Summary
Several U.S. states have enacted laws requiring pornography sites, such as PornHub, to implement age verification to prevent minors’ access, prompting the site’s parent company, Aylo, to block access in affected states.
Proponents argue these laws protect children, while critics highlight privacy risks, inefficiencies, and potential censorship.
These measures reflect growing social conservatism, with some advocates aiming to restrict adult content broadly.
While privacy-focused age verification methods exist, regulatory clarity is lacking.
Critics warn these laws may suppress responsible platforms, favoring unregulated alternatives, and escalate broader culture wars around sexuality and LGBTQ+ rights.
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With this method, users take a photo of their face which is then analyzed by AI to estimate their age. Tombs says this involves no analysis of the user’s actual identity, and that all photos are deleted once the check is finished. Hence, neither Yoti nor the porn site ever needs to know who you are.
No. Fuck no. Just… wow.
Hahaha how easy it will be to fool the AI.
Why? Just take a picture of your neighbor.
Yes, for example. Not sure what the “why” is supposed to be for? At what point to you disagree?
I meant that there’s no need to fool the ai, the system is fundamentally flawed from the start.
So to you it is not fooling the AI if you present someone else? Where would fooling start?
In my experience these type of verifications require you to look forward, then to the right, then to the left, acquiring a 3 dimensional data plot. Which cannot be done with a picture. Maybe if you had 3 pictures.
“Why does your son carry around a mannequin?”
So everybody looks like the picture on Epstein’s Wikipedia now? How dumb is this?
Just like the tsa deleted all the body scan images after the subject left the scanner.
Fascists view sexuality as a threat to their movements.
Fascists view knowledge as a threat. They use sexuality as another means of segregation.
Also: laughing, knowing things, joy.
they keep saying its about trans people but then they keep blocking porn so i don’t know what it is. i think christians and conservatives are stupid as fuck
it’s mostly because the red hats love trans porn, and hate themselves for loving trans porn, and they just need a little help resisting temptation
Every time that a conservative equates the mere existence of trans people with sex, they’re just outing their own kink.
“These people who’ve historically been marginalized to having to do sex work to live authentically and are more likely to be victims of sexusl violence are inherently sex crazed freaks.”
Like, as soon as we could openly do jobs that aren’t sex work we got a reputation as computer programmers. Turns out we’re all multidimensional human beings.
And people don’t seem to notice that more people came out after they could live authentically and do other jobs.
All of this Boomer nonsense about “There were no trans people in my day.”
No, grandpa, they were just too afraid to let you know it, so they lived quietly miserable lives with a socially acceptable spouse and 2.5 kids.
Exactly. I didn’t transition until it was a choice between transition and suicide and I regret holding myself to that bar. It used to be the advice back in the day and like it makes sense when step 1 is start lying to a psychologist because they’re rampantly misogynistic but only to trans women (and also hold trans men to unrealistic standards of manhood), and step 2 is decide if you think it’s worth ever seeing your family and friends again.
I’m sorry that was your experience. I’m sure it was hard, but I’m glad you made the choice that means you’re still here to tell your story.
So no one wants to talk about how maybe we should just be talking to our kids about sexuality? This is just the absence only crowd again. And of course it’s taking the rest of our liberties with it but can we stop framing this has tech was of protecting children here? It’s Trojan horse bullshit.
It’s the sex doesn’t exist if we don’t talk about it crowd. Just like they don’t like talking about the gays or the trans or CRT. Talking about any of these things means accommodation and mental effort has to be expended. Can’t have that.
Yeah. I’m sure it’s awkward, but it’s also necessary. My mom was honest and open about such topics with me and it was really good for me. It meant that had an adult touched me inappropriately as a child I knew what to do and that I could trust my mom to keep me safe and it meant that as I grew older and began experimenting I wasn’t taking undue risks because I knew enough to make reasonably informed decisions.
Teenagers are going to engage in sexual exploration. Some won’t, sure, but most of them are pretty hardwired to want to try and to be willing to break rules to do it. And, given that they’re inexperienced and dealing with a hormonal hurricane some of them will make choices they regret. We can bury our heads in the sand and swear up and down that our kids know better because we told them not to do it, or we can grow the fuck up and accept that little kids need to know how to report a bad touch, elementary schoolers need to know what their body will do in a few years, and teenagers need to know enough to make informed choices when they inevitably experiment
There are thousands of porn sites. Blocking pornhub doesn’t even register. If someone wants to find porn it is no more difficult than it was the day before the ban, it just won’t be pornhub porn.
I think this is just step one. Once the porn sites with money stop fighting it then they will go after any search engine that lists porn sites.
If you can’t find it on Google/Bing/Etc. it may as well not even exist for a majority of people.
I welcome the re-emergence of newsgroups again.
It would be funny if it just ended up teaching everyone how to torrent stuff.
They must know that that’s the case. Even if they blocked the entire internet in those states, porn would still be easily accessible. Blocking PornHub is just whacking a single mole in a huge field full of them.
At least they’re wasting some of their time with this limp-dicked bullshit. Better than using it to pursue their broader, more sinister goals.
“Another method, used in Germany, lets people show their ID card at a post office and get a unique ID to access adult sites. This could potentially be done without logging the person’s identity, but as CNIL points out such systems require much work to set up.”
This exactly what I was thinking of while reading the article. It’s just like going to a bar and getting carded. As long as no info is stored, I would be fine with this if were seriously looking for a solution for the kids
Mad conservative computer scientists: “Yes, using the fear that kids might see porno, we will soon require the implementation of the impossible device: Anonymous age verification! Since no one will be able to implement it, we will ban all pornography off the internet!”
Mad liberal computer scientists: : “Using generative AI, anyone can now produce any porno they want, even offline! And the interface is so easy that even a kid can use it!”
Porn companies: “We will have the computer take a picture of you and analyze your age to grant access.”
Users: Uses generative AI to generate fake pictures to get access to real porn.
User: uses the VPN they had already
We miss you, Larry Flynt. (Not really, he sucked in other ways a great deal, but he at least fought the good fight in this domain)
I loved it when he decided to get revenge on Republicans prosecuting Clinton for getting a blowjob by publishing and distributing a single-issue magazine filled with detailed information about prominent congressmen and their mistresses.
Like you said, he was a piece of shit in a lot of ways, but he did a few things I will happily remember him for.
The most surprising thing to me is that PornHub is owned by a multinational Canada based private equity firm Aylo. I guess surprising might not be the right word, maybe morbidly reassuring that no one escapes from the slimy hands of late capitalism.
Yeah, let’s get back to small business “mom and pop” pornography vendors!
There’s no reliable way to verify age without extensive face verification with liveliness checks. A child can easily upload a parent’s or some other adult’s id card photo to get ‘verified’. Also nothing stops kids to explore porn corners of social media (including lemmy) and thousands of porn sites operated not by the Big Porn. Porn is fundamental to internet.
Edit: I purposefully omitted vpn, that being the most trivial solution.
That’s all besides the point however.
If a young kid is motivated by highschool seniors to watch porn, it is s parenting issue. If some adult encourages some child to watch porn as a grooming technique that’s a much more serious case of child abuse. If a teenager is porn addict and doesn’t do anything else, it is a major mental health concern, not a porn concern itself.
It is kind of accepted fact that many late teenagers are familiar with porn and explore it like any other sexual aspects of their life. Whether that’s harmful is upto debate but teenagers/adults do many things harmful everyday and banning everything with law isn’t realistic either. It is not end of the world if a teenager has sex or watches a porn movie. Children have greater dangers in general where they get abused by their relatives, teachers and even by their own parents and are continuously attempted to be programmed not to critically think by the religions.
It’s there like, 3,000,000 other porn sites people can use? I don’t hover how this is a victory in any form.
Its about VPN sales.
I’m curious what this graph looks like compared to states with legal weed.
Lol. Montana’s wilding up there. Toke up all you please, but no porn.
I think the most fascinating thing is that of out of all states Idaho seems to be the only one that doesn’t even allow medical use.
(Not that the low THC states are much better… you could probably get similar or better stuff from the gas station/head shop in almost any state after McConnells farm bill pseudo legalized it)
Several U.S. states have enacted laws requiring pornography sites, such as PornHub, to implement age verification to prevent minors’ access
Doesn’t seem too unreasonable. When I buy alcohol I have to provide verification that I’m over 21.
The thing is, how do they enforce it? People in those states can still access pornhub through a VPN. Plus, what about all the other many, many porn sites?
I get what they’re trying to do, but I think there are some logistics that haven’t really been thought out.
But that’s just it, they have thought about the logistics. We already have Meta changing their rules to allow LGBTQ + people to be called “mentally ill” with no repercussions.
The Great Firewall of China isn’t an accident, it’s actually how internet hardware like routers and switches are built to work from the ground up, with security like access control lists, as well as logging connections and seeing what data goes where and so on. That’s the scary thing about the internet, it just takes people wanting to turn it into a draconian nightmare to flip a few switches. I mean, really, the US already has but it just feels like it less because of the release valve of “free speech.” The NSA Utah datacenter has been around for a while now.
They have thought about the logistics, and they want to bring those kind of controls here. As always the plan is to control what happens online. Musk has definitely made some weird and creepy comments about “making lists” and while he’s an idiot, he’s got the tools and people to make it happen.
They couch it in a reasonable position to start the path to blocking access to content about sexuality for anyone. When youre a queer kid growing up and being told that it’s just the devil’s work and other bullshit the internet and being able to talk about your experience was the first freeing thing you could do in your life. It also lead to women having higher standards because women could communicate more and not be isolated by their male partners controlling behavior. Conservatives fucking hate that. This kind of ban could ban that kind of speech online, and I firmly believe it’s intended to.
They expect the porn provider to verify age/id through very invasive and onerous means. It is in no way reasonable or secure to give some random porn site a copy of your government ID. They will get hacked; not if, when.
They will get hacked; not if, when.
Not only that, it turns any site that doesn’t just outright block the age verification states into a massive target.
