Looking at banned children's books should fine you an idea of the offline precedent here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
You're practically forced to have a Google/Apple account and a google/apple smartphone to even exist in today's world.
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 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
Anti government folk from the USA hated them and decided they were government overreach.
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.
Privacy from companies maybe, privacy from governments and cops, certainly not.
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.
The EU is not a monolith. There are many people pushing in many different directions. Sometimes the result is good, sometimes less so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Yes, which is why we are not in the early internet anymore and fully into surveillance capitalism, algorithmic social media.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
Implying that they don't care about their kids, or shouldn't have kids as a result, is a pretty awful thing to say.
Especially when everyone who would have this particular "problem" has access to various search tools and video websites that would explain "solutions".
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 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)
If you are too busy to parent, then you shouldn't be one in the first place.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
other iOS applications that have registered themselves as an Identity Document Provider.
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 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
This is simplistic. I think you'll find parents are not a uniform bloc in favor of this kind of overreach.
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_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...
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]
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is absurd. It does look like they're suing, with help from a lot of publishers, at least.
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.
> 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 Texas wants to block content from entities that have nothing to do with Texas, they can build their own great firewall.
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S1-1/AL...
https://ag.ny.gov/resources/organizations/police-departments...
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.
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?
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.)
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.
> "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."
"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."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.
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.
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.
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
If the verified list is tied against identity, there is only a simple law change required to de-anonymize everything.
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.
How can you guarantee that the credential you're getting belongs to the actual person on the other side of the screen?
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
Blood and guns, sure. Freedumb
This goes back a long ways.
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
>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<=
This implies is level of nonchalance toward your child seeing two women have sex and eat turds that demands elaboration.
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.
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'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.
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.
As moral positions go, it's actually quite eccentric.
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?
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.
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).
> (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.
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.
Anything can be perceived as “obscene” especially when you leave that interpretation open to any particular group.
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...
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.
Especially the government.
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.
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.
Can you provide any source for this?
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 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.
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.
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?
Guns, violence = Good
We live in a very strange country. American Christians must be the largest group of hypocrites in history.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That's what I used to say about Roe v. Wade. "They'll never give up that wedge issue."
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
...
Ok so call me a bigot but one of those seems fine and the other seems SUS as HELL to me.
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?
bigyabai•3h ago
Just looking at HN's frontpage, you'd have no idea that anyone here cares about privacy or freedom.
bryancoxwell•3h ago
bigyabai•3h ago
If this is "news" then tomorrow I should expect to see articles reporting Lincoln's death at the top of /active.
alwa•3h ago
arp242•3h ago
munchler•3h ago
jacquesm•3h ago
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.
getoj•3h ago
gchamonlive•3h ago
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.
everdrive•3h ago
viccis•3h ago
recursivecaveat•3h ago
Terr_•2h ago
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/