As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.
Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
Archive: http://archive.today/uZB13
It’s only a matter of time before a data leak happens.
That’ll be a fun day.
Hear me out!
What if parents did their fucking job as they should instead of demanding the state to do it for them, only for it to get hijacked by both
- christofascists wanting to make it illegal to not live a “christian life”,
- and corporations wanting to ensure competition will need to pay a shitton of money on age verification AI?
It’s probably the FREE STATES OF FREEDOM STATES!
MMMERICAAAAAAAA!!! 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉 🎉
That’s because more than half of the country is some combination of evil and/or retarded.
Pornhub
sister sites
Guys, I’ve cracked it.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
100% of commercial porn sites have always required you to identify yourself.
I’m prepared for my downvotes.
I have often joked that in the not-too-distant-future people will look back upon the early days of the internet like we look upon the 1950s view of smoking.
What do you mean kids shouldn’t do it? It’s fine. You know how it is, watch a kids cartoon, look at some memes, two girls 1 cup, email the fam, those two Mexican dudes who had their heads cut off with a chainsaw, research Ghana for a school project, sneak in some porn after the parents go to bed, and cap it off with some chat room conversations about Picard’s superiority to Kirk while some kid across the country goes on about shooting his brains out because mom and dad either don’t love him enough or love him too much. Maybe download some credit card spoofers and Diablo hacks for online play if you aren’t quite ready for bed.
The early internet, and even the internet now, is a fucking wild concept. Take everything that people think, not just what we know, but what we fucking think about while we are taking a shit, and make it available for anyone look at without guidance or context. We can even watch police shootings in real time and pretend to be detectives during terrorist events, consequences to real people be damned.
Should parents know better? Sure. Is the internet an effective babysitter while they grind out a living? You bet.
If we restrict this dumpster fire behind age-verification and eliminate anonymity through tagged identification, the effect on privacy and anonymous online activism will be severe. However, CinnamonRingCumGlaze86 will be significantly less able to use their 6th grade reading level to convince people that modern medicine is bad because Pre-Historical Witches didn’t have AIDS bro. #flatearth #zoroastrianismwasasteptoofar #onceagaintherealproblemiscapitalismandwearelookingatthewrongthingbecauseofmanufactured-outrageandobfuscationcreatedbytheoligarchy #worldofwarcraftclassic
Everyone who ever submits for age verification will have their information stolen. It is a matter of when, not if.
I mean, a VPN is way cheaper than whatever hoops Idaho wants you to jump through to watch some 10/10 goth hottie get their ass eaten.
Yea, but soon we’ll have no states to vpn to, and we will have to start using the Quebec servers, then all the websites will be in French and I’ll have to learn a new language.
because you actually watch porn for the plot?
Omelette du fromage. Omelette du fromage!
I VPN to Montreal servers. Everything is still displayed in English.
Your response is also supposed to be legally in French.
Interesting…all of it? I’m in Ontario but my hub/ISP is in Quebec so all my random advertising is in French.
Somehow it knows to target advertising to you in English…maybe you need to work on your privacy?
Languages accepted by the user is like the second header in http. It’s in all your requests.
I’ve got a lot of privacy stuff, but I also know that I’m being tracked. I’m not using the VPN for privacy though. I’m using it to watch porn, so I don’t really care. If I did want privacy there’s a lot of things I could improve, but I’m not that worried about it.
As for the targeted advertising, I don’t see any of that. I wouldn’t be surprised if that were in French but I wouldn’t know.
Yeah…I don’t really know what I’m talking about…it’s not like I make much of an effort for privacy. I’m guess it’s just my particular ISP. It’s like…the random advertising is in French…but if they know who I am it’s targeted…it’s mixed.
soon we’ll have no states to vpn to
I’ve yet to see any state legislature take that proposal seriously. Unlike trying to make porn sites take your credit card info in advance (a policy they hated so much gosh darn it!) you’re really fucking with the money when you try and regulate VPNs. Also, just… not really that practical. For the same reason Congress has been pretty toothless when it comes to regulating Torrents and digital encryption, going after VPNs at the regulatory level is something of a technological rabbit hole.
then all the websites will be in French
Nothing will ever make anyone on the internet learn a language other than English.
I’ve yet to see any state legislature take that proposal seriously
snekerpimp meant if every state requires ID, then VPN to another state will not get around the ID check.
Setting aside the fact that there’s no appetite for these laws in liberal states because its purely a conservative fetish, you can still get porn on the internet without going to the big corporate online clearinghouses.
FFS, there was porn on Napster back in the day.
There’s no appetite for these laws in the voter public of any state, as far as I can tell given how VPN usage skyrockets in every state where these laws are put in place. Is California no longer liberal? Also consider the people running sites in any of the states that have such a law. They may resort to just blanket ID-checking everyone rather than risk prosecution.
There’s no appetite for these laws in the voter public of any state
Evangelical right-wing states have a huge contingent of politicians who compete with one another to be the toughest on “child sex trafficking” and other Epstein-tangential topics. So, in the GOP primary, you get a lot of promises about how you’re going to round up all the pedos and put them to the sword or whatever. And this inevitably manifests as “please insert your dick into this pepper grinder to access the pornography” laws, as a sort-of practical compromise.
Is California no longer liberal?
Current Status: Failed (2024-08-15: In committee: Held under submission.)
Looks like they’re retaining their title. That said, if you peak under the “Supporters and Opponents” what you’re going to see in the Supporters section is a litany of right-wing evangelical organizations and a couple of mega-corps.
They may resort to just blanket ID-checking everyone rather than risk prosecution.
The current strategy appears to be refusing to host content in the regulated states. Even then, there are plenty of social media and general content distribution channels that dodge the regulation by claiming to be content-blind in how they serve their data. I don’t see Facebook or YouTube getting the business end of any of these regulations. Almost as though they’re toothless if you’ve got enough money to tip your Congresscritters.
Napster was audio only. Did you mean limewire, or kazaa, or one of the many napster clones that came after?
Napster was audio only.
It was file type specific and had a soft file side limit, but that’s easy enough to work around.
Did you mean limewire, or kazaa, or one of the many napster clones that came after?
They all had it as well, yes
… and then all that will be left will be .onion sites
This is the plan all along. It’s not about porn, it’s not even about control. It’s about teaching Americans a second language. You know who’s behind this? Duolingo and Big Language.
Is there a French version of /c/ich_iel?
I can only assume it would be something like !moi_evv if it existed.
Heh. I’m in Ontario, but I guess my DNS is outta Quebec…so most of my banner/insert advertising is in French. It’s fucking awesome because I have no idea what they’re saying or advertising to me most of the time. Highly recommend.
States are also considering banning VPNs now as well. This will never work and is a horrible idea, but it’s being considered.
States are also considering banning VPNs now as well.
Well, some legislators have proposed taking wack-a-mole to the next level and demanding all VPNs be certified and regulated. But good luck getting that passed through the Silicon Valley Presidency or the Ancap Courts.
I would count on them being hypocritical. The rich will just use Starlink.
StarLink connections still exit on the ground, sometimes in a different state. You could gain access or get denied pron based on where your ground IP ends up.
Yeah then Elon can blackmail them instead of someone else
As a watcher from the outside:
It might not be fun to hear but vpn is neither the solution to government oppression nor a solution against tracking (recently there was a good article regarding that) so all you do is pay more.
Welp, now I’m off to XHamster. Thank a ton >B|
yeah I barely can bring myself to give like Fidelity or Charles Schwab photos of my ID, just even having a digital image of my ID on my computer feels wrong lol
I just went through fun trying to explain to a company that my company is a contractor for why I wouldn’t be scanning my passport and emailing it to them.
Ironically? If we were a less prudish society this genuinely wouldn’t matter.
“Oh no! Sarah likes threesome porn. Uhm… okay?”
I don’t think that’s the main reason folks are concerned about having their government IDs stolen.
Yeah, people already browse porn with zero privacy precautions, so linking their fetishes to them would be trivial. The main concern is having yet another privacy vulnerability vector for identity theft.
And there are so many of those these days that a new one genuinely doesn’t matter.
If you haven’t been offered a free year of identity theft insurance recently? Some company/org is plugging their ears.
SSNs are a fundamentally broken system (look it up). Photo IDs? I will guarantee you that if you go to ANY city there is someone at the DMV who will look up whatever you want for fifty bucks. The ONLY reason credit card fraud is less massive than it is (and it is MASSIVE) is because the CC companies put in the effort to monitor that and lock it down.
EVERYONE should have their credit records locked unless they are actively applying for something.
No. the issue with these is that we live in an increasingly christofacist society where even looking at porn makes you Unclean. And if you look at the wrong porn? Off to the reeducation camps with you!
Um, having direct access to pull my government photo ID is a huge deal. Lots of online services require photo ID or other more in-depth verification to pull loans and stuff. So yes, this new vector IS a serious concern.
And paying someone $50 at any DMV? C’mon, man, that sounds like some unfounded bullshit. Hardly anyone is going to risk a cushy government job with solid benefits and great hours for fucking $50, let alone the potential risk of going to jail.
Your “government photo ID” really isn’t all that useful unless people are skilled enough to make fakes (which is a whole different mess). What matters is your SSN, your credit card number, your address, etc.
And those are basically everywhere.
As for the DMV thing: You sweet summer child.
As for the DMV thing: You sweet summer child.
Lol, dude, I’m in my early 40s. Go to the DMV and try bribing a government official and report back. Please. I beg of you.
this “you’d have to make a fake to use it!!” argument is especially ridiculous when you’ve posted on a story about submitting a picture of your photo ID in place of a physical one. and one of the pieces of info you say actually “matters” is literally written on said ID
You’re living in a movie.
It’s not really about the porn in the first place (for advertisers it is - they hate sex unless it’s selling their product). The porn is merely an avenue to attack another minority group. In this case, LGBTQ people. Make everything about them sexual in some way, and then ban them from life for sexual deviancy.
Oui Oui, on my face…
That will protect the children, for sure.
If I lived in the US, I’d be far more concerned about sending my kids to school but whatever.
Also church. I wouldn’t want them to get diddled by a pastor.
Sure, but that is more of a Christian church problem over a US one. There are plenty of cases where I’m from too, and also a few recent scandals with private Catholic school, so I’d tend to shit on the Vatican rather than the US on that particular one.
I just can’t imagine thinking my children could get shot every time they go to school.
US Public Schools messed with me so much, partially contributed to my depression (amongst various other factors)
Damn, I’m sorry to hear. I have seen a couple of your posts around, and yeah, let’s say I know this struggle.
It can get better, I hope it does for you.
The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent. This is an easy first step due to the longstanding controversy surrounding pornography.
It’s all about control.
The end game is id for everything including spending money.
Isn’t this all part of project 2025?
The goal is get tokenized everything attached to an id so that everything you do is tracked to that id.
Thats why government is getting involved with crypto and they want land purchases and material purchases (gold, silver etc) to be tokenized like crypto so that all of a person’s life is digitized and trackable.
That’s the purpose of this whole admin. It’s not just trump… I think this is all more likely to be a coup style maneuver by CIA to move America into a modern digitized lifestyle because it would be easier for the government. And they know if they put it bluntly and allowed the people authentic votes it wouldn’t happen… So this way they have trump and friends to be the fall guys that take the blame when reality it IS “the American government” and not simply psycho trump and friends.
All this has been a long game that started long before trump. I think Whitney webb is right in that it’s the world intelligence agencies attempting to move the 1st world into new age of modern surveillance. And it also makes sense when you look at the Epstein bullshit and Israel vs Gaza bullshit… All the connections come together and it becomes more credible.
It’s a sad sad culture we chose to fund for “protection” and “security”. We are nothing but cattle to them.
We are nothing but cattle to them.
It’s also why they get upset about the declining fertility rates and when people choose not to reproduce.
The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent.
in 7 days, that’s what australia will have.
Social media has mostly divided and isolated us. Twitter and some other platforms have been useful communications channels during unrest. But there could be other forms of communication just for that, since it’s all owned by billionaires now anyway, we need to stop imagining them as reliable tools.
I hope to Darwin social media ends up requiring ID. I believe it would do wonders for democratic discourse. It was only last week, a number of large US right-wing accounts were revealed to be driven from outside the US. Is it healthy for democracies that so many people pay heed to foreign actors?
If you write an op-ed for a newspaper, the newspaper need to identify you as there is an editor who is responsible for what gets written in the paper. This ensures there’s someone who can stand to account for any libellous statements.
With social media we immediately reneged on this and allowed them to wash their hands; “we are just a channel” is a pretty bleak statement to make when the discourse on social media destroys the lives of minorities, encourages suicide, undermines our democracy with AI and troll farm bots.
And we can do this is a privacy preserving way - of course the social media companies feeds the opposite narrative because they don’t want to implicated in the piles of shit they shovel on top of our democracy.
If social media was required to ensure they could tie an account to a real person, which they needn’t reveal unless forced to by a court order, we would know that we were engaging with a real opinion, not something coughed up by a Putin-run AI bot or a Chinese troll farm.
The system required isn’t that complex.
A social media
- a social media company is opening a new account.
- it sends the person opening the account to any of the multitude of ways we can already verify identity online.
- the person is identified and issued an identity token, which gets sent to the social media company.
- the social media company says “great, this person is real and we can, if required by a court order, work with the identity company to reveal who this person is is”. Right now, all the social media company has is a token.
- the account is opened.
In a system likes this, the identity company doesn’t know who the person is; that sits with the social media company.
Nor does the identity service know which account is actually posting for this real person, all they know is they verified someone as part of an account opening process.
Social media should be treated like the press - make them accountable for what gets posted and allow them to place this accountability on a real person by labelling posts “op-eds” if, and only if, they know who is doing the posting.
We are letting large, anonymous money-men ruin our democracy behind the veil of “free discourse”. It’s not free to the many people who gets harmed by it.
I am not doxxing myself because the paranoia will likely continue in such a scenario.
And what’s next? Suspecting US citizens of being foreign agents and then sicking the FBI on them?
Unlike you, I’m not going to be cheerleading the return of McCarthyism.
Fortunately I live in a country where the government can (broadly) be trusted.
Keep this shit up and I’ll have to go back to having sex with my wife.
We’ll all have to go back to having sex with your wife
That was in fact one of the original propositions of communism.
In Soviet Russia, wife fucks you!
…wait, what?
I’ll fuck yours, if you fuck mine. That’s how that works, right?
Sharing is caring.
Yikes! You dug her up just to get a piece?
I mean, far be it from me to kink shame, so…to each their own, I guess.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thats gay cause your actually having sex with every man/woman that she did it with
Yeah, yeah, straight heterosexual intercourse is gay or something. I guess?
But the real question is - who fucking cares?
( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)
Lol I’m referencing a meme I saw this week on Lemmy, it was an Andrew Tate tweet saying anybody with a girlfriend is gay in 2025. Obviously I don’t care that you’re straight kudos to you
Lol, sorry, I should’ve added an ‘/s’ on my reply!
No, I got it, just was being way too sarcastic for text.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: I ain’t straight. Or gay, or bi, or pan. Fuck labels, man! I don’t fit into their tidy little boxes, and why should any of us?!?
Hey, if you can get her to do it, more power to ya.
I’m already fucking your wife. But if this goes through, she wont have income and will have to fuck you. I liked being her big black bull.
Dude, I thought we were just out here making jokes and you come through with whatever that was.
Hey, give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he’s never interacted with humans before.
It was a joke. A bad one…but a joke.
Hey, part of growing and learning is understanding that failure is only a step in the process. Keep at it, brother. When making jokes, I always try to remember this: “If you’re going to be offensive, make sure you are more funny than you are offensive. Just being offensive isn’t funny.”
Now get back in there and make some god damn jokes.
Lol thanks
It was just a bit much with the different aspects of it
I would like to dispute the primary supposition here that pornography is harmful. The use of pornography is nearly universal, and most of the harms that it supposedly causes are symptoms of other issues, or are invented to impose control of sexuality. The ability to reach out with the power of the law to impose religious edicts or project sexual hangups is one of the most esoteric, yet effective, forms of political control available other than violence. If you can control the way that people express their sexuality, you can probably also control their views through the monetization and restriction of sex.
Sexuality and privacy are human rights, and the creation of and access to pornography is protected by the first and fourth amendments under which so-called “age verification” is an unnecessary and excessive burden. If the idea is to prevent access to children, ask yourself why now all adults must now have their access prevented or interrupted.
Furthermore, it is not the state’s role to control childhood sexual development, and the idea that porn is harmful to minors is debatable at best and dubious at worst. Access to objectionable material is solely at the discretion of parents. The fact that they cannot effectively manage this is a symptom of another problem.
When Meta shows teenage girls makeup ads after they delete their selfies, or streaming apps are flooded with violent movies that are easily accessible to minors, this is acceptable. But when I want to watch porn it’s now my job to “protect minors” by compromising my privacy and security?
The real “danger” here is the availability of ideas that do not align with state power.
Feels like half the country wants to outlaw gay marriage and reimplement sodomy laws, so we’re not exactly coming at this issue from a great place right now.
I think i agree for the most part.
These energies would be better spent ensuring that porn stars aren’t being exploited and have access to appropriate support.
No offence to anyone, but this post strikes me as coming straight from a spokeperson for Aylo (formerly MindGeek). A mix of baseless claims and straight up misinformation, that happen to align with the company’s business model.
You speak as if porn sites are analogous to social media and it’s perfectly normal to record your experiences and post them online. Which it absolutely isn’t, anywhere in the world. ‘Expressing your sexuality’ and porn are entirely separate and have very little to do with each other.
It is widely known and confirmed that pornographic content comes with a broad spectrum of negative effects, especially for children and adolescents. The latter really should be common sense in 2025. Watching porn isn’t always bad and can be beneficial in some ways (as some sources below even highlight), but those cases represent a small minority.
Below are some quotes and just a few out of countless sources providing much more reliable information on the topic of pornography’s effects. I strongly recommend reading at least some, because this comment is like ignoring decades of scientific literature and traveling in time back to the 1700s.
Prolonged exposure to pornography is known to lead to habituation, resulting in blunted processing of pleasurable stimuli and greater sensitivity to negative stimuli (21). Continuous use of pornography impairs emotional processing capacity and flattens affect, reducing emotional connection to real-life sexual experiences.
Source: Impact of pornography consumption on children and adolescents
Research shows that frequent porn use hijacks the brain’s reward system and changes the brain’s structure, much like addictive substances.
This means that prolonged pornography use can weaken natural pleasure responses and reinforce compulsive behavior.
A 2014 study found that heavy porn users showed significantly reduced activity in critical areas of the brain responsible for motivation and impulse control, suggesting long-term neurological rewiring.
Source: The Hidden Cost of Pornography: How It Shapes Your Brain and Behavior
Age of first exposure was significantly associated with reported need for longer stimulation and more sexual stimuli to reach orgasm when using pornography, decrease in sexual satisfaction, and quality of romantic relationship, neglect of basic needs and duties due to pornography use, and self-perceived addiction in both females and males. (…) In the opinion of most of the surveyed students, pornography may have adverse effects on human health, although access restrictions should not be implemented.
Additional sources:
Assuming what you’re saying about the harms of consuming pornography, is it the state’s responsibility? Is it a top priority? Do we trust conservatives to implement a solution in good faith?
The answer to all of those I think is no.
There’s no analogous ID check for violent media, so far as I know.
There could be a raging wildfire and I would hesitate if a Republican said “let me deal with it”. They are fundamentally untrustworthy.
That’s on top of the deep irony of the same party that goes on about “small government” and “parents rights” is typically the same one pushing draconian anti-porn laws. It’s a joke. “A government small enough to fit in your bedroom”. Their motivations are so corrupt I am extremely skeptical of anything they propose.
Assuming what you’re saying about the harms of consuming pornography, is it the state’s responsibility?
In general, yeah. It’s quite literally what the government is supposed to be for. When there’s a widespread problem affecting a lot of people, it’s precisely the government’s job to step in, regulate and solve it.
Is it a top priority? Do we trust conservatives to implement a solution in good faith?
These two I can agree with the answer being ‘no’. The problem isn’t that it’s not an issue or that the government shouldn’t interfere. The two main problems I can identify here are:
- The current American government (and most of the previous ones) cannot be trusted to handle this in good faith,
- There are several more pressing matters that should be addressed first.
And a bonus issue. There’s currently no sufficient and reliable infrastructure to even implement restrictions on pornography, as we can plainly see from the results of recent attempts. But this ties in to the first problem. If they really wanted to solve the issue in any capacity, obviously they’d start by building the necessary digital infrastructure.
All in all, I think you brought up important points and I pretty much fully agree with you on them. However, to me it seems like they’re not exactly relevant to the discussion. Or at least that’s not what I was trying to address.
My main goal was to refute the previous guy’s theses that pornography has no confirmed negative effects on people, especially the part about children, since it literally takes seconds to find dozens of studies on this topic. I didn’t mean to speak about whether or not the government should do anything, let alone defend the current US efforts to regulate porn, if we can even call them that. In fact, one of the studies I quoted stated that the participants did not feel a government intervention is needed, which I felt was a crucial detail to highlight.
Prolonged exposure to pornography is known to lead to habituation, resulting in blunted processing of pleasurable stimuli and greater sensitivity to negative stimuli (21). Continuous use of pornography impairs emotional processing capacity and flattens affect, reducing emotional connection to real-life sexual experiences.
Source: Impact of pornography consumption on children and adolescents
This is disingenuous. This issue is caused by prolonged use, as in unhealthy addictive behavior. Framing it as a result of porn access in general is flagrantly dishonest.
Actually it seems like all of your points regard excessive and unhealthy usage. You’re portraying these as results of any level of exposure and that is blatantly dishonest.
