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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26273 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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The right wing has seemed to gain some ground on the porn-being-viewable-by-children issue. North Carolina has passed some legislation requiring age verification for adult sites. I remember Matt Walsh at least advocating for this quite strongly. Not only that, but it's not the first state to do this; laws in Louisiana, Virginia, Utah and Montana also require age verification. Pornhub's response is to block access to its website in these states, stating the following:

“As you may know, your elected officials in North Carolina are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website,” adult entertainer Cherie DeVille said in a video message that pops up when users attempt to access the website. “While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”

“The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the best and most effective solution for protecting children and adults alike is to identify users by their device and allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that identification. Until a real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in North Carolina.”

That statement by itself actually boosts my opinion somewhat of Pornhub; a device level safe search would probably be the best approach to this. Parents could set the birthday of the child in question, a password locked setting, and the phone could then block access to many of these sites. There probably exists some amount of parental options like this, right? I have no knowledge of them, but I doubt they quite reach the level I'm talking about here. If any of you know anything about child safety tools currently available to parents for Android or iPhone, let me know. I'm sure there's a ton for Windows and Linux, and maybe macOS too. You could even get pretty scary and start talking about algorithms that determine if local files are porn or not.

There would certainly be some ways to skirt this, but as always there are ways around any law, really, if someone is motivated enough. Even with a border wall, some Latino illegal immigrants would manage to climb or swim around it, or get in some other way. Despite all the background checks in the world, one could choose to 3d print their own gun. When lawmakers create legislation, they're not counting on that legislation stopping everyone; just stopping most people is satisfactory.

However, none of that is on the table right now. What is on the table are these current laws; Virginia doesn't specify how the sites should verify that users are 18 or older, but others like North Carolina require an external commercially available database containing user age information. The porn sites check with this database and verify the user. At least in theory, if sites like Pornhub and e621 don't decide to self-immolate in response.

I think the arguments for this are pretty obvious. For conservatives, porn is pretty obviously bad for kids, and as that article says, over half of 13 year olds have seen porn by that age. Pretty bad! Requiring some ID would at least nail the mainstream sites that they use. That alone could do a lot. And asking for this database isn't too much; we ask for IDs in various other contexts. Alcohol and cigarettes come to mind. And buying porn in person would require the same. I'm pretty sure you can buy tobacco online, though I do not know the method for verifying the age of customers.

But there's plenty of ammo for people to dislike this law, too.

  1. If you take easy access to porn away, some kids will chase it down elsewhere. Viewing a Pornhub uploader's video is very different from getting into a Discord chat and getting porn directly from a stranger. The latter would be almost impossible to regulate, and it's a lot worse for children. They could also go onto worse virus filled sites.
  2. The effectiveness of this does not seem to be very high. This is the internet. There's an incredible amount of sites out there and it's impossible to catch them all. And preteens and teens can be incredibly motivated in seeking out explicit content. Without parental oversight, this probably wouldn't slow down most kids. Legislation can't replace parenting.
  3. Database leaks could be a problem, depending on how that's handled.
  4. If this becomes a nationwide thing, for people who want to avoid databases for privacy concerns, it could get a lot harder than just grabbing ProtonVPN and going to town. Maybe it would be adopted internationally and you'd HAVE to sign up for the database. Having such a hurdle to something that is arguably a free speech issue would be frightening.

What I'm mostly disappointed in are these redditors that seem to take it for granted that the legislation is a bad thing. Because they assume it's just about exerting control and the Republicans are fascist dictators and Reddit has porn anyway and it's all performative theater. I don't think these are convincing arguments. The people passing these laws are probably the same types that go for things like the Brady Campaign, they're not supervillains doing evil things for the sake of it.

My main problem with the proposal is that it intends to make the internet safe for children.

This is both impractical (there are tons of sites not suitable for kids for any number of reasons, many in foreign jurisdictions) and more generally not desirable (else we would need an age check in front of the motte as well, as well as a small fraction of Wikipedia).

Generally, ten year olds do not buy their own devices, their parents buy them for them. Let them take care to lock the devices down (using whitelisting), if they feel the need to buy them at all.

By the time kids are old enough to circumvent the blockers, I would argue your best bet is to have raised them to have raised them to take enough care of their own mental well-being that they will not search for videos of beheadings or porn acts which would disturb them, nor join every weird cult whose website they stumble upon.

If kids share porn in the schoolyard, the way to get rid of it would be to ban devices with unrestricted internet access from school.

"Think of the children" has long been a rallying cry of people opposing the free internet. Once these laws are in place, the legislative will notice that there are other countries which do not feel the need to follow US laws. The next step is then to pass laws to force ISPs to block these evil foreign websites. Once that infrastructure is in place, one might as well use it to block copyright infringement. Or hate speech.

Over the years, we have had moral panics about kids being exposed to rock and roll, satanic dungeon and dragons role playing, violent video games, et cetera. (Neither is this new: Socrates was charged with corrupting youth back in his day.) Given how these things turned out, I am not overly worried about a teenager being corrupted by seeing a sex video after searching for it.

I stopped porn two weeks ago (not willfully, just got bored eventually) while I haven't skipped a day since my teen years. I don't think I see many benefits yet, so it is unlikely that I will go on a crusade against it. And yet - probably we are in a situation in which porn all the time in quantity is probably having (negative) quality of its own so it could be indeed a societal problem. I also have completely unjustified hunch that it harms adults - aka 22-40 more than teens. So if there is need to be regulation it will be somewhat unusual

If this becomes a nationwide thing, for people who want to avoid databases for privacy concerns, it could get a lot harder than just grabbing ProtonVPN and going to town. Maybe it would be adopted internationally and you'd HAVE to sign up for the database. Having such a hurdle to something that is arguably a free speech issue would be frightening.

Porn is not protected under free speech in the United States. Something that "appeals to the prurient interest" is only protected to the extent it has "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." (See Miller and Ashcroft.) "Patently offensive representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated... [and] representations or descriptions of masturbation, excretory functions, and lewd exhibition of the genitals" are all restrictable without violating the first amendment (according to case law.) Maybe we will see a change to this after these cases are brought up to the Supreme Court. But for now, there is no First Amendment barrier to restricting access to this content.

In fact, it is already federally illegal to send a minor pornographic content over the internet. This is very rarely enforced, but it is the reason why there are those 18+ checkboxes on all your favorite websites.

There's a special version of the Miller test for what is obscene to minors that sets the bar a little lower for media that is sent solely to them, though rules that can impact non-minors hits Ashcroft. The Miller test is pretty arbitrary, but even accepting its constraints, you still run into Problems with a lot of the proposed policies, here.

Most overtly, these policies are not file- or image-specific but website-wide. The North Carolina statute requires any website where "more than thirty-three and one-third percent (33 1/3%) of total material" fails the Miller test. Presumably, this is to avoid sites which only have incidental (or spam) content from being included (although it'd be a little weird if e621 uploads every frame of Steamboat Willie as a separate file to pump the numbers), but this gets complicated for sites that have both SFW and NSFW components.

A lot of furry sites, for example (2015 data, sorry, not finding up-to-date breakdowns), have a large portion or even majority of content marked as plainly safe or only moderate, and some of the content they consider as explicit would still pass the Miller text (and maybe obscene-as-to-minors test) even if it wasn't exactly high-quality deep literature. I think the North Carolina statute excludes written material, but other state laws don't, and either approach has its tradeoffs -- and there are definitely comic or media works with serious literary or artistic value (and no exposed bits).

I wouldn't want a teenager talking with people on InkBunny even if it had an ironclad SFW filter, but FurAffinity or maybe even modern SoFurry? Housepets!, Caelum Sky, read some SFW Rukis stuff, learn some art tricks and tips, join a MineCraft or Terraria server, those aren't the worst things on the planet, and there's a lot of just normalish (or at least as close as furries get to that) communication. Okay, well, furries are... weird. There are reasonable arguments even with the fandom of having even SFW spaces as off-limits to minors: I don't agree with them, but they're not crazy.

What about Discord? I dunno -- and I dunno that Discord knows -- what percentage of image and video file uploads are adult content or obscene, but there are individual discord 'servers' where the rule is always to be SFW, some (particularly common for gaming guilds) where there's one or two focused on adult content, and then some where the whole server is marked 18+ and maybe one-in-ten channels is SFW. Does the site only become liable when the porn discords are going whole hog? By month, by week?

Now, there's only a cause of action for minors accessing adult content material from sites that don't implement compliant age verification; these sites could theoretically do age verification and then just hard-force-on a SFW filter. It's not even clear what would happen for websites who don't: the NC statute and most similar laws just allow a generic "compensatory and punitive damages", "an injunction to enjoin continued violation of this section", and fees.

But in practice, only the largest websites would be able to handle this sort of lawsuit: the costs of simply showing up are tremendous, and injunctions could be absolutely damning. There is no federal anti-SLAPP law, and North Carolina doesn't have one either. Any small web host that thinks they could be even plausibly targeted just has to avoid this matter entirely.

I do not have much to add to the main arguments, and I don't follow other sites that well, but I can confirm (with little credibility) that e621 averages around 60% explicit (by their standards) content. Here is a hastily thrown together graph (expect this to 404 at some point in the future) where you can see the history of post rating over time. With how tagging works on e6, I would claim 50% of questionable content is aimed to excite the mind in the same way explicit content is. This leads the overall percentage to something like 68% explicit. Despite the pleas from the staff (sorry Mairo I love you and everything you do, but you're wrong) the site is uploaders are primarily focused on pornography.

I agree that the policies targeting websites are more nebulous and throw a wrench into the matter. But most people don't even seem aware what the current legality of pornographic content even is. That people think pornography is protected shows that most people (even well-educated people on the Motte) have no idea what is currently on the books. This is an area where it seems the law and the culture have diverged dramatically without much attempt to update the laws. Alternatively, many very-online people have no idea what the average US citizen thinks of Porn use and how available it ought to be.

The only sane application of the law to me would be to streamline a system where parents can sue content distributors or individuals for serving a specific pornographic image to their specific minor without sufficient age verification. That keeps half the burden of proof on the parent to show A) their kid saw porn, B) the party being sued is responsible for the child viewing the porn and C) the party being sued did not use sufficient age verification (defined by the state.) Depending on the damages and how simple this is to file, this could have a dampening effect on even less-than-legit-venues and individual actors on Discord.

I'd quibble that part of people's expectations of the legal scenario reflect the vague and oft-moving ground of the community standards component of the Miller test, with the Movie Buffs case being one of the better-known limits. Miller requires not one of these prongs to be broken, but all of them. There's definitely stuff in the modern era that would fail it, but there's also a lot of stuff that's "porn" or actual-porn by normal definitions that wouldn't.

I think that's a good argument in favor of Douglass's critic of Miller's community standards -- if to the opposite valence as his original intent -- but the problem makes the law hard to analyze. The same content could well be obscene or not just by traveling a hundred miles, or thanks to a tiny fig leaf of 'social importance'.

The only sane application of the law to me would be to streamline a system where parents can sue content distributors or individuals for serving a specific pornographic image to their specific minor without sufficient age verification. That keeps half the burden of proof on the parent to show A) their kid saw porn, B) the party being sued is responsible for the child viewing the porn and C) the party being sued did not use sufficient age verification (defined by the state.) Depending on the damages and how simple this is to file, this could have a dampening effect on even less-than-legit-venues and individual actors on Discord.

I can understand why that might look like an attractive approach at first glance, but I think it has insufficient consideration for how the legal system operates in practice.

At the simplest level, most less-than-legit venues will just been driven outside of the United States (or operate through service run in jurisdictions outside of the United States), beyond what extent they already have moved, since meaningfully collecting judgement on a civil suit across national boundaries is effectively outside of the scope of all but the largest corporations. Even within the US, there's a lot of sites and actors that are judgement proof or effectively judgement proof.

Okay, but the central example is a teenager getting caught accessing a US-bound it's-all-just-porn site, or a rando (in the US, using a US-jurisdiction service) on social media passing/spamming porn at people. Let's assume that we're able to identify the bad actor, and that there's no complications about identification or the nature of the content. What's the process like, here?

The parents bring a (likely interstate!) lawsuit for damages. That's not entirely implausible, especially since a teenager 'borrowing' a parent's credit card, even if it's more likely to revolve around emotional harm. They've got to ante a lot more in legal fees and lawyer costs than the actual damages, and courts generally don't like actually letting all that be recovered even where, such as here, the law does allow for some such recovery, but if you want to prove a point, that's an approach people do take. Might even get an injunction requiring the vendor to comply with an age verification schema. There's some fun procedural issues -- venue, for example -- but there's definitely someone that's going to hit every one.

... what happens with all the cases that don't go every bar of that? What happens for the nuisance lawsuits? Or the sincerely believed ones that are still wrong? Hell, what happens with the times people win, without any true wrongdoing by the website provider? Maybe that's a reasonable tradeoff, but unfortunately you can't really limit the law to the sane applications.

You definitely know more on the topic than I do, my background is a class I took on copyright that only tangentially spoke on this.

That said, I think about medical malpractice lawsuits, which are notoriously difficult to win, expensive for everyone, etc. And yet the tiny amount of medical malpractice lawsuits that go anywhere have had a huge effect on how every doctor and hospital system conducts business. I guess the main difference is that medical procedures take place in a specific location in the US, and so jurisdiction is simple?

Nearer and simpler jurisdiction helps -- the US famously doesn't have interstate small claims courts -- but also the higher damages in severe cases, along with a lot of readily-available experts on best practices, and a liability insurance system that's heavily integrated (and sometimes mandatory) that makes people less judgement proof.

Thank God. One of my friends brought up that it was free speech and it was bugging me ever since. It's not really saying anything, or anything of value anyway. For a while I was thinking "Well, people defecating on each other on camera is extremely degenerate and doesn't seem like a societal gain whatsoever, but if you can't penalize recording it (an act of speech) maybe we could criminalize defecating on people even consensually, which would mean recording it would just be giving evidence of a crime. Because that's gross." I understand that that's totally a moral puritan take on it, but frankly I really have to agree with @FiveHourMarathon here. Porn is celebrated and it leads to activity like /r/GoonCaves, or people shamelessly diving deeper and deeper into their personal kink stuff and some people develop serious problems. Not to mention the porn language creeping into mainstream culture, like he says. Pretty common to see "step bro, I'm stuck" jokes, and various other references to porn star utterances. That being said, I don't see any way this legislation could work, really. It's a cultural problem.

Your citation of that law does also make me wonder if someone shouting the n-word similarly isn't protected.

What I'm mostly disappointed in are these redditors that seem to take it for granted that the legislation is a bad thing. Because they assume it's just about exerting control and the Republicans are fascist dictators and Reddit has porn anyway and it's all performative theater. I don't think these are convincing arguments. The people passing these laws are probably the same types that go for things like the Brady Campaign, they're not supervillains doing evil things for the sake of it.

They're not "supervillains" in either case, but they really are petty control-freaks coming up with schemes for turnkey authoritarianism and blatant disregard for basic constitutional protections. Importantly, what I mean by "they" in both cases are the anti-porn crusaders and the Brady Campaign. Saying that the anti-porn legislators are the same types that go for things like the Brady Campaign doesn't make me think that they're actually good, it makes me think they're the same kind of people that don't think about second-order effects and don't care about rights.

If any scheme to create a porn regulatory policy (or firearm regulatory policy) is successful, the type of people doing the regulation are going to wind up being the same kinds of people that go into public health - true believers that the government has to do this for your own good. I would honestly prefer that they were just political hacks trying to score a few points than sincere believers in the nanny state. CS Lewis remains relevant:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

I'm not super anti-porn, but I am in favor of these policy changes. Let me give an illustrative analogy:

I use marijuana. Weirdly, while my nickname in middle and high school was Weed-Man because I had long hair and wore a vintage green m65 all the time, I started using it after getting married. I think thc is great, it is fun, it lacks the hangover of alcohol, and it allows me to shut down the neuroticism of my brain and unironically enjoy things in a way I otherwise fail to do. As a Frasurbane adult, I take edibles with my wife and go to a nice dinner and La Boheme and I think that is a just-fine thing to do. I'm against the criminalization of Marijuana, because I use it and think it can be good, and because criminalizing it is ineffective (as a nerdy high schooler I had no idea where to get alcohol beyond the limited ability to steal it, while I had five phone numbers in my phone that could have gotten me weed despite not even smoking), and because people shouldn't be punished for using drugs on basically libertarian grounds.

On the other hand, I recently spent months writing letters to the editor, bothering my local police department, and attending local meetings to foment action against a local gas station that was advertising, with big banners, Delta-8 ThC products. This gas station is directly on the main road to the high school I attended, I stopped there frequently after early-spring track practice for hot chocolate. I spent hours playing the gadfly, until they agreed to stop selling.

I have no inherent objection to Delta-8 products, I've used them before, but the idea of them being sold unregulated and without ID to kids, to high schoolers on their way home, is capital-B Bad. I am mildly negative on teenagers using weed at all (my wife and I joke that we think weed is for marriage, and there is evidence it can trigger schizo stuff), but more than that I don't think it's a good idea for them to get it easily. If there was a sketchy head shop downtown, out of the way, in a place teenagers know they shouldn't go, that would sell Delta-8 and other semi-legal drugs (Kratom, Salvia, etc) I would object less. It's the idea of a kid just buying it on the way home from track practice, probably taking the gummy immediately to avoid possible detection at home, that scares me. They bought it with no ID check, no effort to hide it, right next to the TicTacs and the Arizona Green Tea, it can't be anything bad right? It's harmless, I bet it won't even work, I'll take two of them and drive home. If it were anything serious, they surely wouldn't be allowed to sell it like this!

In the same way, this policy will not prevent all kids from watching any porn. No policy will achieve that. But a well outlined and enforced policy will increase the barriers to watching porn, and make it seem less normalized and easy. Kids going to sketchier sites and finding porn less easily is a positive outcome. They will likely consume less porn, and will be aware from the circumstances that it is something kinda bad, kinda dirty, kinda socially disapproved. They will have that judgment in the back of their head, keeping it at arm's length, from the context in which they view it. That extra effort will serve to express viscerally to the kid that this stuff is kinda maybe bad and dangerous.

I don't at the end of the day disapprove of porn that strongly. I've stopped using it myself years ago, but I used it enough in my teen years that I can hardly claim purity, and if I like myself (which I do) I can hardly claim it negatively impacted me. What I do disapprove of is the normalization of pornography, the integration of pornography into our culture. I resent that I can't go on any decent sports subreddit or forum without being constantly subjected to weird pornographic metaphors. I hate that pornography has eaten sex, especially kinky sex, that good sex is taken to be a simulation of pornography, there is always an imaginary camera in the room, an audience. I hate that people consider watching porn normal, even if it is. Jesus Christ people learn to have a shameful dirty secret.

I understand exactly what you mean and I think it gets to the heart of a lot of modern knots we're in related to wanting to both not be mean/shame certain behaviors but also having effective sign posts for "this is pretty bad actually and you should dabble in moderation if at all". In this category are obesity(A couple pounds is not a big deal but dozens to hundreds is a catastrophe), porn, alcohol, drugs, gaming, vanity and even internet arguments. One must balance their indulgences.

A kid can go into a store and buy a knife. Most kids understand that knives are dangerous. The vast majority of kids don't abuse knives. Why can't it be the same with recreational drugs?

I hate that pornography has eaten sex, especially kinky sex, that good sex is taken to be a simulation of pornography, there is always an imaginary camera in the room, an audience.

When I was younger I often used to feel like I had to perform to some imaginary standard while having sex, but this wasn't because of porn, it was because I was wound up too tight to actually let go and enjoy the fun of sex and because I cared too much about what I imagined the person I was having sex with was thinking about me. If anything, I think that porn has helped me to become more comfortable with my sexuality.

I hate that people consider watching porn normal, even if it is. Jesus Christ people learn to have a shameful dirty secret.

I don't think that there is anything shameful whatsoever about watching porn.

The vast majority of kids don't abuse knives. Why can't it be the same with recreational drugs?

The intent of recreational drugs is to "use it on yourself."

The intent of a knife is never to "use it on yourself" except for exceedingly rare medical emergency situations or incidents of self-harm that are universally recognized as bad.

I think that porn has helped me to become more comfortable with my sexuality.

Bully for you.

I don't think that there is anything shameful whatsoever about watching porn.

Would you be alright with a stranger watching porn next to you on an airline flight? Or in a library? Or around children?

The consequences of modal child drug abuse are both far subtler and far more harmful than the modal child knife abuse along many different axes. The positives of knive availability to children outweigh the negatives. The negatives of drug availability to children outweigh the positives.

A kid can go into a store and buy a knife. Most kids understand that knives are dangerous. The vast majority of kids don't abuse knives. Why can't it be the same with recreational drugs?

Except where they can't:

Restrictions on Sale or Transfer. It is unlawful to sell or transfer any “deadly weapon” to a person under the age of 18. A knife “designed as a weapon and capable of producing death or serious bodily injury” would fit within the definition of a deadly weapon set forth in 18 PA C.S.A. § 2301. The prosecution must prove the item in question was “designed as a weapon.”

While intended to prevent kids from buying switchblades or the like, what this tended to cash out to at my local outdoors stores was that no minors were allowed to buy pocket knives without a parent present.

Now, in the boy scouts we all collected pocket knives, the weirder and more aggressive and more "intended to cause serious bodily harm" the better. But there was friction, we were aware that the item was taken seriously because we had to use workarounds of one type or another to get them.

I keep getting reminded by stuff like this that for conservatives in general, liberty is not a chief end in itself, it is more of a means to an end. I keep getting confused about this because conservatives so often use pro-liberty language in their arguments, and a subset of conservatives actually are fairly libertarian. But conservatism as a whole isn't.

Conservatives want the right to own guns because they like guns and they value the idea of forcefully resisting bandits and oppressive governments. At least, some bandits and some oppressive governments. At the same time, they tend to favor keeping recreational drugs illegal. Many of them would support increasing limits on porn availability. Many of them would also view the re-introduction of military conscription favorably.

I must be some kind of sucker because obviously conservatives as a group are not libertarians, and the more intellectual of them are often quite open and explicit about that, but I somehow keep getting misdirected by their tendency to spout pro-freedom type of rhetoric into thinking that they are more libertarian than they actually are.

Oddly, I do not seem to have this blind spot with progressives, it always seems obvious to me that progressives are not primarily liberty-oriented despite their use of the same sort of pro-freedom rhetoric that conservatives use. It is probably because I live in the US so for the most part I view conservative threats to liberty as being weak and defanged. If I lived in Russia or Saudi Arabia I would have the opposite perspective.

quoth someone from elsewhere:

The tribesman doesn't experience autonomy in ANY of their relationships. The tribesman don't choose the group, he belongs to it. To that person, freedom is not the autonomy of the individual, it's the autonomy of THEIR group from outside forces. "Freedom from Washington DC" is a concept that makes perfect sense to them, "Freedom from church" is a non-concept. When they say "Freedom to live my life" or "freedom to live without government interference," they're not talking about letting their neighbor be gay. They're talking about "leave me and my tribe alone."

Many (though certainly not all) conservatives are operating in this mindset. Your freedom to watch porn/do drugs/be gay/generally not conform to societal expectations is not only of no interest to them, it is an active threat to their freedom to live in a society ordered to their preferences. Some will even make the case that these things are not Real Freedom ("I must tell you, That their Liberty and Freedom, consists in having of Government; those Laws, by which their Life and their Gods may be most their own.")

The fundamental problem with "liberty orientation" as a framework is that liberty means different, contradictory things to different people. Most everybody agrees that your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, but once we move from metaphor to application things almost immediately lose clarity.

As others have said, the classical conservative idea of liberty is liberty towards something. In a Christian context, this is liberty towards love:

For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.

What you are thinking of is often described as license, or unlimited ability and right to do whatever you want, whenever you want. Liberty is quite distinct, and in fact many conservatives argue that the highest forms of liberty and freedom are liberty from the flesh, or liberty from our own addictions and negative inclinations.

This is entirely consistent with restricting porn. By watching and becoming addicted to porn, you are actually putting chains on yourself and reducing your liberty, since your compulsion begins to take control over you. That's the line of thinking, anyway.

Why stop there? If we prescribe what people are allowed to eat, we could liberate them from being overweight. If we restrict what people can read, we could liberate them from dangerous ideas polluting their minds. If we institute a draft, we could save people from becoming aimless drifters.

Under that Orwellian definition of liberty, Saudi Arabia would score much better on liberty than the US.

Lol, very fair! I'm not necessarily saying that I agree with the definition, but it is a more coherent philosophical point than most think.

You have to subscribe to the Christian worldview to agree with it though by and large, although I think there's truth even outside that framework. But Christians imposing Christian morality on non Christians via the law is not a good idea imo.

Liberty is, in a classical conservative mind, the tendency for things to tend towards their proper place and stay there. This is because everything has its telos, its right purpose, inherent to its nature and probably written into the laws of reality itself by God, and going against it just doesn’t lead to flourishing.

To take an example, to cross thread a screw instead of using the right one- it works fine, up until you have to take it out and put it back in again. And that’s because you exceeded the operating parameters; using the correct screw would have saved this. And nearly everything is a lot like that; there is a proper role and purpose for everyone and everything, and going against it may not cause obvious damage upfront, but it will quite quickly.

There was a recent AAQC about high powered career women quitting high powered careers because those careers weren’t making them happy; in a classical conservative society where homemaking and child rearing is acknowledged as the proper role for most women, they wouldn’t have cross threaded themselves, because there would have been friction, albeit probably not actual forbidding- there were female doctors in the 19th century. As a classical conservative today I recognize that some women doctors are probably necessary but most women are happier staying at home, and thus think there should be a fairly low quota for women entering medical school.

Likewise, on this issue, kids shouldn't be looking at porn, and they shouldn’t be using drugs. Obviously some of them will do so anyways, but putting up friction can meaningfully change the calculus so that they tend more towards things kids should be doing.

For other issues, I think it should be illegal to sell cold beer for off premises consumption(people use it for drinking and driving, but it’s trivial to put it in your fridge at home), schools should teach heteronormativity, and the welfare system should be reformed to explicitly favor poor married couples over single motherhood or long term cohabitation.

Likewise, on this issue, kids should be looking at porn, and they shouldn’t be using drugs.

I think you meant "shouldn't be looking at porn" here.

You're correct, I do.

I think of it as conservatives erecting boundaries so that people can be as free as possible within them. In this case, wanting kids to wander the kid internet doing kid stuff and not being able to access porn.

Oddly, I do not seem to have this blind spot with progressives, it always seems obvious to me that progressives are not primarily liberty-oriented despite their use of the same sort of pro-freedom rhetoric that conservatives use. It is probably because I live in the US so for the most part I view conservative threats to liberty as being weak and defanged. If I lived in Russia or Saudi Arabia I would have the opposite perspective.

As someone that suffers from the same blind spot, I think this is correct. If, like me, you're a financially comfortable, thirtysomething guy with no particular religious conviction, you have probably not felt any sort of constraint from conservatives on how you live your life. On the contrary, conservatives have mostly fought for you to keep your guns, keep your money, and generally deal with less nanny-state compulsion. Progressives, on the other hand, have been a driving force for endless minor insults, grievances, and compulsion that are impossible to stop noticing once you start noticing them. This isn't a product of the eternal positions of the sides, just the result of being a white guy in the PMC class of the 2020s.

It depends. I consider myself conservative yet I wouldn’t support banning porn for adults nor do I support banning most recreational drugs (even if I would argue most people shouldn’t use them)

But kids are always a tricky area for liberty minded people. There is a real problem since (1) kids don’t really understand the long term costs, (2) have a fuck ton of hormones clouding their judgment, and (3) the future self problem. It is one reason I steadfastly support all bans of so called gender therapy for minors.

I’m not sure how I feel about the topic of OP. But I recognize (maybe rationalize) that one can be pro liberty but realize that doesn’t apply for a 9 year old.

As ever, one of the problems with banning things for just ThosePeople, regardless of who ThosePeople are, is that enforcement mechanisms will tend to antagonize everyone rather than just ThosePeople. Banning the sale of alcohol to teenagers (or at least young teens) is probably a pretty decent idea, but the United States has such an idiotic culture of officious enforcement that convenient stores just make a policy that everyone needs to scan an ID, even if they're obviously elderly. Whether the juice is worth the squeeze winds up being an object-level question, but I think it's best to set out with the assumption that the enforcement will be done by excessively officious and petty bureaucrats in the context of a litigious system that favors maximally annoying policies for everyone involved.

over half of 13 year olds have seen porn by that age. Pretty bad!

Biological adults interested in sex, news at 11.
Why should society's failure to reify the pretenses it currently has about teenagers, or parents failing to parent, ever be my fucking problem?

There probably exists some amount of parental options like this, right?

Those who failed to learn the lessons of the early 2000s are doomed to repeat them forever; what continuously puzzles me is the proportion of parents who were children at that time that don't seem to fully understand this even though they by all rights should. Censorship is effective- that's part of why we continually insist on doing it, after all- but a technological solution to a people problem doesn't solve the people problem that, as a parent, one should obviously be much more interested in actually solving (since the legislature won't)... and if they're not so invested, I don't see why I should have to subsidize these parents' pretense that their 17 year old is still 7 for just a little while longer. Letting them pollute the commons with this extra tax is not acceptable.

Younger children don't tend to search for porn because, should you be fortunate enough to remember what being one is like, it's gross and weird if you don't have the software package that lets you appreciate it. Hell, half of the reason parents even consider turning the parental controls on in the first place is because their kid brought them something they didn't fully understand (because clearly the way you reward your child's trust in you is to respond by revoking your trust in them; it's basically like telling your son who's smart enough to tell the neighborhood creep "no" despite never having received formal instructions to do so that he must now wear a condom at all times).

As far as the teenagers go, of course, you're past the point of realistically controlling them especially if they've inherited enough of their parents disagreeableness to find other ways; general purpose computers that can trivially bypass these blocks are easily-concealable and generally within teenage budgets.

As for your other points:

  1. Realistically, they're just going to go to sites that happen to feature a significant number of results with participants a lot closer to their own age (worth noting that this is the main reason 4chan exists). So instead of being exposed to material traditionalist-progressives are merely concerned about, they'll see material about which they're absolutely apoplectic. At least it's higher-quality than whatever self-indulgent garbage progressives think is worthy of school libraries, and sites that feature this aren't generally trying to manipulate you into clicking on uglier porn like PornHub does, but it's the same "well they banned heroin so everyone just uses fentanyl now because it's easier to get" thing. Some jurisdictions are angrier about that material existing than others; I'm sure throwing the odd teenager in jail over loli is going to make things so much better for everyone just like it already does when they catch him with a nude his girlfriend sent him, and is definitely a good use of our resources.

  2. Legislation can, and has, replaced parenting but only in the "makes it worse for anyone with an IQ above 70" direction. Bad parents don't follow the rules, good parents don't need them, and in its majestic equality the law prohibits both from ignoring them.

  3. You misspelled "will"; this is a target for actors with State-level resources for what should be blatantly obvious reasons.

  4. Most countries whose citizens have at least a vague notion of free speech already get hauled to jail for posting edgy memes on Twitter (they're generally stupid enough to use their real names when signing up for their accounts). The porn equivalent of that would be bad, actually.

they're not supervillains doing evil things for the sake of it

No, it's just the more mundane "stop doing what I don't like"/"I don't want to solve the problem, I want to ban X" thing that slave morality modes don't see as distinct from evil.

Biological adults interested in sex, news at 11.

This is the root problem. Perhaps we should just mandate puberty blockers for all minors, thereby removing the hormonal incentive to watch porn. /sarcasm.

Why should society's failure to reify the pretenses it currently has about teenagers, or parents failing to parent, ever be my fucking problem?

It seems self-evident to me that a citizen should have an interest in the direction of the society in which he lives. As part of that, a citizen should also be interested in the way future adult citizens are likely to turn out.

It seems self-evident to me that a citizen should have an interest in the direction of the society in which he lives. As part of that, a citizen should also be interested in the way future adult citizens are likely to turn out.

Of course, we are. As stated otherwise in your comment's parent: Using a legislative banhammer on the most compliant and controlled porn sites to replace the scalpel of "being a decent fucking parent" is blowback incarnate.

None of this shit works, and I say this as someone who believes wholeheartedly that early exposure to porn is a huge net negative. It's up there with cookie consent popups in terms of bone-headed do-goodism with no thought about the consequences.

Using a legislative banhammer on the most compliant and controlled porn sites to replace the scalpel of "being a decent fucking parent" is blowback incarnate.

You can’t shelter your kids that much without fucking up at least a little bit. I’ve met(and been called in to clean up) the results; without a supportive broader society, the kind of sheltering that is necessary for that makes broken and dysfunctional young men.

I agree totally that sheltering children too much is poor parenting. I see it every day, and am perhaps the most free-range parent in my generation that I personally know.

I have my limits, and they're somewhere around violent, vomitous, bukkake gangbangs being two clicks away.

There's no question that if a kid wants to get to pornography in my household at an early age, they will find a way. Erecting reasonable barriers to entry and making a reasonable case to just... hold off for a bit is my plan. Learning about sex on various textual forums served me very well, I have no intention of blocking that.

My kids are young, I don't know if it will work. We'll see.

I misread your comment; I thought you were either delusional as to the effectiveness of parental controls/internet filtering, or intending to raise your children far more sheltered than that.

What does "being a decent parent" involve? What's the proper strategy?

A combination of managing your own household censorship regime and having frank conversations about why you've implemented it.

The analog to illegal drugs is a good one. I don't care if my 18-year-old kid smokes weed every once in a while, but I'm very uninterested in giving them the greenlight at 14.

As far as the teenagers go, of course, you're past the point of realistically controlling them especially if they've inherited enough of their parents disagreeableness to find other ways; general purpose computers that can trivially bypass these blocks are easily-concealable and generally within teenage budgets.

This is exactly where I get stuck. The lack of theory of mind for teenagers that the geezers seem to have is absolutely remarkable. Do they not recall being a teenager? Were they actually just weird, broken-brained teenagers that didn't act the way the rest of us did? People seem to believe that teenage males aren't the horniest human beings on the planet. The lengths that a teenage guy would go to for a half-hearted handjob from a girlfriend are legendary. Somehow, I'm supposed to believer that political boomers are going to implement policy that will prevent them from accessing pornography? Come on, this is so obviously stupid that it makes the TSA seem like a pretty good plan for security by comparison.

This is one of those traits where there's really massive variance, and it's likely both genetic and cultural. I have been in groups where nearly everyone had an extremely low baseline level of horniness as a teen (this includes people I am close enough to that I know they are not lying for social reasons) and within groups where everyone admits they were psychotically horny as teens.

These two types of people tend to self-sort pretty strongly from a young age, and they tend to understand each other poorly.

Yep. I sorted into the group where romance was interesting, but sex was pointless and unappealing at our stage of life. At one point I asked my mother (in the context of abortion), "Why do people have sex if they don't want to have a baby?" and she stuttered, "Some people find it pleasurable."

I was aware of the people who talked about sex while playing Truth or Dare, but I had long ago labeled these people as "not friend material" before I even knew what sex was. They were the kids who thought Bs were a good grade, or didn't listen to adults when they forbade us from doing things, and being near these kids made me uncomfortable.

I've seen the phrase "time preference" thrown around here, I think it correlates strongly to the two groups.

Do they not recall being a teenager? Were they actually just weird, broken-brained teenagers that didn't act the way the rest of us did?

Evidently yes, but they might also be lying or otherwise acting in bad faith.

You can typically and trivially differentiate the people who don't or won't remember from the people who do/will because the people who won't remember typically use some form of the phrase "raging melanin hormones" as an excuse.

Leaving aside the arguments against it you've already mentioned, I am utterly unconvinced that seeing porn is "bad" for kids. The majority of studies on the longterm effects on pornography showed just about zilch in terms of effect, be it on sexual violence or anything else. The fact that conservatives consider it "obvious" is of little consequence to me here. The entire debacle seems to be far more concerned with arguments from moral purity rather than concrete harm, and I have an exceedingly dim opinion of those. Parents who want their kids to not watch porn should invest in parental controls, not a nanny-state, not that either will really work.

Well, at least it might make the little tykes more tech-savvy, at least they'll learn to use VPNs or even just torrent videos. Or else they might just learn to develop a vivid imagination, you don't need porn to jerk it, don't ask me how I happen to know that. I'll pour one out for the poor aphantasics.

I am utterly unconvinced that seeing porn is "bad" for kids.

As others have mentioned, this is going to be almost impossible to study.

I don't need to prove porn leads to rule-breaking or delinquency for it to be a net negative. That's not what I'm concerned about. The hedonistic treadmill available in pornography is astonishing. "Our" generation had the fences of bandwidth and screen resolution around us - and even so there was Goatse, One Guy One Jar, LemonParty.

I would be hard pressed to find someone who thinks that moving from a squirreled-away lingerie catalog to piss-bangs was healthy for their sexuality. Of course Close Your Eyes Haha and all that, but asking a teenage boy to do so isn't a historically simple ask.

I don't know where that meme comes from, but the studies I see show negative effects on adolescent exposure:

On the negative side of behavioral patterns, a small number of previous studies have addressed the impact of exposure to pornography on adolescent behavioral problems: rule-breaking or highly delinquent youth [41,70] and youth showing symptoms of borderline or clinical depression have been reported to use pornography more frequently [41,71,72]. Similarly, Ybarra and Mitchel [42] (2005) linked pornographic consumption with behavioral problems and depressive symptoms. Accessing online pornography may be a dysfunctional way to cope with stress or with abnormal mood, and as such, it is reinforced and maintained [73]. Accordingly, Brand, Laier, and Young [74] suggested that problematic internet use is associated with expectations that the internet can positively influence mood, the disappointment of which may in turn worsen preexisting mental health problems. Alternatively, the content of the pornographic material may impact negatively on youth by shaping adolescent beliefs and their attitudes towards sex, which may, in fact, come into conflict with those instilled by their families [75]. Tsitsika et al. suggested that Greek adolescents might develop unrealistic attitudes towards sex through exposure to online pornography. These conflicts need to be addressed in sex education classes. Psychosocial impairment associated with pornographic exposure suggests a need to further explore and address underlying mechanisms reinforcing pornographic use behavior among some adolescents.

Regarding aggressive behavior, Mesch, in his study of the social characteristics of pornography users in a sample of Israeli adolescents aged 13–18 years, found a significant association between pornography consumption and aggressiveness in school, with higher degrees of consumption related to higher levels of aggressiveness [45]. In a similar study discussed previously, Alexy, Burgess, and Prentky [76] found that juvenile sexual offenders who were consumers of pornography were more likely to display forms of aggressive behaviors such as theft, truancy, manipulation of others, arson, and forced sexual intercourse [76]. The effect of androgens in both sexual and aggressive behavior shown in the past could be a possible mediator of these relationships [18]. Testosterone levels are positively correlated with the level of aggressiveness, violent behavior, and sexual offences, particularly among adolescents [77,78]. However, well-designed studies are necessary in the future in order to clarify the causality of this relationship.

If you want the keyword that gets all the salacious articles on Google Scholar, search "“Problematic pornography use.” It is a subset of and is the most common manifestation of CSBD (Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder) in the ICD-11.

In brief, PPU is related to: (a) attentional biases toward sexual stimuli, (b) deficient inhibitory control (in particular, to problems with motor response inhibition and to shift attention away from irrelevant stimuli), (c) worse performance in tasks assessing working memory, and (d) decision making impairments (in particular, to preferences for short-term small gains rather than long-term large gains, more impulsive choice patterns than non-erotica users, approach tendencies toward sexual stimuli, and inaccuracies when judging the probability and magnitude of potential outcomes under ambiguity).

What studies are you looking at that show otherwise?

All of those demonstrate correlation and not causation, but thank you for tracking them down. Certainly I don't care at all if their parents disapprove of them consuming porn, as one of the concerns quoted.

Here's an example of what I recall from Psychology Today

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/talking-apes/202104/does-porn-use-lead-sexual-violence

And:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359178909000445

The effects of pornography, whether violent or non-violent, on sexual aggression have been debated for decades. The current review examines evidence about the influence of pornography on sexual aggression in correlational and experimental studies and in real world violent crime data. Evidence for a causal relationship between exposure to pornography and sexual aggression is slim and may, at certain times, have been exaggerated by politicians, pressure groups and some social scientists. Some of the debate has focused on violent pornography, but evidence of any negative effects is inconsistent, and violent pornography is comparatively rare in the real world. Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships. Although these data cannot be used to determine that pornography has a cathartic effect on rape behavior, combined with the weak evidence in support of negative causal hypotheses from the scientific literature, it is concluded that it is time to discard the hypothesis that pornography contributes to increased sexual assault behavior.

Emphasis added.

The experimental research Ferguson and Hartley mention are mainly varieties of showing a college student a video and asking them to answer a survey immediately after. I would not expect that this experimental design is able to detect the effects anti-porn activists are concerned with. Many of these college students likely regularly engage in porn, muddying the waters.

The studies on pornography showing positive effects on attitudes towards women explicitly exclude violent porn. "It is important to note that in the present paper, the focus of our literature review and research is on pornography represented by examples such as Playboy, sexually explicit but nonviolent videos, and adult movie channels." Garos, Beggan, Kluck, and Easton (2004) Are parents supporting these bills worried that their children might stumble on a Playboy magazine, or are they worried their kids are watching an 18 year old girl in a simulated gang rape?

Research by Scott (1985), however, found no correlation between semi-hard-core pornographic magazine consumption and rape rates, but consumption of more soft-core magazines were correlated with rape.

They were studying such a different phenomena from what we are experiencing today.

Regarding the correlational studies, 98% of men in America have watched internet porn in the last six months. When there are so many people in one group, and so few people in the other group, correlational statistics get wonky. Looking at kids is the only way to get a large sample of people who haven't been exposed yet.

It also seems weird to blame the decrease in violent crime in the US on the proliferation of pornography, when there are so many other things to blame, like decreasing lead levels in childhood, increased abortion rates among impoverished groups, etc. I am not familiar with what happened in Denmark during this time, maybe they had a lead problem as well? But being able to cherry pick three other countries that match the correlation does not hold a huge amount of weight. One hypothesis that fits the evidence could be that we would see even less rape if pornography had not proliferated.

Potential confounds abound and no one is going to be able to conduct an RCT for this.

Anecdotally a lot of men report “porn brain” interfering with their ability to have normal relationships with women. Having decided to be done with porn about a year ago, I do notice a difference. But there’s a also a finding-religion confound in my case.

Self-reports from those who can't access a counterfactual surely would be strongly biased by explanations that are available and believed in our society. Some centuries ago, people would have reported humoural deficiencies as the cause of their problems.

But there’s a also a finding-religion confound in my case.

Would you mind writing more about this, when you have a chance? Religiosity among Motteposters is very interesting to me, as I've been wandering a bit down that path.

I would be interested, if the mods give a green light, in doing a standalone thread for motteizeans to write about religion in their lives.

Reddit has porn anyway and it's all performative theater

How is that a bad argument? Do you just mean that the people supporting the law are sincere in believing it will be effective? Because yes they're presumably sincere, the vast majority of political campaigns are, but Reddit seems like a pretty good example of why it will be so ineffective.

Either the law doesn't include general-purpose user-generated sites like Reddit/4chan/Imgur/Twitter and it does nothing to prevent access to pornography, or it does and ends up requiring blocking most of the internet when they don't implement an account system and ID verification just to view their sites. I don't know the statistics but I wouldn't be surprised if general-purpose sites were more popular sources of porn than dedicated porn sites. Further complications include how to treat sites that ban porn but still have plenty of it, like post-2023 Imgur - some sort of bureaucracy to judge their moderation practices? And piracy sites like thepiratebay or nhentai are even less likely to implement such a system, so you have to block them and their mirrors, something institutions have been pretty bad at doing even when focusing specifically on piracy.

They're sincere, yes, and also it will have an effect beyond just theater. I'll take Reddit as an example, let's say that the lawmakers decide to require ID verification to view NSFW content. There will still be tons of porn on Reddit, but they'd have to search for something not tagged NSFW, which would eliminate the majority of mainstream porn subreddits.

If you want to say that that's not going to be terribly effective, I agree with you. People will definitely still be able to find pornography if they want it. There's more than enough untagged porn on reddit, and kids (really, we're talking about male teens and preteens here, right, so I suppose saying "kids" is a little misleading) asking for porn could get themselves into trouble, and there definitely would be teenagers asking for porn or where to find porn in this hypothetical. But it would dissuade a good amount because the low hanging fruit would be eliminated. And call it misguided if you want, but these aren't the actions of fascist dictators or people who just want control for control's sake. They just don't want kids watching this crap.

But it would dissuade a good amount because the low hanging fruit would be eliminated.

Yeah, I'm pretty much always frustrated by "the law can't stop all [x]" arguments against a given law, because it's a fully-general argument against laws in general. No society has ever caught all murderers (indeed, in the current US, only about half get solved). No law will ever stop all thefts. And speed limits certainly don't keep huge numbers of drivers from speeding. Yet, few people if any ever use this to argue for doing away with laws against murder or theft. (I have seen a few libertarians use it to argue for doing away with speed limits, though.)

What matters is whether or not it deters enough people, not some unachievable ideal of total deterrence.

And call it misguided if you want, but these aren't the actions of fascist dictators or people who just want control for control's sake. They just don't want kids watching this crap.

Eh... I'm skeptical that this is the extent of the social conservative movement on this topic. Minors getting exposed to adult content is the most immediate driver (and for some things, like the problem of minors getting bullied by people flashing porn at them, I can pretty strongly agree with), but there are definitely social conservatives that think adults having reduced access to porn is a "good thing".

If ID laws intended for minors also incidentally reduce adult porn usage, of course most conservatives will be completely fine with that, if not celebrating it. I'm sure some of them would want to implement more restrictions that also affect adults explicitly, but that's not the majority, and I don't think you'll see legislation doing that any time soon barring some religious revival.

How does "requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website" "put children and your privacy at risk"? Are they suggesting children are going to try and get fake ID from some crooks? Where does the risk to children come from?

In related news, Pornhub has apparently been pushing gay and transgender content on men and children, per a leaked recording.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/pornhub-pushes-gay-transgender-videos-convert-straight-men

Rice added that children need to be helped to figure out their sexuality and orientation preferences because they are more "pliable."

Speaking about children who may be sexually confused, production coordinator Sylvian Fernandez said Men.com, a gay pornography site run by the company, can be used as a resource, adding, "They'll find their kink in there, I'm sure."

Pornhub and co have made a partial denial:

"The person who was illegally filmed in this video is very clearly speaking of converting free users into paid subscribers, and any insinuation otherwise is disingenuous, reckless, and hurtful," an Aylo spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. "It is egregious for a journalist to misrepresent this information in order to push outlandish and harmful conspiracy theories."

As far as I'm concerned, the whole company should be razed and the earth salted. Their verification for content creators has been historically atrocious, there were a bunch of rape videos that were put up there, the women involved struggled to get them taken down while Pornhub got advertising bucks.

How does "requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website" "put children and your privacy at risk"? Are they suggesting children are going to try and get fake ID from some crooks? Where does the risk to children come from?

I still remember the old days of Usenet where you got porn from small communities that uploaded it one image at a time and had a community with discussions and small talk and etc. built around it. Being a young adult forced to get porn there vastly increased the chances of running across a groomer - or getting a virus for that matter.

Getting porn from Pornhub is vastly safer for kids than any of the less-moderated alternatives.

This is the classic 'will refusing to do any sex education make kids not have sex, or make them have unsafe sex with pregnancies and stds and coercion and etc.' debate.

If you had a policy that makes it so no kid ever sees any porn ever, cool, do it.

This policy can't possibly do that, it can just punish the largest and therefore generally safest and most well-moderated venues, forcing kids into more dangerous venues instead.

Websites such as Pornhub, which is less targeted to specific sexual attitudes and is more a repository for a wide array of content, are designed to "push the envelope" with straight users by suggesting gay and transgender videos to them, Rice explained.

I noticed that. Pornhub is showing more gay/trans/kink into the little thumbnails. I dismissed that as changing mores, a neutral algorithm just showing what is popular. But now I wonder how much ideology is behind that? If one registers a PH account (shock!) instead of incognito browsing, is there a way to set preferences and filter effectively?

How does "requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website" "put children and your privacy at risk"? Are they suggesting children are going to try and get fake ID from some crooks? Where does the risk to children come from?

MindGeek's official position is that inconsistent enforcement will drive under-18s to platforms where enforcement is lackluster or non-existent. And while that's probably motivated in part by their investment in different blocking approaches, it's not exactly an unreasonable concern, nor one that is limited to minors seeing the same porn they'd get exposed to otherwise, or some just slightly-sketchier stuff.

There's a small army of creeps, blackmailers, and unabashed pedophiles that trawl for people they can offer 'illicit' content and then use that to demand money and/or threaten their targets. While the highest-profile cases usually depend on a variant of catfishing, there's been no small number that use approaches based on outre content (whether the victim was looking for that or not) and social engineering.

That statement by itself actually boosts my opinion somewhat of Pornhub; a device level safe search would probably be the best approach to this.

PornHub (or more specifically MindGeek, the parent company) has long been maneuvering to monetize and potentially monopolize the age verification services in the UK, so their preferences for a specific framework of age verification is probably not motivated solely by principle or interest in protecting children or even themselves.

More generally, there is a tradeoff here: where server-level enforcement requires every server to behave, device-level safe searches require very strict limits on how a device can be used and how heavily it can be sandboxed. iOS 'solves' this by running nearly anything related to web functionality through Apple's browser, and the extent it doesn't or can't due to app functionality have lead to a ton of Apple's decision-making driving the rest of the world into censorship regardless of age (cfe tumblrpocalypse). This is kinda okay for phones, where most parents just want their kids using them as phones and maybe a few limited other uses. But doing the same for desktop would be a massive undertaking, and one with major repercussions and a huge lockdown on the ability to run (or write!) unvalidated code. JonSt0kes has written on the AI variant of this problem from a social conservative view, but it's far more general than MLgen.

This is further augmented because you don't just need to protect your kids' hardware. If anyone in their classes are unblocked or is able to bypass the blocks, flashing other students with stuff those other students weren't even looking for is a common attack/bullying tactic -- and that's something that seems much worse.

Parents could set the birthday of the child in question, a password locked setting, and the phone could then block access to many of these sites. There probably exists some amount of parental options like this, right? I have no knowledge of them, but I doubt they quite reach the level I'm talking about here

Kinda. iOS has an automatic birthday-based approach and a manual selection, but it's very similar in level to Google SafeSearch -- not just hard to know what will be blocked, and fairly arbitrary, but even once something is blocked it's hard to know why. Android just uses SafeSearch directly, though in turn it's less effective since Android is less locked-down by default.

More effective approaches are usually going to involve domain- or IP-level blocks enforced at a router level, along with blocking tunnel- or vpn-like connections, but that's still nowhere near perfect, and they can only cover limited areas.

If you take easy access to porn away, some kids will chase it down elsewhere.

I'd also note that they might chase something porn down: an alternative to looking for it elsewhere to look instead for something that falls through the cracks. There's a lot of people who got into vore because all of the obvious 'normal' sex stuff was the sort of thing that was unacceptable to examine or consider, and even when they escaped physically that they didn't really stop getting distracted by it, for something at the milder end of the scale. Nothing wrong with a vore kink itself, but I doubt it's better as an introduction to sexuality.

Database leaks could be a problem, depending on how that's handled.

There are problems well before leaks. I'm old enough to remember when Corbin Fisher used some pretty aggressive legal threats and threats of outing to go after people who torrented their porn -- and it made me a lot more cautious about who got my address, name, and age moving forward, since they were one of the first I ever subscribed to.

Objections 1 and 2 are pretty much my primary take here.

A large infinity minus a small infinity is still infinity.

You can block any number of mainstream sites with corporate offices who actually have to fear government regulation, and there will still be infinite sources of porn available for kids who want it.

It will just be less centralized and less moderated and less regulated, therefore much more likely for kids to see much worse stuff or meet actual groomers or etc.

(like, Pornhub censors searches for the word 'rape', for goodness sake. Do you really want kids going to Motherless or Exhentai instead?)

This seems so blindingly obvious to me that, yes, it is hard for me to resist the intuition that the people pushing for these laws can't actually believe that it will actually decrease the amount of porn kids see, which makes my mind immediately flail to makeup another motivation for them. Punishing porn sites financially out of religious spite, compiling databases of all porn every citizen has ever seen so they can secretly appropriate it and use it against political enemies and malcontents, simple vote-grabbing by appealing to their base with pointless boondoggles that carry the correct cultural signifiers, etc.

I in fact have enough perspective to apply Hanlon's Razor, and imagine that these extremely old and out-of-touch legislators actually do believe that this will make kids see less porn somehow. But it's really really hard for me to do that, it makes so little sense to me and has such obvious dystopic tendencies, I have to entirely take the outside view to hold the possibility in my head.

So I'm not surprised that lots of people with the same intuitions as me can't/don't default to that assumption, and see sinister motives instead. Failing to apply Hanlon's Razor is pretty much a fundamental defining feature of the culture war in general.

If progressives passed a law saying that any site which allows unmoderated comments or comments that feature racism or misogyny will require Real ID to use, with al user's actions on such cites recorded in a database alongside their real names and identifying details, because children should be protected from such things... would the right not assume that this move has nothing to do with protecting children and is 100% sinister and dystopian? That's about what this law feels like.

Why can’t the ID situation be solved by

  1. Must create account to view porn site
  2. Must complete crypto-style Know Your Customer challenge to activate account. Basically hold your ID up to webcam, then take picture of yourself on webcam in several poses to match ID

This is exactly what crypto exchanges are required to do.

A lot of people don't have IDs, or don't want to give their IDs and that level of personal information to a random porn site. For more marginal or custom sites, the overhead in that sort of analysis is huge, particularly since you have to run it not just for paying customers, but pretty much anyone trying to figure out even the slightest bit of what you're doing. I dunno that I'd trust AI-style analysis anyway, but because there's not a standardized US ID layout (even for driver's licenses!), nevermind world-wide, it's a frustratingly large problem.

((There are other issues of varying stupidity. For some godawful reasons, some states allow or even default to having your SSN on them.))

Crypto can (kinda) get away with this for accounts because users are already giving away a lot of their privacy and the median account is in many ways a whale.

I'm actually not entirely unhappy with the solution being to install a VPN. It requires a credit card (the free ones don't have the bandwidth for HD porn, I've tried). Also someone in the house needs to be tech savvy enough to work it, which increases the odds that person would also block porn sites on their kids devices.

I saw a lot of coomers on /r/Nova were pretty upset about the law in VA. I never noticed, having been behind a VPN the entire time.

While I sympathize with the argument that it's tyrannical to require crypto exchanges to adhere to KYC, I would imagine that the immediate and obvious objection from Pornhub's side would be that this would substantially cut into their bottom line, from the principle that providing stuff for free paradoxically increases the revenue of it (look at how piracy of video games boosts their sales). If they can't provide free videos, then they'll get less money.

???

Pornhub didn't say they can't make the ID requirement work, they said it's stupid and awful and they want nothing to do with it.

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