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PornHub blocks users in Utah, cites state’s age verification law

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Re: PornHub blocks users in Utah, cites state’s age verification law

#531

Post by Brendinooo »

evandale wrote: post #530
Brendinooo wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't apply this principle to something like peanut allergies. "If your kid touches a peanut, that's on you as a parent"? No, people recognized that peanuts are harmful enough to a certain segment of the population that it's worth making changes, even changes that might inconvenience others. Besides, I'm not sure why you think that parents are able to be 100% in control of things that their children see/eat/etc. S…

The consequence of exposing a kid with a peanut allergy to a peanut can be death. Watching hardcore porn won't kill a kid.

It will harm a kid, and asking a website to figure out how to verify an age is far less burdensome than taking PB&Js out of kid lunches.

Re: PornHub blocks users in Utah, cites state’s age verification law

#532

Post by Aachen »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #467
Aachen wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then we should also ban any material that contains violence until there are no more homicides. Just watching, or even enacting (as in violent games), violence doesn't make them violent beings. Why would this other outlet lead to more real-world sexual assault? I understand why one might think it a priori (without having evidence either way), but we do have evidence: the reality we live in where, to my knowledge, it h…

To respond to your edit here are some general statistics about sexual assault in the US: https://legaljobs.io/blog/sexual-assault-statistics/ In terms of increase with the availability of pornography, take a look at this chart: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible... You can see that the number of rape reports have almost doubled since the invention of web pornography.

Not sure why this got a downvote. I was going to say that this shows only reports without estimating the proportion of unreported rape over time (I tried for the last ~10 minutes to find it myself but no dice), but it's a constructive comment.

Re: PornHub blocks users in Utah, cites state’s age verification law

#533

Post by GoofballJones »

bumby wrote: post #362
loeg wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't read GP's mind, but sugar doesn't require ID verification to buy in the state of Utah, for example.

They might if sugar was able to be consumed for free with virtually unlimited access. I'm not sure it's a very good analogy.

It is free. It LITERALLY is in unlimited access. It's in everything you eat...unless you live in a cave and only eat squirrels and rabbits. Especially in the US where High Fructose Corn Syrup is in nearly every product that's consumed. Pornography is no where near as dangerous as the obesity epidemic in the United States, which costs the citizens and corporations billions and billions of dollars a year on healthcare alone. But sure, let's focus on porn.

Re: PornHub blocks users in Utah, cites state’s age verification law

#534

Post by BadThink6655321 »

xdennis wrote: post #445
afavour wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll get some angry responses to this but I think it’s very worthwhile to say. Yes , ID verification in order to watch pornography is deeply Orwellian and terrifying (which is the aspect places like HN tend to focus on) but the bulk of the public support for these measures isn’t because people want government surveillance, it’s because they want to look out for children. Are they misguided? Perhaps. But you can’t w…

> it’s because they want to look out for children The issue is that it's _their_ job to look out for their children. We don't force all beds to have "walls", and give adults the keys to lower them if they show proof of age. Parents are supposed to buy _cribs_ for their children.

Just recently a black child, who was born at home with jaundice, was taken from the parents to be given care in a hospital, because a doctor didn’t think the parents would provide effective treatment.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/temecia-rodney-mila-jackson-ret...

Re: PornHub blocks users in Utah, cites state’s age verification law

#535

Post by throwaway743 »

GoofballJones wrote: post #523
theclansman wrote: post #182

Just the fact that pornography is being taken seriously as something that's dangerous for minors is a good thing really.

Is it? Is this a States thing? That in the United States that nudity and pornography is "dangerous", yet in other cultures throughout Europe, it's not taken as seriously, nor does it have this overall "dangerous" tag to it (generally speaking that is. Prudish people trying to impose their will on others can be a world-wide phenomenon). And does this put a curb on explicit R rated movies that has nudity and acts of se…

It's embedded by the puritanical roots of the US. It's nonsense really.

Re: PornHub blocks users in Utah, cites state’s age verification law

#536

Post by ryandrake »

rchaud wrote: post #334
rayiner wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have agreed with you 20 years ago. But I think today, large scale internet censorship would be feasible. My wife and I marvel at her (much younger) Gen Z siblings’ computer illiteracy. These kids are the iPad/walled garden generation. These laws would be effective to keep Internet porn out of the hands of a large majority of younger people. That’s especially true because so many kids rely on phones and iPads,…

Good point. The new generation that came online this past decade never had to deal with popups, Limewire viruses and other things that forced us to learn to some basic level how a computer works and how it can be compromised. It reminds me of this 2021 Verge article quoting a college engineering professor who had to revamp teaching material as many of their students did not understand folder structures and computer f…

Yep, when I was a teenager, computers were tools that provided access to things previously inaccessible. They were tools that empowered users. Enter a command, the computer performed the command and returned the results. Access to anything simply involved knowing the magic spell, and I spent my entire teens learning every incantation I could. My dad, who was totally computer illiterate, would not have had a chance in hell at enforcing content blockers.

My daughter today lives in a world where users no longer issue commands to computers. 99% of computer users limit themselves to typing into a search box and clicking links they are fed. I don't even need to set up content blockers, because the idea of telling her computer what to do is foreign to her. Despite my attempts to get her curious about how they work and about hacking, she doesn't even care enough about it to venture outside of the pre-screened bookmarked sites I set up for her. If it's not reachable via her toolbar's Roblox and YouTube buttons, she doesn't even have a remote chance of finding it, and I know because I've seen the access logs.

Re: PornHub blocks users in Utah, cites state’s age verification law

#537

Post by brightball »

wakannai wrote: post #328

Multiple issues with this. It starts off with arbitrary definitions of what pornography is ( https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/static/SB0287.html ): "nipple of the female breast" You can suck on it when you are a baby, but god forbid you ever take a look at it again before you are married. What's wrong with these people? Even public nudity laws differ from city to city (e.g. in California), so clearly, people aren't al…

There’s such a strange dichotomy in these conversations.

1. Porn shouldn’t be available to kids and it’s on the vendors legally to ensure that.

2. Porn should be unrestricted, it’s up to parents to do something about it.

What I can’t understand is if the people in camp 2 are so unashamed of the porn advocacy then why is age verification such a big deal?

If it’s not a big deal then verifying your age shouldn’t phase you anymore than verifying your age to buy alcohol. If it is then you know exactly why kids should be kept away from it.

Re: PornHub blocks users in Utah, cites state’s age verification law

#538

Post by dopamean »

mustacheemperor wrote: post #513
berkes wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is pornography dangerous for minors? Has it been researched? What "dangers" are there? Do these apply to all age groups of "minors"?

It’s noteworthy to me that in your replies not one single comment links to any research. Multiple comments state point after point as fact with no sources, one comment directly ascribes its entire opinion to an anecdote. In short…I’m not getting the kind of perspective expanding value I often find on HN from this discussion. Just a lot of back and forth from people exchanging the opinions they already had before open…

People rarely link to research on this site or any other. It's a social network. People want to share their opinion and so they do. I cant remember the last reply to a comment I saw on here that actually linked to research.

Re: PornHub blocks users in Utah, cites state’s age verification law

#539

Post by ndriscoll »

honkycat wrote: post #396
padobson wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a mechanism for empowering a polity to protect minors from certain things the polity deems they're not ready for that doesn't rely on arbitrary rules?

Why do we need a policy? Why aren't parents doing basic things like setting up content filters?

I posted this in another thread, but how are parents supposed to set up content filters for social media sites that allow pornography? Reddit's posts are ~40% marked nsfw, and they host hardcore porn of all types on the same domains as discussion forums for minecraft and roblox. Apparently some policy is needed to allow content filters to work in the first place, especially as everything is using TLS these days and it's being made increasingly difficult to install root certificates to do MITM filtering (not that it was ever easy).

I think this is a poor solution; a more empowering one would be to develop a standard for content categorization and require commercial websites and commercially developed browsers (so all of them that are in common use) to implement content blocking via e.g. header exchange, with criminal penalties for negligently providing pornography without the correct headers (have some provision for vandalism when good-faith moderation is in place). Then parents actually could just configure their OS or browser for what kinds of content should be allowed.

A better first step than this bill could also be to require any site that hosts a significant percentage of pornographic content (which I'd place at much lower than the 33% of this bill) to put it on a separate subdomain from any child-oriented content (e.g. forums for a children's game) so that DNS based filtering can work.

Re: PornHub blocks users in Utah, cites state’s age verification law

#540

Post by megous »

jliptzin wrote: post #424
berkes wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is pornography dangerous for minors? Has it been researched? What "dangers" are there? Do these apply to all age groups of "minors"?

I don’t know how one would go about doing that research. Anecdotally I figured out the parental lock code on a cable box when I was 12, watched one of the porn channels, I was more excited that I was able to guess the code than anything else. The porn itself didn’t really have any impact on me. My school also showed us Holocaust documentary footage around the same age. People getting shot in the head, piles and piles…

Not all porn is just people sticking their penis into someone else's vagina. It can get pretty disturbing. And disturbing porn is not that harder to find as the non-disturbing one. Now it's the age of anyone being able to upload almost anything for anyone to easily see. And people do.

(Anyway, I'm not for the internet wide parental lock. Just noting that things are different than in the past, with ease and breadth of access.)

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