply following the standard far right modus operandi, which is to start their cultural attack on the most vulnerable at the margins where it is easiest.
Similarly, passing age verification is essentially a strategy to enact an effective ban, because it is a demand that cannot be met and is easier to pass than an outright ban. So the comment suggesting it's not serious to suggest this is simply or _only_ about "anything other than heterosexuality" is correct, or at least, not impeached by your conclusion they have it backwards by essentially hyperfocusing on some rather irrelevant pornsite protest tactic which entirely misses the point. If anything, the fact they passed the bills after the self initiated “bans” simply bolsters the rejoinder to the root comment.
Here's the OP I'm responding to:
> Not sure how one can say that with a straight face when there are US states that literally block pornhub, but okay.
Note the word "literally" in the statement that US state are literally blocking Pornhub.
That is not the case. Pornhub blocked the states preemptively, not the other way around.
Hope this helps.
I get it and yes, you are technically correct that they are not "literally blocking" it. I just hope you can also see where I'm coming from. In context of the larger comment thread your reply felt like a nitpick that missed the point, and focused on that nitpick to the detriment of the larger point of that OP, which imo has some merit. Or at least some merit you didn't address. But I understand you are correct on this particular point. As a suggestion, maybe next time you could reply more as providing context rather than seeming to suggest their entire take was "backwards". Thanks for replying.
Thanks. Can't put it as eloquently myself.
Note that pornography is not banned here in Texas at least. You just have to provide age verification, and PH elected not to participate in that process. It doesn’t seem like that wild a thing at face value.
Breaking news: VPN stocks skyrocket.
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I can guess which, and I implore you to do some reading from actual medical professionals and groups on this.
And if you’re still opposed to it, the solution is regulation - not criminalization.
> I implore you to do some reading from actual medical professionals and groups on this.
Reading their comment charitably, one might want the trans youth to also get their information from actual medical professionals and groups rather than random internet strangers.
Analogously, sharing information about DIY at-home abortions with people on the internet is also dangerous as hell and will hurt people. In the world we currently live in it may be better than the alternative, but in a better world both of those are not pieces of information that anyone should need to find online.
I think your comment would be well served by adding some reasons why.
Because kids are impressionable and easily manipulated.
It's why there is an age of consent that no kid can waive.
It's why kids aren't allowed to do lots of things, like vote, drive, drink etc.
There needs to be a compelling reason to make an exception for one politically charged thing that comes with irreversible physical changes.
There also needs to be a compelling reason why that decision cannot be deferred until age of majority.
the child can't consent to medical procedures without a parent, today, and if the parent says no, the decision is deferred until the age of majority.
> he child can't consent to medical procedures without a parent, today, and if the parent says no, the decision is deferred until the age of majority.
What does the parent's opinion have to do with it? Their opinion is equally ignored when it comes to statutory rape, no?
This is not a "this is a private matter between the child and the parent" scenario. Some things are, but a clear majority of people do not feel that this should be one of those things.
Convincing and teaching minore to synthesize hormones which will chemically castrate themselves / make them infertile and cause permanent non reversible damage to their bodies, how to use those hormones, how to hide it from their parents. These are all bad things, and the people who do so should be in prison. If I taught kids how to make weapons secretly and told them to use them, I would go to jail.
It appears you and I have different definitions of “sharing HRT tips”.
Because youths don't have developed critical thinking skills and HRT is an invasive medical treatment!?
Putting aside that MDs trained in medical ethics should be the ones to decide the end-all debate of HRT for those under 18y/o (or maybe 24 by your standard) -- I would imagine "tips" here is mostly about logistics of navigating the US health system and filling in health-effect anecdotes where science has yet to affirm/study (which encompasses more areas of health than you might think). Also, "Invasive" and "non-invasive" are usually reserved for surgical contexts so I'm not sure I would apply that here.
Zero kids are getting HRT without their parents consent, don’t spread transphobic FUD
It's not about the kids of their parents, it's about other parties that are promoting or encouraging HRT to other people's kids.
Because kids are highly impressionable and have limited ability to make sound judgements?
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Nobody should be sharing insulin “tips” with other people’s children?
Do you apply this rule to all medications, or just ones you’re offended by?
Setting aside trans issues - plenty of non-trans kids are in hormones or puberty blockers for a wide variety of reasons. Should they be blocked from discussing them online?
One treatment saves lives, other “treatment” essentially shortens your lifespan, and most likely causing you to never have kids again. How are people ok with this I don’t get it and how are people ok with letting KIDS making such life changing decision is I don’t get too.
Given how many trans kids commit suicide when prevented from transitioning, i’d say both save lives. And that’s why i’m ok with it. Because going on puberty blockers until you’re 18 seems like a very non-invasive way to thread the needle of patient care for minors
The recent UK Cass Review concluded "It has been suggested that hormone treatment reduces the elevated risk of death by suicide in this population, but the evidence found did not support this conclusion."
Do you have any counter-evidence?
Not the person you were replying to, but the Cass review was quite clearly bunk. Its main thrust is essentially: "there are no double blind studies on the effects of affirming care for minors, so we should stop prescribing it immediately". Aside from the fact that the conclusion does not follow from the premise, how exactly could one do a double blind study on puberty blockers? So the report throws out essentially the entire body of research for failing to meet an impossible to meet standard.
Here's more information: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12874-025-02581-7
Yes: the cass review is very badly done and misinterprets the data available.
So you have no counter evidence?
If you actually wanted counter evidence I'm sure you could find it yourself. There's enough of it out there.
So, what is it that you're actually looking for?
>One treatment saves lives, other “treatment” essentially shortens your lifespan, and most likely causing you to never have kids again.
The older I get, the more I understand people who prefer quality of life, over longevity.
I always wonder if these arguments are ever made in good faith. Comparing a treatment for diabetes to HRT. But there are people who really are off the deep end. So who knows.
Made in good faith. And HRT is very rarely given to minors. The standard of care is puberty blockers until their 18.
Question about your good faith:
Do you have a problem with puberty blockers when given to non-trans kids? I.e. for precocious puberty
Yes, it should apply to all medical treatments targeted at children, since children don't have developed critical thinking skills.
Do you think it's appropriate for random people to tell a 10 year old how to take their insulin? I don't.
I agree, but it can go too far as well. It's not healthy for children to be limited to knowing only their parents' and the government's opinions on serious topics. There has to be a balance between avoiding indoctrination and being aware of brain development schedule.
I somewhat agree, but exposure to global online content is hardly natural in terms of brain development.
And if doctors develop treatment plans for trans children its ok?
I mean at least you’re consistent - even if you want to ban diabetics from chatting about their care online.
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You’re right that they consume porn, but plenty of them still want to ban it, and not just because of LGBTQ. It’s all about moralistic virtue signaling by immoral people.
The irony of course are stats like these.
From "Data Finds Republicans are Obsessed with Searching for Transgender Porn"[1]:
> So far in 2022, more than 300 anti-LGBT bills have been proposed across 36 states – at least one third of which are directed at trans youth. This surge, especially in anti-trans legislation from Republicans, stands in stark contrast to a startling fact.
> Republicans love transgender porn, a lot.
> With more than 4.7 Million transgender porn related Google searches each month (per Ahrefs.com), do Republicans represent those searching most? The answer seems to be a clear yes.
[1] https://lawsuit.org/general-law/republicans-have-an-obsessio...
I urge all American software engineers not just to completely ignore these unconstitutional laws, but to actively create, distribute and maintain technologies which defend Americans' rights to publish obscene filth without government oversight.
If the Supreme Court agrees they are constitutional then they clearly are constitutional, unless you think the constitution doesn’t apply
The Supreme Court considered internment camps and segregation constitutional, until it didn’t.
There are also people who disagree with the Supreme Court’s interpretations. Including members of the Supreme Court! Both current (dissents) and not (overturning past rulings.)
Let's not pretend that the current federal government isn't completely compromised.
We've drifted pretty far from the Constitution and what the Founders envisioned.
The reinterpretation of the Commerce Clause was the start of a downward spiral.
I'm hoping the Convention of States will succeed and fix this, even if it means rebuilding many institutions at the State level.
> I'm hoping the Convention of States will succeed and fix this, even if it means rebuilding many institutions at the State level.
Amendments proposed by a convention would still need to be ratified by 38 states. That's a pretty high bar for what you're suggesting.
>the Convention of States
when will that happen?
Not really. The Supreme Court believes some rulings to be wrong the day they were decided:
> “The dissent’s reference to Korematsu, however, affords this Court the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: *Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided*, has been overruled in the court of history, and to be clear ‘has no place in law under the Constitution,’” Roberts said, quoting Justice Jackson’s 1944 dissent.
Why would I dedicate time to improving lives of people who actively want to destroy themselves?
Two hundred and fifty years of jurisprudence would suggest there has never been a right to obscenity.
Two-hundred and fifty years of piwertripping lawyers with their heads up their own asses, ignoring the plain text of the constitution.
Tor might be wildly popular in a few years.
Tor doesn't protect against traffic correlation last I checked.
Mixnets/Nym are better for actual privacy.
(I've not audited Nym, not an endorsement)
A bit of a rant on the topic of digital supervision and age verification:
Speaking personally, parent supervision was detrimental to my development as a child. I recently reached the liberation of legal adulthood. While my parents are often sweet, their intents did not always have the desired consequences given how they were enforced. Until I was around 15, I didn't have any computer I was able to freely tinker with, which wasn't constantly supervised and constantly logged my every action. I wasn't allowed to touch a shell. This was troublesome for me, because I was a computer science enthusiast, and my parent did not want me to learn about programming. If I had developer tools open, or if it seemed like I was running a script, I would get questions. I was pretty much restricted to using Scratch (which has a fantastic underground community!). Yes, I spent quite a bit of time on my computer. In my defense, I didn't have any friends where I lived. Not that I didn't want any, I had tried, but at this point I was torted by bad experiences. My computer was my safe haven and where I had my friends. I did try to explain this, but my parent wasn't sympathetic. Expecting a joyous and present individual who should be out playing with friends, I was a failure. My parent never understood my need for digital freedom, even as it in hindsight was all I craved. This is the type of scenario I see playing out again every time I am reached by bills/news/opinions like these. If my parent had put half of the energy they use to keep me bound into supporting my personal development and our relation, things could have been very different. Instead, I became very good at avoiding filters, supervision and going unnoticed. It's quite a sore to me. I sympathise deeply with all the children who had a similar upbringing, who are going to suffer under the regulations in development, both in the US and in the EU.
Obviously, there’s a difference between access to programming materials and the unethical majority of the internet.
I had access to the former at about 12 but no access to the internet until age ~23. Was about perfect.
When did you grow up?
I think people are putting far too much of an ideological lens on this ruling. As a "matter of law" this seems like the right decision. The supreme court is not a board of dictators making societal decisions based on their flavor of the day. Their job is too see if the ruling is consistent with all other laws we have and the normal function of a modern society. Pushing the envelope one way or another is not their job even if they end up doing that. At the end of the day the (elected) state governments have decided to create a policy that reflects what their constituents want. The supreme court job is not to question the logic of that. They did not run for office or win elections. They just need to make sure that what being done is reasonable and not violating any existing laws. As a tech guy I think these laws are stupid but this case was not the right hill to die on. What needs to happen is that these laws get enacted, costs and unintended consequences happen and THOSE parties sue on the supreme court on that basis
That Tennessee law is particularly crazy:
> (a) Pubic hair, vulva, vagina, penis, testicles, anus, or nipple of a human body
Naked bodies do not harm anyone. This is US puritanism at its peek. Glad the author also pointed out the hypocrisy of treating nudity as more obscene than violence.
Interestingly (and I suppose fairly?) the law doesn't seem to make a distinction between male and female nipples. So an image of a shirtless man violates this just as much as an image of a shirtless woman.
I also noticed that! Certainly speaks of the intelligence of the people who write these laws :)
This article is incorrect.
The Supreme Court’s ruling only applied to obscene sexual material. It doesn’t apply to sex scenes within artistic works or sexual content in general.
There’s a test used to determine whether sexual material is considered pornographic. It’s known as the “I know it when I see it” test.
More info on this test here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
More specifically here is what is considered obscene:
The criteria were:
1. whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
2. whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, as specifically defined by applicable state law;
3. whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
The third criterion pertains to judgment made by "reasonable persons" of the United States as a whole, while the first pertains to that of members of the local community. Due to the larger scope of the third test, it is a more ambiguous criterion than the first two.
The article is, in fact, correct.
Community standards vary by community, both physically and digitally. The community standards of a rural town in Utah or ChristianDating.net are likely to be wildly different than the community standards of a major city on the coastlines or PornHub users. This wrinkle is exactly why there's renewed efforts to define what obscenity legally is [1], so that it's inclusive of as much "porn" as possible.
Additionally, you're conveniently ignoring what the author spends most of their piece decrying: the fact that these laws permit "ambulance chasing" attorneys to sue across state lines. That's the real issue, especially given the fact that some state laws can allow civil action to lead to prison time for conviction. Even ignoring the potential outcomes however, these lawsuits are instantly bankrupting for a majority of Americans, and the laws so (intentionally) broadly written that even genuinely innocent parties are likely to fork over money to make it go away given the cost of mounting a defense.
Put simply: obscenity lacks a firm legal definition, the definition of porn is nebulous and variable from person to person, and these laws are written to maximize harm to a maximal population size. The intent is to criminalize as many undesirables as possible, and the current administration and political parties have been transparent that anyone not rich, white, straight, Christian, and cisgendered male are emphatically undesirable.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/167...
As an ambulance chaser, I can assure you that suing out of state defendants for out of state activity has become nearly impossible. See Daimler AG v. Bauman (2014), BNSF Railway Co. v. Tyrrell (2017), Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court (2017), Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District (2021), Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co. (2023)
Sounds like the article isn’t incorrect? The first two criteria depend on which community is doing the judging. New Yorkers will have à different norm than people from say a quaint 5k-person town where there’s an 8:1 church:supermarket ratio. The third criteria is vague, but vagueness cuts both ways.
Who defines an artistic work? If I produce a porn film, why isn't that my artistic commentary on sex? Laws cant be this subjective because subjectivity implies subjectivity in ruling which is objectively awful.
The jury
In the legal sense, a judge would.
That’s an issue
Yes, I know
Ah nvm, you sounded supportive.
The article would seem correct since "obscene" could be twisted to mean whatever they want. As the people making the ruling can say the average person believes x.
kissing is obscene :)
In many cultures, it is. Especially kissing in the public.
The article sounds very correct.
Anything can be perceived as “obscene” especially when you leave that interpretation open to any particular group.
A man in drag is considered obscene by some people.
Same as it ever was. The government has been congenitally unable to strike a rational balance between free speech vs indecency statutes. "I know it when I see it" has been a meme since 1964 when it was written by the Supreme Court. In handing control of that balance over to the states, the federal government is just giving up. But it won't work. The issue still needs to be resolved. We're going to see many, many, many more Supreme Court cases on indecency vs free speech.
That is because the false balance is complete bullshit. Free speech means free speech. Obscenity is just special pleading "but it is icky!". The same thing has been happening for centuries. They came across a good idea as a foundational principle and the dumb fuckers wearing dresses we call judges refuse to see it. They then prove that they are all lawyers by constructing elaborate rationalizations. They also did the same thing to the Fourteenth ammendment's equal protection under the law working as grounds barring corruption and injustice.
We've had kids accessing an Internet without any working age barriers for over 30 years now.
There have been problems, be that grooming, Facebook parties and maybe addiction to TikTok.
But being able to access adult content be that sexual or violent in nature doesn't really seem to have had much negative consequences.
Sure I wouldn't want my 10 year old to see 2 girls 1 cup - but I reckon it wouldn't be the end of the world if he did.
It's good that we have content recommendations. But we shouldn't try to actually enforce them.
Again: with all the options kids have had for accessing porn online in the last couple of decades, if it was actually THAT bad, we'd be having an epidemic. Yet we don't. The kids are alright
Its really sad to see this getting attacked, now, after all that's transpired, after so many years. You'd think if it was that dire, again maybe 10 years in there would have been more action. But again its not genuine, so its really about the ulterior motives. Not even to mention the 1st amendment issues, which again don't just magically dissapear when a bunch of people stick to party lines.
Alas, we are in an age of hyper over-regulation though and this is just another example. I could come up with countless others in wildly different fields which have one astonishing commonality. That business has been running fine for ages and all of a sudden, we need to regulate.
Content restrictions should just be an option with the ISP: to make the entire modem/phone disable adult content and/or require age verification. This, I would disable (presuming `on` by default).
>2 girls 1 cup
I still remember showing that to curious ladies in grad school (who'd heard about it); some of my favorite reaction footage.
>10 years old
My generation's equivalent was lemonparty.com
=>O<=
[flagged]
Let's blind all kids. Anyone who is opposed must believe that a non-zero chance of a child seeing two women have sex and eat turds is normal and healthy.
If it wasn't for your fine taste in ketchup I wouldn't have any qualms about writing you off as an imbecile.
I want to believe that your lack of discernment in one area betrays what suggests sound judgment in another. Unless the latter holds true only on occasions that satisfy your gullet.
I saw that when I was little and it was just gross; I’m fine lol. My generation was the one watching cartel executions at that same time and that’s probably worse.
Who is your generation and how do you think they turned out.
No, save it (don't save it, this is rhetorical), because apparently every generation is screwed up in their own way that begets the ills of the next.
And if we happen to be cohorts (which I suspect we may be), then I think we made out as worse as any.
And is it wrong to assume that there isn't any difference between either kinds of footage? That one goads the other in either direction?
Anything you experience may push you in a direction with some magnitude, but we tend to overestimate the magnitude and mispredict the direction because we’re worried about the wellbeing of kids. Think “violent video games create school schootings.” In reality, kids have to deal with a lot of real things in life that are hard, an abusive parent or bullies at school, but those realities are harder to deal with so we distract ourselves worrying about violent video games. At the end of the day, it’s a recording on a screen, which is very different from a traumatic reality because you can just turn it off.
I'll offer the following speculation:
Virtual reality simulates physical reality.
In some cases, like violent video games, they assuage traumas. Whether it's a recording on a screen or not, can our brains tell the difference?
Something is going on, spooky and subtle in the mind that makes whatever is on the screen meaningful to us.
I don't want to get us trapped in this false interpretation that in the year 2025 there is a difference between how human beings are affected in the physical and digital world. To be frank, it's stupid to think like this, meaning that it's an insult to the intelligence of the person who thinks this way and it needs to be called out as such in order to encourage them to think critically about the matter.
If this whole interaction is just some woopdy doo, willy nilly, be that as it may sort of engagement with media, what compels us then to entertain the things that we don't (or don't want to) attribute to the hard things in life?
I'm going to assume your gender and your age to some degree here:
Middle-aged men have a tendency to Wednesday Night Sitcom Dad their way out of confronting things that bring their own vulnerabilities into question and collectively make them accountable for figuring out what to do about these things, especially if it comes at the cost of comfort that they're trying to preserve that are the accessories to their vulnerabilities.
What we're discussing isn't as simple as the "close your eyes to avoid cyberbullying" quips of yore: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tyler-the-creators-cyber-bull... (in which I make a more blatant attempt at guessing which generation you belong to and consequently expose my own).
Close: male but not middle aged
Our brains can’t tell the difference, but that’s not what I said. What I said is that it can be turned off. Social media cyberbullying comes along with entanglements that keep you on the site. For a shock video, I think the suburban dad has a point. To be clear, if someone came up to me and said they had really struggled with what they’d seen in a shock video as a kid and that it was really messing with them, I wouldn’t dismiss that or make fun of them or something. It’s just that the opposite has been my experience and the experience of those who I’m close to.
My friend (we're friends now, and that makes you middle-aged by association):
I hope it didn't seem like I was advancing premises that you never proposed outright. I was derived that premise on my own. I take full ownership of the words that you put in my mouth by the virtue of what you did say being thought-provoking.
And I ask you, if our brains can't tell the difference then what does turning it off actually achieve? If your self esteem or your sheer will to live is broken offline, going online does not solve this problem on its own. I'm speaking unconditionally and not in a way that can be made subject to circumstance.
If you feel ugly, or feel like dying, or feel anything, in a way that resonates with you at the very core of your being (and I know, I know, who's to say a supernatural "core of being" exists right?) then it's a wrap for you. It's going to take about as much effort to redeem yourself as it would if you were physically harmed in the street.
At the end, I don't think that what I'm saying is spectacular for anyone who has basic qualities of self-awareness and empathy (and I'm not saying that you're not one of them) or psychology (of which I am no savant and would even follow your lead to some extent if you have any trails to offer).
The point of contention is a matter of belief—ideologically and morally—and the depths that we're willing to go to scrutinize what gives us pleasure and why. In a way I think that this runs counterintuitive to the notions of "civil liberty" that pervade modern thought and any attempt to distinguish right from wrong on a scale greater than the individual makes the powder-wigged patriot in us quiver in our britches.
So there's that. I'm tapped.
It doesn't - rather, it attacks the preposition at it's source. Pornography is bad, supposedly, but is it actually? It seems to me we all moved on without actually answering that question.
We know it's bad for moral reasons, but moral reasons are stupid and I don't trust them. But is it actually bad - like in the real world, with tangible effects, not made-up ones? I don't know, and it looks like you don't know, and OP doesn't know, and the people who are pushing this age verification don't know either.
Sure, two girls one cup is disgusting. It's vile. It's immoral. But is it harmful? That's a different question.
That's a huge problem. You see, we're attempting to solve a problem which we haven't proved even exists.
Getting shot at school is far worse than seeing a vagina, but according to the people doing the censoring a movie featuring a vagina is a bigger problem than a violent random death.
As moral positions go, it's actually quite eccentric.
I have a feeling that this is going to turn into one of those exchanges where we capoeira around theory and definitions and what "real" is and what "real" isn't in a way I have to think that either you've lived a sheltered life, or are in denial or have some kind of resentment toward the disgusting, vile and immoral things that you've witnessed that were "harmful" to you (I'm not a therapist).
Moral reasons are stupid and you don't trust them.
Go find a ten-year-old and show them the video yourself. Then see if they feel up to letting you stick around them long enough for you to figure out whether there were any real-world, tangible effects.
What I mean by "real" is real-world, tangible.
If I drive a car without a seatbelt, that has real-world effects. I can get ejected and die, as well as hurting other people.
But pornography doesn't split my skull. It doesn't crush my fingers. It doesn't make me poorer. It doesn't make me sicker. It doesn't hurt me physically, or financially, or even socially.
I know, or at least I figured that's what you meant.
I'm not a proponent of the discipline per say, and maybe because of this, my impression that the entire field of psychology is meant to partially address the real-word, tangible effects of things that do not cause apparent physical harm is naive.
If I'm accustomed to women getting indiscriminately reamed and pinned and prodded at my own discretion—even casually—I am at a detriment.
I'm going to leave out a more accessible or agreeable example because I want to give you the benefit of the doubt that you can come up one on your own.
I don't mean to be condescending, but I want to assume that you're arguing in good faith.
Have you, or any one who you know, seen something disgusting, vile or immoral that didn't cause physical harm but had a negative consequence on how you feel about yourself or the world around you?
Why are we quick to champion the value of the "good" things that don't offer any material benefit (i.e., physically, financially, socially) but criticizing the "bad" requires graphs and groups and variables and peer reviews?
I know, and I figure that you know too. "Good" and "bad" exist in quotations marks and only count among the people who don't need them to use them with each other.
> Why are we quick to champion the value of the "good" things that don't offer any material benefit (i.e., physically, financially, socially) but criticizing the "bad" requires graphs and groups and variables and peer reviews?
To answer this, it's because of how modern societies view rights. Namely, you can do whatever you want, until we can prove it's to a detriment to other people. Before doing something, we need not prove it is good.
On an individual level, it is a very good idea to have some guarantee something is good before we do it. But on a societal level, we don't do this, and for good reason. Before we censor or restrict, we must assure we have good reasons for doing so.
> If I'm accustomed to women getting indiscriminately reamed and pinned and prodded at my own discretion—even casually—I am at a detriment.
I might agree, but sexuality and sex is very complex.
I can argue that it's not that simple, and sex exists beyond the bounds of what you do - it's part of who you are, and not much in your control.
For example, I am a homosexual, I'm gay. Naturally my sex involves anal intercourse with other men. To many, this is disgusting. Gross, unsanitary, distasteful.
My life would certainly be easier if I did not have this affliction, but simultaneously I cannot control it. I've tried, as has every gay man or boy at some point in their lives. And, I do not know what has caused it. If I never viewed pornography, ever, I am 100% confident I would still be gay.
I do not know how it works for heterosexuals, but I imagine, to some degree, their sexual proclivities are, too, not under their control. I don't think removing pornography would remove those sexual proclivities.
Many of these things can’t be “unseen,” and I wish I hadn’t.
I bet they would have found cakefarts.com hilarious! At least it delivered what the url promised, unlike expertsexchange.com, penisland.com, and therapistfinder.com.
Solution: build technologies which make government statute effectively irrelevant. It must be uncensorable even by a nation-state adversary, and must hide its users and their activities. The future is software technology designed to thwart the ability of prosecutors to introduce evidence into a court. We must fight against the state's War on Crime with everything we have; the state has abused that war for centuries to justify its expansion. Courts should only bless victims taking revenge or retribution, offer an optional institution of rehabitation and recompense that the convict can voluntarily ascend to, else if the convict chooses to be free then he's at the mercy of the victim and whatever the victim chooses to do to the convict. Court cases should not result in involuntary imprisonment but only voluntary, incentivized by not being assaulted/killed in public as an outlaw. (Elected oath taking office holders excepted, prison should be a real possibility.)
It matters more to restrain and limit the state than it does to punish bad behavior. Furthermore the state has committed countless crimes in its treatment of the customers they chose to condemn, and ought to be dissolved entirely down to the office clerk. Unfortunately, the only way that happens is law of the guillotine.
> conservative Christians are trying to eliminate ALL sexually-related speech online
I don’t really appreciate this framing. Despite being a very conservative Christian (at least in many ways, if not others) I don’t approve of or agree with the scope of SCOTUS’ current ruling, nor do I approve of all the age- verification laws as written. It seems futile to attempt to make everybody everywhere do this and create a locked-down “second internet” for minors.
But I do understand the impetus. As a zoomer, I’ve heard the problems particularly young men addicted to pornography have caused with some gal friends of mine they’ve dated. I’ve seen the normalization of what I view as degenerate sex acts as the treadmill of endlessly-escalating erotic-novelism spins without ceasing. I’ve watched people become more absorbed in their strange autosexual fixations than their spouses. It doesn’t seem good, or healthy, or sustainable, and I resent the contributions the proliferation of online pornography has made to these issues.
At some level I see this like sixties versus modern marijuana, where a more mild herb (or dad’s playboys beneath the mattress) has been supplanted by THC distilled and bottled into vapes (endlessly-available presence of any outlandish fetishistic stuff.) I wouldn’t like my child exposed to either but I can live with one.
Of course, I see it as primarily the parent’s responsibility to inculcate the virtue to disdain both. The state can’t nanny its way out of this one. But it’s always easier to pick a scapegoat that can’t vote (tax the corporations/rich, make the corporations implement age-filtering, etc.) than to tell people to take a hike and learn to parent.
You might not be pushing for it, but certainly your fellow conservative Christians are.
The problem with moralistic thinking is that it's stupid and it blows up, and we've known this for hundreds of years. What you view as moral means fuck-all. I don't particularly care if you think something is degenerate, and in fact by using a term like degenerate I respect you less as a person.
So when morals are used as the sole reason to justify law, we have a problem. Morals were used to justify slavery. To justify a lack of suffrage. To justify legal domestic abuse.
What's changed since then? Time. The passage of time. But time does not stop. Where will we be in 10 years, or 20? Progressing forward, ideally, but that's not a guarantee. We're laying the ground work for abuse.
For a large part of the American constituency, anything containing homosexuals is degenerate pornography. Right now. So if "it's pornography" is our justification, we have a problem.
I think we agree that said laws are bad, but why they're bad matters. The wider-scale implication is that moralistic law making is bad. Listening to Christians and having them come up with laws based on their personal beliefs is bad. Appealing to the American purity culture is bad. This is all ripe for abuse.
No, some of them are. More evangelicals than my crowd.
Morality bears directly on what we consider to be a just society, so I don’t care if you don’t care. You’re broadening the scope beyond this particular issue, where I’m guessing I agree with you.
It’s not virtuous to act right because the state makes you, but the question of what we require and preclude is defined by our moral frameworks at some level.
I’m not sure with whom you’re arguing about the homosexuals point. I view a lot of things of degenerate I wouldn’t ban. Most adults I see are fat, thus gluttons, thus are committing a sin. It’s just not particularly my business to meddle in what’s between them and God and Satan. I didn’t suggest we “retvrn to Comstock” or something.
I don’t see how you can ignore the massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men, particularly if you think about the marijuana analogy and how it’s increased in strength and availability. Novel hyperstimuli are a big issue. Just like supernormal stimuli tend to increase obesity and cause metabolic dysfunction.
A ton of lawmaking is moralistic. Eg the way I grew up I think it’s fine for two guys to settle something with a fight provided it’s clean and nobody’s kicking someone when he’s down. A bunch of people with different morals (“all violence is wrong”) told the cops to start arresting people for that sort of thing. I think stealing is wrong and vote to tell the cops to arrest people for that, while others (because of their morality) say that “it’s systemic factors” and turn people loose for sub-$1k or so, or sometimes don’t believe in property rights the same way I do. I don’t believe that income tax is just, nor federally-administered welfare, but a ton of people voted to tell the feds to take money and do just that.
I’m not sure how you can suddenly flip to “moralistic legislation is wrong actually” in such a selective sense just because it’s movitated by Christianity or right-wing ideology for once.
Come one man, it would be trivial for me to credibly argue that your religion has given scores of young men an absolutely dysfunctional relation to sexuality, woman, their own body, etc. Anyone could make that case as easily as your case about pornography (arguably with more proof in my case). Should we legislate both the same way?
Yes, but "his religion" is over 2000 years old and has found ways to reform itself many times to re-centre itself towards the core teachings of Jesus Christ, namely compassion and piety. The Christians who sold indulgencies are not the Christians who burned witches are not the Christians who help those in need. It has existed for twenty centuries across continents and anyone who can corrupt it effectively wields the power of God. Of course it has been used as justification for heinous acts. Pretty much anything that has existed that long and is that powerful has been used that way.
It is irrational to hate the entire religion because of select elements, past or present. You are in effect committing the same act of hatred you are accusing Christians of.
> I don’t see how you can ignore the massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men
I ignore it because I've only ever gotten responses of morality. Which, as I've said, I think are stupid.
My point about morality is that it's the same morality that oppresses homosexuals, or previously black people and women. It's not a different morality - it's the same reasoning.
Some thing is immoral because of our beliefs, so we censor it or restrict actions. Throughout history, this has only gone poorly - no exceptions. I have no reason to believe it will work out this time.
You might say, "well it hasn't always gone poorly, what about murder?" Yes, murder has morality argument, but it doesn't only have morality arguments. It has real-world effects. It denies someone of their unalienable rights, mainly by ending their lives.
Pornography only has moral arguments, which is why I reject them.
> massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men
Can you provide any source for this?
I don’t need a source to back up what I’ve consistently observed with my own eyes, and given the speed at which research sometimes move (and particularly since any concern over perceived “sexual liberation” attacks one of the sacred cows of progressivism) being a young guy who can see this firsthand gives me a pretty good perspective.
I’ve read research on this in the past that suggests it can happen. Hard to get people to fess up to that kind of thing for obvious reasons so measuring scope as a research endeavor is a little harder.
I know the research is there and has been if you’re actually interested, but I’m traveling without a laptop for the next bit and so don’t have it saved. If you’d just like to take a cheap shot because my reply (which talked about what I have observed) wasn’t eighteen peer-reviewed studies, go ahead, I guess.
What people do in their private time is none of anyone's business. Period.
Especially the government.
Did something I wrote read like I disagreed with this? What children do in their private time is their parents’ business. What children do can sometimes be the business of the state; there’s tons of precedent for it acting in loco parentis. I just don’t find this to be the best solution.
I come from a small town and know many conservative Christians. They are pushing for this. Like you said, it is easier to blame external sources than to accept you need to do better as parent.
Many of them are. I just don’t see any reason to say “I disagree with the conservative Christians pushing this” rather than “I disagree with the people who support this.” There are secular folks who also support such legislation. It hints at a generalized animus towards religion and likely in particular towards Christianity, kind of like Fox News boomers complaining Obama wouldn’t say “radical Islamic terrorism”.
I understand what you're saying but when you have Trump and his cohorts fake praying in the oval office with the support of conservative Christians who abandon all of Jesus' teachings of love and compassion and embrace Trump's hate, you might understand why people take a specific issue with that.
> I don’t really appreciate this framing.
The framing is objectively accurate. Perhaps you should reconsider the group you identify with.
Not only are you in denial about Project 2025, but also evolution, and the origin and age of the Earth and other planets and stars, and even the idea that slavery is wrong, if you actually believe what your bible says, which you're supposed to.
You, as a believer, should be policing and reforming your own religion instead of defending and evangelizing it and leaving it to us to clean up the damage to society done by your religion.
How about petitioning the Pope to amend the 10 Commandments to include a prohibition against slavery? Did you ever think of that, or wonder why there wasn't already one? Because your bible says slavery is A-OK, and I don't appreciate this framing of slavery as permissible by your bible.
How about you do something about that, since you're the one who believes it? Or are you cool with slavery since the bible condones it in so many ways, and you appreciate that framing?
Oh but apparently it's much more important to prevent people from worshiping other gods, so that certainly deserved its own Commandment, to justify all those wars and inquisitions you fought against other religions.
There are many more slaves today than ever before in history. What are you doing about adding another commandment against Slavery to your Holier Than Thou Bible, when you're not so busy defending Christianity online?
Has it ever occurred to you that a religion whose bible supports slavery is morally bankrupt and definitely not the word of God, and so are you for not either changing it or renouncing that religion? It's all made up and rewritten by people anyway, and even if you believe in God, it's not like he couldn't add an anti-slavery commandment to the bible tomorrow if he wanted to.
normalization of what I view as degenerate sex acts
Those "degenerate sex acts" were normal enough when the Bible was written that they were included in the Bible.
Most of our ancestors would regard modern Americans as hideously prudish.
Something being normal doesn’t make it right. Obesity is normal. Shoplifting has become normal in many places. People getting drunk is normal. Normalcy doesn’t equal moral rectitude.
Why do the opinions of my ancestors bear on that, and which ones are you talking about? Most of the ones I can think of, unless you run back to the days of tribal europe, would see the culture today as hideously liberalized. Regardless a lot of my ancestors probably did a lot of things I don’t think are right. Heck, I’ve done plenty of things I don’t think are right. None of that effects what actually is and isn’t morally good.
If I’m not running around telling off couples who leave the bar together, what do you care?
Alright, you seem receptive to arguments so I'll take a crack at this.
> I don’t approve of or agree with the scope of SCOTUS’ current ruling, nor do I approve of all the age- verification laws as written. It seems futile to attempt to make everybody everywhere do this and create a locked-down “second internet” for minors.
That's not the intent. The intent from the get-go has been to "Baptise" the internet as "God's creation", and to shove out anyone not worthy of God's salvation - as determined by religious leaders. When the initial argument of "the internet is a creation of Satan" didn't work out, the religious leaders in the USA pivoted towards calling it a gift from God and demonizing anyone who "sullied" that gift in their eyes.
> I’ve heard the problems particularly young men addicted to pornography have caused with some gal friends of mine they’ve dated. I’ve seen the normalization of what I view as degenerate sex acts as the treadmill of endlessly-escalating erotic-novelism spins without ceasing. I’ve watched people become more absorbed in their strange autosexual fixations than their spouses. It doesn’t seem good, or healthy, or sustainable, and I resent the contributions the proliferation of online pornography has made to these issues.
Your observations are completely valid. As someone who creates smut (let's just call it what it is), there's a very real problem with people in general getting caught up in fantasies and ignoring reality. However, my observations suggest that pornography is just the convenient scapegoat for a society that constantly markets escapism as entertainment and penalizes anything that doesn't involve spending money. All forms of entertainment have been perverted to maximize chemical responses in humans, in order to sell more stuff. Your beef isn't with pornography so much as it is with the present consumerist hellscape, and a society that demands both spouses work full-time to have a chance at survival rather than balance the needs of the family by allowing every couple to have a spouse stay at home and make the house, if they so choose. Which brings me to your next point...
> At some level I see this like sixties versus modern marijuana, where a more mild herb (or dad’s playboys beneath the mattress) has been supplanted by THC distilled and bottled into vapes (endlessly-available presence of any outlandish fetishistic stuff.) I wouldn’t like my child exposed to either but I can live with one.
That's...man, I want to argue this, but I got nothing. You're basically describing what I did up above, with the proper analogy. As a cannabis user myself, you're entirely correct about the potency and convenient availability being an issue, and I'd absolutely like to see more penalties for physical distribution of these things to minors while also de-glamorizing some of this stuff. Sell the product, not the experience, basically.
> Of course, I see it as primarily the parent’s responsibility to inculcate the virtue to disdain both.
That's where we align - the avowed democratic socialist and the conservative Christian agreeing that, at the end of the day, it's the parent's responsibility to parent, and it's the individual's responsibility to make better choices - including seeking help for problems they're having. Where we may disagree on approach, however (I dunno, this is kinda speculating here based on other CC's I know/lived with/attended Church with), is that I believe the steps towards minimizing or eliminating harms is destigmatizing these things in the first place. It means getting over our societal aversion to SEX, a natural biological thing we've been doing as a species for millennia. It means getting over our disdain for addicts, and offering help.
If these ghouls (passing the laws) actually cared about children, families, or humans in general, they'd be supporting rehabilitation instead of penalizing consenting adults. They'd be penalizing exploitative employers and creating a tax structure that rewards stay-at-home partners while enabling every couple to have one such partner.
That's not what's happening, though, and I resent being denigrated as some sort of sick degenerate by a government that won't even feed its fucking kids.
People need to touch grass instead of blaming everyone else for their failure to do so haha.
A more effective solution would be to implement HTML tags for explicit sexual content (or any other kind of child-sensitive content) and allow the OS or browser to authenticate the user before showing that content, if parental controls are enabled.
Legal obligations and responibilities become very clear: the site has tags - it's ok. No tags - guilty.
It also allows for very fine-grained delimitation of sexual content. No need to forbid access to an entire site for one page, or one paragraf of sexual content. Just blur/censor the <adult> ... </adult> content.
I like this, already got face ID built into our devices including PCs these days... tap into that. That curbs the whole issue of sending your identifying information to third party websites.
I feel so bad for the teenager whose mom is parading him around as a permanently defective ruined form of life. Could that be damaging to a kid do you think?
Munchausen's for sympathy and fame isn't new, but it is pretty tragic when you see it.
"Party of free speech," my ass.
Virtue signalling Christian values, obviously that overrides free speech.
Free speech for me, not for thee
I worry that young people across the political spectrum increasingly no longer see free speech as a foundational value. Both sides pay lip service and deploy it strategically but are quick to sacrifice it when it conflicts with other values and goals.
The ACLU won our expansive free speech protections defending the KKK in the 1950s. But today, the ACLU has become short-sighted. They are more concerned with social progressivism than the liberal foundations of our democracy which allow social progressives to continue fighting. Young progressives are happy to sacrifice free speech protections to prevent hate speech.
On the other hand, social conservatives have always been eager to curtail speech they consider obscene or liscentious, and now Trump is using executive powers to punish protesters, creating an authoritarian atmosphere unlike anything we've experienced since perhaps the McCarthy era.
There are organisations like FIRE and EFF that give me some hope, but it increasingly feels like all sides would rather cement themselves in power than continue the infinite game of liberal democracy.
> But today, the ACLU has become short-sighted. They are more concerned with social progressivism than the liberal foundations of our democracy which allow social progressives to continue fighting.
Quite the opposite. I stopped donating to the ACLU after a few years of the last trump administration because I could no longer stomach it given the clear direction trumpism is taking the country. I still support the mission ideologically but can't back it up with my money. Seeing trump this time around I'm glad I haven't wasted the money - the constitution is dead.
The GOP under Trump has considerably changed from the GOP under Bush. There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives. Perhaps a shift might be coming with the next economic downturn, which seems inevitable given the risk-off investment climate across most industries stemming from Trump’s erratic, unpredictable trade and economic policy. Things don’t look bad just yet, but it takes a while for the full impact of such enormous changes in sentiment to ripple down through the entire economy.
Reagan and Bush were constrained by much more liberal supreme court justices of the previous era. The current Supreme Court justices were clerks and lawyers during Reagan and Bush presidency. If Reagan and Bush had the current justices in their bench I can almost guarantee they’d be pulling the same stunts.
Bush wasn’t exactly a steward of free speech
> There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives.
There is, they just don’t like it for aesthetic and/or historical reasons.
The faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush.
If the centrists and moderate conservatives could make common cause, they would easily shut out both the far left and far right wings of American politics. The demographics are there.
I think the main wedge preventing this unification is still abortion, and to a lesser extent LGBTQ rights. But it’s so weird to see two political factions that agree on 90% of policy get shellacked and overruled by their respective extreme wings. Real tail wagging the dog stuff.
> it’s so weird to see two political factions that agree on 90% of policy get shellacked and overruled by their respective extreme wings
These parties have primaries and Republicans are choosing—by a majority—the crazies over the “traditional” wing. They aren’t extremists. They are the party views.
> These parties have primaries and Republicans are choosing—by a majority—the crazies over the “traditional” wing.
Elections are by and large not contests of policy, and I think it’s likely that most American voters (across the spectrum, not just the GOP) aren’t voting in their own self-interest anymore.
Most moderates don’t vote in the primaries. The hardcore extremists vote unfailingly.
Primaries are primarily voted in by crazies. Regular people have lives and jobs.
Libertarian and Democratic parties ought to feel right at home for any refugees from the GOP who have conservative principles. Democratic party is right of center.
> There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives
That's funny, considering Bush II effectively established the coalition of business interests, religious zealots, and neofascist militias, which then expanded to be the backbone of Trump's support. Cautionary tale about consequences of one's political choices? I wish.
I've found that "free speech" is important for Americans when it is about rights of Neo-Nazis but otherwise not so much.
Neither of the two parties is very much in favor of free speech. The left has cancel culture and policing pronouns while the right has blocking books with gay characters and age verification laws.
There are two common definitions of the phrase "free speech" that I think you are conflating:
1. The Constitutional right to free speech under the first amendment (i.e. specifically that the government may not use its authority to limit or punish its peoples' expression of ideas)
2. The vague notion that others should not be able to criticize you for something you've said or written
In this thread we are more concerned with the former. No one on the left is trying to enact laws to punish anyone's impolite use of pronouns. At worst, maybe someone has asked you to be considerate in some non-official setting (which has little to do with the first amendment).
There is a massive difference between other people reacting to your speech and choosing not to associate with you or propagate what you say, and the government banning your speech and prosecuting you for it. You can exercise your freedom of speech, and other people can exercise their freedom of association to want nothing to do with you.
The left was kinda annoying about it but nobody was going to throw you in jail for misgendering someone or whatever.
“Cancel culture” is not government policy (and never was).
Cancel Culture is actually just the free market, the invisible hand, at work.
What is a boycott but cancel culture? The idea of the free market is that good behaviors and products emerge because consumers "vote" with their wallet. If a company has bad values I don't support then I don't shop there. Enough people do that and the company collapses. So, what remains is an economy where every company acts virtuously.
Theoretically. Then enters propaganda and the GOP. They tell you this invisible hand is bad, and companies should be able to do anything. At a glance this appears to be free speech, but it's not - it's the exact opposite.
You see, they can say anything they want, but we can't. We may not criticize them. Our opinions are not valid, they're "Cancel Culture".
Interesting argument. But I think cancel culture often has more in common with a lynch mob than a boycott.
A lynch mob is a boycott, especially when they aren't lynching. Lynch mob used to mean something literally, when people did lynching. Now it just means "a bunch of people don't like someone and don't financially support them".
That's a boycott.
People still get actually lynched.
I point out to self-described "classic liberals" that what they call "cancel culture" was instead described by John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty" as an essential component of liberty:
"We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement."
No, but it is endemic to American colleges and universities which are government or government-funded institutions.
Furthermore, spend a little time on BlueSky and you will find huge support for the hate speech laws found in other countries.
Finally, the distinction between government regulation of speech and private regulation of speech is key in the court of law, but it is almost irrelevant from the point of view of a philosophy that values open inquiry, debate, and dissent as indispensible to human dignity and progress.
Except it was. It was the government who ordered Twitter to ban or shadowban people like Prof. Jay Bhattacharya.
The government didn't do that.
"The primary weakness in the record of past restrictions is the lack of specific causation findings with respect to any discrete instance of content moderation."
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-411_3dq3.pdf
The government had no capacity to “order” Twitter to do this, in stark contrast to this law.
And yet they did, and twitter did comply.
I've noticed that cancel culture and policing pronouns is far stronger on the right. What Democrat has been canceled as much as Liz Cheney by Republicans? Certainly not the sex pest Andrew Cuomo, heartily supported by the Democratic Party leadership.
What Democratic president has issued an executive order anywhere equivalent to Trump's order requiring pronouns match the gender "at conception", and the anti-scientific claim that gender is a male-female binary?
The right also wants to block books which have nothing to do with gay characters, including “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, “Maus”, “The Handmaid's Tale“, “Of Mice and Men“ and “Brave New World”.
I'm genuinely curious. The parent buys the phone/laptop. And when little Timmy logs in to his phone the account should be in a family/group as a child account.
What's with the obsession with actually verifying identity? Just make a web API available to determine if the current user is configured as a child account. Why isn't that enough to gate-keep access to adult content?
It's a matter of time before the US system crumbles if these assaults on the federal system and civil liberties continue.
I live in state with a population of 40 million who gives $83 billion more to the federal government than gets back. It's absolutely insane we have to be ruled by afar by what is effectively a small minority. This will come to a head not only in Censorship, Immigration, Tariffs, Abortion access (banning abortion medication federally), Industrial policy, etc.
At a certain point California is going to say, "No Thanks" and peace out.
Since the civil war it’s been clear no one is getting out alive.
A variation of “no taxation without representation”?
Why can’t we just have a meta tag that declares that content on a website is not suitable for minors?
Or is it because, as others have mentioned, it’s not really about protecting minors from adult content?
> The First Amendment effectively no longer applies if your speech is online, contains sex scenes, and not behind an age verification wall
The First Amendment doesn’t apply to obscenity, so I’m not sure what the complaint is.
Hopefully someone kept a snapshot of the country's configs before this year began. I feel like we're going to need it. This is ludicrous - as so much is lately.
Unfortunately, the S3 bucket we use to host the backups is gone... the compliance department complained about it, but now they're gone, too...
Is there anything we can actually do to combat this? Im short of ideas, tho the 33% rule can be potentially worked around by generating loads of fake content similar to a previous poster who generates fake content for scrapers to eat Im in the UK and they recently passed a similar law banning any explicit _imagery_, which I already thought was bad but the land of freedom beats us out again, the literally surveillance state, at least that's that's enforced top down by ofcom instead of an army of injury lawyers so it works at ofcom's speed
Next comes continually redefining “pornography”.
Remember personals and missed connections on Craigslist? Remember when they took those down, and why?
This goes back a long ways.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/business/craigslist-perso...
> The public library in rural Donnelly, Idaho, at only 1,024 square feet, had no practical way to create an enforceable “adults only” section and no budget to defend against lawsuits. Therefore, to comply with the law, they decided to make the entire library for adults only. The library has banned minors from entering the library (even to use the bathroom) unless they are accompanied by an adult, or holding a waiver from their parents.
This is absurd. It does look like they're suing, with help from a lot of publishers, at least.
I spent a lot of time after school in the library to avoid my abusive cult guardians at home. If this avenue hadn't been available to me in my small town, I'd likely have committed suicide. But, I'm an atheist, so me committing suicide would probably be seen as a win for these evangelical freaks.
Yeah, me too. It’s very chilling to see the resurgence of a very broad conception of parental rights, which can in some cases permit the wholesale physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children without recourse.
It’s hard to talk about it without being accused of hyperbole, but some of these proposed laws come very close to making children the property of their parents. As someone who grew up in an abusive household, that makes me exceedingly uncomfortable.
I shared this experience before on a recent thread about the role librarians play in counterculture and a user made a throwaway account in order to tell me to kill myself all sorts of creative ways and that he's glad I was abused, etc. etc.
I've talked to enough people who explicitly believe that children are chattel (sometimes in the same breath as complaining about abuse they suffered from their own parents) to know this isn't hyperbole.
The Republican party has worked to kill public libraries and public education for years, so this fits right in line.
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An ADA compliant bathroom is almost 200sqft. And they will need at least 2 of them. So now that 1000sqft is now 600sqft. And they still need a place to store and process books, reading rooms, etc.
Also there's a big difference between a general "children's room" and strictly enforced "adults only" and "for children" section, with risk of costly lawsuits if some extremist parent thinks the kid saw something "obscene". My library had a children's section and even some toys, but I could walk in and go anywhere.
Since I'm not American I don't have a good idea of what 1024 sq feet is: it's about 95m². I laughed out loud when I realised just how small it is. To suggest this is large enough for a strictly separated adult and children section is profoundly unserious.
I've lived in several houses that had 2 bedrooms, a bathroom (with tub/shower), a kitchen, and laundry closet that were 8-900 sq ft, so to me it seems profoundly unserious to suggest you can't fit a small adult only room (think more like a walk in closet) in that space.
Ignoring that, they don't even need a room. They just can't let kids access it. A locked armoire near the checkout ought to suffice.
> The ADA Standards, on the other hand, do not address the number of toilet rooms or fixtures required for a facility, but instead specify which ones must be accessible where provided.
https://www.access-board.gov/ada/guides/chapter-6-toilet-roo...
For what it's worth, chatgpt and random reddit comments claim you'd need closer to 50sqft for a compliant bathroom. Maybe that's nonsense.
In any case, their Facebook page is full of recent pictures of children in the library, so it seems that they were indeed unsurprisingly just posturing.
You design libraries? Fascinating!
Unfortunately, these laws are working exactly as intended. If they discourage all forms of sexually-explicit material, the laws are working as intended. They are not really about "protecting the children." They use that as an excuse to make it too legally risky to publish pornographic/sexual material under any circumstances.
If I was a publisher, would I trust an age-verification system to protect me from 15 years in prison or an "investigation" that results in nothing but destroying my life? Nope. So eventually the legitimate website operators just give up.
Or how about the ISP who now simply refuses to do business with any website that publishes sexual material just to avoid legal consequences for themselves?
Working as intended.
The Supreme Court is eroding the credibility of the institution of law faster than they can make laws. They really want to see how the public reacts to overreach?
Does it have to be written? Does it apply to video and audio contents of similar manners?
I don't think it has to be written or even particularly raunchy, just has to be deemed "damaging to children".
Looking at banned children's books should fine you an idea of the offline precedent here.
This article doesn't really go into any detail about the Supreme Court decision it discusses, instead reserving its detailed discussion for the laws this decision permits. Anyone have a link to the opinion, or an article discussing it specifically?
The strategic objective here is to authenticate all web traffic.
If sex writing means so much to you then you should feel obliged to be persecuted and maimed in the streets and corridors for its sake, no?
If pornography is the spirit of mass media to the detriment of our youth, would you not feel that it is your civic duty to be persecuted and maimed in the streets and corridors for their sake, even more so?
On a sociological level: good. I personally believe that easy-access porn has been detrimental to society.
I immediately scrolled to the bottom of the HN comments so I could find a comment like this to upvote.
It really hasn’t and there’s absolutely no evidence to support this at all
Transvestite epidemic?
I imagine they were referring to the behavior of cis men
Secondly, it's not clear which group you're bigoted over—trans folks or drag queens
So no bounty because it's not a security problem. But the MV3 API they are deleting, they say...is being deleted for security reasons. Not at all to hobble ad blockers.
I'm still wrapping my head around the consequences of this, which almost seem too big to believe. It sounds like there are hundreds of millions if not billions to be made on filing these kinds of lawsuits, which means change is coming hard and fast. What if anything prevents the following?
1. Lawsuits against content "normalizing LGBTQ+ identity," which many conservatives claim is harmful to minors. This creates opportunities for conservative groups to file frivolous but expensive-to-defend lawsuits targeting LGBTQ+ advocacy online. Will this sort of thing get sued out of existence?
2. Lawyers will first go after the largest targets. Does this mean that e.g. large health websites will have to take down articles on sex education? Might they even do do preemptively?
3. Relatedly, will all major US porn websites go behind age gates soon? Has this already happened?
That has always been the problem with advocating free speech - that eventually you have to protect the rights of the writers of nazi furry slash fiction and similar fellows. And are really soft and fluffy target.
It's time to abandon this sinking ship. America was fun for a couple decades but the jig is up.
The government is just another religion, another church. Sometimes they are right, but usually they are just dangerous like any other group of religious bigots.
>ELLSBERG
I can't take a post seriously when it uses AI images. How do I know the rest of the content isn't AI slop?
FTA: "In fact, under the laws that the Supreme Court just upheld, prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site."
No, they can't. That's not how jurisdiction works in the U.S. If states could do stuff like that, GOP prosecutors would be charging out-of-state Democratic politicians with made-up-crimes all the time. They're not doing that. It's not because they don't want to; it's because they can't. (And also, the legal justification that would allow them to go after their political enemies like this would allow politically-opposed prosecutors to do the same to them.)
States are already trying to police abortions outside of state lines. If you helped someone get an abortion in another state, they want to be able to arrest you for it.
This is insane. Literally goes against the first amendment. What recourse is there for this nonsensical decision? Mass disobedience? Leaking verified IDs until they stop this?
One of the goals in Project 2025 is to make teachers, librarians, etc. that purvey "pornography" into felons, and jail them for a long time. That starts with labeling things as pornography.
Before you know it, anything that mentions LGBTQ+ topics will be labeled as porn.
How exactly do these laws work if the servers are hosted outside of the US?
They don't, of course. These laws aren't here to protect children. They're just a step on the road to one of their (conservative Christian) goals: banning pornography entirely in the US.
They will try blackmail hosting country with tariffs.
As an outsider seeing the US destroy everything people associate with America in a couple months is sort of morbidly funny...
While we do produce a lot of porn, remember that the pre-US colonies were founded by conservative religious people who were too conservative even for Europe at the time.
Most people's associations with the US were fanciful and unrealistic to begin with. It's just that now the reality has diverged so far from their mental images that they're forced to acknowledge the disparity.
When it comes to nudity and sex America has always been puritanical.
Blood and guns, sure. Freedumb
I mean, I think my fellow lefties have gotten too comfortable with having a center-left Supreme Court coming up with reason after reason to liberally give broad rights.
This is an issue of the legislature. There have been publishing restrictions on pornography for centuries, then in the last 20 years, we decided porn for everyone all the time. The conservatives were always going to push back. And I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable.
Is "this was restricted for centuries" a moral rule of thumb you use consistently? What's your opinion about gay rights, woman's suffrage?
I’m a liberal. I generally agree with the principle, not the premise.
My point again is that these “rights” you’re talking about are built on our social contract. There is no premise that “porn is free speech,” in fact, quite the opposite, again, for centuries.
The existence of porn on the internet was the result of legislation, not right. That legislation is changing, we need to organize to make sure it remains legal.
That's your "Small Government" in action, folks.
So now we can out up porn and harvest IDs? Love it.
I really didn't expect that from the land of freedom. /s
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I'll acknowledge that you mentioned "leftists" here and they do quite a bit of purity testing in their circles, but what laws did they pass to limit speech?
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You’re forgetting the entire history of Europe and the Catholic church.
We don’t even come close to the bullshit that happened in the past.
Not that it makes the present any better.
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Nothing you single out matters here. His background doesn't invalidate his arguments.
Meh they can take the bottom 64bits of your IP address and then put your biometrics in there. Why do you think they made the address space so big in the first place. I've been saying that's what it was for for at least a decade.
A bit off base. He's basically having a meltdown over what's actually a pretty narrow ruling about age verification.
First, he claims the Court "nullified the First Amendment" for sex writing, but that's just not what happened. The Court explicitly said adults still have the right to access this stuff—they just need to show ID first, like buying beer. That's not "nullification."
Second, Ellsberg acts like any sex scene anywhere triggers these laws, but H.B. 1181 only hits commercial websites where over a third of the content is sexually explicit material that's harmful to minors. His personal blog with some raunchy stories? Probably doesn't qualify.
Third, the whole "fifteen years in prison" hysteria ignores that these are civil penalties, not criminal prosecutions for most violations. And interstate prosecution for a California blogger? Extremely unlikely.
Age verification requirements do create real burdens and privacy concerns. But Ellsberg's "the sky is falling" rhetoric makes it impossible to have a serious conversation about the actual trade-offs between protecting kids and preserving adult access to legal content. The Court tried to balance these competing interests—it didn't burn down the First Amendment.
Dismissing this as a “meltdown” ignores the real First Amendment stakes. Requiring ID to access legal adult content isn’t like buying alcohol. It introduces surveillance and self-censorship, especially with vague thresholds like “one-third explicit” or “harmful to minors.” That legal ambiguity alone forces smaller publishers to self-censor to avoid risk. Unlike alcohol, speech is a constitutionally protected right, not a regulated commodity. Buying beer doesn’t create a permanent record of your interests or route through third-party identity brokers.
Whether or not speech is the explicit target, the chilling effect is the outcome and likely the intent. Lawmakers know these rules shrink the space for controversial content online. The burden and fear do the censoring for them. That’s not hysteria it’s how digital speech is throttled.
The "chilling effect" argument here is pretty weak. You're basically saying that because some small publishers might get confused about legal requirements, the whole system is unconstitutional. That's not how First Amendment analysis works. Courts don't strike down laws just because some people might overreact to them.
If this really created such massive chilling effects, we'd see data showing widespread site shutdowns or self-censorship. (Checks pornhub). Instead, we mostly see compliance.
Chilling effects are settled doctrine, not hand-waving. SCOTUS struck the CDA (Reno v. ACLU, 1997) and COPA (Ashcroft v. ACLU, 2004) precisely because vague “indecent/harmful” standards plus stiff penalties make rational speakers self-censor. Courts don’t wait for carnage. The predictable chill itself is the constitutional flaw.
We already have hard evidence of chill. Pornhub, one of the few players with the budget to fight, has geoblocked Utah, Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Montana, and about ten other states. Sixteen in total as of mid-2025 rather than risk strict-liability fines. That’s exit, not “compliance.” Smaller publishers just disappear quietly. Their absence isn’t a data gap, it’s the effect you’re denying.
You flipped the First Amendment burden. For content-based rules, the state must prove narrow tailoring and minimal speech impact under strict scrutiny. Demanding that speakers first produce a body count of shuttered sites inverts that standard and dodges the real constitutional test.
That’s why your “show me shutdowns” line doesn’t work: the shutdowns are already happening, and the law not the speakers has the burden to justify them.
Intermediate not strict scrutiny
This isn't only about H.B. 1181 specifically, it's about precedent for any law like it having teeth across state lines.
The ruling was not about anyone being prosecuted over state lines. So there was no precedent set.
It's funny that stuff like this flies under the radar, while HN users are still splitting hairs over cookie banners and Manifest V3. A week-old ruling comes as imminent surprise to the Hackers and their cohorts.
Just looking at HN's frontpage, you'd have no idea that anyone here cares about privacy or freedom.
You must be hurting from patting yourself in the back. You should first remember that front page is a matter not only of interest to the community, but timing, luck and moment. It's meaningless that it took a week to be in the front page. It's there now and we are discussing it. And it also doesn't diminish the value of other discussions that is dear to HN readers.
If you feel like antagonizing an entire community, maybe you should consider just leaving it and finding your own group. It'll be hard for us but we'll make it here without you.
It received 200+ comments at the time it happened... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397799
Exposure != Accumulated comments, especially if you aren't counting distinct authors.
Dig a little deeper, and you'll see that particular submission ("US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law") was visible on the front page for barely five minutes [0] before something abruptly exiled it to to the end of the second page and a slide into obscurity.
In contrast, I randomly picked something from several pages down today that which looks bland with triple-digit comments, and got "A Typology of Candianisms." Turns out that has even more comments (327!) and was visible on the front page for about twenty hours [1].
Quite a difference, isn't it? I'm not against the idea that HN needs to guard its content-mix, but we should not live in denial about it happening.
[0] https://hnrankings.info/44397799/
[1] https://hnrankings.info/44515101/
It's right on the front page of HN and there's a lively discussion. I'm just not sure your criticism holds up.
I haven’t seen this aspect of the ruling discussed anywhere else either, so I don’t know why you’re picking on HN in particular.
This is on the front page.
It's a week-old secondary source that had to editorialize the title.
If this is "news" then tomorrow I should expect to see articles reporting Lincoln's death at the top of /active.
Where should we turn to be more promptly and fully informed about questions like these?
A week old? That's practically ancient, and certainly no longer applies to the situation today!
It's kind of funny to be whining about this in a frontpage post here, but that aside, this doesn't add anything to discussion. You should probably keep these things to yourself.
What sites/communities keep up with things like this more actively? I’d love to read them too. Drop a link!
That's because we're hackers and we're too cool to be bothered with pesky politics. /s
On a more serious note: HN tries hard to stay in its lane, but there are quite a few people on here that are engaging in political activism, but that every now and then make a (sometimes even useful) tech comment to avoid the activism ban hammer.
Personally I don't really see the difference between 'curious conversation' vs 'click bait' and 'rage bait'. Examples abound, but the balance as it is struck right now picks a reasonable median between 400 hour work weeks for the people involved and some kind of manageable work/life balance. It works, but barely and it is still worth reading but I find myself getting more and more cynical reading HN. Oh, and of course we really don't do humor.
And some people here really do care about both privacy and freedom, and some people are not absolutists but rather see that there are reasonable limits to both of these. Another thing to remember is that HN is global, you're going to find a predominantly English speaking audience here but so many people around the world manage to express themselves reasonably well in English that you will find all kinds of cultures represented here, including ones that have entirely different ideas on subjects such as freedom and privacy. And then there are the tech bros who want freedom and privacy for themselves and less of both of those for the rest of us.
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In practice this is going to be utilized to shut down sex education and other content deemed "harmful to children".
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We're there. We're long past there. Start solving.
Do you have any examples of the finding being used to stymy sex education in schools?
There are many, many, many examples of every previous round of censorship in the name of "Think of the Children" being used against anything disliked by people in power, and filtered through the lens of the most conservative backwards puritans. Take a look at any banned book list.
This is not a slippery slope fallacy, it's basic pattern recognition.
> There are many, many, many examples of every previous round of censorship in the name of "Think of the Children" being used against anything disliked by people in power
Do you have any available?
https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/
https://bookshop.org/lists/banned-and-challenged-books-updat...
https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
None of these are sex education books.
The comment upthread was:
> In practice this is going to be utilized to shut down sex education and other content deemed "harmful to children".
Many of the books on the lists I linked, and many other such lists, are in fact educational in a variety of ways. Often they're banned precisely because they cover topics that people in power don't want there to be any education on.
(And, to be clear, this comment should not be interpreted as in any way supporting the idea that a book should need to be "educational", or have any other redeeming quality, in order to not be banned.)
"Sex education" is not so narrow as to only include an approved/mandated textbook (though those and their content do get affected by these attitudes as well). Having e.g. healthy relationships (or for that matter unhealthy relationships) depicted or described in fiction is part of a well-rounded education.
It's also remarkable, and ironic, how often depictions of dystopias, particularly dystopias that restrict books and other access to information, get banned.
And, frankly, banning something misses the opportunity to contextualize it and talk about it, and instead makes it more appealing.
States have had these laws for a while now. Is there evidence that this has happened?
> TeH iNtErNeT
Don't do this on HN. It's sneering and snark, and thus against the guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe but it was part of my point, that the internet gets a pass for a vague variety of reasons.