All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
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?
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.
Has some fun history: California went with an independent contractor for its mDL implementation, which ultimately pressured Apple into integrating open(-ish) standards to interoperate.
This is interesting, but I’d like to go a step further. I watched the first quarter of the video on where they go over how it works. The site requests data from your ID and they get that data. The site chooses which data it needs and if it will store it or it or not. Sites these days have a tendency to ask for more than what they need, and to store it for profiling purposes. The user can deny the request, but then can’t use the site. They are then left with a dilemma. Give up this personal information or not have access at all? Companies are betting on users giving up privacy in exchange for access.
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 website sends the verification function to the user device. The user device then returns a proof that it knows an input that the verification function accepts.
The verification function should include a digital signature check.
This is generally possible already with SSI based credentials, including standards created by W3C.
Or attribute-based credentials. Basically, you're challenged and get a one-time, challenger-specific credential for exactly the requested attribute(s) from a credential provider. Eg. government (municipality, province, national) can become a credential provider.
Exactly. Yivi isn’t new having been renamed from IRMA (https://privacybydesign.foundation/en/). Nevertheless, adoption outside the Netherlands remains almost non-existent.
Except for the additional download requirement for a user, the friction is pretty low once it’s setup and you have created some attributes.
The project would benefit from a rebranding review, standardization, an enterprise-capable infrastructure to promote and support alternative service providers, and a review of clients. The current Yivi mobile app hasn’t changed much over the years and when I last used it I still needed a PIN instead Face ID.
The spec is being implemented by Apple, who is sensitive to privacy issues.
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
> 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.
Aren't the regulations the problem here? If not for that nobody would be getting pressured to divulge this personal information to every shady app and website in the first place.
Suppose I want to make a service that verifies your age by asking you questions about what life was like before 9/11. Can I do that? And if I can't, is the problem the standards, or the law?
I think most age verification ranges from silly to chilling to speech. But I don’t think we can somehow punt these problems to the quiz from the beginning of Leisure Suit Larry (which never stopped 10 year old me).
Requiring someone to have a government ID isn't anywhere near 100% effective because people will just borrow one from dad's wallet while he's not looking or use a device already signed in as someone else or the high school freshmen will get one from the high school seniors etc.
If we're admitting solutions that aren't 100% effective, why can't we admit solutions that aren't 100% effective but are much better at preserving privacy?
Well this time around the phone will ask the person presenting an ID for biometrics before allowing them to use Dad’s ID. We are improving. There is no perfect solution; we don’t live in a perfect world. Surely we shouldn’t give up and regulate nothing…
> Well this time around the phone will ask the person presenting an ID for biometrics before allowing them to use Dad’s ID. We are improving.
How is this improving? It's the most invasive proposal yet, serves to prohibit devices that are controlled by their owners and still doesn't actually work because a) there are still a zillion devices with security vulnerabilities and b) none of this applies to websites hosted in other jurisdictions, so you're not actually limiting the access of minors to anything, you're only inconveniencing anyone who does have servers in the US or interacts with any that are. Which is an extremely large number of people to trouble for a benefit that rounds to zero.
> Surely we shouldn’t give up and regulate nothing...
When we're in the category of speech, let's go with this option all the way to the wall.
I’m not following your argument, sorry. How are device owners being prohibited from anything? Which zillion vulnerabilities in the TPM are you referring to? Because that’s how seriously these standards take security. These are device bound TPM secured identity credentials where the wallet stack is audited and certified by security professionals before credentials are allowed to be stored. There’s no less secure option.
> How are device owners being prohibited from anything?
I think a lot of us are wary of a world where we have limited selections of software stacks that we can run and do essential things. At some point, we don't own the devices anymore.
I like that Apple is a benevolent overlord, for now.
But I like to be able to run software that I control and participate in the world, and that has alternated between being somewhat harder and prohibitively so. Lockdown of devices (chain of trust, mandatory signed binaries, limitations of device drivers, bootloaders that won’t unlock) makes it increasingly difficult to experiment, repair, or even trust the tools we rely on, and is viewed as a prerequisite for many of these solutions.
--
(I appreciate the alternatives are really hard, and that there are substantial potential downsides creating pressure towards these types of solutions, above and beyond the desires to lock down marketplaces and capture rents).
I empathize with many of your concerns here and share your frustration. Man do I wish there was some sum that Apple would let me pay to own my iPhone. If anything we need more legislation that prevents the amount of exclusivity Apple has over their hardware.
I don’t see digital identity documents as a threat, though. It’s mostly orthogonal to software provenance, device ownership, secure boot, etc.
PS: we already live in a world where by and large all the software you use is only licensed to you individually. It’s crap. If digital identity makes this more plainly obvious then good. We need fuel to fight unethically and impractically licensed software.
I get to choose what software to run, though. If it becomes difficult for me to prove identity in more of everyday life without such a remotely-owned device, I am hosed on privacy.
This is true even if the protocols themselves protect privacy well, use zero knowledge proofs, etc… if Google can vacuum it all up from the device representing me, all the privacy-centric design makes no difference.
> How are device owners being prohibited from anything?
Biometric data isn't cryptographic in nature. Once you've recorded someone's fingerprint -- which any device using it for authentication would have to do and have the hardware to do -- you can then replay it to any service using the same data for authentication. You don't even have to lift them off of any of the objects people leave them on just by existing, which is also a way to get them. And once someone has them, you can't change it.
Which means the only way to use biometrics to gate this sort of thing is for everyone to be locked out of their own devices (or unable to use devices they're not locked out of), or they could use the device they control to play back the biometric data to whatever external service is nominally authenticating it.
> Which zillion vulnerabilities in the TPM are you referring to?
And those are only the ones specific to a TPM, not any of the ones that impact privileged code the TPM is attesting to the security of.
Notice also that this doesn't require every device to be vulnerable, it only requires any device to be vulnerable. Cheap devices are more likely to be vulnerable and then anyone who wants to bypass anything can get one of those.
This is one of the reasons these systems are so nefarious. You get an iPhone for unrelated reasons and it may not have any current known vulnerabilities, so you are locked out of your own device. Meanwhile some $50 Android or old netbook does have a vulnerability which any kid can get if they want to view age-gated sites, or people set up services to do it over the internet -- and then those services become attack vectors because kids start plugging their parents' IDs and fingerprints into shady bypass services.
I don’t see any key exfiltration CVEs on that list. Or anything that could be exploited in a way that is relevant to discussion of digital identity documents.
The biometric data doesn't leave the device in any of these protocols. Keybinding to TPM keys and Wallet provenance is used. I’m not sure you really understand how this works it sounds more like you have a basic FUD imagining a world where instead of literally uploading a photo of your drivers license you present a digitally signed certificate with the same info. I can’t really argue with FUD other than encouraging you to onboard an mDL version of your government ID and to try using it the next time you fly, provided you live somewhere where this technology has been made available. It’s demonstrably better and you can experience it or talk to someone who has today.
The theocracy types are making this terrible, but the technology has alot of potential to enhance privacy.
For example, I was involved in a project several years ago on this where this was explored before the big vendors became players. The issue we were studying was abuse of credentials in-person - many bars will capture people’s identity information when validating IDs.
The ability to provide only the attribute securely is awesome, but of course the systematic abuse of this technology by the reactionaries among us will drive adoption.
Yes, they are! but also because the law sets the standard, it can also provide a new one. For example:
a) you are still legally required to age verify online alcohol purchases but
b) it’s illegal to use information collected for that purpose for other purposes and
c) Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents
Maybe something around only collecting minimal data, too.
Some of the first eager customers are banks with onerous KYC requirements – they want one click account creation! Good luck changing financial disclosure laws, though, my bank knows quite a bit about me.
> but also because the law sets the standard, it can also provide a new one.
If the people writing the law cared about privacy they wouldn't have passed that one, and anybody who does would be repealing it rather than trying to find the best shade of lipstick for the pig.
> Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents
This is the part you don't need a law in order to do because the user can choose their user agent. Or if they can't, you should stop talking about any of this and go fix your antitrust problem.
> you are still legally required to age verify online alcohol purchases but
By conceding this you've already lost, because:
> it’s illegal to use information collected for that purpose for other purposes
This is the part which is hopeless. If they have the information, you're already screwed, because once they have it it's almost impossible for you or the government to know what they're doing with it, which makes those laws nearly impossible to enforce. And on top of that, a large part of the problem is what criminals or governments do once there is a legally-mandated database of all of that stuff, and those entities aren't constrained by laws.
Which is why anybody who really cares about this knows that the only solution is to not have the law requires that data to be collected.
> Good luck changing financial disclosure laws, though
"Slippery slope is a fallacy", they said. "It's just one inch", they said.
I don’t see my primary care doctor selling my health data, due in part to data privacy laws like HIPAA. Consumer companies take COPPA seriously.
You absolutely cannot control what companies do with data, so you want to prevent its collection in the first place – but you can penalize them when they do something wrong, which does influence their beyavior. The jury is still out on the effectiveness of the GDPR, but to say it had no effect would be an odd claim.
> I don’t see my primary care doctor selling my health data
Without overstretching the metaphor, it is quite revealing - you wouldn't see your primary care doctor selling that information whether they are or aren't. You don't have an effective way of monitoring the situation. Nobody outside the hypothetical transaction does.
It is common for that sort of situation to go bad if the economics of selling the data make sense despite the risk of getting caught.
It is revealing: I went to same PCP for the first 18 years of my life and he was incredible as a doctor. He ran his own practice. He was also a great IT admin: he managed his own records, paid to digitize all of them including mine. If he betrayed that trust I’d be sad.
But I hear you. A product just needs to come along that provides some benefit, or the practice could be acquired, etc
That doesn't mean any of those other companies are buying or selling that data.
The healthcare provider uses an EHR. They might have some managed service provider managing their IT assets and their EHR deployment. Two companies they have BAAs with. That EHR company could be cloud hosted, another BAA. They probably rely on other tools and contractors which might have BAAs. Later on when they go to bill they exchange that billing data through billing analysis tools (another BAA) and then submit to a clearing house (another BAA). All of those companies probably have companies they work with that potentially need BAAs as well, if they work directly with that PHI data in the role of working on behalf of that healthcare provider.
One trip to the doctor could potentially involve dozens of companies you've never heard of that might have a business use case to handle your healthcare data in some way or fashion and none of them actually sold that data or mishandled it under HIPAA.
You can only punish them if you find out about it.
I'm not going to do the legwork for you, but you should be looking around for the way Google is transferring the medical information on 50 million Americans as part of Project Nightingale a few years back, and you should be looking very seriously at medical sites that use Google Analytics in direct violation of HIPAA. The situation here is very much like the situation with the government collecting detailed profiles on every citizen and knowing their location in real time: they're not supposed to be doing it, but the reality is they can and they do.
Snowden's leaks were another great example about how the law doesn't actually matter, if you can't see whether or not it's being enforced.
My point here is if you're counting on the system to protect you, you're going to be disappointed.
Recent example was that I was supposed to give up my ID because I lost my 2FA for a particular site and I refused because I didn't believe they would delete my ID. My friends said that I was paranoid.
>I don’t see my primary care doctor selling my health data, due in part to data privacy laws like HIPAA.
Oh, you sweet summer child. Bless your little heart. You're right. Doctors don't. Insurance companies do! And that data is passed around like hotcakes to make actuarial datasets which basically have the effect of ensuring premium go up! Several states, in fact, have done everything they can lobbying wise to make sure it remains okay to trade in your personal health data! Also, from personal experience at a PBM, it is at least an offering to get covered populational reports on spend done on behalf of your covered group, meaning employers are given a view of the overall health of their workforce and what that translates to in dollars out the door on their behalf. Information that, of course, would never be used to do strategic layoffs or cross correlation with time taken off to further optimize for cost reduction right?
(Note: if I've had this idea, and rejected it on moral/ethical/legal grounds, there are absolutely people who have had it and hasn't done so).
Are you arguing that we should not regulate porn, alcohol, and cigarettes? Or that we shouldn’t have digital ways to do the regulating we’ve been doing for decades?
If the discussion was a question of whether to regulate or not, I’d see more where you’re coming from. But the discussion is about how to effectively respond to the enforcement of existing laws now against websites. Society has grown up and we’re not comfortable giving the internet a pass because digital identity is hard.
> Are you arguing that we should not regulate porn, alcohol, and cigarettes?
Most of the important regulations around these things have nothing to do with the topic at hand. Requiring bourbon not to contain methanol and adult performers to be tested for STDs aren't related to the internet.
And once we're talking about the internet, those things are in a different category because alcohol and cigarettes are physical objects. You can't download vodka from Russia.
Whereas if you want to stop kids from downloading porn from other parts of the world, the police state that would require is the thing wars have been fought against and righteously so. Not because of the porn but because of what it would take to actually make those laws effective, and what it would be used for as soon as it's in place.
But ineffective laws aren't worth having, because they're all costs with no benefits, not least because then people will keep trying to make them effective and the only means to do that is the police state.
> Society has grown up and we’re not comfortable giving the internet a pass because digital identity is hard.
I feel like this kind of language is designed to make people angry. As if you're not an adult if you can look at a trade off against privacy and free speech and say "that's not worth having" instead of implementing every creeping authoritarian proposal specifically because the last one didn't solve the problem.
You’re missing the point entirely. I’m talking about age requirements to purchase alcohol and cigarettes and view porn. There is not a world where we decide to restrict purchase by age in meatspace but throw up our hands and say “whelp we just can’t have digital ID presentation that would ruin society I guess we should give up on digital age verification and just let kids do whatever”. Whether the restrictions are justified or not or stupid or not, we’ve decided they should exist (and there are much more “legitimate” use cases for ID verification that happen entirely online with no meatspace concerns like banking and underwriting etc. so it’s somewhat a straw man to get hung up on porn). We’re not going to not apply our laws to the new technology that emerges as time progresses…
> There is not a world where we decide to restrict purchase by age in meatspace but throw up our hands and say “whelp we just can’t have digital ID presentation that would ruin society I guess we should give up on digital age verification and just let kids do whatever”
We've been living in exactly that world for decades without issue.
It makes perfect sense for meat space to be treated differently from the internet. A downloaded picture of a cigarette can't be smoked. The only thing that can happen on the internet is the exchange of data, and an ID requirement for that is absurd.
> there are much more “legitimate” use cases for ID verification that happen entirely online with no meatspace concerns like banking and underwriting etc. so it’s somewhat a straw man to get hung up on porn
Amazing how those use cases have survived for these decades without such a law. If I don't need to send a copy of my ID every time I sign into my bank account, what possible argument could be made for the requirement I do so to watch porn?
> Whether the restrictions are justified or not or stupid or not, we’ve decided they should exist
No, we have not collectively decided they should exist. Plenty of laws exist which are unpopular either because of the goal or the execution. Even if a law has majority support, that doesn't mean the minority can't argue against keeping or expanding it. A restriction being unjustified or stupid is a very good argument for not doing additional unjustified or stupid things to enforce that law. It's rather silly that there is a federal law forbidding leaving the country with more than $25 in nickels but it's on the books. Ensuring this law is thoroughly enforced with universal mandatory cavity searches looking for rolls of nickels would be indefensible.
Then change the law. I’d probably vote with you. That’s besides the point.
The hacked up solutions for the things existing “perfectly fine” over the last few decades are complete crap. Anybody who’s ever had to take photos of their ID then a confirmation selfie knows this. Anybody who’s had to apply for a loan or open a bank account online knows this. We have wonderfully secure cryptography and you’re arguing we should keep using plastic cards that you can’t even sha256sum.
> There is not a world where we decide to restrict purchase by age in meatspace but throw up our hands and say “whelp we just can’t have digital ID presentation that would ruin society I guess we should give up on digital age verification and just let kids do whatever”.
And after you take the rose tinted glasses off, it was full of spam and scams and abuse and all the other low reputation poor security crap that happens when anybody can be anybody all the time. And if that world was good/sustainable then nobody would be working to make digital identity possible, would they? We grew up in it, now it seems we’re work working to iron out the kinks.
Not everything needs or should have strong ID. But no I don’t want my children stumbling into a porn site because they got click jacked by unscrupulous advertisements they never consented to being solicited with. I don’t want them learning about the world that way. A simple age check without revealing any personal info supported by the digital credential standards being discussed here would absolutely be an improvement.
Having my age checked at the time of purchase for alcohol rather than having to present my ID to the delivery person would also be an improvement.
>Society has grown up and we’re not comfortable giving the internet a pass because digital identity is hard.
I'm not comfortable giving society digital identity, because being a human and not abusing the primitive is even harder still. And we can't take it back once we've built it. It's just there for every wannabe despot to start building systems of oppression with. And there's an awful lot of them running around with the "best of intentions" to line the way to hell.
The problem is using physical identity online sucks. Well intentioned and honest people want to fix that issue. I have flown entirely with a mobile drivers license without pulling out a physical ID for the last few years. It’s objectively better and it’s already here. It’s heaven. You can’t really be arguing that when some service needs your ID that uploading photos of it is better from any angle. There’s not a one.
> The spec is being implemented by Apple, who is sensitive to privacy issues.
I generally agree with your points, but I wouldn't trust Apple, or any publicly traded company, to have any kind of ethics. Just because their incentive to make as much profit as possible, leads to them trying to differentiate themselves from other companies, and thus they choose to temporarily align with privacy concerns doesn't mean they will not compromise on them, if they see better profits elsewhere.
I rather have privacy enforcing regulations like the GDPR or policies that go even further, than relying on publicly traded companies to protect their users.
For what it’s worth these mDL providers are the people already contracted to provide the services for the government to manage the IDs and the IT system for the DMV. They were part of the ISO standardization body for mDL. Not sure California’s choice pressured Apple so much as it being an international standard that had support from the governing bodies in Europe, UK, North America and Japan (met all of them there).
Apple wasn’t there when I was and even broader Google joined about 6 months after I left Google in 2015 (I was just proactive about seeing the standard coming) but the big players hopped on board later in the process.
We were all also acutely aware of the privacy implications and making sure the bodies would sign records of >18, >21 to avoid having to share too much info (pre ZKproofs being more widely accepted recognized).
The slippery slope from here to banning under 18s looking at websites discussing suicidal thoughts, transgender issues, homosexually and onto anything some group of middle age mothers decide isn't appropriate seems dangerously anti-fallacitical.
While I completely understand the slippery slope concept, we ban all kinds of things for under 18s based on morals. Why couldn't these be any different? How else does a society decide as a whole what they are for or against. Obviously, there should be limits.
The question is always “whose morals”. I think society as a whole is in agreement that minors are better off without access to pornography, for example. But the arrangement OP is outlining is one where a minority are able to force their morality on a broader population that doesn’t agree with it.
> society as a whole is in agreement that minors are better off without access to pornography
Once a significant part of said society can't (or won't) differentiate sexual education and intimacy from pornography, I don't think your statement holds true anymore.
This isn't an "I believe..." / "Do you believe..." kind of issue though. This is "Will the American State and Federal government impose an increasingly stringent moral compass on the wider internet, over time"
Which... the VISA-Mastercard duopoly, backed by American soft power and with an American moral compass, already rather proves that point for anyone that's ever tried to pay for erotica outside the mainstream
> This isn't an "I believe..." / "Do you believe..." kind of issue though.
I asked because I wanted to get a sense on if he conflating the two by accident, or if it was an attempt to steer the conversation away from free speech concerns.
Let’s be clear about what you mean when you say “outside the mainstream”, because that innocuous turn of phrase is doing a lot of work to cover what you’re really saying.
Visa and MasterCard disallow content depicting CSA, rape, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, scatological erotica, torture, extreme sexual violence, and revenge porn.
Equivocating child sexual abuse with the dude drawing consentual fan-fic or furry porn feels disingenuous at best, and more like bad faith though.
Because you're not wrong, the mainstream is fairly narrow, but to say the credit card duopoly excludes only the most heinous and vile imagery that can only barely be covered under "artistic expression" isn't exactly an entirely accurate depiction of reality.
I believe that happens for other reasons though. No law is telling Visa/Mastercard to prohibit payments to furry artists. They have some risk model that says it’s not good business and additionally pressure from advertising partners to not have their logo near that stuff.
> The grandparent post didn't say "transgender treatments" they said "transgender issues."
You don't think that transgender treatments is a transgender issue? If you think it is then my response is perfectly on-topic.
> Do you believe that the mere concept of questioning your gender identity or expression is something that should be kept from the minds of minors?
Depending on your jurisdiction, there are messages you can't target to kids. Why should there be a special exemption for this?
Besides, my belief on this is irrelevant; the only transgender issue that has gotten pushback en-masse from the clear majority of people world wide has been transgender treatments on minors.
IOW, this (treatment for persons unable to give informed consent) is a very unpopular position.
I used to feel the same way about prisoners, but there are plenty of arguments that they’re not slaves. The one that convinced me was that you can’t buy a prisoner, for example. Ditto for children (most of the time).
The trouble about laws involving children is that you’re up against every parent who has a child. By default they’ll err on protection, because our biology says that’s the safest thing to do. But as you say, that’s not always the best approach.
Male circumcision is an interesting one. The correct thing to do isn’t to say "here’s an example of something screwed up" as a way to justify something else; instead, ban the screwed up thing.
Personally, I hope it’ll be banned one day. I once asked my dad whether I was circumcised. He laughed and said haven’t you looked? I still have no idea whether I am. Now I’d rather not know.
> The one that convinced me was that you can’t buy a prisoner, for example
So slavery has taken MANY forms throughout history - the form most people are familiar with is american chattel slavery “a form of slavery where individuals are treated as personal property and can be bought, sold, or owned indefinitely”. There are lots of other forms of slavery many that don’t including purchasing humans, and the US prison labour system is slavery beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Why beyond the shadow of a doubt? Because the 13th amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
Also, since the US prison system allows prison labour to be sold to private corporations, you can actually buy a prisoner’s forced labour.
13th amendment explicitly permits slavery as a punishment for a crime. And, you can definitely buy time manufacturing with prison labor.
Now, you're probably confusing chattel slavery as the only form of slavery, of which you buy and sell humans as property. There are other types, now predominantly slavery by the state (as punishment of a crime).
As for children, it definitely looks like a slave-owner type arrangement.
I have absolutely no clue about circumcision in the bible. But if it's in there WHY would it be, there's probably a reason that they figured out overtime and the benefits. There is an abundance of literature and well formed research to indicate the benefits of circumcision. It's not at all unlikely that people 1000s of years ago figured that out too, especially during a time when there were far fewer hygiene options.
The most impactful benefit of circumcision is the lower cervical cancer incidence. As evidenced by the lower rates in the US despite the much poorer healthcare than in European countries, particularly the Nordics that choose not to embrace science and advocate for circumcision.
Lobotomies were also once considered solid science, but our views change over time. That people did it millennia ago isn’t really a persuasive point.
Would you mind citing some of the research supporting that it’s a good idea to take a knife to a baby’s penis? (Sometimes it feels like the word "circumcision" is a nice way to sidestep the implications.)
It seems strange to blame infant penises for higher cancer rates, but if there’s science to support the claim, it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
On the other hand, perhaps a higher cancer rate would be worth it. The question is, how much higher?
> What are the absolute medical indications for circumcision?
> Medical indications […] occur in 1.5% and 1% of boys respectively.
That is, the overwhelming majority (>98%) of circumcisions in the US are not done for medical reasons. As the article states,
> Nearly all circumcisions are carried out for cultural or religious reasons.
Lastly, this:
> The most impactful benefit of circumcision is the lower cervical cancer incidence.
Is an illogical argument for circumcision as it is being discussed here, at birth.
> It seems strange to blame infant penises for higher cancer rates, but if there’s science to support the claim, it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
… the claim is absurd. There's no science to support it.
The argument as raised above stands: why is circumcision — done at birth and without the consent of the patient — permissible, but puberty blockers — done far closer to adulthood and with the consent of the patient — are impermissible?
>The argument as raised above stands: why is circumcision — done at birth and without the consent of the patient — permissible,
Because we make a lot of medical decisions for children and this one is extremely minor with wide raining results.
The same paper you linked showed multiple pathologies that are significantly reduced by circumcision including penile cancer and HIV. That paper also cuts off at 1999. More recent studies show even greater effects.
> the claim is absurd. There's no science to support it.
No it's not, compare the rate of cervical cancer in countries with and without circumcision. It's considerably higher in countries where the majority of males are uncircumcised, even when those countries have higher vaccination rates and better overall health care.
If that is the reasoning behind allowing infant circumcision, then there should be no argument against puberty blockers. It is proven to be beneficial to a person's quality of life if they suffer from gender dysphoria.
I'm not sure what my personal opinion is on the topic, since I'm principally against infant circumcision. But I have less problems with puberty blockers, since it can still be reversed once a person is old enough to give consent.
Not sure about them, but for me, that’s correct. Solid research should be the foundation we make decisions on.
I used to have a problem with that idea too, until someone pointed out that puberty is an irreversible process with major consequences. The fact that everyone goes through it is a bit irrelevant; if it was happening to someone over 18, puberty blockers wouldn’t even be controversial.
As a parent, what to do? I look at my 2yo daughter and wonder if I’ll have to support her in a decision like that one day, or go against her wishes just because she’s 11. If there’s research indicating that delaying puberty doesn’t have major long term harm, then I’m more likely to endorse puberty blockers.
I made an off hand comment here that has got a lot of great response while I slept. I do wonder though if I'd have mentioned a handful of other issues whether the trans one would still have been the one to stir most controversy.
The fact is trans people are a tiny minority who are abused for political gain. I don't have hard numbers but it's probably not an exaggeration to say that to grant or withhold puberty blockers is probably no more common than a smorgasbord of other agonising medical decisions you may have to make.
Personally I don't like the idea of puberty blockers but if my 7 year old decided tomorrow that she was a boy, and lived that as authentically as they were able for years, then I think long and hard about it.
It is impossible to pause puberty or any other biological process. You cannot delay and restart something that is biologically time-bound. By giving a child puberty blockers you permanently prevent them from becoming an adult. They will never develop any of the features required for having children, they will never experience the brain developments that help with reasoning and empathy.
There are no studies on this Bec doing such studies is considered grossly unethical and evil, same as studying brain lobotomies in infants. As such we have no science on this, there are just people who have decided one thing and are performing live experiments without any controls. However, it should be noted that until very recently there was no significant incidence of unexplained child suicide, there was no significant incidence of unexplained teenage suicide, nor was there a significant incidence of unexplained young adult suicide. This is 100% social contagion, exacerbated by evil greedy pharmaceutical orgs who have latched on to small childhood insecurities and used them to build a multi-billion dollar industry mutilating and disfiguring healthy people.
Puberty blockers have been used on children to manage early puberty. The meds don't know if you're trans or not, so it's only reasonable to assume giving them to trans kids would have similar outcomes.
> If that is the reasoning behind allowing infant circumcision, then there should be no argument against puberty blockers.
That sword cuts both ways: if the reasoning for banning infant male circumcision is "they can always do it as an adult", then that's a perfectly good reason for doing it with puberty blockers too.
I've always been against infant circumcision. Why would I extend that exception to be broader? I'd rather narrow the number of things we can do to children, not expand them.
The outcome of transitioning after puberty versus before is meaningfully different. Not to mention the mental distress of going through puberty with gender dysphoria.
> The most impactful benefit of circumcision is the lower cervical cancer incidence. As evidenced by the lower rates in the US despite the much poorer healthcare than in European countries, particularly the Nordics that choose not to embrace science and advocate for circumcision.
Interesting, I would like to see that evidence. Specially when compared with the vaccination against HPV. Because, as far as I'm aware, that's by far the best way to prevent cervical cancer.
The lower HPV incidence rate is due to the fact that the skin on a circumcised penis is thickened due to the constant abrasion. Basically your penis gets covered with a callus. This thicker skin provides an improved barrier compared to the thin and moist skin inside an intact foreskin. But a thicker skin merely lowers the HPV infection rate, as evidenced by plantar warts on people's feet, which are also caused by HPV.
Luckily, as you've said, we already have HPV vaccines, so maybe it's time to stop cutting off pieces from little boys' penises?
That's not really accurate, the foreskin is an ideal area for pathogen development. Almost all STDS are reduced in circumcised populations as well as UTI.
If you want to cut off your foreskin, do it as an adult. Some other procedures to consider for additional health benefits:
- You can also decide to cauterize the nailbeds on your toes to get lifelong protection against ingrown toenails.
- You can preemptively put metal crowns over all your teeth to protect them from tooth decay - metals are stronger than enamel!
- You can also remove all your body hair with laser treatments, to get protection from ingrown hairs - those can get badly infected!
- You can also tattoo your blood type on your chest, like they did in the SS, to save precious time in case you need blood transfusion while unconscious.
You can do all of these things to yourself, as an adult with informed consent. But don't do it to infants.
> Infant circumcision is proof people don't actually give a fuck about informed consent. You can perform genital alteration surgery on all the baby boys you want and nobody bats an eye.
Right, and my argument is "We should stop things like that" while your argument is "we should do more things like that".
> Depending on your jurisdiction, there are messages you can't target to kids. Why should there be a special exemption for this?
Because the idea that the only acceptable gender norms a kid is allowed to be exposed to and express is the one tied to their genes is frankly a ridiculous concept.
There's nothing wrong with boys wearing dresses and playing with dolls. If you don't believe that harmless message should reach the ears of kids, then why? What is in that sort of message that you're afraid of?
> There's nothing wrong with boys wearing dresses and playing with dolls. If you don't believe that harmless message should reach the ears of kids, then why?
I fully agree there's nothing wrong with boys wearing dresses and playing with dolls
I think the idea that a boy wearing dresses and playing with dolls must automatically be trans is actually very harmful and I do oppose that message reaching anyone
“There’s nothing wrong with boys wearing dresses and playing with dolls” is true, but it’s a very dishonest summary of what the transgender movement advocates for.
A more honest example would be something like “children with a male anatomy might actually be girls, depending not on physical but rather on psychological characteristics (i.e. ‘gender identity’)”. That’s a completely different claim, and one that fewer people would agree with, so your post is more or less a motte and bailey.
My overarching question - the one that started this comment chain - explicitly mentioned gender expression and gender identity. It has been brought up by me several other times in this comment thread. I am not hiding what this discussion is ultimately about.
> What is in that sort of message that you're afraid of?
Your line questioning is sort of revealing that this only points you are wishing to score. I have, after all, not taken a position on targeted messages at children (I only pointed out that there are still restrictions on messages targeted to children).
I have already clarified that the specific contentious "transgender issue" is "transgender treatment", and that the clear majority of people all over the world are opposed to that specific "transgender issue".
I have not taken any position on whether or not children should be targeted with messages across the spectrum, ranging from the extreme on one end "It's okay for boys to play with dolls", to the extreme on the other "You will be happier after castration".
The reason I have not taken any position on messages is because of the many times proponents use the former as examples of what the rules should allow while ignoring that the rule they are championing also allows the latter message.
My position on the messages that children are to hear will always depend on the specific message. This is because children (even some young adults to, TBH) are impressionable!
If I had adopted your method of arguing for/against a point, I would have asked "Why are you so afraid of having your access to children cut off?" but I did not. Since you appear to be arguing your point in bad faith, I'm just going to go ahead and ask it.
If you had any faith that your message was the correct one you wouldn't be on the internet arguing for access to other people's children.
Why are you so afraid of having the easily impressionable in society prevented from seeing your message? Are you really afraid that if you don't get to imprint them with your message at the correct age they might never buy it as an adult?
>I have not taken any position on whether or not children should be targeted with messages across the spectrum, ranging from the extreme on one end "It's okay for boys to play with dolls", to the extreme on the other "You will be happier after castration".
Mere gender non-conformity isn't enough for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, despite what you're claiming. These are the DSM criteria for diagnosis of gender dysphoria in children:
---
A. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least 6 months’ duration, as manifested by at least six of the following (one of which must be Criterion A1):
1. A strong desire to be of the other gender or an insistence that one is the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).
2. In boys (assigned gender), a strong preference for cross-dressing or simulating female attire; or in girls (assigned gender), a strong preference for wearing only typical masculine clothing and a strong resistance to the wearing of typical feminine clothing.
3. A strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasy play.
4. A strong preference for the toys, games, or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender.
5. A strong preference for playmates of the other gender.
6. In boys (assigned gender), a strong rejection of typically masculine toys, games, and activities and a strong avoidance of rough-and-tumble play; or in girls (assigned gender), a strong rejection of typically feminine toys, games, and activities.
7. A strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy.
8. A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics that match one’s experienced gender.
B. The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, school, or other important areas of functioning.
---
> If you had any faith that your message was the correct one you wouldn't be on the internet arguing for access to other people's children.
Classy as ever implying that trans people are grooming children to be trans.
It seems like the opposite happens to me: parents with attitudes like yours will attempt to keep the existence of trans people secret in an attempt to groom their child to be cis, but if their child is gender dysphoric, it's not going to work and they're just going to suffer worse dysphoria-induced distress during puberty and transition as adults.
> So majority chooses what healthcare options are available?
You sound surprised, so maybe you really don't know this: this state of affairs is how it's always been, and is likely to continue well into the future.
The government regulates all medicines, all medical procedures, and all medical practices.
It's literally one of the many jobs of government.
Government run did not always mean majority ruled. Many times rights of the minority have been ruled to be important, as in cases like abortion. In today’s US, we’re trending toward enforcing minority opinions about e.g. vaccines.
> Government run did not always mean majority ruled.
Right.
> Many times rights of the minority have been ruled to be important, as in cases like abortion.
Correct, but it was with the agreement of the majority of voters! IOW, the majority opinion still prevailed.
We are not talking about tyranny of the minority by the majority; your example is literally the majority agreeing that those specific minorities rights be granted to them.
TBH, the opposition that we are seeing is opposition to medical intervention on minors who by definition alone cannot give informed consent.
Stop fighting that battle and I guarantee that this entire "issue" turns into a nothing-burger.
There is no reason to argue for medical interventions on someone who is unable to consent.
Doctors intervene to operate on minors all the time. Their guardian and doctors can decide to do essentially anything. If the doctor and guardian feel that the blockers, while harmful, are outweighed by the risk of self harm even with therapy and other medication, then let the doctor do the doctoring, not the politicians. There are almost twice as many intersex people who literally have at least partial sets of both reproductive organs as there are people who identify as trans. Doctors have to make hard calls without knowing the future on a regular basis. They can handle this too.
> Doctors intervene to operate on minors all the time.
On objective metrics, certainly. Never on subjective metrics.
Kid got a broken leg? Sure, doctors can intervene, often without even parental involvement (Emergencies, for example).
Kid feels like they have a broken leg? The doctor that cuts up that kid without doing any scans and working simply off the kid's self-reported feelings is going to be out of practice very very quickly.
Hell, doctors won't even prescribe antibiotics based off a kid's self-reported feelings; they'll confirm with a number of objective metrics (presence/absence of mucous in mouth/lungs, body temperature, pulse, etc).
So, no, we don't allow doctors to perform any procedures on children with only self-reported feelings as "evidence"[1].
[1] With the exception being male genital mutilation at birth, which is something I've always been vocally against.
I should not have said operate, you are correct. The only other incidence I could find is appendectomy, because there is a clock ticking, they sometimes operate without scans. Though sometimes tonsillectomy onvoarental reports of snoring. When I was writing I was thinking about antidepressants or stimulants for adhd which are generally given based on subjective self reported evidence. They also have permanent side effects and I think we probably over proscribe them. But not giving them can lead to self harm or learning deficits which are also permanent. This seems in the same category. I'm not sure how to correctly weigh those risks, glad I'm not a pediatrician. Also about 0.02% of babies have surgery based on subjective criteria about which biological gender they are physically closest to. That is rare enough that most of us won't know such a person, and private enough that most pf us wouldn't know if we did. Statistically only about 54k in the US. But as many as 1.7% or 5M with objective intersex characteristics. Enough most of us probably know someone who is not unambiguously male or female from a biological perspective, whether we know it or not.
There’s plenty of reason to argue for parents’ rights to make difficult ethical calls on behalf of their children. This happens all of the time. The only counter-argument is denying the harm that going through puberty as the wrong gender causes. Suicide rates support the reality. “Stop fighting against trans suicide” is disingenuous.
I'm going to assume you're asking in good faith, and the short answer is yes — this is already happening!
Before engaging in what could be a huge discussion here, I suggest you do some quick searching about legal risks of performing life-saving abortion procedures, gender-affirming care for prison inmates, and workplaces choosing whether the health insurance they provide employees covers gender-affirming care as starting points to learn about the sad state of affairs.
Yes, but since when do we allow the majority to dictate what healthcare options are available?
The mode for treating trans kids is puberty blockers until they’re 18 and then they can choose their own treatment - but that pathway is being blocked by more and more laws and fear mongering about kids being transitioned against their will
"Transitioned against their will" is a very crude way of articulating the tradeoffs of prescribing puberty blockers. The core issue at hand is that absent puberty blockers, somewhere between 60-80% do not persist with a cross-sex gender identity after going through their natal puberty. Psychologists attempted to predict which patients would persist in a cross sex gender identity and which would not, but they were never able to do so.
When patients are given puberty blockers, desistence rates are miniscule, in the single digits. Proponents of hormonal intervention insist that this is proof that doctors are selecting kids that would persist in a cross sex gender absent blockers. But that's hard to reconcile with psychologists previous failures to predict persistence. While they're billed as giving "time to think", it's pretty much impossible to deny that blockers are causing patients who would have desisted in their cross sex gender identity if they went through their natal puberty.
It's not just conservative American States that are changing course on blockers for children: Finland, Sweden, the UK, Italy, Denmark, and Norway have all stopped prescription of blockers in children. Plenty of other countries never allowed it in the first place.
The effects of puberty prevent people who are trans from living as their gender identities. Why bother when you'll need $400k in surgery post-puberty just for a chance to maybe look your gender?
If you ask trans people, "it's too late to live as my gender" is a common sentiment. You even see it in the gay community, where gay/bi people who come to acceptance of their sexualities late in life, feel like it's "too late" to live with that identity, and choose to continue to live and identify as straight people.
Hence the option for puberty blockers.
Turns out trans people will opt to go through the puberty that matches their gender if the opportunity arises, just as more people come out gay/bi/etc at an earlier age now that the opportunity arose.
People can, and do, transition as adults. Natal puberty clearly does not prevent all people from transitioning. Effectively 100% of trans people prior to about 2010 transitioned as adults.
Same thing with gay people, as per your example. I'm sure some do remain closeted their entire lives. But plenty of them come out as gay later in life.
> Same thing with gay people, as per your example. I'm sure some do remain closeted their entire lives. But plenty of them come out as gay later in life.
Plenty do, but the ones that don't give credence to the idea that forced closeting as a teenager makes it harder to follow your heart later. And that's in a situation where it doesn't get more difficult to come out later (if you're not married). Transitioning pre- and post- puberty is very different with current medical technology, so a lot more people will get "stuck".
As per the linked study, the desisters tend to no longer experience gender dysphoria. It's not just that they don't transition later in life. The scenario you're describing - people struggling with gender dysphoria but reluctant to transition on account of having undergone natal puberty - does not describe the bulk of the sample.
I never said that they don't, just that the opportunities to do so diminish post-puberty and with age, and many people give up on the dream of being themselves.
> But plenty of them come out as gay later in life.
Some do, but statistics show that the majority don't. At some point it stops making sense to identify as a gay/bi person if you've been married for 20 years and have no intention of leaving. That ship has sailed, so to speak. The same thing happens with trans people for very practical and biological reasons post-puberty.
The majority of patients stop experiencing gender dysphoria. The analogy to a married person "stuck in the closet" is not correct: in that scenario this person is still same-sex attracted but suppresses that desire. In the case of ~80% of gender dysphoric youth, they stop desiring to be the cross-sex gender altogether. They are not refraining from transition on account of doubting their ability to pass after having gone through natal puberty.
> Some do, but statistics show that the majority don't.
Well, yeah. That's because it literally was a passing phase that the child experienced. That's why there's so many studies (some of them linked in this thread) showing that if you simply defer the decision until the minor is a major , the majority of gender dysphoria desists.
IOW, once the child has actually matured a little, their identity confusion goes away.
Deferring is the path of least harm; is it any wonder then that most of the people in the world, including highly secular countries, go that route?
The statistics I am talking about are the rates of gay/bi identification by generation.
There's a reason there's nearly 10x as many gay identifying people in recent generations compared to past, and you can't generalize it as being a "phase". The true rates are likely the same, but people who identify that way dip off as you go back generations.
You notice the same pattern with left-handedness and those who identify as left-handed over time.
What do you mean by "giving up"? These patients have the opportunity to transition later in life. Patients were followed up with for 10+ years, well past puberty and into adulthood. The minority that persisted transitioned as adults.
The initial puberty is never going to be undone. If they'd rather live with it now that it happened, then it's great that they're probably not undergoing heavy dysphoria but that doesn't mean it's zero or that this was the best outcome.
> The initial puberty is never going to be undone. If they'd rather live with it now that it happened, then it's great that they're probably not undergoing heavy dysphoria but that doesn't mean it's zero or that this was the best outcome.
Well there was never going to be a perfect solution, right? So a solution that results in the most number of satisfied adults is an okay goal.
Given the disparity in life outcomes between trans people and cis people, the idea that the desisters would have been better off transitioning is quite the bold speculation.
Again, these people are not prevented from transitioning. A minority, about 20%, do transition as adults. The rest no longer harbor desire to live as a different gender.
People have explained to you previously why this claim is false, yet you keep repeating it over and over. You are counting kids with GNC behavior who never talked about transitioning themselves stopping said GNC behavior. You are also counting kids who end up repressing (some of which end up transitioning with worse outcomes years down the line). You already know this.
> You are counting kids with GNC behavior who never talked about transitioning themselves stopping said GNC behavior.
These children met the criteria for GID in the contemporary iteration of the DSM. The author of the study I linked would go on to write the criteria for gender dysphoria in the DSM-V. The idea that we'd see a substantially different rate of desistence if the DSM-V was used is not likely: the author of the study has stated that most of the children would have met the criteria for gender dysphoria under the DSM-V.
> You are also counting kids who end up repressing (some of which end up transitioning with worse outcomes years down the line)
The study followed up with patients for an average of over 10 years. Do you have any actual evidence that a significant portion of desisters in this study transitioned later in life? Or are you just stating this without evidence?
People have not offered a good explanation why these rates of desistence are false. They either insist that the criteria used was wrong, or baselessly claim that desisters are repressing a desire to transition.
We have been saying that the DSM is a joke for years, and that you can't diagnose someone of being trans just by ticking boxes, the only way to go about it is self identification. So yeah sure, they used the DSM to diagnose and then perform conversion therapy on GNC children who never necessarily claimed to be trans, and from that they inferred that most trans kids end up "becoming cis".
> Do you have any actual evidence that a significant portion of desisters in this study transitioned later in life?
I don't have enough funds to perform such a research, maybe there exists such a paper but I have not looked for it. In general trans topics are woefully underfunded. But I know enough people that ended up desisting either due to conversion therapy or due to shame and lack of support from their family, and transitioned years afterwards (5-15+ years) after living shitty and depressing empty lives pretending to be cis.
For the third time, the children in the study met the same criteria that would be used to approve a child for puberty blockers. Why do you keep insisting that these children "never necessarily claimed to be trans"? Whatever "claiming to be trans" is supposed to mean, the important thing is that the study used the same criteria that would be used to approve a child for puberty blockers.
> But I know enough people that ended up desisting either due to conversion therapy or due to shame and lack of support from their family, and transitioned years afterwards (5-15+ years) after living shitty and depressing empty lives pretending to be cis.
This is called "anecdote". As I said, the claim that a sizeable chunk of desisters transition later in life is being made without evidence.
And again, with a mean followup time of over 10 years, most of the people who transitioned 5-15 years later would be counted as persisters, not desisters.
And again, we have been saying that these criteria are stupid. You can't diagnose someone as trans unwillingly, and then be surprised that they decided to not transition. Teenagers who start hormones or blockers do so because they ask for it, because they identify themselves as trans.
> This is called "anecdote"
When you are lacking proper research all you are going to get are anecdotes. Let's not put our heads in the sand.
> with a mean followup time of over 10 years, most of the people who transitioned 5-15 years later would be counted as persisters, not desisters.
10-15 years means that you are 25-30 if you came out at 15. At that point people often self-medicate with hrt and nobody ends up knowing. The mean age of 10 years is because they tracked younger children, if you came out at 7 its unlikely that you will transition at 17 with unsupportive parents, especially back then.
No, "trans kids" don't get prescribed blockers just because they ask for it. Does a child just say one day "I'm a girl" (or boy) and then get handed blockers as they head out the door?
Of course not. There is an assessment period. They are assessed for gender dysphoria, and if diagnosed they may be prescribed puberty blockers to treat their gender dysphoria. And what is the criteria for diagnosing a patient with gender dysphoria? Whether or not you think the criteria in the DSM are effective, at the end of the day these are the criteria that would be used to approve puberty blockers. If you think these criteria erroneously include kids who aren't "trans kids" then we're approving puberty blockers for patients who aren't "trans kids".
Of course a longer follow up time is strictly better, but it's not valid to simply fill in a gap in data with whatever better suits your worldview. If a study measuring rates of detransition follows up with patients for 10 years, then patients that detransition after 10 years would not be counted. Is it valid to point to a couple anecdotes of detransition, and then claim that the study's finding are false because there's loads of people who detransitioned after 10 years? Of course not. But that's the same flawed criticism you're making here.
Why the scarequotes? For the record I don't think I have used these two words together, but I obviously do think that kids can be trans just like anyone else, is that even debatable?
> don't get prescribed blockers
I am quoting here out of context but correct, there is no point in puberty blockers before the "natural" puberty.
> There is an assessment period. They are assessed for gender dysphoria, and if diagnosed they may be prescribed puberty blockers to treat their gender dysphoria
Sure, and we have been saying that these criteria are unscientific, inaccurate, and based on social stereotype.
> at the end of the day these are the criteria that would be used to approve puberty blockers
The difference being that teenagers who don't explicitly seek them because they don't consider themselves as trans are never considered for undergoing puberty blockers. All that study shows is what we have been saying all the time about the DSM.
> If you think these criteria erroneously include kids who aren't "trans kids" then we're approving puberty blockers for patients who aren't "trans kids".
No, because teenagers who don't consider themselves trans do not seek puberty blockers and are therefore never considered for them. The main distinguisher between trans and nontrans people is their self identification.
> Of course a longer follow up time is strictly better, but it's not valid to simply fill in a gap in data with whatever better suits your worldview. There certainly seems to be a pattern.
I don't think it's surprising or debatable that trans people who undergo conversion therapy or grow up in oppressive/conservative environments often end up repressing.
For, what, the fifth time the sample in the study did express cross sex gender identity. They were trans kids, to use your terminology. A patient can't desist from a cross sex gender identity if they never expressed one in the first place. Pointing out that these patients didn't seek blockers is nonsensical since blockers weren't an option at the time. The fact of the matter is that the desisters in this study:
1. Expressed a cross-sex gender identity. They were trans kids, as you choose to term it.
2. Met the assessment criteria that would be used to approve a patient for blockers.
Yes, the desisters in the study would most likely be prescribed blockers if they went to a gender clinic that prioritized affirmation.
> The difference being that teenagers who don't explicitly seek them because they don't consider themselves as trans are never considered for undergoing puberty blockers
Again, these patients did express a cross-sex gender identity, or "consider themselves as trans" to use your language. If they never did, then they can't desist from a cross sex gender identity if they never expressed one in the first place.
> No, because teenagers who don't consider themselves trans do not seek puberty blockers and are therefore never considered for them. The main distinguisher between trans and nontrans people is their self identification.
To re-use your terminology, studies found that ~80% of the children who considered themselves trans stop considering themselves trans and become comfortable and no longer experience gender dysphoria in their cis gender after natal puberty. It seems like the root of the problem is the lack of understanding that the children in the study did "consider themselves trans", as you choose to put it.
If all you're going to do is continue to erroneously claim that the patients in this study weren't expressing a cross sex gender identity ("consider themselves trans"), or baselessly claim that the desisters are actually just repressing a trans identity then there's no value in continuing this.
Puberty blockers are a huge step. Not one taken lightly. Kids who are unsure, by and large don’t take that step.
I injured my wrist a few years back. Doctors offered me pt or surgery + pt. They clearly advised me that given the low severity of my injury, surgery would likely improve some things while causing other impacts. I declined the surgery.
This is how most medical choices are made. Doctor advises, patient listens and choses best option. For patients who are also minors - their parents are also involved. Every day a parent and child choose between consequences of the intervention and consequences of non intervention. The only difference with trans kids is apparently you and the gov want a say in the choice. It’s not your body, nor your kid. It’s none of your business.
How would you have decided if the doctors offered preemptive surgery on your wrist when you were still an impressionable child, before you ever got to experience the "pain" of your injury. How could you possibly make an informed decision then?
How could I possibly make an informed decision as a child?
Well, first off - we trust children to make life-altering decisions every day - sometimes without good access to info about potential downsides. A great example is sports. Many sports (ballet, football) can and do have life-long health and quality of life impacts. Minors can commit to those and yet there’s no widespread moral panic about it.
The thing is I actually do trust children to figure out what’s best for themselves. Children are impulsive, yes - they have poor in-the-moment judgement. But medical transition isn’t something that can be done impulsively. It takes years of consistent action, not minutes or hours.
That is the same user, me. The critical used the same arguments made here: insisting that the patients weren't "actually trans", which I find unlikely for the reasons I wrote above. Not only that, they cited the retracted CAMH report to try and discredit the study author. Not only was that report retracted, CAMH had to pay the author over half a million in damages for defamation.
The part of society that treats them badly are those that encourage the delusions, including but not limited to the doctors that directly profit from that.
Accusing the doctors of profiting directly off transitioning… well yes, in the states you have a for-profit medical system. But unless you think oncologists are giving kids cancer for their own profit, you’re being a hypocrite.
In the UK, Canada, most of the rest of the world? Single payer public health systems mean trans healthcare isn’t more profitable than any other type of health care. Doctors have no profit incentive, as there are easier less controversial specialities that have larger patient bases and higher patient thru-put.
How much can the disparity in life outcomes be attributed to a trans person needing to undergo a second puberty in a society where doing so is discriminated against?
I feel like as a society we put trans people in a situation where it is controversial for them to transition as children, but also controversial for them to transition as adults. (The notion of a man in a dress no longer exists if the man never had male puberty, but not only is it controversial for such a boy to never have male puberty, we villainize the now-man's attempts to become a woman!) But then we say that outcomes for trans people are bad so them staying in the closet is good. Which is weird, because the cause of the bad outcomes is that there is no stage of their life where trans people can transition noncontroversially.
Desisters are not "still in the closet". They have become comfortable in their cis gender and no longer want to transition. Many (~60% of the sample) live happily as same-sex attracted cis people.
And so how does all of this prove that it should be illegal to speak about transitioning anywhere kids might read? Because that is what is at stake with these rulings
No, I don't think it should be illegal to speak about transitioning. Where in this comment chain does it even remotely look like I argued in favor of the bans discussed in the OP?
You are arguing about the harms of transitioning in a thread about how talking about it online is being suppressed. It seems pretty clear your priorities are controlling other people, not access to information.
What didn't I address? The fact that trans people have worse life outcomes than cis people? That's such a well documented health disparity I didn't feel the need to links sources, but if you insist:
Even if these disparities are due to discrimination, those disparities still exist. We don't measure health outcomes based on what hypothetically would happen in an ideal world where people genuinely do not recognize or distinguish between the sexes. We measure health outcomes based on what happens in real world.
For the third time, desisters are non-dysphoric cis people. They are not repressing a trans identity. If they still feel gender dysphoria living as their cis gender they have, by definition, not desisted.
Desisting is no longer seeking medical or social transition. It says nothing about how you feel. You’re making that jump, but that’s not something you or anybody can know.
The logic here is so strange. You acknowledge discrimination against trans people exist and yet also use the discrimination against trans people as a justification to discriminate against children exploring gender, i.e. trans children.
I wonder how many left handed people were beaten into becoming right handed, and remained right handed. In a society where left handed people continue to be beaten, would these people be considered happily right handed since they continue to use their right hand? How would we be able to tell?
I wonder if we existed in a world where soft boys were beaten into becoming less emotional, who grow up to be unemotional men. In a society where adult men are beaten if they express softness, are these men considered happily unemotional? How would we be able to tell?
How do we tell if someone is cis when it is stigmatized to be trans or express gender dysphoria? Genuinely not sure, honestly.
Sex is so deeply ingrained in humanity - heck, not just humanity but mammals and animals writ large - that it is almost certainly impossible to create a world where people genuinely treat trans people the same as cis people. Sure, outlawing discrimination in housing and employment against trans people is not only feasible it's been implemented in most liberal democracies. But that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the difference between living life as a trans person versus a cis person. Gender is a social construct. Sex is biology. For many people, the latter is more salient than the former.
This is why talking about what the outcomes would be in some hypothetical world is pointless. Doctors are striving to deliver the best outcomes in the real world, not the outcomes in some hypothetical world that doesn't actually exist and probably never will.
> yet also use the discrimination against trans people as a justification to discriminate against children exploring gender, i.e. trans children.
Children are free to explore their gender. Just not with powerful drugs that have lifelong effects. Refusing to prescribe puberty blockers to a child experiencing gender dysphoria isn't discrimination any more than it is to refuse to prescribe artificial testosterone to a boy that has normal levels of testosterone for his age. We "discriminate" against this boy that wants to explore hypermasculinity, too.
> I wonder if we existed in a world where soft boys were beaten into becoming less emotional, who grow up to be unemotional men. In a society where adult men are beaten if they express softness, are these men considered happily unemotional? How would we be able to tell?
You would measure their health outcomes: do the latter experience depression or other negative mental health conditions at different rates? Do they die by suicide at different rates? I haven't dug deeply into the effects of corporal punishment, but presumably it's discouraged because we've observed negative outcomes.
> How do we tell if someone is cis when it is stigmatized to be trans or express gender dysphoria? Genuinely not sure, honestly.
I'm not sure what you mean by "how do we tell if someone is cis". I think you mean something along the lines of "how do we tell which gender dysphoric children will or won't continue to experience dysphoria in their cis gender past natal puberty?" If that's the case then the answer is "we can't". Psychologists tried, for decades, and failed to predict the minority of patients that would persist in cross sex gender identity. We know that ~80% become comfortable in their cis gender after natural puberty. This is why it's hard to justify prescribing puberty blockers. Suppressing natal puberty will help someone pass better in a cross-sex gender, but the benefits of passing better need to be weighted against the probability that the child would live comfortably in their cis gender without dysphoria absent blockers.
Which is the better health outcome? 5 trans people who medically transitioned before puberty, or 4 cis people who live comfortably without dysphoria in their cis gender and 1 trans person who transitioned after natal puberty? Ideally we'd be able to predict the 1 patient that would persist, and transition them medically before puberty. But again, we don't have that ability. Thus, it's insufficient to justify prescription of puberty blockers by pointing to the one trans person who medically transitioned as an adult and say that they would have had a better live if they were able to transition medically before puberty. This is the big reason why advocates for puberty blockers tend to dislike discussion of persistent rates with versus without puberty blockers. It's fairly easy to justify them in the simplistic world where all gender dysphoric youth are guaranteed to persist. But factor in the persistence rates without blockers and it becomes vastly harder to make the case for them.
> Yes, but since when do we allow the majority to dictate what healthcare options are available?
We've always done so - popular opinion as reflected by the voters dictate that you aren't getting a prescription for arsenic (anymore? Or crack cocaine, for that matter.)
The government, for good or bad, regulates all healthcare, and that government is guided by its voters.
The majority of voters don't see this as a bigger problem than the issue they are currently voting on.
> We've always done so - popular opinion as reflected by the voters dictate that you aren't getting a prescription for arsenic (anymore? Or crack cocaine, for that matter.)
As someone else pointed out, the idea of gov deciding what our doctors can and cant give us is a VERY modern concept.
But your examples: arsnic & crack
1. Cocaine is legal for doctors to prescribe and use in specific circumstances. What is legally prohibited is recreational use. Most of the restrictions on use are due to the threat of addiction, not the threat of appropriate medical use.
2. Arsnic is similarly entirely legal for medical use. Restrictions are around putting it in FOOD because it’s POISON. Nobody is saying you can’t treat cancer with it, if it’s shown to be effective.
Your examples are not examples of the majority regulating medical care for individuals.
> We've always done so - popular opinion as reflected by the voters dictate that you aren't getting a prescription for arsenic (anymore? Or crack cocaine, for that matter.)
That began in 1906; it's hardly something we've "always done".
Those bans are leaky, and physical. They aren't censorship, and (almost?) Exclusively ban services or sale of goods to underage people.
They are also costly to implement, and require a lot of state effort to enforce.
These digital checks, if done "right". Are cheap to implement, and hard to get around. They don't easily let adults allow a kid to do it anyway. And a government can trivially check if a whole swath of businesses is implementating it.
That last point makes it very easy for governments to use this for widespread ideological interventions. With very little option for others to push back, because few people are involved in enforcement.
A society doesn't decide and can't decide, society is an abstraction. People have different morals, and they decide. The only thing that "putting it in the hands of society" is to put it in the hands of a small group of people who will force others to comply.
> we ban all kinds of things for under 18s based on morals. […] a society decide […]
Which society though? It used to be that political decisionmaking understood and accepted the existence of people not like the voting majority, and work to a common consensus… that's rather eroded now, and not just in the USA.
> Obviously, there should be limits.
Obviously? The only thing I'd accept as "obvious" in terms of speech limits is that which is actively violating people, e.g. CSAM, revenge porn and doxxing.
Raunchy stories? Porn with consenting participants? Fictional horror & gore? Those are not "obvious" limits…
…and then consider nude selfies exchanged consensually between 15yo teens. Is that CSAM?
Many businesses in the US check ID at the door. If you are underage, they don't let you in.
On the surface it seems reasonable to ask for an equivalent ID check online.
But. The bouncer doesn't photocopy my ID and store it in a poorly secured back room that is regularly raided by criminal enterprises or outright sold by unscrupulous owners of the establishment. Similarly, they don't check in with the government in a manner that leaves a record.
I'm fine with an ID check, but I think it is also reasonable to demand the same level of privacy that one gets when visiting a bar, casino, burlesque club, or similar establishment.
> The bouncer doesn't photocopy my ID and store it […]
It simply means that it has not arrived in your vicinity yet. In Sydney (Australia, not Canada), whilst most venues are satisfied with quick visual checks of one's face / ID for anyone who looks young, some venues have equipped the bouncers with iPads that run an app dedicated to taking one's face picture and recording the government issued ID details (driver licence number, residential address and particulars – all of them! or no entry). I have had an argument with them a couple of times where the bouncers refused to say – and pretty aggressiveley so – how the PII is handled, who will own it after handing it over, and how to delete it. I simply walked away each and every time, and I no longer approach the venues that record the ID details.
Frankly, the erosion of privacy in western countries is reaching epic proportions, with incumbent governments making substantial efforts to get into one's colon against the citizen's wish.
Absolutely not "banned". Movie theaters customarily won't let children under 17 into R-rated films without a parent, but there's no law that I'm aware of enforcing that - it's purely an industry custom. And there's certainly no analogous restriction when purchasing an R-rated DVD, or watching one on a streaming service.
Oh wild. Learn something new every day. I worked at a movie theater myself and totally thought it was a law that people under 18 had to be accompanied by a guardian by law.
The very reason this isn't legally enforced is because industry self-regulated this way (to avoid legislation that would come with actual liability). If the Internet made any effort at self-regulation beyond "say, you're over 18, right?" perhaps we wouldn't be in this situation.
Sepa, pix, ideal, swish? Bitcoin?
A debit card from a bank on the us west coast that has state laws forbidding them to comply with laws like Texas'? If your hosting, banking, and residence are in CA, OR, or WA, and there was no discernable intent to target residents of the other state, it seems pretty unlikely anything could happen to you. Just don't take any plane that might get emergency diverted to some other state.
The slope isn't slippery, it's paved with a Starbucks on the way. This process is outlined in detail in Project 2025 to get around 1A being used as a defense because the aim is to define anything as lgbt related as pornography.
The current administration has collected nearly all the pieces of Exodia to be able to legally criminalize homosexuality and transgenderism without ever writing a law that says those exact words and have it be held up as constitutional. I'd say it was clever if it wasn't awful.
With all due respect this comes across as mysoginic and ageist. It is also quite unnecessary to your point. Especially because middle aged women aren't the most powerful lobby in the US by any stretch.
That seems more like your interpretation of it; it’s merely an objective descriptor of the identity group in the same way that “straight white males” is.
I did not mean that the words "middle age mothers" are mysoginic or ageist in themselves. I was referring to the singling out of this particular identity group within the context of OP's message.
I should have quoted a longer part of that message for better clarity. I incorrectly assumed that my full comment was enough to contextualise what I meant.
This is a slippery slope towards democracy I tell you! Before you know it they'll be asking for representation.
Seriously, isn't this sort of par for the course? We've always regulated what minors can access on the internet. Facebook didnt even formally allow children on their site (I don't know if that's still the case). I think it's a much larger issue that we haven't been enforcing those rules, since we apparently think they are a good idea.
Again, you have no requirement to recognize this form of neurotic authoritarianism as anything related to either morality or christianity, for that matter. This isn't about morals at all, it's rather nakedly about control and ignorance.
...and it's packaged up as Christian nationalism. It's the next part of a very long campaign of developing an ignorant voting base who believe you are operating with a divine cause. It's used to cultivate racism and sexism and patriarchy. To not recognize the role of religion with respect yo governance in America's history is to ignore half the story. Look no further than the dollar bill, or Pledge of Allegiance, to understand how integral religion has been in our governance.
Ethos of the very early Internet. It was mid 90s when people started thinking the Internet was a great resource for kids, and various blacklists arrived for DNS and email and this cool Netscape web browser thing, and Internet providers were chosen on how much of the alt.* Usenet hierarchy they provided or which IRC servers were accessible. Way back when the Internet was academia, porn and piracy and the sysadmins could do little but roll their eyes when people talked about how great it would be when the schools would be able to give their students accounts and they could all hang out in #hottub and slap each other with trouts and other innocent things. ASR?
It existed only on the edges, usually in softer pragmatic forms, and stopped a lot of bad ideas as a pressure group.
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.
The “freedom” of the early internet was bullshit, because it just meant “freedom to make money” and “freedom from having to deal with the consequences of your products on regular people.”
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.
> 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.
Yes, which is why we are not in the early internet anymore and fully into surveillance capitalism, algorithmic social media.
Exactly. And the early internet lead directly here. Which is why going back makes about as much sense as picking up your baby and dropping it on the floor again.
All of those changes were choices. Like setting icann as a for profit entity at the behest of a corrupt libertarian faction. We didn’t have to destroy peer to peer communication. We didn’t have to cede email to google. None of those things were inevitable. Could have become anything really.
Yeah but we didn’t do it, because our political system is built around deference to large corporations and we’ve abandoned antitrust and taking on corporate power.
But here’s the thing. This effort to stop these corporations from delivering unlimited porn to children is a step in the right direction. Which is restraining the activity of these companies to hurt people.
Which is why calls for the old “free” internet are now, like then, bullshit.
Bullshit. This about enacting tboughtcrime and normalizing that two Americans cannot exchange whatever arbitrary information the current administration has decided is disallowed. It starts with porn and ends with any form of dissent. It's another step towards Newspeak.
I know they taught you about slippery slopes in elementary school social studies, and I assume you've educated yourself not only of the past but also with speculative material such as 1984. If not, I'm not sure why you feel qualified to make the claims you're making.
Yeah that’s the libertarian techno utopian Silicon Valley point of view. It’s not that I don’t understand it, it’s that I think it’s pretty clear at this point it’s just a PR pitch for a group of sociopathic assholes who think they deserve to run the country.
Giving unlimited porn to kids is not “good, actually” and it was illegal before the internet and it’s a frustrating accident of history that nobody understood the implications of Section 230 at the time.
The internet is a core infrastructure commercial enterprise and what it produces should be subject to standard product regulations.
I'm not a libertarian, and I don't live in SV. I'm also not a sociopathic asshole. Your argument is filled with ad hominem, then presents a ridiculous straw man, and never actually addresses the argument I made.
< This about enacting tboughtcrime and normalizing that two Americans cannot exchange whatever arbitrary information the current administration has decided is disallowed. It starts with porn and ends with any form of dissent. It's another step towards Newspeak.
No, it's not.
It's about regulating consumer product safety. The above argument is one employed to avoid that obvious fact. Nobody wants to decide what you can email another adult. We want to make these giant conglomerate tech companies accountable for the harm they cause to people. Giving massive amounts of unlimited porn to children is harmful and we shouldn't be OK with it.
I get that "oh think of the children" is often used disingenuously. So what? This isn't one of those times.
You've doubled down on the straw man. Literally no one is talking about "giving massive amounts of unlimited porn to children" but you.
> So what? This isn't one of those times.
It 100% is, and you cannot see it because you yourself are caught in the fervor.
If you don't want to visit a website, don't visit it. If you don't want your child to visit a website, block it. But to force website operators to check IDs at the door through sketchy third party services so that other consenting individuals can use their services is just batshit insane and a gigantic slippery slope towards a State-run internet that criminalizes all non-sanctioned speech. You need to look past your little hang up and understand the bigger picture.
I got us 4chan and 8chan. It got us mass shootings and endless "they are just trolling, they are just teenagers, they are just ironic" chorus constantly bad faith defending the far right.
4chan is not emblematic of the Internet Wild West. It was spawned by users ejected from a traditional forum, a scant half-year before Facebook was launched; it was, in fact, a sort of mirror to Facebook's response to that old internet, moot and Zuck being two sides of the same upper middle class white boy script kiddie coin.
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.
Are you saying that the early web only existed in the USA? I did not witness a growth in mass shootings here in Europe from that time. Those things did not happen until Web 2.0.
Society gave us mass shootings. 4chan and other anonymous boards gave us protected speech. We've had mass shootings long before 4chan and they didn't start kicking off until they reached a critical threshold of interest due to social media and the almighty algorithm, not 4chan. Conflating these things is either ignorant or dishonest.
So now that we've arrived at the far right, it's time to stop decentralized dissent and prevent the pendulum from swinging back? This seems like a terrible idea.
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.
"Arrived" because any further and we're into the far reich. "Swinging back" because I have to be an optimist that as the blatant autocratic authoritarianism rises there will be mass pushback.
I do know how deep the sophomorically-justified rabbit hole goes, in that I've read a fair amount of dark enlightenment material. I actually credit Moldbug's writing for helping me go from defaulting to fundamentalist-axiomatic analysis (rightist) to leftist-constructive-qualitative analysis (leftist) - top down hierarchy is utterly incapable of responding to the complexity of the world, and only sounds so appealing post-facto when a singular coherent narrative has been written.
4chan was started because posters in the Something Awful anime subforum could not stop posting underage child porn which was obviously against the rules.
To stop these disgusting freaks from polluting the SA forums with their child pornography and degeneracy, Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka closed the anime subforum (ATDRW aka Anime Tentacle Death Rape Whorehouse) and moot started 4chan.
So yeah, 4chans early legacy is ‘a bunch of pedophiles were mad they couldn’t share their abuse images’ which later transitioned into a love of fascism. What a great place… NOT.
P.S. Adults who like anime are fundamentally broken, it’s children’s entertainment.
Both of us can be right, moot is a massive ween and I’m sure he wanted a 2ch clone in English but it didn’t happen until ATDRW was shut down in 2003. I was an SA forums member when it happened.
I bet that in practice, at scale, these zero knowledge proofs end up being a lot more than zero.
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.
VPNs and zero knowledge proof systems are vulnerable to traffic analysis (based on packet size and timestamps) and there's almost no cure.
Mullvad is the only VPN I know of that has a mode that normalizes all packets to the same size (going into the VPN) and sends fake packets that don't get sent as real traffic. But that's only obfuscation and, at low traffic or high bandwidth (videos) or with sufficient heuristics, it can be beaten.
The US has basically zero regulation on selling this data. I can imagine a world where within a couple decades the US has one of the largest blackmail crisis ever seen, as foreign governments target civil workers. Or, I guess, at this point, the US government against the "undesirable" party within this administration.
It really depends on the implementation around it, how a user conducts themselves, and what data you can buy. While there is zero knowledge inside the proof, its use creates a side channel that reveals information.
For instance: The relying party server needs to call the auth server on novel users. Thats a new, unavoidable indicator!
How large are token batches and how long do they last? Will the implementation force them to wait a time period between redemption and use?
A bad implementation means the user IP will talk to the A server, then it will contact the RP server, who will contact the A server. Because this happens once per connection (or 60 minutes in this bill) and takes maybe a few hundred milliseconds. there's not going to be a huge number of candidates to have to sort through. And that's just the handshake.
Oh, that's my bad, I re-read the privacy pass protocol to brush up and it does use signing without requiring the RP to necessarily make another call to the original approver server. I also see there's been work on hidden witness ZKP, so the RP may not even know who approved a given token.
Very cool! Always happy to be proven wrong with cool tech!
> I bet that in practice, at scale, these zero knowledge proofs end up being a lot more than zero.
Zero knowledge proof is not a marketing term, its a math term. Maybe sometimes they are implemented wrong, but if they are implemented correctly its pretty rock solid. Certainly more rock solid than much cryptography which rests on sketchy foundations.
At the same time they seem pragmatic about putting their mark on standards. It seems to me like we’re at a confluence: a regulatory tipping point where there really is pressure to bring laws to bear on online harms affecting kids; and a socio-technological moment where “gotta distinguish kids from adults” can realistically happen separately from “…by handing over personal info directly to shady random counterparts.”
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.
I expect Apple will implement a general privacy-preserving arbitrary attribute proof, with age proof just one of the things it could be used for, probably using something similar to the library that Google recently released [1].
Zero knowledge proof smart contract verification called by the site interested in your age. You provide your public key wallet with its government issued soul bound NFT of your identification.
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.
They can require a selfie to compare against, multiple documents, a video, etc. IMHO best bet is to consolidate the validation to a small set of reputable companies, delegate validation to them, then improve regulations around access. Eg non-reputable site needs to know you are 18 (etc) but not see your actual id if they can have a third party do it in a blind-to-them fashion.
I'm just saying that if age verification is done via a "smart card" then it shouldn't be hard to just add that to the phone.
Unless of course they're planning on making us go to some facility to ensure our phones get the digital components of the IDs get loaded into the secure enclave? Which sounds dystopian as heck given the scenes coming out of the US right now.
It would be preferable if the prover party that holds the credentials in this scenario weren't Google. If anything I'd prefer a government issued digital ID with some form of local-only cryptographic exchange where neither the government knows someone has verified at a particular site/service and the verifier doesn't get info about one's identity. Just some cryptographic proof that verifies an age ('just' is doing some heavy lifting).
In past HN comments this apparently exists IRL in Germany and/or Canada, where age can be proven via a smartphone without leaking one's identity to the verifier and without any communication back to the government.
There was a thread on reddit asking the other day what about the modern world bothers you the most
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
Either so few people appreciate the freedom that privacy confers or the perceived conveniences for trading it away are too compelling because of just how little society has done to protect privacy.
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.
Privacy is required for the mental health of many people, perhaps everyone except the extroverted and naive. Anxiety and fear over people watched, caught, punished, especially innocently. Anxiety and fear over their lack of privacy being abused and harming them, such as currently popularized with identity theft and other crimes, or simple ridicule or bullying. And the resultant chilling effects, where people who wish to speak feel they cannot because they might suffer, especially in cases where this is an actual risk rather than normal existential dread. Without privacy, you can't be inclusive.
The EU is both pro-privacy and anti-privacy. In many ways, they're ahead of the US - you can opt out of more telemetry, more advertising, more tracking. Good. But then the encryption stuff - bad.
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.
It is very much not clear to me that you should have privacy from governments or cops. Aren't the whole point of the government and cops that they are the institutions we have created to entrust with this access?
Please feel free to set up a spyware on your phone that records every image you send, every text and email you write and saves all this data somewhere that you will never have access to and for an indefinite amount of time.
That is exactly what the EU is trying to do with the Chat Control law. Targeted law enforcement access to some data is not what is being discussed here.
We are talking about 24/7/365 mass surveillance without warrants and without the suspicion of any crime committed.
Given that Europe specifically has a very sordid history with the use of data collected by government to genocide literally millions of people, no, I don't think it can be entrusted with such access.
I don't feel as strongly about privacy because "community" is what holds civilisation together.
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.
> We always need to balance freedoms with responsibility.
Sure, but is this a measure that appropriately balances it?
I think the traditional view is that the balance should be: your rights end where they start stepping on another person's rights.
We aren't really talking about someone else being harmed, we are talking about (at worst) someone harming themselves. There is no other person being harmed.
On the other hand, porn habits are a great way to blackmail people. When the identity data gets leaked, it will very easily ruin lives.
From a balance perspective, i don't really think it follows that the benefits are worth the potential harms. I think civilization is best preserved by not doing this.
> I don't feel as strongly about privacy because "community" is what holds civilisation together.
Dude I'm sure most people are okay with their neighbors knowing their names and addresses. We're talking about the governments and megacorps here. Theses are not "communities" in any traditional sense.
> small transparent governments
No developed country has that. Not EU and definitely not the US.
I am never providing my ID to anyone who can store it indefinitely. I am an adult and have no problem showing it in a shop if required as it isn't stored. Unless it can be proven it wont be stored (i.e. the bytes are never sent from my laptop) I will not provide it.
Your ID is effectively stored by the issuer indefinitely. What’s the difference between one and two entities? What’s the difference between two and a hundred?
The more people you give your personal information to, the less personal it becomes.
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.
ID verification does not increase risks for majority of people. Most people don’t use single use email aliases and thus harmful association can happen for them in any leak of their account data, with or without ID details. It is likely that higher compliance requirements will actually reduce the risk of a leak. And of course, chances that every website doing verification will store your ID are very low. It‘s costly, so it will likely be outsourced to a third party provider specializing in this job (which will be much more secure than doing it with some WordPress plugin or other shitty custom solution).
Where I'm from we sorted this out with laws. It's not hard to figure out if one of your workers are associating with a union, but you're not allowed to treat them differently based on that. Laws make sure you don't, even though you technically could.
The tricky part is proving you’re being treated differently and that’s the reason why. Trying to legislate human behavior at that level doesn’t seem to work well.
My company has rules against retaliation. Good luck proving that’s the reason you didn’t get promoted, or were left off of a project. People get left off projects and don’t get promoted all the time. Keeping your job because the company is legally obligated to sounds like an uncomfortable working environment.
That’s a strange assumption. ID verification is part of entering the contractual relationship in many parts of this world, it’s absolutely normal thing. You don’t show your ID to random sites, only to those where you want to become a customer. If you don’t want to sign the contract, you don’t show your ID. I don’t know how many places have a copy of my passport (many hotels, for sure) and I don’t care as long as they are compliant with the laws. Tracking via ID is economically much less effective, since most websites won’t require ID verification anyway, so the biggest concern should be identity theft - but there having a copy of your ID is rarely enough in countries with developed government ID infrastructure. E.g. in Germany you must present original ID to open a bank account or change your residence address. In countries with digital IDs and government services identity theft often goes via easier routes by hijacking digital ID accounts.
The difference between one and two is being able to link two things I did.
If you know who I am, that barely affects me. But if you can then cross-check whether I also went ballroom dancing, or went to a golf course, or went to a sexclub, or went to a ball-game. Then it starts affecting me.
Just don’t consent to sharing your data to third parties for marketing or research purposes. In civilized world there exist laws which give you this right. It is surely not the problem with ID verification or storage.
Giving your data to a website is the same as giving it to a stranger on the bus. Maybe closer to going to a seedy part of town and giving your ID to random criminal and hoping they don't do anything unscrupulous.
It is not the same, it’s a classic straw man argument. First of all, not just some data, but your ID details - this is important detail. Second, not to a random website, but to a website you wish to engage in a contractual relationship and where your ID is actually required. Third, they are unlikely criminal and there are legal protections in this scenario in most civilized countries. Fourth, the way it goes, it is very unlikely that you will be presenting your ID, instead providing attribute proof through a third party. See e.g. Nect Wallet and similar apps. ID verification will not increase your risks of identity theft etc compared to leaks of other PII. Probably the risk will be lower due to higher compliance requirements.
> All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
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.
PICS and ICRA were not adopted by many due to complexity. RTA [1][2] is a more generic header that can be used on any adult site or site that allows user contributed content and is easier to implement. There needs to be a law that requires clients to look for this header if parental controls are enabled. Not perfect, nothing is. Teens will easily get around it but most small children will not which should be the spirit of the ID verification movement. It's better than what we have today. The centralized ID verification sites will push many small sites to Tor and bigger sites to island nations and tax evasion in my opinion. More browsers are natively supporting .onion domains.
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.
Put it in the parental controls feature of the browser. Parents have to turn it on. Parents get to decide if their kids can watch porn. The government helps parents enforce the rules parents want.
I wonder if I can detect when parental controls are engaged like that.
As of this ruling, all sites within striking distance of South Dakota must take “reasonable efforts” to age-verify, or be certain that no content could ever be politically harmful to the hypothetical minor.
Reasonable efforts in this case would be to send the RTA header. That's it. Done and dusted. If the client is able to browse your site that would mean that either parental controls are not enabled or they are enabled and your site was approve-listed in the client. This of course depends on changing the laws anywhere that require using a third party data-leakage site to verify ID.
> 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.
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.
You’re getting downvoted, likely because the people downvoting you dont realize that Project 2025 explicitly calls for the complete outlawing of pornography and the imprisonment of anyone who produces it. They also frame transgender ideology and LGBTQ+ educational materials as falling under “pornography”, essentially calling for these to be banned.
And when they've banned all of those, they'll be banning r/pastorarrested for pointing out what everyone already knows about these fine upstanding moralists.
> They also frame transgender ideology and LGBTQ+ educational materials as falling under “pornography”, essentially calling for these to be banned.
Close, but it's worse than that -- they don't want LGBTQ+ material merely banned; they want LGBTQ+ people dead, or at the very least banned from all public life. The next step is where they call for the death penalty for child abuse (also in Project 2025). So according to them LGBTQ+ is pornographic -> pornography is child abuse -> child abuse is punishable by death -> therefore existing as a queer person is punishable by death.
> Transgender people will see their existence denied and their rights stripped away under Project 2025. The authors equate "transgender ideology" to pornography, calling for it to be outlawed. While the far-right policy agenda cannot directly ban transgenderism, it aims to do so indirectly by labeling it as pornography, and then outlawing pornography itself - effectively erasing transgender identity from the U.S.
the search term 'transgender' appears 13 times largely in screeds against the things the authors don't like, these are followed by dot point actions to take to eliminate the mote in their neighbour's eye.
Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection.
* Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists;
Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended.
What’s more, NIH has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism.
* Restrict the application of Bostock. The new Administration should restrict Bostock’s application of sex discrimination protections to sexual orientation and transgender status in the context of hiring and firing.
* Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.
.. these are just short excerpts featuring the term. Reading through the FULL pdf (linked above) in those vicinities will provide further planned actions that will restrict rights w/out directly using the term.
No, they very much realize that. The people down voting them want these things. HN isn't some bastion of progressive thinkers or the libertarian hacker-minded anymore. It's chock full of wealthy tech-bro neocons who dote on figures like Elon Musk.
Just see how any criticism of dear leader gets flagged in mere minutes now.
The actual point of these laws isn't to stop minors from viewing the material, it's to stop sites from hosting the material entirely. They're using "protect the kids from obscene content" as a wedge to get popular support. Acting like some technical solution to make authenticating as an adult more user-friendly would make the politicians who want this implemented happy is disingenuous. Let's take a look at how Tennessee has legislated their ID check should be implemented:
- ID must be verified either by matching a photo of the user to their photo ID, or by processing private transactional data (i.e. a credit card transaction).
- The user must verify their ID at the start of the session, and every hour the session is active.
- Historical anonymized ID verification data must be retained for at least 7 years.
- Anyone running a site that's viewable in Tennessee without the above ID verification rules is committing a class C felony, regardless of what state they reside in or host their site in.
This is clearly an attempt to stop any content they label as "obscene" (using a very broad definition of "obscenity") from being viewable at all in Tennessee. It's a completely unreasonable set of hoops to jump through that solely exists as a fig leaf because they know that making a law banning the content entirely would be ruled unconstitutional.
No entity willingly gives up control, and that is what this issue is about.
This is going to impact every book out there, creating an environment where the authors simply can't tell their stories anymore because of someone's moral shock.
Bad things happen in stories to characters, and authors need that flexibility. Its the journey in overcoming these things that makes the story good. The moment you or an author can't express reality without it being a felony, is the moment you no longer have real writers.
Some people don't write for money, and these things impose untenable cost on everyone.
Thinking about client vs server, wouldn't it be even less wide-ranging, less costly to enforce, and more appropriately targeted if such mandates are one-time and on the client side - only on device manufacturers and OEM-shipped OS? Suppose new mass market devices are defaulted to parental controls on, until unlocked by an adult at point-of-sale or afterwards through a form of validation? The KYC of who unlocked it could be anonymized or the PII-proving side of the log if it needs keeping could be on-device only (high bar for criminal investigations). There should be a clear exemption threshold for low volume indie products, build your own PC, and open source self-install like Linux - since the purpose is to protect ignorant/apathetic consumers.
Are you ok with all devices considering the user hostile and coming with heavy encryption and locked bootloaders?
> There should be a clear exemption threshold for low volume indie products, build your own PC, and open source self-install like Linux - since the purpose is to protect ignorant/apathetic consumers.
Then everyone will just follow a YouTube tutorial to reinstall their operating system and bypass restrictions. There were TikTok videos teaching kids how to steal cars, would there not be easy to follow instructions to bypass whatever client side filtering is implemented?
I get where you're coming from, but mandated client side filtering has been tried and has been ridiculed as a complete failure every time. Attempts have been made to market and provide filtering products to parents with little effect, with them either being easy to bypass or difficult to use.
It's actually kind of interesting to see the people who were fighting against client side filtering are now advocating for it, because server side restrictions are the next logical step.
This would actually be an effective way to teach kids about technology. If they learn enough to install their own OS, let them have their smut.
I’m hearing more and more how younger generations don’t have what people used to call basic computer skills, because everything just kind of works now. Putting up some road blocks that require research and hands on tinkering to solve, is an invaluable part of the learning process.
While I wouldn't put it that way, I definitely agree that local device technical obstacles are the best conduit for learning as a youth. As a kid and young teen during the 1995-2005 era there were a lot of hoops to figure out and jump through as a gamer with Mac and then Windows ME. There were no video guides or wikis - just print manuals and text forums. Needing to upgrade the family computer RAM from 128 mb to 512 mb to get WoW above 2-3 FPS was a formative experience.
One could say the same of server/cloud obstacles, but because those systems are afar and opaque, it's easy to be content copy-pasting scripts. And there is less sense of progression and ownership since it doesn't involve building up your own environment.
> Are you ok with all devices considering the user hostile and coming with heavy encryption and locked bootloaders?
This might be the least bad option. If it prevents server side enforcement, then settling on government enforcement of the commercial status quo might be less bad.
And what you describe is already the case for almost all devices anyway. The commercial incentives are there. And sadly, from a security PoV it is also quite valuable.
> Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
They won't have to, most websites will use 3rd party age verification. This is basically what Doordash and Uber Eats use to verify your age before delivering alcohol or THC to your apartment.
Rife for abuse? Absolutely. Will these databases get leaked and increase the chances of your identity getting stolen? Yes. But isn't a small increase to an already-existing problem.
I don't understand your seemingly petty and demeaning retort. What makes me uninformed? It sounds like you were the one who was unfamiliar with the ability to interact with door dash with an ID and not having to upload it.
I have accepted door dash as a non-door dash customer. They check for ID. Just like the store.
> 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.
Sure. A government issued certificate that is required to get an IP and be able to navigate the internet. How does that f-+-ing sound?
>Sure. A government issued certificate that is required to get an IP and be able to navigate the internet. How does that f-+-ing sound?
sounds like the solution to me. disallow under 18s from internet access. any parent who allows an underage to browse the internet unsupervised should be penalized to the same degree that they would if they directly provided hardcore pornography to the child, because thats exactly what it is.
I personally would choose this route, handing kids fully internet enabled pornography consumption devices is beyond ridiculous, and the size factor of smartphones (take them everywhere, camera connected directly to encrypted chats with strangers) well the fact that the government even allows this is simply a matter of confusion to my small mind.
What am I missing here? Why do we allow children internet access?
These are Authoritarian Christo-fascists. They do not care. They will demonize everyone involved in anything related to online sex. They are coming for the sex workers, and all of porn too - they stated they would do this in "Project 2025". "Think of the children" is how they justify it.
> there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18
No there doesn't. Why is the burden on ME (as a site owner) to do literally anything at all? The burden should be on parents to control their childrens' Internet use. Install a robust content blocker or don't give them Internet access.
Am I, a site owner, supposed to work with every asinine state and national system for making this attestation system work? How do I know the person behind the keyboard is actually the person whose age is being verified (and not one of their parents')? And as a citizen and consumer, why do I have to go out of my way to get some kind of digital identification that proves my age?
Why does this have to stop at porn? The logical next step is that legislators and parents will demand that sites will block folks from accessing blasphemous content. Or that you need to prove that you're not a resident of a particular state in order to access medical facts about abortion (because if you're looking it up, you obviously intend to get one or help someone get one)?
I don't want people to know how old I am or am not. Or where I live or don't live, or my sexual orientation, or anything else about me. I don't want to have to know any of these things about people who visit my website. And frankly, the idea that I am the one who is responsible for this and not the extreme minority of folks who want to keep certain content away from their kids or whatever is wild.
But I bet that signal would still be a unique identifier. It doesn't have to be, but it will be because that is the point. Not to see who is old enough, but to track every page visit and interaction of everybody all the time.
> Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids.
I mean, they are. But I've never seen a similar reaction on HN or any forum when social media require age verification. Actually, I think most HN users would cheer if the government required Facebook to only allow users over 18.
I feel the general opinion about something on the internet basically comes down to this simple rule: !(do American Christians want that thing?), no matter what that thing is.
I think American Christians should do neither. Restricting a child's access to information in order to indoctrinate them into a set of beliefs unquestioningly is a form of child abuse. Various forms of psychological and physical abuse are extremely prevalent in American Christian parenting practices, and it's something as a society we should not tolerate.
Exposing children to propaganda that they are ill equipped to deal with is also child abuse.
Just because someone can argue better than you can does not mean they are right. Climate change deniers can be very convincing if you don't understand physics.
I think the majority of people on HN are well aware of this. The big question is how to transfer this simple idea to the people in charge at governments.
By a similar argument, why should stores check id's when selling alcohol or cigarettes? Raising kids is not their job either.
The answer is because we live in a society. Society is about families, not just adults. Sure, raising kids is primarily the job of the parents, but everyone helps. Sometimes that results in a bit of inconvenience for businesses.
Excluding kids from businesses that are adult-only isn't very kid-friendly, but it's the bare minimum when there are children around.
The issue is that currently, adding restrictions to what minors can do is expensive, both economically, and politically. It requires the cooperation of a lot of non-government appointed people, and many of them could (locally) sabotage the restrictions.
This limits the restrictions to those with incredibly broad support. Keeping a lot of agency with families on how to raise their children.
Digital age verification, if implemented well, is easy to enact, and hard to sabotage without being noticed. That enables restrictions that 49% of people disagree with. Heck, it enables restrictions that 49% of Congress disagrees with. That could be 60% of people disagreeing.
I don't think it's all that different, because nothing is foolproof. People will still circumvent age restrictions by sharing devices. (For example, borrowing a phone.)
And educating the kids should be, and always has been a collective effort. Even in pre-industrial societies it was true. In the modern world it should be doubly true. I think most people would agree that we need public schools, even though some of them disagree with how sex ed and evolution were taught there.
It’s not the material cigarettes or alcohol that are the problem, it’s lying to get them. Same is true for sins like gambling and explicit romance novels.
The enforcement here is quite twisted: it attracts greedy litigants. Lying is bad, but greed is a mortal sin.
You can't show porn to kids in regular stores, I'm not sure why it's okay to do it on the internet, such that it becomes "raising" the kids when it's not in the first instance.
Because 'online' is the entire planet, including sellers in foreign countries. Would you like to have "digital borders" between countries, where data has to show some sort of passport to cross the border?
This ruling kind of assumes the opposite in some ways, that the strictest law anywhere applies everywhere. It's not digital borders, it's no borders but where the most draconian authoritarian law supercedes everything.
How does it do that? It doesn't seem to mandate age verification when a user from Poland access a server in France. Only when one of the parties (either user or hoster) is within the jurisdiction.
The Federal harmful-to-minors laws don’t mandate you check IDs. Only some state laws do. You’re better off asking, “why would buying a magazine here in Michigan have anything to do with Rhode Island statutes?”
I'm concerned that such validation would need to be proprietary and locked down with some sort of user hostile TPM-like-thing in order to be effective. If this wasn't the case, then anyone could fork the foss tool and create a bypass. The average child won't do this, but a few will and some adults probably will over anti DRM principles and then it's published and widely available.
These are ideological litigious fanatics among a much bigger herd of worried parents. They’ll attack any bypass tool and risk degrading the features of normal stuff like browsers and url parser libraries; totally ineffective at solving the problem but doing something in the eyes of unsophisticated constituents.
> Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids.
(1) Without addressing the general statement, specifically this isn't new. You’ve historically not been allowed to buy pornography or cigarettes or alcohol without age verification or watch obscene content between the nightly news runs. I don't see this specifically as parents wanting the government to raise their kids at all. It’s people without any other real options wanting to make it more difficult for inappropriate material to end up in the hands of minors. When I was 12 I remember getting online with AOL discs and having popups with porn appear in front of me as I’m playing neopets, because some unsavory ad got accidentally “clicked” many sessions ago. How can a parent “parent” that?
> If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should)
(2) These laws already exist, the internet was a loophole. If it’s done right you verify your age when you make your account and the site doesn’t bug you again. Not sure how frequently you’re visiting new porn sites, but I can’t imagine getting over prompted would be a real problem.
(3) There is a concept of using ZKPs to do more things client side. However I think currently people are more excited about selective disclosure. You just give the site a signed claim that you’re over 18 and that’s all they know. It’s more private than handing over your DL at the grocery store 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.
They should, shouldn’t they. But some privacy nut out there will say we can’t have nice things because an advertiser might use it to profile you.
Really though one aspect of digital identity is presence and liveliness checking. The states that issue your ID to Apple Wallet are only willing to do so because Apple ensures that the user presence is verified at time of use.
The question isn’t why should you have to jump through hoops, it’s why should we enforce age restrictions in person but not in the internet—why haven't you had to jump through all the existing hoops to watch internet porn until now?
1) it doesn’t go as far back as you think. Only within my lifetime did the drinking age settle on 21. The Feds couldn’t do it directly, so they hacked highway funds. So that’s a bad example when porno has changed so much. What we’re risking here is parents who haven’t tried any solutions being convinced that litigation is the only way.
2+3. A simple cookie with a birth year ought to work. Why should every site worry about South Dakota’s definitions when checking a cookie seems reasonable effort. Circumvention of that is already fraud.
Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.
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.
> parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device
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.
> Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.
I'm going to have to upload 3D models of my face and pictures of my ID just to use the internet because... some people don't like the idea of other people's kids using the internet?
This is a good point of course but that's always the issue, no? You may try to hide violence from your children, but if they see gang violence around them it doesn't matter. You can try to hide sexual content from your kids but if they have friends who share the content, hear people talking about it, or live in an area where prostitution occurs, you can't stop them from being exposed to it.
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
It takes less than 5 minutes to set up NextDNS with the same functionality and it costs $2 a month for unlimited DNS calls. If you download the app it absolutely can police cellular.
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.
> but that’s way beyond the technical capability of probably 95% of people.
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)
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.
Sounds like marketing is the problem. In fact, I'd say 90% of the Internet's more problematic aspects disappear once you get rid of marketing/monetization. We had a good thing. We let mercantilism and surveillance capitalism ruin it.
>Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.
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?
In this day and age lack of knowledge is no excuse.
Especially when everyone who would have this particular "problem" has access to various search tools and video websites that would explain "solutions".
I feel like, to say that, you haven't tried helping many older adults — or even middle-aged adults — use technology.
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 feel like, to say that, you haven't tried helping many older adults — or even middle-aged adults — use technology.
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)
Sorry you're experiencing a bunch of downvotes over a counterpoint from your own experience.
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.
The replies here are disturbing for their lack of concern or even awareness of the fact that some parents have, you know, economic pressures? Like they have to work long hours or multiple jobs? Both parents have to work?
This site can be really gross sometimes. I want to think it's just that the site skews young and people just don't know. I might have said similar things when I was 20.
It’s not gross to want parents to only parent their kids, and to leave the kids of other parents out of it. It’s your responsibility what your kid does on devices that you permit them to have. If you can’t control your kid when they’re not in your presence, or can’t trust them when they’re left to their own devices (pun intended), that’s an issue, but it isn’t a technological problem, but rather a parenting problem.
You’re not arguing it well. There are effective free tools; not expensive ones like you claim. You’re worried about regulation when the Supreme Court is supporting this burdensome patchwork that’ll outlive its usefulness because it’s politically difficult to repeal. And yes somewhere there is an unsupervised kid whose parents are overwhelmed by other pressures, but of all the risks to that kid, if porn is #1 then we’re talking upper middle class or higher.
This is a barrier put in place so that children are less likely to casually access these sites while they're browsing around.
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.
Right, so you're admitting what we already know to be true: it's censorship.
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.
Proving one's age is required for many other activities that are considered unsuitable for children, such as purchasing alcohol and drugs, and watching age-restricted films in the cinema.
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?
The internet is already blocked by age. In order to order internet service, you must be an adult, and you must prove it by showing papers, such as residence and pay stubs.
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.
The internet is not blocked by age. Any child with a laptop or phone, or any other device that can connect to a wifi hotspot, can access it.
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.
Many public WiFi hotspots have content filters. Kids are not going to be seeing porn at the library.
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.
kids shouldn't get internet access at libraries. there are books in libraries. adults can show their ids and get wifi access.
Block kids at the on ramp to the internet, all the problems go away. I just don't understand what I'm missing here, why do we allow kids to use the internet?
> 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.
> Give me your ID or stop posting on HN. No one is forcing you to post on HN. If you don't want me to know your name and address and age and driver's license number and keep a record of everything you say that I sell to anybody I want and store in an unencrypted hard drive, you don't have to post.
Public wifi near universally implements porn blocks in the first place. I can't imagine there would be much chagrin about promoting that into a law.
> 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.
Others have said this, I'm sure, but this will move past porn _quickly_. Once there is agreed-up age verification for pornography, much of the professional internet will require identity verification to do _anything_. This is one of the bigger nails in the coffin for the free internet, and this true whether or not you're happy with all the pornography out there.
This is why they are doing it. Goverments wants ID-check before anyone uses the internet. So they pick a topic like pornography to get their foot through the door. It's salami tactics.
Sharing/storing child porn is already illegal and punished far more harshly. So it's not like we've gone from zero to one. We've been censoring things people don't like for a little while now.
We're long past that point. Many (most?) Western governments ban simulated CP, including non-realistic stuff like cartoons or even purely textual descriptions.
Some go further still. E.g. in Australia, "laws also cover depictions of sexual acts involving people over the threshold age who are simulating or otherwise alluding to being underage, even if all those involved are of a legal age."
This doesn't sound so bad. I would much prefer to have discussions about politics, technology, or religion safe in the knowledge that I am not inadvertently communicating with a minor.
I had very passionate talks online about all 3 categories before I turned 18, and I got a lot of feedback, from older folk I didn't previously know, that I shaped opinions and formed new perspectives - and a lot of the talks sure as shit did the same for me. I cannot say I would have nearly the same current passion that I do for technology, aspects of politics, and philosophy (including that of religion) without such exposures during my adolescent years, and I'm sure you'd be hard-pressed to find others young enough that wouldn't say the same - provided they have an adequate baseline of introspection.
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.
> safe in the knowledge that I am not inadvertently communicating with a minor.
Why is that so bad? As a kid I really appreciated participating in mixed-age discussions on many topics. I view that as part of what it means to grow into a "young adult."
Too often I think we (North American society) assume that school, with all it's rigorous age separation, gives kids the space and instruction they need to do well in the world but inevitably we get 18 year olds with no awareness of how the world functions beyond themselves... because they've only ever dealt with people of the same age.
The world is a diverse place; ideologically, racially, and in age. We, adults, need to be comfortable communicating with both children and legal minors because they'll be future citizens of the world [added in edit:] and they need to learn those skills too.
Overall, we keep trying to model a world that filters it's own interactions towards children, which is flawed to begin with, but at some point people stop being children, and where does that leave them w.r.t. their expectations of others? If you've never had to consider that an adult might act in bad faith because your world has been so sanitized, are you prepared for a world with bad actors in it?
I don't care if they are 16 or 68, I discuss about topics, not necesarily with the person themself. the former can be insightful and the latter still be extremely close minded.
I also don't understand why the government should control who I can talk to in a digital space. Maybe start investigating the president's flight records if you suddenly care about children interacting with adults.
You won't though. Malicious actors will find a way around this - either purchasing or stealing whatever form of ID is used for this. The only people who will suffer are law-abiding citizens simply trying to browse the Internet.
No idea why you’re getting downvoted when there’s a slow but unstoppable migration of everything into discord or other walled, somewhat LLM-proof gardens.
>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
Discord just changed management and new managment immediately said they are interested in IPO'ing. If trends emerge, it will indeed get overriden by bots like Reddit did around the time it was preparing to IPO. I see it as an inevitability at this point.
Where in this statement did people conclude that all websites require identification? Even if they did, you know the technocrats would just pay a few million to have the government look the other way. I don't see the upside here.
It was a very tonedeaf take, that's why. Most of the internet is concentrated in the top 100 websites, and 80% of them would not be affected by this law. So you'll still see plenty of bots on Youtube, Discord, Reddit, news sites, and so on.
Blogs with a few comments would go from 5 real commenters to 0 or 1. This does not get the desired result.
----
secondly, I assure you there's plenty of classic spam on servers that don't have good moderation. pre-AI spam never disappeared.
GAN style training is only going to get cheaper and easier. Detection will collapse to noise. Any ID runes will be mishandled and the abuse will fly under the radar. Only the space of problems where AI fundamentally can't be used, such as being at a live event, will be meaningfully resistant to AI.
Another way for it all to unfold is maybe 98% of online discourse is useless in a few years. Maybe it's useless today, but we just didn't have the tools to make it obvious by both generating and detecting it. Instead of AI filtering to weed out AI, a more likely outcome is AI filtering to weed out bad humans and our own worst contributions. Filter out incessant retorting from keyboard warriors. Analyze for obviously inconsistent deduction. Treat logical and factual mistakes like typos. Maybe AI takes us to a world where humans give up on the 97% and only 1% that is useless today gets through. The internet's top 2% is a different internet. It is the only internet that will be valuable for training data to identify and replace the 1% and converge onto the spaces that AI can't touch.
People will have to search for interactions that can't be imitated and have enough value to make it through filters. We will have to literally touch grass. All the time. Interactions that don't affect the grass we touch will vanish from the space of social media and web 2.0 services that have any reason to operate whatsoever. Heat death of the internet has a blast radius, and much of what humans occupy themselves with will turn out to be within that blast radius.
A lot of people will by definition be disappointed that the middle standard deviation of thought on any topic no longer adds anything. At least at first. There used to be a time when the only person you heard on the radio had to be somewhat better than average to be heard. We will return to that kind of media because the value of not having any expertise or first-hand experience will drop to such an immeasurable low that those voices no longer participate or appear to those using filters. Entire swaths of completely replaceable, completely redundant online "community" will just wither to dust, giving us time to touch the grass, hone the 2%, and make sense of other's 2%.
Callers on radio shows used to be interesting because people could have a tiny window into how wildly incorrect and unintelligent some people are. Pre-internet media was dominated by people who were likely slightly above average. Radio callers were something like misery porn or regular-people porn. You could sometimes hear someone with such an awful take that it made you realize that you are not in the bottom 10%. The internet has given us radio callers, all the time, all of them. They flooded Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. They trend and upvote themselves. They make YouTube channels where they talk into a camera with higher quality than commercial rigs from 2005. There is a GDP for stupidity that never existed except as the novelty object of a more legitimate channel. When we "democratized" media, it wasn't exclusively allowing in thoughts and opinions that were higher quality than "mainstream".
The frightening conclusion is possibly that we are living in a kind of heat death now. It's not the AIs that are scary. Its the humans we have platformed. The bait posts on Instagram will be out-competed. Low quality hot takes will be out-competed. Repetitive and useless comments on text forums will be out-competed. Advertising revenue, which is dependent on the idea that you are engaging with someone who will actually care about your product, will be completely disrupted. The entire machine that creates, monetizes, and foments utterly useless information flows in order to harness some of the energy will be wrecked, redundant, shut down.
Right now, people are correct that today's AI is on an adoption curve that would see more AI spam if tomorrow's AI isn't poised to filter out not just spam but a great mass of low-value human-created content. However, when we move to suppress "low quality slop" we will increasingly be filtering out low-quality humans. When making the slop higher quality so that it flies under the radar, we will be increasingly replacing and out-competing the low-quality content of the low-quality human. What remains will be of a very high deductive consistency. Anything that can be polished to a point will be. Only new information outside the reach of the AI and images of distant stars will be beyond the grasp of this convergence.
All of this is to say that the version of the internet where AI is the primary nexus of interaction via inbound and outbound filtering and generation might be the good internet we think we can have if we enact some totalitarian ID scheme to fight against slop that is currently replacing what the bottom 10% of the internet readily consumes anyway.
Nothing is going to be "regulated properly" for at least the next 3.5 years, and we'll all be dealing with backwards decline for decades after. That's best case, but i'm guessing It'll be even worse than the "radicals" are shouting about.
I still don't see any reason erasing bots and captchas from my online experience is bad. I hate bots and captchas. They add absolutely no value to my life. Conversely there is lots to be gained if imagine if something like X or reddit or whatever can anonymously verify that a user is a person and over 18 or 21 or 30 even (whatever) without having to directly handle identities. It's could be all the benefits of a bouncer checking for a pulse and valid ID without the privacy invasion. If done correctly it can also make fraud more difficult.
Because you're choosing not to see the obvious downsides. Wasn't this community the ones worried last decade about tech companies havesting their data for profit?
But sure, let's explain the downsides:
1. this isn't an all encompasing law. It's only for sites that host adult content. You know what people will do... remove adult content.
2. As we see this year, rules are useless without enforcement. I'm sure X or Reddit or whatever large companies will strike deals and be exempt. This will only harm the little sites who get harassed by vested interests.
3. There's been campaigns to try and assossiate LGBT to pornography for a while now. This will delve beyond porn and be used to enforce yet more bigotry. This "think of the children" rationale is always their backdoor to stripping away freedoms, and I sure don't trust it this time.
4. On a moral level, I care more about retaining my pseudo anonymity than about worrying over bots. I'm not giving my ID.ME in order to interact on a games forum, for instance. The better way to address this (if these people actually cared about it) is to force companies to disclose with commenters are being operated via bots. Many websites have API's so that would eliminate many of them, even if it's not perfect.
5. This execution sounds awful. On a general principle, I do not want people sued over state laws that they do not reside in. Why should California need to comply with Floridian laws? This is why porn sites impacted simply block those state IP's. The Internet is more and more connected, so you can imagine the chaos is this is generalized more, instead of actually taking hold and making federal laws. This is half hearted.
One response to flaws in the law is to oppose them. Another response is to find common ground and embrace and extend.
It won't harm anything. Even now as these things spread nationwide something like Stripe or whatever will pop up and fill the need as a service. It used to be essentially universally required to prove your age using a credit card. There was/is a company that specializes in that. I can't remember its name but it was ubiquitous for porn access for quite a long time. Those over 18 confirmation banners used to be much stronger than the merely souped up cookie notices they have become today. Age verification as a service is trivial (particularly with the rise of phones) and someone will build a system that does a much better job preserving anonymity than credit cards ever did. At this point all you need is something like a passkey or FIDO token and a way for something to vouch age during account creation.
The article concludes that age verification must repeat every 60 minutes. And when there’s doubt about safe harbor, better safe than sorry. There’s a chance you’ll look back at captchas with relish.
> Just in time for the Fourth of July, last week the Supreme Court effectively nullified the First Amendment for any writers, like me, who include sex scenes in their writing, *intended for other adults*
There you have it. The author already is self-aware of the appropriateness of their creation for minors.
All that's needed is an easy way for the author to click "intended for adults" on whatever material they are creating and the entire article becomes nothing more than yapping into the wind.
Substack can easily build that as a feature for example. Reddit already has that with its "NSFW" flags (but does not currently verify accounts are actually 18yo+ adult humans).
Generally, it seems like silicon valley has become so entitled to taking the mile that the threat of taking back an inch brings out the hysterical Chicken Little fursona.
Substack and Reddit are huge websites. What you’re talking about kills self-hosting. Ironically, your idea for regulating this reinforces the VC-driven Silicon Valley capital-intensive model and kills independent, community driven low/no-capital websites.
I don’t agree, at least as far as legal obligation goes. The average voter is far more worried about porn and other explicit content and not so much about anything else.
This doesn't really track with widespread and normalized use of pornographic materials, including written descriptions, by most adults in this country. There's a pretty wide gulf between "I don't think kids should be able to access this stuff" and "I think we need to supercharge the surveillance state and destroy the first amendment"
This doesn't destroy the first amendment any more than requiring an ID & background check to purchase a firearm destroys the second amendment. Which is to say that it might, but for exactly the same reason, so The People ultimately need to decide on a consistent choice of interpretation.
Fine, then ATF Class 3 licenses, which are required to keep and bear some kinds of arms, are a breach of the 2A similar to how the 1A is being breached here.
NFL stuff is actually a pretty good example of largely pointless law considering that what it does is effectively just make the items in question more expensive by taxing them and artificially limiting supply. If you want to own a machine gun, a grenade launcher, or even a fully functional tank in US, you still can so long as you're rich enough to afford it (unless your state has laws banning it). There are no additional restrictions on who can and cannot own that stuff beyond the requirement to pay the tax.
It has as much to do with other people as buying guns does. What about the actresses in the porn content; people the world, clearly including you, so quickly forget about? The concerning number of women who are trapped into this industry, usually in third world countries, by men? What about the people on the other side of the personal relationships of individuals who consume this content; the averted gazes, their treatment of women, how that impacts their community and their children?
But isn't harm minimization a thing? That's something we practice in other domains, like providing clean needles to drug addicts. After all, if drug use is harmful to the people doing drugs, then it should be illegal. So; making things illegal often doesn't solve the problem. Making it harder to consume porn reduces consumption which reduces the amount of money being funneled into the industry, which might be beneficial to those harmed by it (both producers and consumers). Versus, making it illegal might have a prohibition-style impact, and is, of course, legally tenuous anyway.
I agree but, then they can go after people producing porn, not people that watch it.
This is the same as going after the drug addicts.
This feels like going after the people on the more vulnerable side because it is easy. Which signals it is more about forcing people to not do something instead of trying to genuinely help them.
But going after people producing porn is a no no because they have money and they are organised.
Also imo the intention of people trying implement things like this is just about surveillance and has absolutely nothing to do with protecting the families, children, addicts etc. etc.
There's no evidence that porn addiction is nearly as harmful as drug addiction other than making some religious people feel more shame about it than usual. If the argument is that the people who produce porn are doing something illegal or harmful, then prosecute them. If they're filming consenting adults in compliance with regulations that are already in place then I don't really understand the problem here.
You're essentially saying that you'd like to ban it long term, but since you can't make it happen right away, laws like these can serve as a first step to normalize censorship leading to such a ban.
Thank you for being honest about it and illustrating why the slippery slope is very real.
Did you miss the recent years of some states trying to ban gay/trans books from libraries? Or even just books written by gay/trans authors? It's been part of their playbook for years to try and assosiate transgenderism with pornographic.
You are right, the average voter is not worried about any single enforcement outside of CSAM. The people who will exploit this are not just "your average voter".
> 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.
> 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 an state AG tries to prosecute an entity that has no ties to the state other than content being passively accessible, that's probably another supreme court case if it doesn't get immediately decided in favor of the defendant in the lower courts. You open a big can of worms if entities are required to proactively comply with regulations in states they have zero presence in.
If Texas wants to block content from entities that have nothing to do with Texas, they can build their own great firewall.
> You open a big can of worms if entities are required to proactively comply with regulations in states they have zero presence in.
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.
As far as I understand it (IANAL), this ruling decides that the speech restrictions imposed by the Texas ID verification law are compliant with the 1st amendment. It didn't touch on whether or not Texas can enforce its laws on entities that don't do business in Texas.
IANAL, but it seems like things are already moving in this direction. For example, FL has a similar state law regarding pornography, and the response from many porn sites has been to comply or block FL IPs rather than fight it up to the supreme court. I guess someone will do it eventually, but I suspect there is an assumption that they'd be wasting their time and money to do so.
Yeah I don't think a business is going to try to force the issue when a geoblock is simple to implement. If it happens, it's probably going to be some kind of advocacy group pushing it.
Technically anything is possible with the Calvinball Supreme Court, but states can choose not to extradite their citizens. E.g. NY has a shield law for abortion doctors.
This feels helpful, but puts a big burden on the person targeted. I live in California; let's say I run afoul of this Tennessee law and am criminally prosecuted.
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.
That would be one wild case if it did happen. Sucks for whoever it happens to, but that would 100% turn into a high profile case that puts the 10th amendment into question.
To be honest, it would be settled relatively quickly because I don't think any state wants to be the one to set such precedent as of now.
> Personal jurisdiction in American civil procedure law is premised on the notion that a defendant should not be subject to the decisions of a foreign or out of state court, without having "purposely availed" himself of the benefits that the forum state has to offer.
> Courts have held that the greater the commercial nature and level of interactivity associated with the website, the more likely it is that the website operator has "purposefully avail[ed] itself" of the forum state's jurisdiction. [..] In contrast, a passive website that simply makes the information available to the user will be less likely to have a basis for personal jurisdiction.
(By the same principle, even an interactive website can probably avoid jurisdiction if they block IP addresses from the state, and don't encourage people to evade the block or anything like that.)
It's going to get used against trans and queer people. Someone will try to claim that a trans person in normal street clothes is "corrupting children", or that merely mentions of their existence is.
So, while I agree that this feels foreign and wrong to me as someone who has experienced "The Internet" for so long, I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works.
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.
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.
> 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.
Well, yes. It's exactly like that for drugs too. You can take great time and care to vet every person your kid interacts with outside of school, or keep them monitored 24/7 all you want. But that doesn't stop someone from passing them a blunt in the restroom at school.
It's not about blocking it all. It's about blocking some, removing the monetary incentives to entice children from major players. It's about stopping some of the addiction and damaging effects. Just like we limit alcohol but kids still drink, or vape etc. They still do it, but it requires more effort and that barrier can be a very real barrier to addiction formation.
> It's about stopping some of the addiction and damaging effects
I used to think this was a valid point, but I read something that changed my opinion completely. Pornhub, plus other large sites, have a lot of attention on them. They're a long way from perfect but they do self police, probably far more than anyone here knows, because they don't want to get banned. If you get rid of them, you're boosting smaller and far nastier sites that don't self regulate anywhere near the same amount.
To state it simply, if you block Pornhub, curious children will still find porn, but it'll be far worse.
It's not the same as banning sale of physical items like cigarettes. It's more like if you banned cigarettes but then all the children went and got black market cigarettes that are 50% asbestos.
I don't really believe it. It's the big sites that have the monetary backing to employ the dark algorithmic patterns and monetization schemes.
I don't really see much of an issue with the content of the porn if that's what you mean by nastier sites. To me it's more like if you ban cigarettes and now kids are all buying black market cigarettes without nicotine.
Are they actually just as hard to block though? e.g. I don't see much reason to allow traffic to any Russian or Chinese IPs for any reason from my network. To be honest a default blacklist to any non-American IP seems like it'd not cause much trouble for my family, and then if there were some educational or FOSS or whatever sites in Europe, those could be whitelisted on a case by case basis.
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.
For children though? Supposing we were able to be effective at making it hard to host free porn with no ID in the US, why not make kids access to the Internet US-only by default plus a generous allow-list (it's easy to add exceptions for educational and other harmless sites like say, BBC, foreign universities, etc)
You personally adding exceptions for every beneficial foreign website isn’t so trivial. Using someone else’s software to do this for you is more realistic.
However this is just a cost vs benefit tradeoff. If looking at porn instantly killed a kid or caused significant harm then going to extremes would be worth it, but the benefit of such an approach is minimal. There’s a bunch of metrics that tracked kids as internet porn became a thing and the net impact is effectively zero on metrics like suicide, self worth, promiscuity, age of first sex, etc. Instead the correlation goes in the other direction.
Blocking social media on the other hand is much easier and backed up by a lot of research.
How so? Why would I not default filter e.g. Iran or Chad or El Salvador or most of the world on my home network? I can always unblock a specific IP if needed, but chances are that will never happen.
My kids aren't old enough for computers yet, but I'm mostly of the mindset that a whitelist or curated offline cache (at least for anything on the web) is the sanest approach for younger kids. Outside of .gov, .edu, a handful of discussion forums, and stuff not relevant to them like shopping/banking, there's honestly not a lot of utility to the web. If they end up interested in programming, reference material can be kept offline, libraries downloaded through a proxy repository, etc.
You need to add Canada, UK, Australia, Japan, etc to that list to actually achieve what you set out to accomplish. Which then does more harm than what you’re trying to prevent.
He’ll realistically the US doesn’t make the cut either.
Why? Concretely, what would I be trying to allow in Japan? Don't they mostly communicate in Japanese anyway? The US has things like local government, schools, businesses, clubs, organizations, etc. Because the US is where we live. That makes it inconvenient to default block the US. Australia has what that is relevant to us? I don't see any .au in my browser history. Or .jp. Or .ca. There is some ac.uk, granted, but that could probably be kept to a small whitelist. I highly doubt anyone would notice for years if ever if I blocked Japan or Australia. It's a near certainty that no one would notice if I blocked all non-English parts of the web.
Are US organizations hosting in Canada for some reason? They probably wouldn't go further than that for latency reasons.
There's the separate problem of foreign companies having US points of presence, but assuming these laws expand, I'd imagine that would eventually lead to liability for services like cloudflare providing the endpoint/hosting on US soil.
I assume you buy some non US products and many .com address are hosted outside the US by non US companies.
Gigabyte.com for example makes a great deal of computer parts like graphics cards and it’s hosted at 103.130.100.144 which geolocates to Taiwan, Province of China.
bmw.com 160.46.226.165 Germany
Now some of them will route US users to US servers to lower their ping, but that’s an added expense that not everyone pays for.
That's still not giving a concrete reason. Why would I need to access gigabyte.com? I can't even buy their products there; I'd have to buy them on something like Amazon. Firmware updates? If it works I'm not going to change it. If it doesn't, I'm going to return it. If products try to reach out to their manufacturers on their own that's twice the reason to default block as much as you can.
Looking up manuals, researching products before purchasing them, there’s a bunch of reasons to go to a manufacturer’s website.
Firmware updates can fix compatibility long after a purchase, it’s not just a question of whether something works on day 1 but day 540. IE why isn’t this EV charger taking to the solar inverter so it preferentially charges the car over sending energy to the grid? Firmware fix and suddenly it all works.
Why would little children need to access motherboard firmware updates though? Nobody's saying that grown-ups should be blocked inside a US-only Internet. We're saying that cleaning up US IP space from free no-questions-asked porn would mean that parents could allow children more freedom by choosing to allow traffic only to US IPs by default. Just like you could allow your 10-year-old child to roam around a mall if (but ONLY if) you knew it didn't have stores demonstrating sex toys out in front of them.
> Why would little children need to access motherboard firmware updates though?
Because they're interested in it. I was installing Linux when I was 9 because I thought it was cool.
If my parents had walled me off into a foam internet safe-room, it would have stifled one of my lifelong interests that led to my career, and bred trust issues and resentment against my parents.
Im hosting my site on an IP in the US, just because it was the best hosting option. If the US laws change so that either a) I am liable or b) the hosting provider wont host me. Then of course I would have to move to another, non US, provider. And I wouldn’t be alone so the U.S internet would probably be a lot smaller than it is now.
The fundamental problem—and it's a big one—is that in the physical world, age verification does not result in a centralized log of when and where I was, and what I did. If I buy cigarettes I show my paper id to some dude and then buy smokes. It's transient with no record (except the fallible memory of the bloke doing the ID check).
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.
That's not even universally true, though. I've been to bars where they scan the barcode on my drivers' license. I assume that's more convenient than reading the data off it, so maybe they're just doing it for convenience and aren't storing the data anywhere, but who knows, maybe they are. Maybe there's a database somewhere with a list of name, date, time, location tuples for some of my bar visits from years ago. Creepy.
Not well-designed ones. I think you overestimate how much retailers want to even possess sensitive information like that.
What's going to be stored is the fact that an of-age ID was scanned, and possibly the DOB. This is to protect honest cashiers and to have a way to punish ones who might sell to the underage. If an underage sale is reported, they check the audit log and it says the transaction had an ID scanned the cashier can be cleared of wrongdoing. Unless it's the same DOB always being scanned, which seems like some kind of dishonesty.
I do not buy that the supermarket chain wants to use your ID card data for any purpose. First of all, they don't need to, they have (most people's) loyalty cards that do a much better job as they're swiped or entered even without buying any beer. Second, again, only downsides come from saving it. If they were to sell the data and be caught, terrible. If they were to get hacked, terrible.
Your comment made sense perhaps only twenty years ago. But today, everyone is desperate for this kind of info. Third-parties provide these services for free or close to it, especially to get access to the data stream.
Someone was on here a couple of years ago stating that even "line item" level data on your receipt is now being transmitted in a lot of cases, and growing.
The bottom line today—never expect a company to default to respect of your privacy. Simply too lucrative.
Pot shops in legal states are compiling databases with their compliance CRM systems.
Pot industry needs to anonymize their customer records or stop using SaaS packaged solutions.
Now if China hacks Meadows or something, they have customer and purchase lists which may include security cleared personnel who can now be blackmailed.
If you run a pot shop, or an SaaS solution for them like Meadows, you really have to figure out how to divorce customer PII from purchases.
I am back to the black market in Oregon for this reason!
1. In the offline world, the child and media provider are in the same physical location, subject to the same laws. On the internet, they're in different places. This is central, as the argument by SCOTUS seems to be that the most restrictive law anywhere applies everywhere.
2. I don't think "just" is a silly instruction. Your child can do any number of things and we expect parents to have a certain amount of oversight and/or involvement to help children navigate it. I don't see how the internet is any different from anything else.
3. There's an important difference between a child entering a store or library and finding a page on the internet. Entering a store, library, or physical home, or whatever, presupposes a certain amount of effort involved in entering the premises, and that the owner of the store or whatever is present and can in fact monitor each visitor easily; on the internet it's a matter of linking from one text to another. Sometimes I don't think you can draw analogies easily, and this is one of those cases. To me it's less like requiring an ID for purchase of a media item within a store, and more like having ID requirements to view something in a public square, or having ID requirements to publish the media item in the first place. It's a bit like SCOTUS saying "if you publish a book in state X where it's legal, but state Y requires a publisher to be responsible for monitoring every purchaser of their book everywhere, then you have to comply with state Y."
For what it's worth, I think its absurd to have legal age requirements for speech, offline or online.
RE Point 1. All it takes is one of those other peers' parents to allow them to view pornography and then that kid just becomes the porn-distributor for the school, just like some kids in my day passed around porno mags. In essence, nothing changes for the kids, but every single adult is at best inconvenienced and at worst at risk of government invasion of their privacy. Not worth doing, imo.
RE Point 2. They could just use a whitelist instead of a blacklist/filter. They exist already, after all. Fill it up with sites showing the wholesome version of the world you want your child exposed to and they can only visit those places.
Yeah this is the thing everyone here seems to ignore. The moment someone does age verification and downloads a file the whole thing falls apart.
You would have to lock down any electronics device that can be used to bypass the restrictions. In reality the best way to do this is to build a screen based nudity filter into the device, which is not only more effective, it exposes this whole nonsense as an attempt to grow the police state.
I didn't say public libraries, I was going to say bookstore but picked "library" because I wanted to drive home the point that even a kid whose parents didn't give them any money would be allowed to access the materials. My point: if someone opened a facility to knowingly give kids books about sex acts (and not the "sex ed" kind), we would all agree they are a creep.
Calvin and Hobbs, the comic strip, has been banned in Tennessee schools on the grounds that it had pornography in the form of Calvin's naked butt being in some cells.
What is adult content? A cartoon butt? A book on breastfeeding? "I can't define porn, but I know it when I see it" has led to Calvin and Hobbs being banned.
I think the point they were making is that a child can walk into a library, pick up any book, and open it. All without any adults being in the loop. They can do that today.
Yeah, and my point is that the "pick up any book" thing is hiding the
fact that selection is in fact seriously limited.
And second, underaged kids can not checkout non kid material without
adult in the loop. That part is simply not true, the librarian will
say no to the child or ask for parents permission.
I have been to my library yes. You don't need ID or a library card (unless you want to check something out or use a computer) and you can pick up any book you like (including e.g. 50 Shades of Grey), sit down at a table, and read it. There are children in there all the time and there isn't an adults-only section.
Pretty much none which is exactly why the comparison to libraries makes zero sense.
And yes, there was considerable pearl clutching over same sex kiss. To the point the supposed old school bastions of freedom would not print it, would not put it in the library and would do everything possible for kid not to read it.
The physical world of back then was considerably more restrictive in terms of what kids could access. Whether in the libraries or outside of them.
Also, censorship software is infamously bad at curation. Peacefire isn't around anymore these days, but the sites blocked by local censorship software around 2000 is pretty terrible, whether they used keyword filters or URL lists. See the list of sites in the left column at https://web.archive.org/web/2020/http://www.peacefire.org (peacefire circumventor is a tool I used to use to access blocked sites at school)
> I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works.
From a different angle: many people went into the web in disagreement with how the physical world is managed.
Those who were good at politics also tried to improve the offline rules, but not everyone can.
From that POV, opposing the application of irl biggotery into the online world isn't some illogical or whimsical move. They tried to make a better world for the likes of them, and in a way you're using the success of the platform to explain why they're not welcome anymore.
I'd be sympathetic to your logic if it was for the betterment of the online world, but IMHO it surely isn't and we're looking at bullies expanding irl power to crush other platforms as well.
> 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.
I like this point. I feel like the tech community just figured politicians would forget about the issue. Instead of working together to develop a solution.
By providing technical means to implement such censorship in "more acceptable" ways, you lower the political bar for its passing.
Not only that, but once you do so, you effectively concede that such censorship is valid to begin with, which can and will be used against you to pass further laws along those lines in the future. And if those laws cannot be implemented without ditching all that privacy you worked so carefully to respect in your compromise, well, too bad about that.
No. The tech community absolutely has the right to refuse to provide technical means and argue any views they want.
However we're seeing what happens next. Politicians write laws anyway forcing the tech community to do what they want.
I am just saying that in hindsight a bit of cooperation may have resulted in a less privacy invasive solution. I guess with the supreme court ruling it's too late now. The politicians have already won.
> allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn
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.
I would say the best option, if there absolutely must be age verification etc., would be to have a registry of sites that comply with all regulations and by default devices shouldn't access sites off that list. Basically a giant allolist for verified good sites. The internet is already effectively shrunk to less than a dozen sites for regular users, so this won't impact them, and the rest of us can have real free speech and unregulated internet back by switching DNS servers or some similar trivial change.
Or we move everything not meant for the sanitised internet to TOR hidden services.
But we don't need any government intervention for this kind of thing. You can already maintain such a whitelist yourself, and interest groups can collaborate with businesses interested in maintaining their public image to have a centralized registry of voluntary certification for websites (similar to those ratings for e.g. movies that we already have).
Separately from that, if switching DNS servers is an easy workaround to keep access to porn, kids interested in it will quickly learn how to do so, trading recipes and even downloaded content directly. Ditto with Tor etc.
The fundamental problem here is that it is an attempt to censor something for which there is huge demand among the very group that's being excluded. The only way you can do so that would actually work is full-fledged panopticon, where all communication channels are pervasively monitored.
I actually agree with this. One would just need Apple, Google, and Microsoft to buy into this and listing a legitimate site on the registry would be adopted as fast as universal HTTPS was. Keeping pubescent kids from mainly learning about sexuality through the lens of often-disturbing porn is a worthwhile goal.
Still need a solution to age-verify without tracking though, or else people would think of it as something to be turned off immediately since Reddit and X would obviously not be on the registry since they host tremendous amounts of porn.
I don't think that's an intractable problem at all, and I think as technologists we should be putting our efforts into building the most trustworthy system for that instead of just campaigning for nothing to change because it's "the parents' problem." Easy for us to say: We're all either not parents, or we're the type who are equipped to properly filter access to the Internet for our young kids. In reality, the single mom of 3 working 12 hours a day is not equipped to "just" set up a proxy server or figure out how to install internet filtering software on the Amazon Fire tablet she got her 8-year-old to watch Spider-Man.
A bit of a rant on the topic of digital supervision and age verification:
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.
I still think the open internet is not a place for children today. People forget the surveillance aspect, not to mention the other dozen negative aspects.
It’s easy enough to download things for their local use.
> (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.
Interestingly (and I suppose fairly?) the law doesn't seem to make a distinction between male and female nipples. So an image of a shirtless man violates this just as much as an image of a shirtless woman.
I'd imagine that male nipples are exempted due to the line that mentions "applying contemporary community standards".
Of course, that wording is deliberately vague for a reason. Judges, especially conservative ones, have often let states use wording like that to get away with female-toplessness bans, blue laws, religious imagery in government buildings, etc, since that kind of wording lets them avoid including discriminatory language in the law itself, therefore supposedly not violating the constitution.
A tenant is somebody who has a lease, for example to an apartment or one of those big metal sheds for a supermarket, and by analogy, customers of something like Microsoft's "Entra ID" (what was "Azure Active Directory" at least the new name is less confusing)
A tenet is a belief or principle that you believe in absolutely, I think we'd say that this "protects but does not bind / binds but does not protect" idea isn't a tenet of Fascism but instead an observable trait.
Thank you for that, I've been looking for a decent pre-AI/Non-wikipedia summary like that. Unsurprisingly but depressingly, at least 13 out of 14 points are a perfect match.
> These people will never actually ban pornography, because they consume pornography.
Banning porn won't affect them: mainstream porn will find a way (dealing with rulings will just be a cost of business).
And more than anything, making it technically illegal allows for selective enforcement, which means a lot more power for them to decide who wins and who loses.
They never banned abortions for themselves, just made it more difficult to get if you’re not getting an “acceptable” one (i.e. have the money to go where it’s legal or have a private family doctor who can make Bastard Fetus go bye-bye).
You can see how this model worked in Ireland for example.
Historically Abortion was literally prohibited constitutionally in the Republic. That changed†, one of my friends lived there at the time and she's got a picture somebody made (painted? sketched?) on her wall of the group watching the results come in. But for most of my life, abortion was absolutely illegal in the Republic of Ireland.
So, if you were poor, too bad no abortions, they're illegal. But if you're wealthy you just decide to "go on holiday", maybe a long weekend somewhere nice - and miraculously while abroad you stop being pregnant. No problem
You’re right that they consume porn, but plenty of them still want to ban it, and not just because of LGBTQ. It’s all about moralistic virtue signaling by immoral people.
From "Data Finds Republicans are Obsessed with Searching for Transgender Porn"[1]:
> So far in 2022, more than 300 anti-LGBT bills have been proposed across 36 states – at least one third of which are directed at trans youth. This surge, especially in anti-trans legislation from Republicans, stands in stark contrast to a startling fact.
> Republicans love transgender porn, a lot.
> With more than 4.7 Million transgender porn related Google searches each month (per Ahrefs.com), do Republicans represent those searching most? The answer seems to be a clear yes.
Of course not. Pornhub blocked these IP because they knew it was going to be (and is now) illegal in those states, at least at its current form. I see it no different from said states banning Pornhub.
That you have it backwards, because you do. Pornhub preemptively blocked states that were considering implementing ID rules, and states are not actively blocking Pornhub.
> These people will never actually ban pornography
> Not sure how one can say that with a straight face when there are US states that literally block pornhub, but okay
You then say, well actually they weren't blocked by the states, they were blocked by the sites themselves to protest a bill that passed.
The issue is this clarification is totally irrelevant given the context of the above comment.
The root comment claims in this domain, the right wing is targeting "anything other than heterosexuality". Not sure what their evidence of that claim is. I would think anyone with even a basic familiarity re the right-wing American culture warrior would know this isn't the case. They are simply following the standard far right modus operandi, which is to start their cultural attack on the most vulnerable at the margins where it is easiest.
Similarly, passing age verification is essentially a strategy to enact an effective ban, because it is a demand that cannot be met and is easier to pass than an outright ban. So the comment suggesting it's not serious to suggest this is simply or _only_ about "anything other than heterosexuality" is correct, or at least, not impeached by your conclusion they have it backwards by essentially hyperfocusing on some rather irrelevant pornsite protest tactic which entirely misses the point. If anything, the fact they passed the bills after the self initiated “bans” simply bolsters the rejoinder to the root comment.
I get it and yes, you are technically correct that they are not "literally blocking" it. I just hope you can also see where I'm coming from. In context of the larger comment thread your reply felt like a nitpick that missed the point, and focused on that nitpick to the detriment of the larger point of that OP, which imo has some merit. Or at least some merit you didn't address. But I understand you are correct on this particular point. As a suggestion, maybe next time you could reply more as providing context rather than seeming to suggest their entire take was "backwards". Thanks for replying.
Note that pornography is not banned here in Texas at least. You just have to provide age verification, and PH elected not to participate in that process. It doesn’t seem like that wild a thing at face value.
> conservative Christians are trying to eliminate ALL sexually-related speech online
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.
You might not be pushing for it, but certainly your fellow conservative Christians are.
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.
No, some of them are. More evangelicals than my crowd.
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.
> I don’t see how you can ignore the massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men
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.
This is actually a pretty sound framework and I mostly agree. Usually it's justifiable to intervene when somebody is harming someone else and not before. I think it's a bit oversimplified, though. Do you think it might contribute to the incel epidemic and the associated violence? In that sense one could make a similar line of argument to that of the temperance movement's talk of alcohol contributing to wife-beating (which it did). I don't believe that indirection leaves a clear enough link to justify state violence to ban something, but there do exist less explicitly moralistic arguments for it. Not really my position but it's not constructive to reduce every criticism to "moralizing".
> Do you think it might contribute to the incel epidemic and the associated violence?
No actually I don't, not at all. I blame the patriachy and feminism for the creation of incels. Not in the sense that feminism is bad, but the contrary.
What I mean is, incels have always existed. However, our tolerance for widespread misbehavior of men has grown thinner over the last 70 years.
When I was in college, it was typical to hear "oh man, don't go to that frat house, they roofie!" Looking back, it's almost comical. What? They... roofie? Is... anybody going to do anything about this? Should I tell someone? No, evidently - just don't go there.
Of course, it used to be worse. Men used to be able to just beat women, and nobody cared. Financial abuse was not only common, it was mandated by law.
We've come a long, long way. And, we've left a lot of men behind. Before, you could be a piece of shit and still be almost guaranteed a marriage, or at least sex. Our standards for behavior are much higher.
Men have been, understandably, slow to evolve. It's a much less sweet deal. This is compounded by the fact we've really never had a progressive movement for men. To this day, there are infinite ways to be a heterosexual woman - but there's only one way to be a heterosexual man. Men are closed in, trapped, by social expectations. We carry all the baggage of the patriarchy and misogyny of days gone, but we reap few benefits. We are not so liberated, not so open-minded.
It's a fine line. You must evolve, but not too much so that you may reject the performance of masculinity. You must be progressive, but not so much so. You must be traditional, but only in the right ways. Some men, even a lot of men, cannot keep up or fit into what is expected of them. And, there's no moving back.
It's true, and for all the reasons you list, men are in fact genetically inferior.
At this point all male babies should be aborted or otherwise discarded at birth. Babies born with two X chromosomes can simply transition into the gender identity role of "man" during puberty, if they so choose.
Bio-essentialism is an inherently patriarchal belief. I'm sure you're being sarcastic, but no - obviously men are not born evil. They're socialized in such a way that sets them up for failure, and they have to actively work to overcome this. Those that don't, fail.
For the record, I'm a man. If you want to argue against the things I say then actually address the things I say, instead of some obviously hyperbolic strawman.
Come one man, it would be trivial for me to credibly argue that your religion has given scores of young men an absolutely dysfunctional relation to sexuality, woman, their own body, etc. Anyone could make that case as easily as your case about pornography (arguably with more proof in my case). Should we legislate both the same way?
I agree that some "purity gospel" teachings have made people uncomfortable with their own bodies. For example, I don't find myself bent out of shape by girls wearing shorter shorts and don't agree with the degree of taboo applied to nudity in America. I also think this only contributes to over-sexualization rather than reducing it.
I just don't see that as "my religion". That's not what I believe. In a certain sense an Eastern Orthodox Christian and a Missouri Synod Lutheran both have the "same religion", but for practical purposes they do not.
Yes, but "his religion" is over 2000 years old and has found ways to reform itself many times to re-centre itself towards the core teachings of Jesus Christ, namely compassion and piety. The Christians who sold indulgencies are not the Christians who burned witches are not the Christians who help those in need. It has existed for twenty centuries across continents and anyone who can corrupt it effectively wields the power of God. Of course it has been used as justification for heinous acts. Pretty much anything that has existed that long and is that powerful has been used that way.
It is irrational to hate the entire religion because of select elements, past or present. You are in effect committing the same act of hatred you are accusing Christians of.
I was pointing out that similar arguments could be made about the “badness” of both religion and porn to show that these arguments are facetious in both cases
Pauline Christianity, which represents the vast majority of Christian denominations worldwide including the more liberal ones, has little to do with "core teachings of Jesus". Starting with the claim that Jesus is God, given that the guy literally never once claimed to be one.
Haven’t all the reforms of christianity specifically brought the church away from the core teachings of Jesus Christ? Isn’t that why there are coptic and orthodox christians at all? Because they feel the catholic church out of Rome did not follow the core teachings of Jesus Christ?
> Most adults I see are fat, thus gluttons, thus are committing a sin.
This is not how fatness works.
Some people are genetically predisposed to gaining weight easily. Some people are literally just hungrier and have a higher satiety threshold. This is why "just eat less" is horribly ineffective.
Diet and exercise help but are more Band-Aids than a true long-term fix. Many people gain MORE weight after a period of intense dieting and exercise than before. There's a saying that summarizes this conundrum well: "Nobody knows more about diets than fat people."
I am sure that you mean well, but please understand that this is a very complex topic.
This is, as a matter of fact. Both sides of my family are essentially universally obese. I grew up with it. I saw lots of it. I am probably genetically predisposed, but I'm not giving my DNA to one of those sketchy testing companies, so I can't say for sure.
It's not an issue of metabolism. I've walked in on people sneaking a junk food binge at 1:30AM too many times to believe this. I've seen all the sneak-eating, all the extra oily sauce when they think "well it's a salad", to believe that.
Diet and exercise are actually great long-term fixes, they're just not easy. We can see this pretty well by how reducing appetite via a GLP-1 agonist helps to decrease body fat, even with older-generation drugs that act almost entirely by just reducing appetite and increasing satiety rather than by additional mechanisms. There are also benefits like increased muscle mass increasing one's BMR so the same-size meal might no longer cause one to gain fat.
I understand that it's complex. It doesn't mean I want to blame or castigate people. I can empathize strongly with struggling against impulses to sin.
Both sides of my family also have extensive history of alcoholism. This has caused me to be very, very careful around alcohol, because despite a predisposition, drunkenness is still a sin. Somebody may have anger issues, but clocking somebody is still a sin. Many of us will have all these impulses or commit these sins. Most of the time, my reaction is to sit and empathize, particularly for "victimless crimes" (rather, sins where the only victim is one's own soul.)
I come from a small town and know many conservative Christians. They are pushing for this. Like you said, it is easier to blame external sources than to accept you need to do better as parent.
Many of them are. I just don’t see any reason to say “I disagree with the conservative Christians pushing this” rather than “I disagree with the people who support this.” There are secular folks who also support such legislation. It hints at a generalized animus towards religion and likely in particular towards Christianity, kind of like Fox News boomers complaining Obama wouldn’t say “radical Islamic terrorism”.
The majority of people pushing this in the USA are evangelicals who are moving more and more to christofascism over the years. Now they are mixing in government more and more and dropping the traditional values of Christianity and replacing them with fascism and prosperity gospel
People need to understand that there is a radical Christian element trying to impose its beliefs on everyone. They should be called out continuously and especially when they successfully modify any laws, state or federal.
There is a radical proportion of American Christians which believes this, yes. I'm fine with calling out those beliefs. That's not my issue here, more tarring Christianity broadly, or even specifically those of us who hold conservative social beliefs but don't believe in imposing those via state coercion.
I don't see any moral benefit to forcing people not to sin. There's no virtue when there's no choice.
I understand what you're saying but when you have Trump and his cohorts fake praying in the oval office with the support of conservative Christians who abandon all of Jesus' teachings of love and compassion and embrace Trump's hate, you might understand why people take a specific issue with that.
I'm fine with criticizing that, and actually agree with that criticism. "Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven."
You're the one identifying me with them. That's my point. The group you dislike is "people who support this policy" or "Christians who want to enshrine their social policy via legislation." That's not what you said though.
Did something I wrote read like I disagreed with this? What children do in their private time is their parents’ business. What children do can sometimes be the business of the state; there’s tons of precedent for it acting in loco parentis. I just don’t find this to be the best solution.
If you look at the goals of christofascists this is really just the beginning of incrementally becoming a theocracy run by them rather than a democracy with a diversity of thoughts and freedoms. That is the antithesis of what they want.
The thing most people misunderstand with weed getting strong is that in the past people would smoke way more. They’d smoke joints like cigarettes. Unless you’ve built up a tolerance you are smoking far less today to get high. And once you’ve built a tolerance that hardly matters too you just smoke more.
Something being normal doesn’t make it right. Obesity is normal. Shoplifting has become normal in many places. People getting drunk is normal. Normalcy doesn’t equal moral rectitude.
Why do the opinions of my ancestors bear on that, and which ones are you talking about? Most of the ones I can think of, unless you run back to the days of tribal europe, would see the culture today as hideously liberalized. Regardless a lot of my ancestors probably did a lot of things I don’t think are right. Heck, I’ve done plenty of things I don’t think are right. None of that effects what actually is and isn’t morally good.
If I’m not running around telling off couples who leave the bar together, what do you care?
Hijacking this comment because it seems to be the most recent. I’d love to start a private email thread with you if you’re willing to do so.
After the previous election, I felt wildly out of touch, and I’ve been trying to find people who I can talk to who might be able to help me improve understanding of my (metaphorical) neighbors. I suspect that our beliefs will be quite different, but I appreciate your willingness to provide long-form, respectful responses to so many comments here.
Most of the BS from modern christians is a byproduct of the church trying to control every aspect of a person's mind and body rather than being an expansion of their spiritualism. Traditional religion does not like free thinking amongst its worshippers. Puritans were amongst the worst and they have a huge influence on early Americans and their religions.
I agree with this to an extent actually, which has led me to conflict strongly with the structure of most denominations. There are a few exceptions (the Roman Catholic Jesuits are a good example) but I'd actually say the Roman Catholic Church contributed far more to the Church-as-a-power model than Puritans overall. That aside, some days, I get as much from reading Eckhart or Kierkegaard as a Newman or Aquinas.
Would you also understand impetus behind any proposed hypothetical ban on alcohol, tobacco, firearms, or anything else that causes harm to the society?
Yes, I would. Just like with proposed bans on alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, I understand the motives (particularly when I look at the rash of wife-beating that encouraged the temperance movement, for instance) but oppose the proposed solution (banning those things).
Alright, you seem receptive to arguments so I'll take a crack at this.
> 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.
I'm not sure if that's the intent of everyone backing this; I think part of it amounts to parents who are legitimately worried. I may not agree with their means but I can understand that. I haven't personally met anyone who talked about baptizing the internet but that doesn't mean it isn't happening, and I'd oppose that.
I strongly agree with you on escapism and consumerism. I see pornography as a nasty end-stage manifestation of this, but not as the root issue. I've also seen peers spend way too much time rotting in front of netflix or tiktok or videogames, or addicted to shopping, or spending their money traveling to highly-instagrammable destinations and posting it. I have a huge beef with what you're describing, very true, and consumerist hellscape is a great characterization. Sticking with the drug analogy, I think it's like cocaine vs. fentanyl. It seems like many fewer people can consume is "recreationally" without some level of harm if they do it repeatedly over time. I also tend to key on it more because it so explicitly pertains to what I see as some of the most beautiful and sacred elements of creation (love, sex, marriage). But it's absolutely one manifestation of a greater issue.
I tend to agree with you that "purity culture" is bad and that America has a weirdly-victorian air about it that almost seems to tempt people more. I see alcohol as another example of this; I'd prefer my kids didn't drink until they were older and in the right place/at the right time, but our current set-up just makes most kids get blackout the first half-dozen times they drink.
To be honest, it's still not something I'd be comfortable sitting and discussing personally, but I think there's a difference between "not polite dinner-table conversation" and "God forbid anyone mentions it ever."
I agree with you that lawmakers don't care one whit about children, families, or people. I wish some of my fellow Christians weren't so quick to assume that "their guy" is actually going to fix anything, and see it as a way to disclaim responsibility for working on their own families and communities in particular. I think I've noticed more of this amongst my peer group, a basic distrust of particularly the federal and state governments across the political and ideological spectra. I hope this drives us to focus on fixing what we can. Work on our families rather than calling state assemblymen, work more to feed our homeless rather than expecting the feds to implement a perfect nationwide solution. And I hope rather than politicization, Christianity in America focuses more on the Second Great Commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself."
The Supreme Court considered internment camps and segregation constitutional, until it didn’t.
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.)
The Supreme Court is not the ultimate decider of what the layman's document means. It was wrong when it decided, for instance, Plessy v. Ferguson. The law that the Court upheld patently violated the Fourteenth Amendment and was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court was simply wrong.
By definition, the Supreme Court does decide what is Constitutional. It doesn't decide what is right or moral, but it does, according to the Constitution, decide what laws conform to the Constitution.
That is their job, yes. But they don't always do their job, especially in a compromised government. Let's not pretend that Trump didn't stack the courts.
I think it's more likely we'd see term limits and balanced budget amendments. Possibly even the power for states to override federal laws, with a supermajority.
I'd like to see other things, like the commerce clause returning to its original meaning, but like you said, it's already a high bar.
When at least 34 states call for a constitutional convention. Potentially as early as this year if at least 15 of the 21 states with proposed legislation enact the laws which call for a convention (currently 19 states have enacted laws which call for a convention). Thirty-eight states would need to ratify any proposed amendments.
Not really. The Supreme Court believes some rulings to be wrong the day they were decided:
> “The dissent’s reference to Korematsu, however, affords this Court the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: *Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided*, has been overruled in the court of history, and to be clear ‘has no place in law under the Constitution,’” Roberts said, quoting Justice Jackson’s 1944 dissent.
If Mommy says I can't eat carrots because they are bad for me, I have to listen to her. But I don't have to listen to her because she's right, it's because she's mommy.
The fact that some people model the government as patriarchal or matriarchal is one of our biggest issues today, because under that model we accept that all sorts of moralist values must be legislated, and we patronize the hell out of our citizenry, and it really defeats the entire point of the Constitution.
The point is not what most people think it is, the point is to give that illusion that there is the some rule of law. This illusion ensure that the potentially revolting masses are somewhat kept in check. Meaning the constitution is meant for the rulers, to serve their purpose, and not of the people.
Quiet frankly I don't give a shit what a judge says is constitutional when they are acting in direct opposition to the stated goals of the constitution and I don't think anybody else should either. I believe the Founding Fathers both expected and wanted people to stand up in defiance against legal rulings and laws that many find unjust, even to the point of violence after some time. The Constitution starts with "We the People", which means if the people don't agree then the judges are wrong and should be opposed in every aspect.
The US legal system has gone out of control and it is getting to the point where people need to defy the law as a matter of principle and fight for their rights. The preamble of the constitution is pretty clear in its general goals, and working against the people's will, restricting the peoples rights, committing what the people believe are injustices, and causing social turmoil among them, are all blatantly opposed.
And this is compounded by the efforts of multi-generational corporate brainwashing to the tune of trillions of dollars. A critical threshold of people are compromised and this is then used as proof that the "will of the people" is uncontested authoritarian fascism.
We don't get to selectively decide when a Constitutionally recognized inalienable human right is applied or not.
If you don't protect the right for Americans to share obscene material, you open the door for the first amendment to be trampled over time by the authoritarian ratchet.
A more effective solution would be to implement HTML tags for explicit sexual content (or any other kind of child-sensitive content) and allow the OS or browser to authenticate the user before showing that content, if parental controls are enabled.
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.
I like this, already got face ID built into our devices including PCs these days... tap into that. That curbs the whole issue of sending your identifying information to third party websites.
The rub is how you authenticate the user. Most such content is already behind an age verification check. If the risk is that people who shouldn’t be doing so are clicking “yes I am 18” then whatever you need to do to authenticate the user otherwise to counter that sort of circumvention are going to be really ugly from a privacy standpoint.
It shoudn't be the website's responsibility to authenticate viewers of sexual content, not unless it's paid sexual content.
This proposed solution allows the parent to choose whatever authentication he/she wants for the device. Windows login, browser login, 3rd party filtering proxy in the router, etc.
I know what you're about to say: What if the child gains access to an unrestricted device? Well, if you put it that way, what if the child gains access to an old stash of porn magazines? What are you gonna do? Sue the publisher?
Same as it ever was. The government has been congenitally unable to strike a rational balance between free speech vs indecency statutes. "I know it when I see it" has been a meme since 1964 when it was written by the Supreme Court. In handing control of that balance over to the states, the federal government is just giving up. But it won't work. The issue still needs to be resolved. We're going to see many, many, many more Supreme Court cases on indecency vs free speech.
That is because the false balance is complete bullshit. Free speech means free speech. Obscenity is just special pleading "but it is icky!". The same thing has been happening for centuries. They came across a good idea as a foundational principle and the dumb fuckers wearing dresses we call judges refuse to see it. They then prove that they are all lawyers by constructing elaborate rationalizations. They also did the same thing to the Fourteenth ammendment's equal protection under the law working as grounds barring corruption and injustice.
We've had kids accessing an Internet without any working age barriers for over 30 years now.
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
Its really sad to see this getting attacked, now, after all that's transpired, after so many years. You'd think if it was that dire, again maybe 10 years in there would have been more action. But again its not genuine, so its really about the ulterior motives. Not even to mention the 1st amendment issues, which again don't just magically dissapear when a bunch of people stick to party lines.
Alas, we are in an age of hyper over-regulation though and this is just another example. I could come up with countless others in wildly different fields which have one astonishing commonality. That business has been running fine for ages and all of a sudden, we need to regulate.
Content restrictions should just be an option with the ISP: to make the entire modem/phone disable adult content and/or require age verification. This, I would disable (presuming `on` by default).
>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.
These points would greatly benefit from being put into perspective
You can't seriously think a significant percentage of people are emotionally unstable because they looked up porn of their own will at an age of their own choosing, even if I trust that it can be listed as a contributing factor for some infinitesimal fraction of those with that issue
I assume I would if I had them. Similar to keeping offline and online bullying in check (no matter if they're the victim or perpetrator), until a certain point I guess I'd keep an eye on what they're up to (less and less as they age, assuming it goes well). If I see sites super unsuitable to their development stage (e.g. afaik girls mature slightly earlier so I may stop monitoring their media consumption sooner, I'd do my research if I were a parent) then sure we can have an uncomfortable talk and see what action I need to take. But if they're a horny 13-year-old, heck no I'm not looking into their pornhub pageloads, they have their privacy too. I'd be super weirded out if my parents had done that until I was 14 or whatever the legal consent age is where you are! Would/do you do that to your kids?!
Anyway, I guess the more relevant question is whether I think it has no effect whatsoever. Nah, of course it does, potentially some good and also potentially some bad effects. I just thought many of the points on your list had a negligible risk level (where risk=chance*impact), since it's e.g. not like most people who've grown up with the internet freely now are aggressives without impulse control
I'm not an expert on the topic and I'm happy to look at studies that update my worldview. Yet it's evidently not the case that anyone born between ~1990 and ~2000 (widespread internet and thus porn but not yet social media) has the issues you've mentioned. Maybe elevated levels, and maybe some research can disentangle the various environmental effects to point to porn as a partial culprit, but clearly it's not a majority of the population and, among those who are affected, it seems unlikely that porn is a typical significant contributor
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.
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.
As an ambulance chaser, I can assure you that suing out of state defendants for out of state activity has become nearly impossible. See Daimler AG v. Bauman (2014), BNSF Railway Co. v. Tyrrell (2017), Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court (2017), Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District (2021), Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co. (2023)
Sounds like the article isn’t incorrect? The first two criteria depend on which community is doing the judging. New Yorkers will have à different norm than people from say a quaint 5k-person town where there’s an 8:1 church:supermarket ratio. The third criteria is vague, but vagueness cuts both ways.
Who defines an artistic work? If I produce a porn film, why isn't that my artistic commentary on sex? Laws cant be this subjective because subjectivity implies subjectivity in ruling which is objectively awful.
The article would seem correct since "obscene" could be twisted to mean whatever they want. As the people making the ruling can say the average person believes x.
Nope. A key aspect of this ruling is that it's about "sexual content that is obscene to minors but not to adults". "Adults have the right to access speech obscene only to minors [..] and submitting to age verification burdens the exercise of that right. But adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification."
The Texas law at issue takes the same three factors you quoted and lists them verbatim, but tacks on "for minors" to each factor, e.g.:
> (C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
There's no precedent yet on what it means for something to "lack [..] artistic [..] value for minors", but it's almost certain to be interpreted as a harder standard to satisfy than the normal one.
Solution: build technologies which make government statute effectively irrelevant. It must be uncensorable even by a nation-state adversary, and must hide its users and their activities. The future is software technology designed to thwart the ability of prosecutors to introduce evidence into a court. We must fight against the state's War on Crime with everything we have; the state has abused that war for centuries to justify its expansion. Courts should only bless victims taking revenge or retribution, offer an optional institution of rehabitation and recompense that the convict can voluntarily ascend to, else if the convict chooses to be free then he's at the mercy of the victim and whatever the victim chooses to do to the convict. Court cases should not result in involuntary imprisonment but only voluntary, incentivized by not being assaulted/killed in public as an outlaw. (Elected oath taking office holders excepted, prison should be a real possibility.)
It matters more to restrain and limit the state than it does to punish bad behavior. Furthermore the state has committed countless crimes in its treatment of the customers they chose to condemn, and ought to be dissolved entirely down to the office clerk. Unfortunately, the only way that happens is law of the guillotine.
I worry that young people across the political spectrum increasingly no longer see free speech as a foundational value. Both sides pay lip service and deploy it strategically but are quick to sacrifice it when it conflicts with other values and goals.
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.
>They are more concerned with social progressivism than the liberal foundations of our democracy
That's absolutely not true
In 2017 they filed a lawsuit defending conservative / far-right Milo Yiannopoulos [1] and spoke up for suppression of Trump [2]. Defended someone wishing death to gay people [3]. Filed an amicus brief supporting the NRA's free speech in '18 [4]
There's a lot more where that came from but I don't need to lie by citation. The reality, as the electorate saw it, was that most liberal organizations in the 2020's suffered from mission creep. Planned Parenthood went on record supporting defunding the police, the Sierra Club redefined environmentalism as antiracism(?) etc
> 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.
Quite the opposite. I stopped donating to the ACLU after a few years of the last trump administration because I could no longer stomach it given the clear direction trumpism is taking the country. I still support the mission ideologically but can't back it up with my money. Seeing trump this time around I'm glad I haven't wasted the money - the constitution is dead.
The GOP under Trump has considerably changed from the GOP under Bush. There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives. Perhaps a shift might be coming with the next economic downturn, which seems inevitable given the risk-off investment climate across most industries stemming from Trump’s erratic, unpredictable trade and economic policy. Things don’t look bad just yet, but it takes a while for the full impact of such enormous changes in sentiment to ripple down through the entire economy.
Reagan and Bush were constrained by much more liberal supreme court justices of the previous era. The current Supreme Court justices were clerks and lawyers during Reagan and Bush presidency. If Reagan and Bush had the current justices in their bench I can almost guarantee they’d be pulling the same stunts.
> There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives.
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.
> it’s so weird to see two political factions that agree on 90% of policy get shellacked and overruled by their respective extreme wings
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.
> These parties have primaries and Republicans are choosing—by a majority—the crazies over the “traditional” wing.
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 faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush.
How are you defining "deficit-reducing"?
>Over the four years of President Biden’s term – from January 2021 through January 2025 – we estimate that he approved $4.7 trillion in new ten-year debt through legislation and executive actions.
That rate of debt increase is neither responsible or sustainable - though such irresponsible behavior has now been adopted by both parties. Both parties seem to have become radicalized and are catering to their worst instincts.
There are two ways to lower the deficit: increase revenue or lower spending.
As you say, neither party does particularly well at lowering spending.
The moderate Republican approach to raising revenue is typically but not always through regressive taxes. The general theory since Reagan (and before) has been taxing the upper brackets hurts economic growth. The ideal of this is a flat tax or “fair tax.”
The centrist Democrat approach to raising revenue is typically but not always through progressive taxes. The general theory is that wealth inequality is overall bad, and since purchasing power is more or less logarithmic in dollars, the upper brackets suffer relatively less from higher tax rates. The ideal of this is the post-war 90% top bracket.
Of the two, I think only the second offers any real hope of deficit reduction. The middle and lower classes are already tapped out, metaphorically speaking. Household debt is already frighteningly high and the savings rate very low despite relatively high interest rates. If the goal really is to reduce the deficit through increasing revenue, I think it’s likely that revenue must come from the upper classes in one way or another.
Of course this is all written in very broad strokes and there are a hundred nitpicks one could make on this general point of view, but this is a forum comment and not a dissertation on political economics.
I would disagree with your characterization of the two approaches to increasing taxes but like you said this is a forum comment.
>...Of the two, I think only the second offers any real hope of deficit reduction. The middle and lower classes are already tapped out, metaphorically speaking.
Many people point to the high government spending in some of the OECD countries, but what they fail to recognize is that the US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the OECD. The difference is that in those other OECD countries, the middle class pays a higher share of the taxes and there is more money available because there are a lot more middle class tax payers than high income payers.
>If the goal really is to reduce the deficit through increasing revenue, I think it’s likely that revenue must come from the upper classes in one way or another.
The effective tax rates paid by the high income earners is fairly close to the highest it has ever been.
Your original point was:
>The faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush.
Again, I have a hard time considering a party that increases spending so much that debt will be increased by $4.7 trillion to be one that can be called "deficit-reducing". (Nor can the R party be called that either of course.) Just because the D party talks about raising revenue doesn't really mean anything.
The Bushes and Reagan were a little more genteel but that's it. Reagan even gave the wink wink nod nod speech about States' Rights at the Neshoba County Fair. The difference between them and Trump is sortorial.
Libertarian and Democratic parties ought to feel right at home for any refugees from the GOP who have conservative principles. Democratic party is right of center.
> There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives
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.
Neither of the two parties is very much in favor of free speech. The left has cancel culture and policing pronouns while the right has blocking books with gay characters and age verification laws.
There are two common definitions of the phrase "free speech" that I think you are conflating:
1. The Constitutional right to free speech under the first amendment (i.e. specifically that the government may not use its authority to limit or punish its peoples' expression of ideas)
2. The vague notion that others should not be able to criticize you for something you've said or written
In this thread we are more concerned with the former. No one on the left is trying to enact laws to punish anyone's impolite use of pronouns. At worst, maybe someone has asked you to be considerate in some non-official setting (which has little to do with the first amendment).
There is a massive difference between other people reacting to your speech and choosing not to associate with you or propagate what you say, and the government banning your speech and prosecuting you for it. You can exercise your freedom of speech, and other people can exercise their freedom of association to want nothing to do with you.
I've noticed that cancel culture and policing pronouns is far stronger on the right. What Democrat has been canceled as much as Liz Cheney by Republicans? Certainly not the sex pest Andrew Cuomo, heartily supported by the Democratic Party leadership.
What Democratic president has issued an executive order anywhere equivalent to Trump's order requiring pronouns match the gender "at conception", and the anti-scientific claim that gender is a male-female binary?
The right also wants to block books which have nothing to do with gay characters, including “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, “Maus”, “The Handmaid's Tale“, “Of Mice and Men“ and “Brave New World”.
Cancel Culture is actually just the free market, the invisible hand, at work.
What is a boycott but cancel culture? The idea of the free market is that good behaviors and products emerge because consumers "vote" with their wallet. If a company has bad values I don't support then I don't shop there. Enough people do that and the company collapses. So, what remains is an economy where every company acts virtuously.
Theoretically. Then enters propaganda and the GOP. They tell you this invisible hand is bad, and companies should be able to do anything. At a glance this appears to be free speech, but it's not - it's the exact opposite.
You see, they can say anything they want, but we can't. We may not criticize them. Our opinions are not valid, they're "Cancel Culture".
A lynch mob is a boycott, especially when they aren't lynching. Lynch mob used to mean something literally, when people did lynching. Now it just means "a bunch of people don't like someone and don't financially support them".
I point out to self-described "classic liberals" that what they call "cancel culture" was instead described by John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty" as an essential component of liberty:
"We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement."
This is ignoring difference between individual distancing from such person and cancel culture campaigns, whose characteristic pattern is transitivity (boycotting third persons just because they do not participate themselves in boycott). Amplifying effect of such transitivity creates a social coercion in the form that Mill warned against in chapter 1. That is why he mentioned "though not to parade the avoidance" - to not induce society-wide coordination leading to social coercion.
Mill distinguishes between natural penalties (which are just results of others distancing from the person) and artificial punishment:
"It makes a vast difference both in our feelings and in our conduct towards him, whether he displeases us in things in which we think we have a right to control him, or in things in which we know that we have not. If he displeases us, we may express our distaste, and we may stand aloof from a person as well as from a thing that displeases us; but we shall not therefore feel called on to make his life uncomfortable."
I think it is clear that actions like urging an employer to fire such person are more on level "make his life uncomfortable" than "we may express our distaste and we distance".
The "displeases us" you quoted is for "the part of a person's life which concerns only himself". For example, "No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk."
For actions "which concerns others" Mill writes:
"The evil consequences of his acts do not then fall on himself, but on others; and society, as the protector of all its members, must retaliate on him; must inflict pain on him for the express purpose of punishment, and must take care that it be sufficiently severe. In the one case, he is an offender at our bar, and we are called on not only to sit in judgment on him, but, in one shape or another, to execute our own sentence: in the other case, it is not our part to inflict any suffering on him, except what may incidentally follow from our using the same liberty in the regulation of our own affairs, which we allow to him in his."
Yes, but in the first chapter, Mill is clear that even public speech falls into sphere of liberty, the part of person's life "that affect only himself":
"But there is a sphere of action in which society, as distinguished from the individual, has, if any, only an indirect interest; comprehending all that portion of a person’s life and conduct which affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only with their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation. When I say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first instance: for whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself; and the objection which may be grounded on this contingency, will receive consideration in the sequel. This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty."
"It comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological."
"The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it."
(Also note that your original citation was also related to judgements based on actions that concern only the judged person: "Though doing no wrong to anyone, a person may so act as to compel us to judge him, and feel to him, as a fool, or as a being of an inferior order")
No, but it is endemic to American colleges and universities which are government or government-funded institutions.
Furthermore, spend a little time on BlueSky and you will find huge support for the hate speech laws found in other countries.
Finally, the distinction between government regulation of speech and private regulation of speech is key in the court of law, but it is almost irrelevant from the point of view of a philosophy that values open inquiry, debate, and dissent as indispensible to human dignity and progress.
"The primary weakness in the record of past restrictions is the lack of specific causation findings with respect to any discrete instance of content moderation."
I'm genuinely curious. The parent buys the phone/laptop. And when little Timmy logs in to his phone the account should be in a family/group as a child account.
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?
Timmy's friend has a big brother that lets him use his ID. There will always be ways to circumvent this. The only functional difference between a simple setting in the browser and requiring ID attestation is how much surveillance it allows the government to do.
According to this logic, why ban anything? There is always someone who can help you overcome the ban.
So, let children buy alcohol and cigarettes, why not also drugs?
Identification verification doesn't solve that either. His friend could still hand him his phone after logging in and verifying, right? Unless they're doing facial scans the entire time the user is reading adult content.
It's a matter of time before the US system crumbles if these assaults on the federal system and civil liberties continue.
I live in state with a population of 40 million who gives $83 billion more to the federal government than gets back. It's absolutely insane we have to be ruled by afar by what is effectively a small minority. This will come to a head not only in Censorship, Immigration, Tariffs, Abortion access (banning abortion medication federally), Industrial policy, etc.
At a certain point California is going to say, "No Thanks" and peace out.
Funnily enough, this was pointed out by the very people who established our federal government structure. Hamilton, Federalist Papers #22:
"Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Deleware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last."
I feel so bad for the teenager whose mom is parading him around as a permanently defective ruined form of life. Could that be damaging to a kid do you think?
Hopefully someone kept a snapshot of the country's configs before this year began. I feel like we're going to need it. This is ludicrous - as so much is lately.
The land of the free. Where every moron can get and use a firearm and the rest of the world only knows the country even has educational institutes because of all the school shootings. But let's outlaw trans, drags and writings for the poor religious conservative inbreds in the South. Because that's the real danger in the world now. Yikes
It's interesting that we, as humans, are all so neurotic about sex, and especially about allowing our kids to understand that sex exists, that we rush to outlaw any depictions of it that our kids could potentially see. While at the same time making sure adults are still able to see it, of course. Because everyone knows that when you're 6569 days old, seeing someone have sex will cause life-long scarring, but when you're 6570 days old it doesn't matter anymore.
We also outlaw the depiction of any crimes related to sex, and here we find it easier to justify the ban, but in our haste we clump together actual crimes committed against a real victim, and imaginary crimes such as e.g. a cartoonist drawing a rape scene. In the latter case we close our eyes to the fact that we claim to support something called "freedom of speech" and, in our neurotic hunt to ban things sex-related we trample our principles.
Same goes for e.g. CSA, but in that case in particular, logic and consistency seems to go out the window and principles are sacrificed in the blink of an eye. It makes me a little depressed to see.
As for individual countries trying to enforce their local socio-cultural norms on the rest of the world, that is of course equally silly. The US is great in many ways, but introspection and ability to follow principles is sometimes lacking for sure.
I wouldn't be surprised if our sexual neurosis is what makes an AGI finally decide that we're not competent to captain the ship anymore.
I'm in Sweden, and we behave the same way. We just don't focus on exactly the same things. The attitude towards sex in general is more relaxed, but when it comes to CSA we would love to impose our views on defining and policing it on the rest of the world, see https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
Is there anything we can actually do to combat this?
Im short of ideas, tho the 33% rule can be potentially worked around by generating loads of fake content similar to a previous poster who generates fake content for scrapers to eat
Im in the UK and they recently passed a similar law banning any explicit _imagery_, which I already thought was bad but the land of freedom beats us out again, the literally surveillance state, at least that's that's enforced top down by ofcom instead of an army of injury lawyers so it works at ofcom's speed
Because then: whose computer is it? If it's my computer, it does my bidding. If a child is currently on the computer, should the computer decide and refuse to work as in "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" where the operator (Dave) is deemed a threat to its objective? In this case, the computer's programmed goal would be preventing any minor from seeing content with this tag. It has to decide if you're a minor whenever content is marked as such. If you can't override its programming, it's your computer no longer
It's ironic that the faction that's usually talking about "personal responsibility" is now saying we can't put this horrible burden on parents to control their kids' device use --- or even just teach them how to make healthy decisions and interpret what they see in a healthy manner. I seriously doubt that reading smutty stories online is going to scar a kid for life.
It's not ironic, rather it's hypocritical. At this point it's painfully clear that they only invoke lofty ideals to trick reasonable people into supporting their backwards authoritarian agenda. The real aim is simply for power, and open hypocrisy is one aspect of demonstrating power - rules for thee, not for me.
That has always been the problem with advocating free speech - that eventually you have to protect the rights of the writers of nazi furry slash fiction and similar fellows. And are really soft and fluffy target.
If there's going to be strict rules around sex, then I'd like to see similar laws around distributing violent content. What we need are age verification requirements before kids can see violence on News programmes or be subjected to the threat of gun violence (e.g. in schools).
> The public library in rural Donnelly, Idaho, at only 1,024 square feet, had no practical way to create an enforceable “adults only” section and no budget to defend against lawsuits. Therefore, to comply with the law, they decided to make the entire library for adults only. The library has banned minors from entering the library (even to use the bathroom) unless they are accompanied by an adult, or holding a waiver from their parents.
This is absurd. It does look like they're suing, with help from a lot of publishers, at least.
I spent a lot of time after school in the library to avoid my abusive cult guardians at home. If this avenue hadn't been available to me in my small town, I'd likely have committed suicide. But, I'm an atheist, so me committing suicide would probably be seen as a win for these evangelical freaks.
Yeah, me too. It’s very chilling to see the resurgence of a very broad conception of parental rights, which can in some cases permit the wholesale physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children without recourse.
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.
I shared this experience before on a recent thread about the role librarians play in counterculture and a user made a throwaway account in order to tell me to kill myself all sorts of creative ways and that he's glad I was abused, etc. etc.
I've talked to enough people who explicitly believe that children are chattel (sometimes in the same breath as complaining about abuse they suffered from their own parents) to know this isn't hyperbole.
FTA: "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."
No, they can't. That's not how jurisdiction works in the U.S. If states could do stuff like that, GOP prosecutors would be charging out-of-state Democratic politicians with made-up-crimes all the time. They're not doing that. It's not because they don't want to; it's because they can't. (And also, the legal justification that would allow them to go after their political enemies like this would allow politically-opposed prosecutors to do the same to them.)
States are already trying to police abortions outside of state lines. If you helped someone get an abortion in another state, they want to be able to arrest you for it.
The Supreme Court is eroding the credibility of the institution of law faster than they can make laws. They really want to see how the public reacts to overreach?
Someone missed the responsibility step: parents are responsible for their kids not rando strangers across the world, and when kids get old enough they're responsible for themselves. Unless they need carers, then the carers are responsible.
This article doesn't really go into any detail about the Supreme Court decision it discusses, instead reserving its detailed discussion for the laws this decision permits. Anyone have a link to the opinion, or an article discussing it specifically?
Unfortunately, these laws are working exactly as intended. If they discourage all forms of sexually-explicit material, the laws are working as intended. They are not really about "protecting the children." They use that as an excuse to make it too legally risky to publish pornographic/sexual material under any circumstances.
If I was a publisher, would I trust an age-verification system to protect me from 15 years in prison or an "investigation" that results in nothing but destroying my life? Nope. So eventually the legitimate website operators just give up.
Or how about the ISP who now simply refuses to do business with any website that publishes sexual material just to avoid legal consequences for themselves?
This is insane. Literally goes against the first amendment. What recourse is there for this nonsensical decision? Mass disobedience? Leaking verified IDs until they stop this?
One of the goals in Project 2025 is to make teachers, librarians, etc. that purvey "pornography" into felons, and jail them for a long time. That starts with labeling things as pornography.
Before you know it, anything that mentions LGBTQ+ topics will be labeled as porn.
Most people's associations with the US were fanciful and unrealistic to begin with. It's just that now the reality has diverged so far from their mental images that they're forced to acknowledge the disparity.
While we do produce a lot of porn, remember that the pre-US colonies were founded by conservative religious people who were too conservative even for Europe at the time.
They don't, of course. These laws aren't here to protect children. They're just a step on the road to one of their (conservative Christian) goals: banning pornography entirely in the US.
I’m a porn abolitionist, and I still hate these laws. Requiring digital identification online is an incredibly chilling step. It is a direct assault on anonymity.
It's an attempt to get a list of people for a future Gilead like government to prosecute. It's not about protecting children, it's a way to get a list of nonbelievers and sinners in the hopes they can set up their theocracy and punish the non-believers.
To be clear, my view is not one rooted in moral judgment, and certainly not directed at sex workers.
Rather, it’s grounded in trauma ethics. The statistical prevalence of CSA amongst sex workers is incredibly high — nearly universal.
Sex work itself is quite often a form of trauma reenactment, and the degree to which they engage in disassociation in order to perform is staggering.
I believe that in a very real and ethical sense, pornography and other forms of sex work entails the commodification of disassociation, and the consumption of maladaptive trauma responses rooted in CSA.
In effect, it amounts to taking pleasure in the psychological aftershocks of abuse.
I’m not convinced that porn abolition is even possible, but that it is important to be honest about the ethical fault almost universally implicit in sex work.
I'm still wrapping my head around the consequences of this, which almost seem too big to believe. It sounds like there are hundreds of millions if not billions to be made on filing these kinds of lawsuits, which means change is coming hard and fast. What if anything prevents the following?
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?
I think people are putting far too much of an ideological lens on this ruling. As a "matter of law" this seems like the right decision. The supreme court is not a board of dictators making societal decisions based on their flavor of the day. Their job is too see if the ruling is consistent with all other laws we have and the normal function of a modern society. Pushing the envelope one way or another is not their job even if they end up doing that. At the end of the day the (elected) state governments have decided to create a policy that reflects what their constituents want. The supreme court job is not to question the logic of that. They did not run for office or win elections. They just need to make sure that what being done is reasonable and not violating any existing laws. As a tech guy I think these laws are stupid but this case was not the right hill to die on. What needs to happen is that these laws get enacted, costs and unintended consequences happen and THOSE parties sue on the supreme court on that basis
This would be all correct if we didn’t have one particular set of laws above the others – the constitution. And it is unclear if rights guaranteed by constitution (freedom of speech in this case) aren’t infringed by this particular law. There is no such thing here as “if they passed a law let it be”. It can be true if they passed the constitution amendment but they obviously didn’t.
Now we can talk about real issue here - how correct the trade off the court is taking between freedom of speech infringement and this law. And as you can see in original post - author there thinks this trade off was taken wrongly by the court. I, personally, think the same.
IP banning Tennessee would be an interesting form of protest. Seems like these laws are usually super unpopular, but the general public doesn’t usually find out about them enough to get upset. If it doesn’t airtime on Fox News, my dad will literally never know it happened.
Putting up a big “Tennessee might try to put me in jail if you access this site” would get people’s attention.
Not that any business that gets a real amount of traffic would ever do such a thing. Nobody visits my shitty personal site lol
The EU is far ahead of Texas on this. Spain is launching a “porn passport” system (Cartera Digital Beta) using government-issued digital ID to verify age, and France has already attempted something similar. Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, platforms—including porn sites—must implement age checks for EU users regardless of where the site is based. And this isn’t being led by “conservative Christians”—Spain’s Socialist PM Pedro Sánchez is pushing it. I know we’re talking “America” here, but this isn’t some puritanical American concept.
This article overreads the Supreme Court’s decision. It upheld a narrow Texas law requiring age verification to access adult content, applying intermediate scrutiny and emphasizing in-state regulatory authority. It didn’t grant states power to prosecute across borders, nor did it change existing limits on state jurisdiction.
The argument relies on a stack of fallacies:
Post hoc — assumes the ruling causes harms that depend on future, hypothetical laws.
Slippery slope — claims this leads to extraterritorial prosecution, which the ruling doesn’t support.
Appeal to fear — frames state level regulation as existential threat without legal basis.
any kid that has unlimited porn is a kid with poor parents, and they were gonna get into things much worse than porn anyway since parents aren't around and being negligent.
That's an interesting line you're drawing. I'd not say my parents were negligent or that I'm any worse off for having a computer to myself
I heard later they talked about porn and decided that if I seek it out, I'm probably ready for it and otherwise, if I find it icky (I remember feeling that way as a child), I'll just not go back to it. Looking back, for me at least, I think it really was that simple: some things are icky to me still today and I don't seek them out, but I don't remember ever wishing I hadn't seen something that I had looked up
The second thing is that my mom was concerned about my computer use, but then at some point saw that I also created things (probably HTML pages). She later told me that this was when she decided it could be good for my development to continue down this path and learn more about computers. I now work in IT. I don't think she was wrong
Keeping my computer use supervised just isn't feasible when it's most of my free time (after maybe 13 years old, idk). I don't think these considerations mean my parents were "not around". They were 100% there for me when I needed them and then some. You can call this negligent but that's neither their nor my opinion, more than ten years after leaving their supervision and looking back at it and how others are raising children currently
What seems harmful to me is the helicopter parenting style that movies and online (news) media portray the USA as doing. Idk to what extent that's actually real though, a lot of it seems really far out there
Just to double check, this is a joke right? Because you suggested upthread (if I'm reading the sarcasm right) that consumption must be curtailed, but clearly this comment about not having a right to be a non-tech-savvy parent is a joke...or?!
So no bounty because it's not a security problem. But the MV3 API they are deleting, they say...is being deleted for security reasons. Not at all to hobble ad blockers.
I'm puzzled by this 33% thing. Can I just host two videos of wholesome AI slop for every porn shoot? Like, if Pornhub adds a Christian section they can continue as-is?
It's a foot in the door law, newer laws will only become more draconian. Slow frog boil tactics are not uncommon with fascists. Look what Orban is doing, setting up fascism one step at a time, rather than an overwhelming military coup type of takeover.
So you're saying that human relationships in our society are working really well, have no problems and should continue without changes?
Porn is one of the big contributors to many negative effects we see today. Seeing how many problems porn sites cause, I say should be banned immediately.
Of course, people watching porn/addicted to it, won't want it to go away. Similar to drug addicts don't want drugs to be banned.
The government is just another religion, another church. Sometimes they are right, but usually they are just dangerous like any other group of religious bigots.
Meh they can take the bottom 64bits of your IP address and then put your biometrics in there. Why do you think they made the address space so big in the first place. I've been saying that's what it was for for at least a decade.
We’re just trying for something better here, and this is only a place where people want to participate because of the people who make the effort to make it better.
I guess this is the one place I have to actually voice my complaint.
The entire thread is full of sneering and snark — dark allusions to fascism; unfounded (by logical necessity) allegations about the true motivations of people involved; and attempts to tie together all sorts of ideological enemies into a single outgroup, roughly labelled "Republicans". It is absolutely waging ideological warfare and it only seems to pass muster because it goes along with the community consensus rather than against it.
This has been happening on seemingly every vaguely politically-relevant, popular post for months. It didn't seem to be happening when I joined the site, months before the election. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ... seems like relevant reading here. With a note that this is from the previous cycle, and nobody has apparently learned a damned thing.
I hear you. The problem is it's just the way the world is at the moment, and HN is part of the world.
We don't like the kinds of things that are posted in these threads, and we try to minimize how much day-to-day political rage fodder gets front page space. At the same time, we have to recognize that these are issues that people care a lot about, and if people find that HN is a better place to have these discussions than elsewhere, then maybe we're offering something worthwhile by having these discussions here when they're about major developments.
But the guidelines still apply and if people are attacking others and engaging in political/ideological battle, you can help us by flagging comments or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com to let us know about the worst stuff you see.
We certainly wouldn't want HN to be like this forever (it's no fun to moderate, that's for sure). We'll keep doing what we can to move things in the right direction.
> We certainly wouldn't want HN to be like this forever (it's no fun to moderate, that's for sure). We'll keep doing what we can to move things in the right direction.
Isn’t the work of manual moderation largely no fun to begin with, when the rubber meets the road and you need to formulate a novel response, I mean?
I don’t mean to minimize your role here, as all the mods are awesome, and I can’t speak for others out of respect, but I can be trying and have definitely made more work for you all at times.
But all that said, what do the mods do here? What does moderation of HN look like on a good day? What makes the job fun in the first place? Can we build in more fun for users and mods? (Meta-moderation and its points system on Slashdot were peak internet message board user voting and moderation for me, I’ll admit. But Slashdot isn’t Slashdot anymore either.)
I guess I’m trying to understand what you can do and are doing to move things in the right direction, and what that means for HN, and more importantly, how we all can make HN more fun for all involved, hopefully even mods.
A bit off base. He's basically having a meltdown over what's actually a pretty narrow ruling about age verification.
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.
Dismissing this as a “meltdown” ignores the real First Amendment stakes. Requiring ID to access legal adult content isn’t like buying alcohol. It introduces surveillance and self-censorship, especially with vague thresholds like “one-third explicit” or “harmful to minors.” That legal ambiguity alone forces smaller publishers to self-censor to avoid risk. Unlike alcohol, speech is a constitutionally protected right, not a regulated commodity. Buying beer doesn’t create a permanent record of your interests or route through third-party identity brokers.
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.
The "chilling effect" argument here is pretty weak. You're basically saying that because some small publishers might get confused about legal requirements, the whole system is unconstitutional. That's not how First Amendment analysis works. Courts don't strike down laws just because some people might overreact to them.
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.
Chilling effects are settled doctrine, not hand-waving. SCOTUS struck the CDA (Reno v. ACLU, 1997) and COPA (Ashcroft v. ACLU, 2004) precisely because vague “indecent/harmful” standards plus stiff penalties make rational speakers self-censor. Courts don’t wait for carnage. The predictable chill itself is the constitutional flaw.
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.
It's a foot in the door law. First they just "ask for ID", then they "save it permanently for warrants", then they "must upload all ID to Texas' ID servers and a list of all pornography viewed" to protect the children from known deviants. These sorts do not stop at "ID verification", they want to morally control every aspect of your life down to your bedroom activities.
All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
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?
You mean like this?
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
Has some fun history: California went with an independent contractor for its mDL implementation, which ultimately pressured Apple into integrating open(-ish) standards to interoperate.This is interesting, but I’d like to go a step further. I watched the first quarter of the video on where they go over how it works. The site requests data from your ID and they get that data. The site chooses which data it needs and if it will store it or it or not. Sites these days have a tendency to ask for more than what they need, and to store it for profiling purposes. The user can deny the request, but then can’t use the site. They are then left with a dilemma. Give up this personal information or not have access at all? Companies are betting on users giving up privacy in exchange for access.
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.
Zero knowledge proofs are the solution.
The website sends the verification function to the user device. The user device then returns a proof that it knows an input that the verification function accepts.
The verification function should include a digital signature check.
This is generally possible already with SSI based credentials, including standards created by W3C.
Or attribute-based credentials. Basically, you're challenged and get a one-time, challenger-specific credential for exactly the requested attribute(s) from a credential provider. Eg. government (municipality, province, national) can become a credential provider.
Eg. Yivy: https://docs.yivi.app/technical-overview/
Exactly. Yivi isn’t new having been renamed from IRMA (https://privacybydesign.foundation/en/). Nevertheless, adoption outside the Netherlands remains almost non-existent.
Except for the additional download requirement for a user, the friction is pretty low once it’s setup and you have created some attributes.
The project would benefit from a rebranding review, standardization, an enterprise-capable infrastructure to promote and support alternative service providers, and a review of clients. The current Yivi mobile app hasn’t changed much over the years and when I last used it I still needed a PIN instead Face ID.
The spec is being implemented by Apple, who is sensitive to privacy issues.
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
> 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.
Aren't the regulations the problem here? If not for that nobody would be getting pressured to divulge this personal information to every shady app and website in the first place.
Suppose I want to make a service that verifies your age by asking you questions about what life was like before 9/11. Can I do that? And if I can't, is the problem the standards, or the law?
I think most age verification ranges from silly to chilling to speech. But I don’t think we can somehow punt these problems to the quiz from the beginning of Leisure Suit Larry (which never stopped 10 year old me).
Requiring someone to have a government ID isn't anywhere near 100% effective because people will just borrow one from dad's wallet while he's not looking or use a device already signed in as someone else or the high school freshmen will get one from the high school seniors etc.
If we're admitting solutions that aren't 100% effective, why can't we admit solutions that aren't 100% effective but are much better at preserving privacy?
Well this time around the phone will ask the person presenting an ID for biometrics before allowing them to use Dad’s ID. We are improving. There is no perfect solution; we don’t live in a perfect world. Surely we shouldn’t give up and regulate nothing…
> Well this time around the phone will ask the person presenting an ID for biometrics before allowing them to use Dad’s ID. We are improving.
How is this improving? It's the most invasive proposal yet, serves to prohibit devices that are controlled by their owners and still doesn't actually work because a) there are still a zillion devices with security vulnerabilities and b) none of this applies to websites hosted in other jurisdictions, so you're not actually limiting the access of minors to anything, you're only inconveniencing anyone who does have servers in the US or interacts with any that are. Which is an extremely large number of people to trouble for a benefit that rounds to zero.
> Surely we shouldn’t give up and regulate nothing...
When we're in the category of speech, let's go with this option all the way to the wall.
I’m not following your argument, sorry. How are device owners being prohibited from anything? Which zillion vulnerabilities in the TPM are you referring to? Because that’s how seriously these standards take security. These are device bound TPM secured identity credentials where the wallet stack is audited and certified by security professionals before credentials are allowed to be stored. There’s no less secure option.
> How are device owners being prohibited from anything?
I think a lot of us are wary of a world where we have limited selections of software stacks that we can run and do essential things. At some point, we don't own the devices anymore.
I like that Apple is a benevolent overlord, for now.
But I like to be able to run software that I control and participate in the world, and that has alternated between being somewhat harder and prohibitively so. Lockdown of devices (chain of trust, mandatory signed binaries, limitations of device drivers, bootloaders that won’t unlock) makes it increasingly difficult to experiment, repair, or even trust the tools we rely on, and is viewed as a prerequisite for many of these solutions.
--
(I appreciate the alternatives are really hard, and that there are substantial potential downsides creating pressure towards these types of solutions, above and beyond the desires to lock down marketplaces and capture rents).
I empathize with many of your concerns here and share your frustration. Man do I wish there was some sum that Apple would let me pay to own my iPhone. If anything we need more legislation that prevents the amount of exclusivity Apple has over their hardware.
I don’t see digital identity documents as a threat, though. It’s mostly orthogonal to software provenance, device ownership, secure boot, etc.
PS: we already live in a world where by and large all the software you use is only licensed to you individually. It’s crap. If digital identity makes this more plainly obvious then good. We need fuel to fight unethically and impractically licensed software.
I get to choose what software to run, though. If it becomes difficult for me to prove identity in more of everyday life without such a remotely-owned device, I am hosed on privacy.
This is true even if the protocols themselves protect privacy well, use zero knowledge proofs, etc… if Google can vacuum it all up from the device representing me, all the privacy-centric design makes no difference.
> How are device owners being prohibited from anything?
Biometric data isn't cryptographic in nature. Once you've recorded someone's fingerprint -- which any device using it for authentication would have to do and have the hardware to do -- you can then replay it to any service using the same data for authentication. You don't even have to lift them off of any of the objects people leave them on just by existing, which is also a way to get them. And once someone has them, you can't change it.
Which means the only way to use biometrics to gate this sort of thing is for everyone to be locked out of their own devices (or unable to use devices they're not locked out of), or they could use the device they control to play back the biometric data to whatever external service is nominally authenticating it.
> Which zillion vulnerabilities in the TPM are you referring to?
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=TPM
And those are only the ones specific to a TPM, not any of the ones that impact privileged code the TPM is attesting to the security of.
Notice also that this doesn't require every device to be vulnerable, it only requires any device to be vulnerable. Cheap devices are more likely to be vulnerable and then anyone who wants to bypass anything can get one of those.
This is one of the reasons these systems are so nefarious. You get an iPhone for unrelated reasons and it may not have any current known vulnerabilities, so you are locked out of your own device. Meanwhile some $50 Android or old netbook does have a vulnerability which any kid can get if they want to view age-gated sites, or people set up services to do it over the internet -- and then those services become attack vectors because kids start plugging their parents' IDs and fingerprints into shady bypass services.
I don’t see any key exfiltration CVEs on that list. Or anything that could be exploited in a way that is relevant to discussion of digital identity documents.
The biometric data doesn't leave the device in any of these protocols. Keybinding to TPM keys and Wallet provenance is used. I’m not sure you really understand how this works it sounds more like you have a basic FUD imagining a world where instead of literally uploading a photo of your drivers license you present a digitally signed certificate with the same info. I can’t really argue with FUD other than encouraging you to onboard an mDL version of your government ID and to try using it the next time you fly, provided you live somewhere where this technology has been made available. It’s demonstrably better and you can experience it or talk to someone who has today.
The theocracy types are making this terrible, but the technology has alot of potential to enhance privacy.
For example, I was involved in a project several years ago on this where this was explored before the big vendors became players. The issue we were studying was abuse of credentials in-person - many bars will capture people’s identity information when validating IDs.
The ability to provide only the attribute securely is awesome, but of course the systematic abuse of this technology by the reactionaries among us will drive adoption.
Yes, they are! but also because the law sets the standard, it can also provide a new one. For example:
a) you are still legally required to age verify online alcohol purchases but
b) it’s illegal to use information collected for that purpose for other purposes and
c) Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents
Maybe something around only collecting minimal data, too.
Some of the first eager customers are banks with onerous KYC requirements – they want one click account creation! Good luck changing financial disclosure laws, though, my bank knows quite a bit about me.
> but also because the law sets the standard, it can also provide a new one.
If the people writing the law cared about privacy they wouldn't have passed that one, and anybody who does would be repealing it rather than trying to find the best shade of lipstick for the pig.
> Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents
This is the part you don't need a law in order to do because the user can choose their user agent. Or if they can't, you should stop talking about any of this and go fix your antitrust problem.
> you are still legally required to age verify online alcohol purchases but
By conceding this you've already lost, because:
> it’s illegal to use information collected for that purpose for other purposes
This is the part which is hopeless. If they have the information, you're already screwed, because once they have it it's almost impossible for you or the government to know what they're doing with it, which makes those laws nearly impossible to enforce. And on top of that, a large part of the problem is what criminals or governments do once there is a legally-mandated database of all of that stuff, and those entities aren't constrained by laws.
Which is why anybody who really cares about this knows that the only solution is to not have the law requires that data to be collected.
> Good luck changing financial disclosure laws, though
"Slippery slope is a fallacy", they said. "It's just one inch", they said.
I figured I’d get this response, but:
I don’t see my primary care doctor selling my health data, due in part to data privacy laws like HIPAA. Consumer companies take COPPA seriously.
You absolutely cannot control what companies do with data, so you want to prevent its collection in the first place – but you can penalize them when they do something wrong, which does influence their beyavior. The jury is still out on the effectiveness of the GDPR, but to say it had no effect would be an odd claim.
> I don’t see my primary care doctor selling my health data
Without overstretching the metaphor, it is quite revealing - you wouldn't see your primary care doctor selling that information whether they are or aren't. You don't have an effective way of monitoring the situation. Nobody outside the hypothetical transaction does.
It is common for that sort of situation to go bad if the economics of selling the data make sense despite the risk of getting caught.
Yeah, that totally makes sense!
It is revealing: I went to same PCP for the first 18 years of my life and he was incredible as a doctor. He ran his own practice. He was also a great IT admin: he managed his own records, paid to digitize all of them including mine. If he betrayed that trust I’d be sad.
But I hear you. A product just needs to come along that provides some benefit, or the practice could be acquired, etc
Every doctor I've been to makes me sign a paper that says I acknowledge all my data will be shared with all of their partners.
That doesn't mean any of those other companies are buying or selling that data.
The healthcare provider uses an EHR. They might have some managed service provider managing their IT assets and their EHR deployment. Two companies they have BAAs with. That EHR company could be cloud hosted, another BAA. They probably rely on other tools and contractors which might have BAAs. Later on when they go to bill they exchange that billing data through billing analysis tools (another BAA) and then submit to a clearing house (another BAA). All of those companies probably have companies they work with that potentially need BAAs as well, if they work directly with that PHI data in the role of working on behalf of that healthcare provider.
One trip to the doctor could potentially involve dozens of companies you've never heard of that might have a business use case to handle your healthcare data in some way or fashion and none of them actually sold that data or mishandled it under HIPAA.
> I don’t see my primary care doctor selling my health data, due in part to data privacy laws like HIPAA.
I'm glad I didn't get a diagnosis and treatment for ADHD, ADD, or autism.
The enemy is also government, especially with RFK's anti-autism trend, along with trawling through all medical records with those diagnoses.
> I don’t see my primary care doctor selling my health data, due in part to data privacy laws like HIPAA. Consumer companies take COPPA seriously.
Insurance companies are laughing all the way to the bank.
You can only punish them if you find out about it.
I'm not going to do the legwork for you, but you should be looking around for the way Google is transferring the medical information on 50 million Americans as part of Project Nightingale a few years back, and you should be looking very seriously at medical sites that use Google Analytics in direct violation of HIPAA. The situation here is very much like the situation with the government collecting detailed profiles on every citizen and knowing their location in real time: they're not supposed to be doing it, but the reality is they can and they do.
Snowden's leaks were another great example about how the law doesn't actually matter, if you can't see whether or not it's being enforced.
My point here is if you're counting on the system to protect you, you're going to be disappointed.
Recent example was that I was supposed to give up my ID because I lost my 2FA for a particular site and I refused because I didn't believe they would delete my ID. My friends said that I was paranoid.
https://www.404media.co/id-verification-service-for-tiktok-u...
>I don’t see my primary care doctor selling my health data, due in part to data privacy laws like HIPAA.
Oh, you sweet summer child. Bless your little heart. You're right. Doctors don't. Insurance companies do! And that data is passed around like hotcakes to make actuarial datasets which basically have the effect of ensuring premium go up! Several states, in fact, have done everything they can lobbying wise to make sure it remains okay to trade in your personal health data! Also, from personal experience at a PBM, it is at least an offering to get covered populational reports on spend done on behalf of your covered group, meaning employers are given a view of the overall health of their workforce and what that translates to in dollars out the door on their behalf. Information that, of course, would never be used to do strategic layoffs or cross correlation with time taken off to further optimize for cost reduction right?
(Note: if I've had this idea, and rejected it on moral/ethical/legal grounds, there are absolutely people who have had it and hasn't done so).
Are you arguing that we should not regulate porn, alcohol, and cigarettes? Or that we shouldn’t have digital ways to do the regulating we’ve been doing for decades?
If the discussion was a question of whether to regulate or not, I’d see more where you’re coming from. But the discussion is about how to effectively respond to the enforcement of existing laws now against websites. Society has grown up and we’re not comfortable giving the internet a pass because digital identity is hard.
> Are you arguing that we should not regulate porn, alcohol, and cigarettes?
Most of the important regulations around these things have nothing to do with the topic at hand. Requiring bourbon not to contain methanol and adult performers to be tested for STDs aren't related to the internet.
And once we're talking about the internet, those things are in a different category because alcohol and cigarettes are physical objects. You can't download vodka from Russia.
Whereas if you want to stop kids from downloading porn from other parts of the world, the police state that would require is the thing wars have been fought against and righteously so. Not because of the porn but because of what it would take to actually make those laws effective, and what it would be used for as soon as it's in place.
But ineffective laws aren't worth having, because they're all costs with no benefits, not least because then people will keep trying to make them effective and the only means to do that is the police state.
> Society has grown up and we’re not comfortable giving the internet a pass because digital identity is hard.
I feel like this kind of language is designed to make people angry. As if you're not an adult if you can look at a trade off against privacy and free speech and say "that's not worth having" instead of implementing every creeping authoritarian proposal specifically because the last one didn't solve the problem.
You’re missing the point entirely. I’m talking about age requirements to purchase alcohol and cigarettes and view porn. There is not a world where we decide to restrict purchase by age in meatspace but throw up our hands and say “whelp we just can’t have digital ID presentation that would ruin society I guess we should give up on digital age verification and just let kids do whatever”. Whether the restrictions are justified or not or stupid or not, we’ve decided they should exist (and there are much more “legitimate” use cases for ID verification that happen entirely online with no meatspace concerns like banking and underwriting etc. so it’s somewhat a straw man to get hung up on porn). We’re not going to not apply our laws to the new technology that emerges as time progresses…
> There is not a world where we decide to restrict purchase by age in meatspace but throw up our hands and say “whelp we just can’t have digital ID presentation that would ruin society I guess we should give up on digital age verification and just let kids do whatever”
We've been living in exactly that world for decades without issue.
It makes perfect sense for meat space to be treated differently from the internet. A downloaded picture of a cigarette can't be smoked. The only thing that can happen on the internet is the exchange of data, and an ID requirement for that is absurd.
> there are much more “legitimate” use cases for ID verification that happen entirely online with no meatspace concerns like banking and underwriting etc. so it’s somewhat a straw man to get hung up on porn
Amazing how those use cases have survived for these decades without such a law. If I don't need to send a copy of my ID every time I sign into my bank account, what possible argument could be made for the requirement I do so to watch porn?
> Whether the restrictions are justified or not or stupid or not, we’ve decided they should exist
No, we have not collectively decided they should exist. Plenty of laws exist which are unpopular either because of the goal or the execution. Even if a law has majority support, that doesn't mean the minority can't argue against keeping or expanding it. A restriction being unjustified or stupid is a very good argument for not doing additional unjustified or stupid things to enforce that law. It's rather silly that there is a federal law forbidding leaving the country with more than $25 in nickels but it's on the books. Ensuring this law is thoroughly enforced with universal mandatory cavity searches looking for rolls of nickels would be indefensible.
Then change the law. I’d probably vote with you. That’s besides the point.
The hacked up solutions for the things existing “perfectly fine” over the last few decades are complete crap. Anybody who’s ever had to take photos of their ID then a confirmation selfie knows this. Anybody who’s had to apply for a loan or open a bank account online knows this. We have wonderfully secure cryptography and you’re arguing we should keep using plastic cards that you can’t even sha256sum.
> There is not a world where we decide to restrict purchase by age in meatspace but throw up our hands and say “whelp we just can’t have digital ID presentation that would ruin society I guess we should give up on digital age verification and just let kids do whatever”.
Yes there is and we all grew up in that world.
And after you take the rose tinted glasses off, it was full of spam and scams and abuse and all the other low reputation poor security crap that happens when anybody can be anybody all the time. And if that world was good/sustainable then nobody would be working to make digital identity possible, would they? We grew up in it, now it seems we’re work working to iron out the kinks.
Not everything needs or should have strong ID. But no I don’t want my children stumbling into a porn site because they got click jacked by unscrupulous advertisements they never consented to being solicited with. I don’t want them learning about the world that way. A simple age check without revealing any personal info supported by the digital credential standards being discussed here would absolutely be an improvement.
Having my age checked at the time of purchase for alcohol rather than having to present my ID to the delivery person would also be an improvement.
>Society has grown up and we’re not comfortable giving the internet a pass because digital identity is hard.
I'm not comfortable giving society digital identity, because being a human and not abusing the primitive is even harder still. And we can't take it back once we've built it. It's just there for every wannabe despot to start building systems of oppression with. And there's an awful lot of them running around with the "best of intentions" to line the way to hell.
The problem is using physical identity online sucks. Well intentioned and honest people want to fix that issue. I have flown entirely with a mobile drivers license without pulling out a physical ID for the last few years. It’s objectively better and it’s already here. It’s heaven. You can’t really be arguing that when some service needs your ID that uploading photos of it is better from any angle. There’s not a one.
I took their post to mean the law steers implementations down a path which is not privacy- preserving.
Showing your driver's license to the store clerk didn't used to mean the store kept a copy.
> The spec is being implemented by Apple, who is sensitive to privacy issues.
I generally agree with your points, but I wouldn't trust Apple, or any publicly traded company, to have any kind of ethics. Just because their incentive to make as much profit as possible, leads to them trying to differentiate themselves from other companies, and thus they choose to temporarily align with privacy concerns doesn't mean they will not compromise on them, if they see better profits elsewhere.
I rather have privacy enforcing regulations like the GDPR or policies that go even further, than relying on publicly traded companies to protect their users.
Those $99 fake driver's license sites are going to make a killing
For what it’s worth these mDL providers are the people already contracted to provide the services for the government to manage the IDs and the IT system for the DMV. They were part of the ISO standardization body for mDL. Not sure California’s choice pressured Apple so much as it being an international standard that had support from the governing bodies in Europe, UK, North America and Japan (met all of them there).
Apple wasn’t there when I was and even broader Google joined about 6 months after I left Google in 2015 (I was just proactive about seeing the standard coming) but the big players hopped on board later in the process.
We were all also acutely aware of the privacy implications and making sure the bodies would sign records of >18, >21 to avoid having to share too much info (pre ZKproofs being more widely accepted recognized).
> Marcos Caceres (Apple Inc.) > Tim Cappalli (Okta) > Mohamed Amir Yosef (Google Inc.)
Don't forget: these are the upstanding members of society who brought the dystopia to you.
Personally i'd be much more excited about something like https://zkpassport.id/
The slippery slope from here to banning under 18s looking at websites discussing suicidal thoughts, transgender issues, homosexually and onto anything some group of middle age mothers decide isn't appropriate seems dangerously anti-fallacitical.
While I completely understand the slippery slope concept, we ban all kinds of things for under 18s based on morals. Why couldn't these be any different? How else does a society decide as a whole what they are for or against. Obviously, there should be limits.
The question is always “whose morals”. I think society as a whole is in agreement that minors are better off without access to pornography, for example. But the arrangement OP is outlining is one where a minority are able to force their morality on a broader population that doesn’t agree with it.
> society as a whole is in agreement that minors are better off without access to pornography
Once a significant part of said society can't (or won't) differentiate sexual education and intimacy from pornography, I don't think your statement holds true anymore.
You might be wrong there. While the majority does not oppose homosexual relationships they are against affirmative transgender treatments for minors.
> transgender treatments
The grandparent post didn't say "transgender treatments" they said "transgender issues."
Do you believe that the mere concept of questioning your gender identity or expression is something that should be kept from the minds of minors?
This isn't an "I believe..." / "Do you believe..." kind of issue though. This is "Will the American State and Federal government impose an increasingly stringent moral compass on the wider internet, over time"
Which... the VISA-Mastercard duopoly, backed by American soft power and with an American moral compass, already rather proves that point for anyone that's ever tried to pay for erotica outside the mainstream
> This isn't an "I believe..." / "Do you believe..." kind of issue though.
I asked because I wanted to get a sense on if he conflating the two by accident, or if it was an attempt to steer the conversation away from free speech concerns.
Let’s be clear about what you mean when you say “outside the mainstream”, because that innocuous turn of phrase is doing a lot of work to cover what you’re really saying.
Visa and MasterCard disallow content depicting CSA, rape, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, scatological erotica, torture, extreme sexual violence, and revenge porn.
Equivocating child sexual abuse with the dude drawing consentual fan-fic or furry porn feels disingenuous at best, and more like bad faith though.
Because you're not wrong, the mainstream is fairly narrow, but to say the credit card duopoly excludes only the most heinous and vile imagery that can only barely be covered under "artistic expression" isn't exactly an entirely accurate depiction of reality.
I believe that happens for other reasons though. No law is telling Visa/Mastercard to prohibit payments to furry artists. They have some risk model that says it’s not good business and additionally pressure from advertising partners to not have their logo near that stuff.
> The grandparent post didn't say "transgender treatments" they said "transgender issues."
You don't think that transgender treatments is a transgender issue? If you think it is then my response is perfectly on-topic.
> Do you believe that the mere concept of questioning your gender identity or expression is something that should be kept from the minds of minors?
Depending on your jurisdiction, there are messages you can't target to kids. Why should there be a special exemption for this?
Besides, my belief on this is irrelevant; the only transgender issue that has gotten pushback en-masse from the clear majority of people world wide has been transgender treatments on minors.
IOW, this (treatment for persons unable to give informed consent) is a very unpopular position.
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I used to feel the same way about prisoners, but there are plenty of arguments that they’re not slaves. The one that convinced me was that you can’t buy a prisoner, for example. Ditto for children (most of the time).
The trouble about laws involving children is that you’re up against every parent who has a child. By default they’ll err on protection, because our biology says that’s the safest thing to do. But as you say, that’s not always the best approach.
Male circumcision is an interesting one. The correct thing to do isn’t to say "here’s an example of something screwed up" as a way to justify something else; instead, ban the screwed up thing.
Personally, I hope it’ll be banned one day. I once asked my dad whether I was circumcised. He laughed and said haven’t you looked? I still have no idea whether I am. Now I’d rather not know.
> The one that convinced me was that you can’t buy a prisoner, for example
So slavery has taken MANY forms throughout history - the form most people are familiar with is american chattel slavery “a form of slavery where individuals are treated as personal property and can be bought, sold, or owned indefinitely”. There are lots of other forms of slavery many that don’t including purchasing humans, and the US prison labour system is slavery beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Why beyond the shadow of a doubt? Because the 13th amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
Also, since the US prison system allows prison labour to be sold to private corporations, you can actually buy a prisoner’s forced labour.
13th amendment explicitly permits slavery as a punishment for a crime. And, you can definitely buy time manufacturing with prison labor.
Now, you're probably confusing chattel slavery as the only form of slavery, of which you buy and sell humans as property. There are other types, now predominantly slavery by the state (as punishment of a crime).
As for children, it definitely looks like a slave-owner type arrangement.
If you decide you want to know I can provide a description to help you figure it out.
If you REALLY don't want to know, it might be best to remove this comment, in case somebody decides to grief you.
Chattel slavery is only one kind of slavery and you can certainly buy slave/prison labor.
I have absolutely no clue about circumcision in the bible. But if it's in there WHY would it be, there's probably a reason that they figured out overtime and the benefits. There is an abundance of literature and well formed research to indicate the benefits of circumcision. It's not at all unlikely that people 1000s of years ago figured that out too, especially during a time when there were far fewer hygiene options.
The most impactful benefit of circumcision is the lower cervical cancer incidence. As evidenced by the lower rates in the US despite the much poorer healthcare than in European countries, particularly the Nordics that choose not to embrace science and advocate for circumcision.
Lobotomies were also once considered solid science, but our views change over time. That people did it millennia ago isn’t really a persuasive point.
Would you mind citing some of the research supporting that it’s a good idea to take a knife to a baby’s penis? (Sometimes it feels like the word "circumcision" is a nice way to sidestep the implications.)
It seems strange to blame infant penises for higher cancer rates, but if there’s science to support the claim, it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
On the other hand, perhaps a higher cancer rate would be worth it. The question is, how much higher?
> Would you mind citing some of the research supporting that it’s a good idea to take a knife to a baby’s penis?
First,
> In medicine, an indication is a valid reason to use a certain test, medication, procedure, or surgery.
From https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2128632/ ,
> What are the absolute medical indications for circumcision?
> Medical indications […] occur in 1.5% and 1% of boys respectively.
That is, the overwhelming majority (>98%) of circumcisions in the US are not done for medical reasons. As the article states,
> Nearly all circumcisions are carried out for cultural or religious reasons.
Lastly, this:
> The most impactful benefit of circumcision is the lower cervical cancer incidence.
Is an illogical argument for circumcision as it is being discussed here, at birth.
> It seems strange to blame infant penises for higher cancer rates, but if there’s science to support the claim, it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
… the claim is absurd. There's no science to support it.
The argument as raised above stands: why is circumcision — done at birth and without the consent of the patient — permissible, but puberty blockers — done far closer to adulthood and with the consent of the patient — are impermissible?
>The argument as raised above stands: why is circumcision — done at birth and without the consent of the patient — permissible,
Because we make a lot of medical decisions for children and this one is extremely minor with wide raining results.
The same paper you linked showed multiple pathologies that are significantly reduced by circumcision including penile cancer and HIV. That paper also cuts off at 1999. More recent studies show even greater effects.
> the claim is absurd. There's no science to support it.
No it's not, compare the rate of cervical cancer in countries with and without circumcision. It's considerably higher in countries where the majority of males are uncircumcised, even when those countries have higher vaccination rates and better overall health care.
If that is the reasoning behind allowing infant circumcision, then there should be no argument against puberty blockers. It is proven to be beneficial to a person's quality of life if they suffer from gender dysphoria.
I'm not sure what my personal opinion is on the topic, since I'm principally against infant circumcision. But I have less problems with puberty blockers, since it can still be reversed once a person is old enough to give consent.
Not sure about them, but for me, that’s correct. Solid research should be the foundation we make decisions on.
I used to have a problem with that idea too, until someone pointed out that puberty is an irreversible process with major consequences. The fact that everyone goes through it is a bit irrelevant; if it was happening to someone over 18, puberty blockers wouldn’t even be controversial.
As a parent, what to do? I look at my 2yo daughter and wonder if I’ll have to support her in a decision like that one day, or go against her wishes just because she’s 11. If there’s research indicating that delaying puberty doesn’t have major long term harm, then I’m more likely to endorse puberty blockers.
I made an off hand comment here that has got a lot of great response while I slept. I do wonder though if I'd have mentioned a handful of other issues whether the trans one would still have been the one to stir most controversy.
The fact is trans people are a tiny minority who are abused for political gain. I don't have hard numbers but it's probably not an exaggeration to say that to grant or withhold puberty blockers is probably no more common than a smorgasbord of other agonising medical decisions you may have to make.
Personally I don't like the idea of puberty blockers but if my 7 year old decided tomorrow that she was a boy, and lived that as authentically as they were able for years, then I think long and hard about it.
It is impossible to pause puberty or any other biological process. You cannot delay and restart something that is biologically time-bound. By giving a child puberty blockers you permanently prevent them from becoming an adult. They will never develop any of the features required for having children, they will never experience the brain developments that help with reasoning and empathy.
There are no studies on this Bec doing such studies is considered grossly unethical and evil, same as studying brain lobotomies in infants. As such we have no science on this, there are just people who have decided one thing and are performing live experiments without any controls. However, it should be noted that until very recently there was no significant incidence of unexplained child suicide, there was no significant incidence of unexplained teenage suicide, nor was there a significant incidence of unexplained young adult suicide. This is 100% social contagion, exacerbated by evil greedy pharmaceutical orgs who have latched on to small childhood insecurities and used them to build a multi-billion dollar industry mutilating and disfiguring healthy people.
Puberty blockers have been used on children to manage early puberty. The meds don't know if you're trans or not, so it's only reasonable to assume giving them to trans kids would have similar outcomes.
> If that is the reasoning behind allowing infant circumcision, then there should be no argument against puberty blockers.
That sword cuts both ways: if the reasoning for banning infant male circumcision is "they can always do it as an adult", then that's a perfectly good reason for doing it with puberty blockers too.
I've always been against infant circumcision. Why would I extend that exception to be broader? I'd rather narrow the number of things we can do to children, not expand them.
> "they can always do it as an adult", then that's a perfectly good reason for doing it with puberty blockers too.
You can't block puberty as an adult. Most people are already past puberty once they turn 18.
> You can't block puberty as an adult. Most people are already past puberty once they turn 18.
"You can always transition as an adult" is that other edge, not "you can always block puberty as an adult".
The outcome of transitioning after puberty versus before is meaningfully different. Not to mention the mental distress of going through puberty with gender dysphoria.
> The most impactful benefit of circumcision is the lower cervical cancer incidence. As evidenced by the lower rates in the US despite the much poorer healthcare than in European countries, particularly the Nordics that choose not to embrace science and advocate for circumcision.
Interesting, I would like to see that evidence. Specially when compared with the vaccination against HPV. Because, as far as I'm aware, that's by far the best way to prevent cervical cancer.
The lower HPV incidence rate is due to the fact that the skin on a circumcised penis is thickened due to the constant abrasion. Basically your penis gets covered with a callus. This thicker skin provides an improved barrier compared to the thin and moist skin inside an intact foreskin. But a thicker skin merely lowers the HPV infection rate, as evidenced by plantar warts on people's feet, which are also caused by HPV.
Luckily, as you've said, we already have HPV vaccines, so maybe it's time to stop cutting off pieces from little boys' penises?
That's not really accurate, the foreskin is an ideal area for pathogen development. Almost all STDS are reduced in circumcised populations as well as UTI.
If you want to cut off your foreskin, do it as an adult. Some other procedures to consider for additional health benefits:
- You can also decide to cauterize the nailbeds on your toes to get lifelong protection against ingrown toenails.
- You can preemptively put metal crowns over all your teeth to protect them from tooth decay - metals are stronger than enamel!
- You can also remove all your body hair with laser treatments, to get protection from ingrown hairs - those can get badly infected!
- You can also tattoo your blood type on your chest, like they did in the SS, to save precious time in case you need blood transfusion while unconscious.
You can do all of these things to yourself, as an adult with informed consent. But don't do it to infants.
Should we wait on vaccines too?
> Infant circumcision is proof people don't actually give a fuck about informed consent. You can perform genital alteration surgery on all the baby boys you want and nobody bats an eye.
Right, and my argument is "We should stop things like that" while your argument is "we should do more things like that".
Which sounds more reasonable to you?
> Depending on your jurisdiction, there are messages you can't target to kids. Why should there be a special exemption for this?
Because the idea that the only acceptable gender norms a kid is allowed to be exposed to and express is the one tied to their genes is frankly a ridiculous concept.
There's nothing wrong with boys wearing dresses and playing with dolls. If you don't believe that harmless message should reach the ears of kids, then why? What is in that sort of message that you're afraid of?
> There's nothing wrong with boys wearing dresses and playing with dolls. If you don't believe that harmless message should reach the ears of kids, then why?
I fully agree there's nothing wrong with boys wearing dresses and playing with dolls
I think the idea that a boy wearing dresses and playing with dolls must automatically be trans is actually very harmful and I do oppose that message reaching anyone
“There’s nothing wrong with boys wearing dresses and playing with dolls” is true, but it’s a very dishonest summary of what the transgender movement advocates for.
A more honest example would be something like “children with a male anatomy might actually be girls, depending not on physical but rather on psychological characteristics (i.e. ‘gender identity’)”. That’s a completely different claim, and one that fewer people would agree with, so your post is more or less a motte and bailey.
My overarching question - the one that started this comment chain - explicitly mentioned gender expression and gender identity. It has been brought up by me several other times in this comment thread. I am not hiding what this discussion is ultimately about.
> What is in that sort of message that you're afraid of?
Your line questioning is sort of revealing that this only points you are wishing to score. I have, after all, not taken a position on targeted messages at children (I only pointed out that there are still restrictions on messages targeted to children).
I have already clarified that the specific contentious "transgender issue" is "transgender treatment", and that the clear majority of people all over the world are opposed to that specific "transgender issue".
I have not taken any position on whether or not children should be targeted with messages across the spectrum, ranging from the extreme on one end "It's okay for boys to play with dolls", to the extreme on the other "You will be happier after castration".
The reason I have not taken any position on messages is because of the many times proponents use the former as examples of what the rules should allow while ignoring that the rule they are championing also allows the latter message.
My position on the messages that children are to hear will always depend on the specific message. This is because children (even some young adults to, TBH) are impressionable!
If I had adopted your method of arguing for/against a point, I would have asked "Why are you so afraid of having your access to children cut off?" but I did not. Since you appear to be arguing your point in bad faith, I'm just going to go ahead and ask it.
If you had any faith that your message was the correct one you wouldn't be on the internet arguing for access to other people's children.
Why are you so afraid of having the easily impressionable in society prevented from seeing your message? Are you really afraid that if you don't get to imprint them with your message at the correct age they might never buy it as an adult?
Since you are throwing around accusations of bad faith and grooming, I do not believe that this conversation is of any further productive use.
Instead, I only offer a gentile reminder of the Hacker News guidelines, along with a genuine wish that you are having a fulfilling day. :)
>I have not taken any position on whether or not children should be targeted with messages across the spectrum, ranging from the extreme on one end "It's okay for boys to play with dolls", to the extreme on the other "You will be happier after castration".
Mere gender non-conformity isn't enough for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, despite what you're claiming. These are the DSM criteria for diagnosis of gender dysphoria in children:
---
A. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least 6 months’ duration, as manifested by at least six of the following (one of which must be Criterion A1):
1. A strong desire to be of the other gender or an insistence that one is the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).
2. In boys (assigned gender), a strong preference for cross-dressing or simulating female attire; or in girls (assigned gender), a strong preference for wearing only typical masculine clothing and a strong resistance to the wearing of typical feminine clothing.
3. A strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasy play.
4. A strong preference for the toys, games, or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender.
5. A strong preference for playmates of the other gender.
6. In boys (assigned gender), a strong rejection of typically masculine toys, games, and activities and a strong avoidance of rough-and-tumble play; or in girls (assigned gender), a strong rejection of typically feminine toys, games, and activities.
7. A strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy.
8. A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics that match one’s experienced gender.
B. The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, school, or other important areas of functioning.
---
> If you had any faith that your message was the correct one you wouldn't be on the internet arguing for access to other people's children.
Classy as ever implying that trans people are grooming children to be trans.
It seems like the opposite happens to me: parents with attitudes like yours will attempt to keep the existence of trans people secret in an attempt to groom their child to be cis, but if their child is gender dysphoric, it's not going to work and they're just going to suffer worse dysphoria-induced distress during puberty and transition as adults.
So majority chooses what healthcare options are available?
> So majority chooses what healthcare options are available?
You sound surprised, so maybe you really don't know this: this state of affairs is how it's always been, and is likely to continue well into the future.
The government regulates all medicines, all medical procedures, and all medical practices.
It's literally one of the many jobs of government.
But what if they ban something like robbery? Then the robbers won’t be able to rob things, thus depriving them of their right to choose robbery.
Government run did not always mean majority ruled. Many times rights of the minority have been ruled to be important, as in cases like abortion. In today’s US, we’re trending toward enforcing minority opinions about e.g. vaccines.
> Government run did not always mean majority ruled.
Right.
> Many times rights of the minority have been ruled to be important, as in cases like abortion.
Correct, but it was with the agreement of the majority of voters! IOW, the majority opinion still prevailed.
We are not talking about tyranny of the minority by the majority; your example is literally the majority agreeing that those specific minorities rights be granted to them.
TBH, the opposition that we are seeing is opposition to medical intervention on minors who by definition alone cannot give informed consent.
Stop fighting that battle and I guarantee that this entire "issue" turns into a nothing-burger.
There is no reason to argue for medical interventions on someone who is unable to consent.
Doctors intervene to operate on minors all the time. Their guardian and doctors can decide to do essentially anything. If the doctor and guardian feel that the blockers, while harmful, are outweighed by the risk of self harm even with therapy and other medication, then let the doctor do the doctoring, not the politicians. There are almost twice as many intersex people who literally have at least partial sets of both reproductive organs as there are people who identify as trans. Doctors have to make hard calls without knowing the future on a regular basis. They can handle this too.
> Doctors intervene to operate on minors all the time.
On objective metrics, certainly. Never on subjective metrics.
Kid got a broken leg? Sure, doctors can intervene, often without even parental involvement (Emergencies, for example).
Kid feels like they have a broken leg? The doctor that cuts up that kid without doing any scans and working simply off the kid's self-reported feelings is going to be out of practice very very quickly.
Hell, doctors won't even prescribe antibiotics based off a kid's self-reported feelings; they'll confirm with a number of objective metrics (presence/absence of mucous in mouth/lungs, body temperature, pulse, etc).
So, no, we don't allow doctors to perform any procedures on children with only self-reported feelings as "evidence"[1].
[1] With the exception being male genital mutilation at birth, which is something I've always been vocally against.
I should not have said operate, you are correct. The only other incidence I could find is appendectomy, because there is a clock ticking, they sometimes operate without scans. Though sometimes tonsillectomy onvoarental reports of snoring. When I was writing I was thinking about antidepressants or stimulants for adhd which are generally given based on subjective self reported evidence. They also have permanent side effects and I think we probably over proscribe them. But not giving them can lead to self harm or learning deficits which are also permanent. This seems in the same category. I'm not sure how to correctly weigh those risks, glad I'm not a pediatrician. Also about 0.02% of babies have surgery based on subjective criteria about which biological gender they are physically closest to. That is rare enough that most of us won't know such a person, and private enough that most pf us wouldn't know if we did. Statistically only about 54k in the US. But as many as 1.7% or 5M with objective intersex characteristics. Enough most of us probably know someone who is not unambiguously male or female from a biological perspective, whether we know it or not.
There’s plenty of reason to argue for parents’ rights to make difficult ethical calls on behalf of their children. This happens all of the time. The only counter-argument is denying the harm that going through puberty as the wrong gender causes. Suicide rates support the reality. “Stop fighting against trans suicide” is disingenuous.
I'm going to assume you're asking in good faith, and the short answer is yes — this is already happening!
Before engaging in what could be a huge discussion here, I suggest you do some quick searching about legal risks of performing life-saving abortion procedures, gender-affirming care for prison inmates, and workplaces choosing whether the health insurance they provide employees covers gender-affirming care as starting points to learn about the sad state of affairs.
Yes, but since when do we allow the majority to dictate what healthcare options are available?
The mode for treating trans kids is puberty blockers until they’re 18 and then they can choose their own treatment - but that pathway is being blocked by more and more laws and fear mongering about kids being transitioned against their will
"Transitioned against their will" is a very crude way of articulating the tradeoffs of prescribing puberty blockers. The core issue at hand is that absent puberty blockers, somewhere between 60-80% do not persist with a cross-sex gender identity after going through their natal puberty. Psychologists attempted to predict which patients would persist in a cross sex gender identity and which would not, but they were never able to do so.
When patients are given puberty blockers, desistence rates are miniscule, in the single digits. Proponents of hormonal intervention insist that this is proof that doctors are selecting kids that would persist in a cross sex gender absent blockers. But that's hard to reconcile with psychologists previous failures to predict persistence. While they're billed as giving "time to think", it's pretty much impossible to deny that blockers are causing patients who would have desisted in their cross sex gender identity if they went through their natal puberty.
It's not just conservative American States that are changing course on blockers for children: Finland, Sweden, the UK, Italy, Denmark, and Norway have all stopped prescription of blockers in children. Plenty of other countries never allowed it in the first place.
The effects of puberty prevent people who are trans from living as their gender identities. Why bother when you'll need $400k in surgery post-puberty just for a chance to maybe look your gender?
If you ask trans people, "it's too late to live as my gender" is a common sentiment. You even see it in the gay community, where gay/bi people who come to acceptance of their sexualities late in life, feel like it's "too late" to live with that identity, and choose to continue to live and identify as straight people.
Hence the option for puberty blockers.
Turns out trans people will opt to go through the puberty that matches their gender if the opportunity arises, just as more people come out gay/bi/etc at an earlier age now that the opportunity arose.
People can, and do, transition as adults. Natal puberty clearly does not prevent all people from transitioning. Effectively 100% of trans people prior to about 2010 transitioned as adults.
Same thing with gay people, as per your example. I'm sure some do remain closeted their entire lives. But plenty of them come out as gay later in life.
> Same thing with gay people, as per your example. I'm sure some do remain closeted their entire lives. But plenty of them come out as gay later in life.
Plenty do, but the ones that don't give credence to the idea that forced closeting as a teenager makes it harder to follow your heart later. And that's in a situation where it doesn't get more difficult to come out later (if you're not married). Transitioning pre- and post- puberty is very different with current medical technology, so a lot more people will get "stuck".
As per the linked study, the desisters tend to no longer experience gender dysphoria. It's not just that they don't transition later in life. The scenario you're describing - people struggling with gender dysphoria but reluctant to transition on account of having undergone natal puberty - does not describe the bulk of the sample.
I don;t see a linked study...
In the child comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44546443
I never said that they don't, just that the opportunities to do so diminish post-puberty and with age, and many people give up on the dream of being themselves.
> But plenty of them come out as gay later in life.
Some do, but statistics show that the majority don't. At some point it stops making sense to identify as a gay/bi person if you've been married for 20 years and have no intention of leaving. That ship has sailed, so to speak. The same thing happens with trans people for very practical and biological reasons post-puberty.
The majority of patients stop experiencing gender dysphoria. The analogy to a married person "stuck in the closet" is not correct: in that scenario this person is still same-sex attracted but suppresses that desire. In the case of ~80% of gender dysphoric youth, they stop desiring to be the cross-sex gender altogether. They are not refraining from transition on account of doubting their ability to pass after having gone through natal puberty.
> Some do, but statistics show that the majority don't.
Well, yeah. That's because it literally was a passing phase that the child experienced. That's why there's so many studies (some of them linked in this thread) showing that if you simply defer the decision until the minor is a major , the majority of gender dysphoria desists.
IOW, once the child has actually matured a little, their identity confusion goes away.
Deferring is the path of least harm; is it any wonder then that most of the people in the world, including highly secular countries, go that route?
The statistics I am talking about are the rates of gay/bi identification by generation.
There's a reason there's nearly 10x as many gay identifying people in recent generations compared to past, and you can't generalize it as being a "phase". The true rates are likely the same, but people who identify that way dip off as you go back generations.
You notice the same pattern with left-handedness and those who identify as left-handed over time.
About 3% of people 50-65 identify as gay. 4% of 18-29 year old identify as gay. 1% of 65+ identify as gay. At most, the rate increased 4x over the span of half a century: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/23/5-key-fin...
Left handedness increased from about 5% to 12% over the span of more than 60 years: https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/history-of-left-handedness
By comparison rates of transgender identification among minors has increased by a factor of a hundred over the span of just 10 years: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rates-of-newly-recorded-...
We're talking about an increases that are multiple orders of magnitude greater, over a fraction of the time span.
> "Transitioned against their will" is a very crude way of articulating the tradeoffs of prescribing puberty blockers.
That is an extremely generous interpretation. I think you're giving way too much credit to the average person that uses that argument.
Also I really have to wonder how much of that desistance is giving up versus actually being satisfied.
What do you mean by "giving up"? These patients have the opportunity to transition later in life. Patients were followed up with for 10+ years, well past puberty and into adulthood. The minority that persisted transitioned as adults.
The initial puberty is never going to be undone. If they'd rather live with it now that it happened, then it's great that they're probably not undergoing heavy dysphoria but that doesn't mean it's zero or that this was the best outcome.
> The initial puberty is never going to be undone. If they'd rather live with it now that it happened, then it's great that they're probably not undergoing heavy dysphoria but that doesn't mean it's zero or that this was the best outcome.
Well there was never going to be a perfect solution, right? So a solution that results in the most number of satisfied adults is an okay goal.
Given the disparity in life outcomes between trans people and cis people, the idea that the desisters would have been better off transitioning is quite the bold speculation.
Seems like you’re saying “society treats trans people badly, so we should prevent people from transitioning”
Coulda said the same about homosexuality ~30 years ago. It’s a bad reason then, it’s a bad reason now.
Again, these people are not prevented from transitioning. A minority, about 20%, do transition as adults. The rest no longer harbor desire to live as a different gender.
People have explained to you previously why this claim is false, yet you keep repeating it over and over. You are counting kids with GNC behavior who never talked about transitioning themselves stopping said GNC behavior. You are also counting kids who end up repressing (some of which end up transitioning with worse outcomes years down the line). You already know this.
Neither of the two things you asserted are true.
> You are counting kids with GNC behavior who never talked about transitioning themselves stopping said GNC behavior.
These children met the criteria for GID in the contemporary iteration of the DSM. The author of the study I linked would go on to write the criteria for gender dysphoria in the DSM-V. The idea that we'd see a substantially different rate of desistence if the DSM-V was used is not likely: the author of the study has stated that most of the children would have met the criteria for gender dysphoria under the DSM-V.
> You are also counting kids who end up repressing (some of which end up transitioning with worse outcomes years down the line)
The study followed up with patients for an average of over 10 years. Do you have any actual evidence that a significant portion of desisters in this study transitioned later in life? Or are you just stating this without evidence?
People have not offered a good explanation why these rates of desistence are false. They either insist that the criteria used was wrong, or baselessly claim that desisters are repressing a desire to transition.
We have been saying that the DSM is a joke for years, and that you can't diagnose someone of being trans just by ticking boxes, the only way to go about it is self identification. So yeah sure, they used the DSM to diagnose and then perform conversion therapy on GNC children who never necessarily claimed to be trans, and from that they inferred that most trans kids end up "becoming cis".
> Do you have any actual evidence that a significant portion of desisters in this study transitioned later in life?
I don't have enough funds to perform such a research, maybe there exists such a paper but I have not looked for it. In general trans topics are woefully underfunded. But I know enough people that ended up desisting either due to conversion therapy or due to shame and lack of support from their family, and transitioned years afterwards (5-15+ years) after living shitty and depressing empty lives pretending to be cis.
For the third time, the children in the study met the same criteria that would be used to approve a child for puberty blockers. Why do you keep insisting that these children "never necessarily claimed to be trans"? Whatever "claiming to be trans" is supposed to mean, the important thing is that the study used the same criteria that would be used to approve a child for puberty blockers.
> But I know enough people that ended up desisting either due to conversion therapy or due to shame and lack of support from their family, and transitioned years afterwards (5-15+ years) after living shitty and depressing empty lives pretending to be cis.
This is called "anecdote". As I said, the claim that a sizeable chunk of desisters transition later in life is being made without evidence.
And again, with a mean followup time of over 10 years, most of the people who transitioned 5-15 years later would be counted as persisters, not desisters.
And again, we have been saying that these criteria are stupid. You can't diagnose someone as trans unwillingly, and then be surprised that they decided to not transition. Teenagers who start hormones or blockers do so because they ask for it, because they identify themselves as trans.
> This is called "anecdote"
When you are lacking proper research all you are going to get are anecdotes. Let's not put our heads in the sand.
> with a mean followup time of over 10 years, most of the people who transitioned 5-15 years later would be counted as persisters, not desisters.
10-15 years means that you are 25-30 if you came out at 15. At that point people often self-medicate with hrt and nobody ends up knowing. The mean age of 10 years is because they tracked younger children, if you came out at 7 its unlikely that you will transition at 17 with unsupportive parents, especially back then.
No, "trans kids" don't get prescribed blockers just because they ask for it. Does a child just say one day "I'm a girl" (or boy) and then get handed blockers as they head out the door?
Of course not. There is an assessment period. They are assessed for gender dysphoria, and if diagnosed they may be prescribed puberty blockers to treat their gender dysphoria. And what is the criteria for diagnosing a patient with gender dysphoria? Whether or not you think the criteria in the DSM are effective, at the end of the day these are the criteria that would be used to approve puberty blockers. If you think these criteria erroneously include kids who aren't "trans kids" then we're approving puberty blockers for patients who aren't "trans kids".
Of course a longer follow up time is strictly better, but it's not valid to simply fill in a gap in data with whatever better suits your worldview. If a study measuring rates of detransition follows up with patients for 10 years, then patients that detransition after 10 years would not be counted. Is it valid to point to a couple anecdotes of detransition, and then claim that the study's finding are false because there's loads of people who detransitioned after 10 years? Of course not. But that's the same flawed criticism you're making here.
> "trans kids"
Why the scarequotes? For the record I don't think I have used these two words together, but I obviously do think that kids can be trans just like anyone else, is that even debatable?
> don't get prescribed blockers
I am quoting here out of context but correct, there is no point in puberty blockers before the "natural" puberty.
> There is an assessment period. They are assessed for gender dysphoria, and if diagnosed they may be prescribed puberty blockers to treat their gender dysphoria
Sure, and we have been saying that these criteria are unscientific, inaccurate, and based on social stereotype.
> at the end of the day these are the criteria that would be used to approve puberty blockers
The difference being that teenagers who don't explicitly seek them because they don't consider themselves as trans are never considered for undergoing puberty blockers. All that study shows is what we have been saying all the time about the DSM.
> If you think these criteria erroneously include kids who aren't "trans kids" then we're approving puberty blockers for patients who aren't "trans kids".
No, because teenagers who don't consider themselves trans do not seek puberty blockers and are therefore never considered for them. The main distinguisher between trans and nontrans people is their self identification.
> Of course a longer follow up time is strictly better, but it's not valid to simply fill in a gap in data with whatever better suits your worldview. There certainly seems to be a pattern.
I don't think it's surprising or debatable that trans people who undergo conversion therapy or grow up in oppressive/conservative environments often end up repressing.
For, what, the fifth time the sample in the study did express cross sex gender identity. They were trans kids, to use your terminology. A patient can't desist from a cross sex gender identity if they never expressed one in the first place. Pointing out that these patients didn't seek blockers is nonsensical since blockers weren't an option at the time. The fact of the matter is that the desisters in this study:
1. Expressed a cross-sex gender identity. They were trans kids, as you choose to term it.
2. Met the assessment criteria that would be used to approve a patient for blockers.
Yes, the desisters in the study would most likely be prescribed blockers if they went to a gender clinic that prioritized affirmation.
> The difference being that teenagers who don't explicitly seek them because they don't consider themselves as trans are never considered for undergoing puberty blockers
Again, these patients did express a cross-sex gender identity, or "consider themselves as trans" to use your language. If they never did, then they can't desist from a cross sex gender identity if they never expressed one in the first place.
> No, because teenagers who don't consider themselves trans do not seek puberty blockers and are therefore never considered for them. The main distinguisher between trans and nontrans people is their self identification.
To re-use your terminology, studies found that ~80% of the children who considered themselves trans stop considering themselves trans and become comfortable and no longer experience gender dysphoria in their cis gender after natal puberty. It seems like the root of the problem is the lack of understanding that the children in the study did "consider themselves trans", as you choose to put it.
If all you're going to do is continue to erroneously claim that the patients in this study weren't expressing a cross sex gender identity ("consider themselves trans"), or baselessly claim that the desisters are actually just repressing a trans identity then there's no value in continuing this.
The explanation is there, if you want to see it.
Puberty blockers are a huge step. Not one taken lightly. Kids who are unsure, by and large don’t take that step.
I injured my wrist a few years back. Doctors offered me pt or surgery + pt. They clearly advised me that given the low severity of my injury, surgery would likely improve some things while causing other impacts. I declined the surgery.
This is how most medical choices are made. Doctor advises, patient listens and choses best option. For patients who are also minors - their parents are also involved. Every day a parent and child choose between consequences of the intervention and consequences of non intervention. The only difference with trans kids is apparently you and the gov want a say in the choice. It’s not your body, nor your kid. It’s none of your business.
How would you have decided if the doctors offered preemptive surgery on your wrist when you were still an impressionable child, before you ever got to experience the "pain" of your injury. How could you possibly make an informed decision then?
How could I possibly make an informed decision as a child?
Well, first off - we trust children to make life-altering decisions every day - sometimes without good access to info about potential downsides. A great example is sports. Many sports (ballet, football) can and do have life-long health and quality of life impacts. Minors can commit to those and yet there’s no widespread moral panic about it.
The thing is I actually do trust children to figure out what’s best for themselves. Children are impulsive, yes - they have poor in-the-moment judgement. But medical transition isn’t something that can be done impulsively. It takes years of consistent action, not minutes or hours.
I had that happen for another medical condition of mine and it did not seem controversial at all.
Previous discussion (with a different user): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44333870
That is the same user, me. The critical used the same arguments made here: insisting that the patients weren't "actually trans", which I find unlikely for the reasons I wrote above. Not only that, they cited the retracted CAMH report to try and discredit the study author. Not only was that report retracted, CAMH had to pay the author over half a million in damages for defamation.
> That is the same user, me
I am talking about d6e
The part of society that treats them badly are those that encourage the delusions, including but not limited to the doctors that directly profit from that.
Accusing the doctors of profiting directly off transitioning… well yes, in the states you have a for-profit medical system. But unless you think oncologists are giving kids cancer for their own profit, you’re being a hypocrite.
In the UK, Canada, most of the rest of the world? Single payer public health systems mean trans healthcare isn’t more profitable than any other type of health care. Doctors have no profit incentive, as there are easier less controversial specialities that have larger patient bases and higher patient thru-put.
How much can the disparity in life outcomes be attributed to a trans person needing to undergo a second puberty in a society where doing so is discriminated against?
I feel like as a society we put trans people in a situation where it is controversial for them to transition as children, but also controversial for them to transition as adults. (The notion of a man in a dress no longer exists if the man never had male puberty, but not only is it controversial for such a boy to never have male puberty, we villainize the now-man's attempts to become a woman!) But then we say that outcomes for trans people are bad so them staying in the closet is good. Which is weird, because the cause of the bad outcomes is that there is no stage of their life where trans people can transition noncontroversially.
Desisters are not "still in the closet". They have become comfortable in their cis gender and no longer want to transition. Many (~60% of the sample) live happily as same-sex attracted cis people.
And so how does all of this prove that it should be illegal to speak about transitioning anywhere kids might read? Because that is what is at stake with these rulings
No, I don't think it should be illegal to speak about transitioning. Where in this comment chain does it even remotely look like I argued in favor of the bans discussed in the OP?
You are arguing about the harms of transitioning in a thread about how talking about it online is being suppressed. It seems pretty clear your priorities are controlling other people, not access to information.
Note how I was focused on the idea that "given the life outcomes of trans people" and that's what you didn't address.
What didn't I address? The fact that trans people have worse life outcomes than cis people? That's such a well documented health disparity I didn't feel the need to links sources, but if you insist:
Higher rates of suicidality: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7011156/
~4x the rate of depression: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Even if these disparities are due to discrimination, those disparities still exist. We don't measure health outcomes based on what hypothetically would happen in an ideal world where people genuinely do not recognize or distinguish between the sexes. We measure health outcomes based on what happens in real world.
The idea that repressors have the same life outcomes as non dysphoric cis people seems dubious.
For the third time, desisters are non-dysphoric cis people. They are not repressing a trans identity. If they still feel gender dysphoria living as their cis gender they have, by definition, not desisted.
I used to be one of these desisters who was bullied out of thinking about transitioning. I think I know enough about the topic.
You will say "but then you were not a desister" but I would be counted as one, just like the other kids in my position.
Unless you transitioned over 10 years after seeing your psychiatrist, you would be counted at the ~20% that persisted.
Desisting is no longer seeking medical or social transition. It says nothing about how you feel. You’re making that jump, but that’s not something you or anybody can know.
The logic here is so strange. You acknowledge discrimination against trans people exist and yet also use the discrimination against trans people as a justification to discriminate against children exploring gender, i.e. trans children.
I wonder how many left handed people were beaten into becoming right handed, and remained right handed. In a society where left handed people continue to be beaten, would these people be considered happily right handed since they continue to use their right hand? How would we be able to tell?
I wonder if we existed in a world where soft boys were beaten into becoming less emotional, who grow up to be unemotional men. In a society where adult men are beaten if they express softness, are these men considered happily unemotional? How would we be able to tell?
How do we tell if someone is cis when it is stigmatized to be trans or express gender dysphoria? Genuinely not sure, honestly.
Sex is so deeply ingrained in humanity - heck, not just humanity but mammals and animals writ large - that it is almost certainly impossible to create a world where people genuinely treat trans people the same as cis people. Sure, outlawing discrimination in housing and employment against trans people is not only feasible it's been implemented in most liberal democracies. But that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the difference between living life as a trans person versus a cis person. Gender is a social construct. Sex is biology. For many people, the latter is more salient than the former.
This is why talking about what the outcomes would be in some hypothetical world is pointless. Doctors are striving to deliver the best outcomes in the real world, not the outcomes in some hypothetical world that doesn't actually exist and probably never will.
> yet also use the discrimination against trans people as a justification to discriminate against children exploring gender, i.e. trans children.
Children are free to explore their gender. Just not with powerful drugs that have lifelong effects. Refusing to prescribe puberty blockers to a child experiencing gender dysphoria isn't discrimination any more than it is to refuse to prescribe artificial testosterone to a boy that has normal levels of testosterone for his age. We "discriminate" against this boy that wants to explore hypermasculinity, too.
> I wonder if we existed in a world where soft boys were beaten into becoming less emotional, who grow up to be unemotional men. In a society where adult men are beaten if they express softness, are these men considered happily unemotional? How would we be able to tell?
You would measure their health outcomes: do the latter experience depression or other negative mental health conditions at different rates? Do they die by suicide at different rates? I haven't dug deeply into the effects of corporal punishment, but presumably it's discouraged because we've observed negative outcomes.
> How do we tell if someone is cis when it is stigmatized to be trans or express gender dysphoria? Genuinely not sure, honestly.
I'm not sure what you mean by "how do we tell if someone is cis". I think you mean something along the lines of "how do we tell which gender dysphoric children will or won't continue to experience dysphoria in their cis gender past natal puberty?" If that's the case then the answer is "we can't". Psychologists tried, for decades, and failed to predict the minority of patients that would persist in cross sex gender identity. We know that ~80% become comfortable in their cis gender after natural puberty. This is why it's hard to justify prescribing puberty blockers. Suppressing natal puberty will help someone pass better in a cross-sex gender, but the benefits of passing better need to be weighted against the probability that the child would live comfortably in their cis gender without dysphoria absent blockers.
Which is the better health outcome? 5 trans people who medically transitioned before puberty, or 4 cis people who live comfortably without dysphoria in their cis gender and 1 trans person who transitioned after natal puberty? Ideally we'd be able to predict the 1 patient that would persist, and transition them medically before puberty. But again, we don't have that ability. Thus, it's insufficient to justify prescription of puberty blockers by pointing to the one trans person who medically transitioned as an adult and say that they would have had a better live if they were able to transition medically before puberty. This is the big reason why advocates for puberty blockers tend to dislike discussion of persistent rates with versus without puberty blockers. It's fairly easy to justify them in the simplistic world where all gender dysphoric youth are guaranteed to persist. But factor in the persistence rates without blockers and it becomes vastly harder to make the case for them.
It seems like you're referring to a specific study, could you link it?
A multitude of studies, not just one. This is the review covering the outcomes of gender dysphoric children who aren't given blockers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44546443
> Yes, but since when do we allow the majority to dictate what healthcare options are available?
We've always done so - popular opinion as reflected by the voters dictate that you aren't getting a prescription for arsenic (anymore? Or crack cocaine, for that matter.)
The government, for good or bad, regulates all healthcare, and that government is guided by its voters.
The majority of voters don't see this as a bigger problem than the issue they are currently voting on.
> We've always done so - popular opinion as reflected by the voters dictate that you aren't getting a prescription for arsenic (anymore? Or crack cocaine, for that matter.)
As someone else pointed out, the idea of gov deciding what our doctors can and cant give us is a VERY modern concept.
But your examples: arsnic & crack
1. Cocaine is legal for doctors to prescribe and use in specific circumstances. What is legally prohibited is recreational use. Most of the restrictions on use are due to the threat of addiction, not the threat of appropriate medical use.
2. Arsnic is similarly entirely legal for medical use. Restrictions are around putting it in FOOD because it’s POISON. Nobody is saying you can’t treat cancer with it, if it’s shown to be effective.
Your examples are not examples of the majority regulating medical care for individuals.
> We've always done so - popular opinion as reflected by the voters dictate that you aren't getting a prescription for arsenic (anymore? Or crack cocaine, for that matter.)
That began in 1906; it's hardly something we've "always done".
No more weirdos, no more creeps!
No more fucking filthy geeks!
No more neckbeards or incels!
All you guys just really smell!
Yaaay progress!
Those bans are leaky, and physical. They aren't censorship, and (almost?) Exclusively ban services or sale of goods to underage people. They are also costly to implement, and require a lot of state effort to enforce.
These digital checks, if done "right". Are cheap to implement, and hard to get around. They don't easily let adults allow a kid to do it anyway. And a government can trivially check if a whole swath of businesses is implementating it.
That last point makes it very easy for governments to use this for widespread ideological interventions. With very little option for others to push back, because few people are involved in enforcement.
A society doesn't decide and can't decide, society is an abstraction. People have different morals, and they decide. The only thing that "putting it in the hands of society" is to put it in the hands of a small group of people who will force others to comply.
> we ban all kinds of things for under 18s based on morals. […] a society decide […]
Which society though? It used to be that political decisionmaking understood and accepted the existence of people not like the voting majority, and work to a common consensus… that's rather eroded now, and not just in the USA.
> Obviously, there should be limits.
Obviously? The only thing I'd accept as "obvious" in terms of speech limits is that which is actively violating people, e.g. CSAM, revenge porn and doxxing.
Raunchy stories? Porn with consenting participants? Fictional horror & gore? Those are not "obvious" limits…
…and then consider nude selfies exchanged consensually between 15yo teens. Is that CSAM?
What content are you thinking of that is banned for under 18? Idk if I can think of anything besides porn.
Many businesses in the US check ID at the door. If you are underage, they don't let you in.
On the surface it seems reasonable to ask for an equivalent ID check online.
But. The bouncer doesn't photocopy my ID and store it in a poorly secured back room that is regularly raided by criminal enterprises or outright sold by unscrupulous owners of the establishment. Similarly, they don't check in with the government in a manner that leaves a record.
I'm fine with an ID check, but I think it is also reasonable to demand the same level of privacy that one gets when visiting a bar, casino, burlesque club, or similar establishment.
> The bouncer doesn't photocopy my ID and store it […]
It simply means that it has not arrived in your vicinity yet. In Sydney (Australia, not Canada), whilst most venues are satisfied with quick visual checks of one's face / ID for anyone who looks young, some venues have equipped the bouncers with iPads that run an app dedicated to taking one's face picture and recording the government issued ID details (driver licence number, residential address and particulars – all of them! or no entry). I have had an argument with them a couple of times where the bouncers refused to say – and pretty aggressiveley so – how the PII is handled, who will own it after handing it over, and how to delete it. I simply walked away each and every time, and I no longer approach the venues that record the ID details.
Frankly, the erosion of privacy in western countries is reaching epic proportions, with incumbent governments making substantial efforts to get into one's colon against the citizen's wish.
They just take a picture with a phone or tablet. The reason you don't see people using photocopiers because there are better options.
I've never encountered a bouncer taking pictures of an ID. They check it, using a flashlight if needed, and wave you in.
I take you never been to alcohol/tobacco websites
I don't think I've ever seen one with an age gate stricter than "please enter your date of birth".
R rated movies for one.
Absolutely not "banned". Movie theaters customarily won't let children under 17 into R-rated films without a parent, but there's no law that I'm aware of enforcing that - it's purely an industry custom. And there's certainly no analogous restriction when purchasing an R-rated DVD, or watching one on a streaming service.
Oh wild. Learn something new every day. I worked at a movie theater myself and totally thought it was a law that people under 18 had to be accompanied by a guardian by law.
The very reason this isn't legally enforced is because industry self-regulated this way (to avoid legislation that would come with actual liability). If the Internet made any effort at self-regulation beyond "say, you're over 18, right?" perhaps we wouldn't be in this situation.
logistics for age checks are much easier for a movie theater.
The hilarious part is this only regulates American speakers. If you want to sell Americans porn and ignore the age gate, publish from abroad.
It's only hilarious until they criminalize even looking at such content.
How will you sell them porn when VISA and Mastercard ban you?
Sepa, pix, ideal, swish? Bitcoin? A debit card from a bank on the us west coast that has state laws forbidding them to comply with laws like Texas'? If your hosting, banking, and residence are in CA, OR, or WA, and there was no discernable intent to target residents of the other state, it seems pretty unlikely anything could happen to you. Just don't take any plane that might get emergency diverted to some other state.
The slope isn't slippery, it's paved with a Starbucks on the way. This process is outlined in detail in Project 2025 to get around 1A being used as a defense because the aim is to define anything as lgbt related as pornography.
The current administration has collected nearly all the pieces of Exodia to be able to legally criminalize homosexuality and transgenderism without ever writing a law that says those exact words and have it be held up as constitutional. I'd say it was clever if it wasn't awful.
Yup... this was the plan, they published the plan, certain candidates denied it, and enough of the nation fell for/into it.
We'll be about a quarter of the way to the Chinese Internet by 2029.
Only for sites hosted in the US. They’ll still be able to access Russian content on the matter of course. The land of the free web.
roskomnadzor
For example, banning sites that criticize the religion of the mother.
Anti-fallacitical?
> some group of middle age mothers
With all due respect this comes across as mysoginic and ageist. It is also quite unnecessary to your point. Especially because middle aged women aren't the most powerful lobby in the US by any stretch.
That seems more like your interpretation of it; it’s merely an objective descriptor of the identity group in the same way that “straight white males” is.
I did not mean that the words "middle age mothers" are mysoginic or ageist in themselves. I was referring to the singling out of this particular identity group within the context of OP's message.
I should have quoted a longer part of that message for better clarity. I incorrectly assumed that my full comment was enough to contextualise what I meant.
Moms for Liberty makes this their identity
This is a slippery slope towards democracy I tell you! Before you know it they'll be asking for representation.
Seriously, isn't this sort of par for the course? We've always regulated what minors can access on the internet. Facebook didnt even formally allow children on their site (I don't know if that's still the case). I think it's a much larger issue that we haven't been enforcing those rules, since we apparently think they are a good idea.
This goes against the very ethos of the early web. We should not be normalizing any form of this extreme moral overreach.
The early web died when everything went behind the walled gardens.
I would call this a "legal overreach". Laws have nothing to do with morals or morality.
Of course they do. Laws are how we codify the subset of morals we can all (well most of us) agree on.
No, morals are individual. Ethics are what we as a society agree upon.
In an ideal world, but in this case we're dealing with moral overreach from zealous Christian nationalists.
Again, you have no requirement to recognize this form of neurotic authoritarianism as anything related to either morality or christianity, for that matter. This isn't about morals at all, it's rather nakedly about control and ignorance.
...and it's packaged up as Christian nationalism. It's the next part of a very long campaign of developing an ignorant voting base who believe you are operating with a divine cause. It's used to cultivate racism and sexism and patriarchy. To not recognize the role of religion with respect yo governance in America's history is to ignore half the story. Look no further than the dollar bill, or Pledge of Allegiance, to understand how integral religion has been in our governance.
Ethos of the very early Internet. It was mid 90s when people started thinking the Internet was a great resource for kids, and various blacklists arrived for DNS and email and this cool Netscape web browser thing, and Internet providers were chosen on how much of the alt.* Usenet hierarchy they provided or which IRC servers were accessible. Way back when the Internet was academia, porn and piracy and the sysadmins could do little but roll their eyes when people talked about how great it would be when the schools would be able to give their students accounts and they could all hang out in #hottub and slap each other with trouts and other innocent things. ASR?
Its also to little, to late- the smut is in the LLMs now and they can generate whatever the user wants - locally. So good luck censoring that.
Easy, now every site hosting LLMs weights requires age verification.
Painstakingly hand drawing 10,000 individual dongs and 10,000 things that look like but aren't dongs so I can train my own local-only model
The how-to site describing llamafiles becomes an accomplice.
How did widespread adoption of the libertarian techno-utopianism of the early web work out for society as a whole?
not at all? because it didn't even get to a point where it could have worked out for society as a whole?
It existed only on the edges, usually in softer pragmatic forms, and stopped a lot of bad ideas as a pressure group.
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.
The “freedom” of the early internet was bullshit, because it just meant “freedom to make money” and “freedom from having to deal with the consequences of your products on regular people.”
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...
it depends on which early free internet you're talking about. mine strictly forbid commercial usage at all - and it was lovely.
> 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.
Yes, which is why we are not in the early internet anymore and fully into surveillance capitalism, algorithmic social media.
Exactly. And the early internet lead directly here. Which is why going back makes about as much sense as picking up your baby and dropping it on the floor again.
All of those changes were choices. Like setting icann as a for profit entity at the behest of a corrupt libertarian faction. We didn’t have to destroy peer to peer communication. We didn’t have to cede email to google. None of those things were inevitable. Could have become anything really.
Yeah but we didn’t do it, because our political system is built around deference to large corporations and we’ve abandoned antitrust and taking on corporate power.
But here’s the thing. This effort to stop these corporations from delivering unlimited porn to children is a step in the right direction. Which is restraining the activity of these companies to hurt people.
Which is why calls for the old “free” internet are now, like then, bullshit.
Bullshit. This about enacting tboughtcrime and normalizing that two Americans cannot exchange whatever arbitrary information the current administration has decided is disallowed. It starts with porn and ends with any form of dissent. It's another step towards Newspeak.
I know they taught you about slippery slopes in elementary school social studies, and I assume you've educated yourself not only of the past but also with speculative material such as 1984. If not, I'm not sure why you feel qualified to make the claims you're making.
Yeah that’s the libertarian techno utopian Silicon Valley point of view. It’s not that I don’t understand it, it’s that I think it’s pretty clear at this point it’s just a PR pitch for a group of sociopathic assholes who think they deserve to run the country.
Giving unlimited porn to kids is not “good, actually” and it was illegal before the internet and it’s a frustrating accident of history that nobody understood the implications of Section 230 at the time.
The internet is a core infrastructure commercial enterprise and what it produces should be subject to standard product regulations.
I'm not a libertarian, and I don't live in SV. I'm also not a sociopathic asshole. Your argument is filled with ad hominem, then presents a ridiculous straw man, and never actually addresses the argument I made.
Would you like to try again?
< This about enacting tboughtcrime and normalizing that two Americans cannot exchange whatever arbitrary information the current administration has decided is disallowed. It starts with porn and ends with any form of dissent. It's another step towards Newspeak.
No, it's not.
It's about regulating consumer product safety. The above argument is one employed to avoid that obvious fact. Nobody wants to decide what you can email another adult. We want to make these giant conglomerate tech companies accountable for the harm they cause to people. Giving massive amounts of unlimited porn to children is harmful and we shouldn't be OK with it.
I get that "oh think of the children" is often used disingenuously. So what? This isn't one of those times.
You've doubled down on the straw man. Literally no one is talking about "giving massive amounts of unlimited porn to children" but you.
> So what? This isn't one of those times.
It 100% is, and you cannot see it because you yourself are caught in the fervor.
If you don't want to visit a website, don't visit it. If you don't want your child to visit a website, block it. But to force website operators to check IDs at the door through sketchy third party services so that other consenting individuals can use their services is just batshit insane and a gigantic slippery slope towards a State-run internet that criminalizes all non-sanctioned speech. You need to look past your little hang up and understand the bigger picture.
I got us 4chan and 8chan. It got us mass shootings and endless "they are just trolling, they are just teenagers, they are just ironic" chorus constantly bad faith defending the far right.
4chan is not emblematic of the Internet Wild West. It was spawned by users ejected from a traditional forum, a scant half-year before Facebook was launched; it was, in fact, a sort of mirror to Facebook's response to that old internet, moot and Zuck being two sides of the same upper middle class white boy script kiddie coin.
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.
Are you saying that the early web only existed in the USA? I did not witness a growth in mass shootings here in Europe from that time. Those things did not happen until Web 2.0.
Society gave us mass shootings. 4chan and other anonymous boards gave us protected speech. We've had mass shootings long before 4chan and they didn't start kicking off until they reached a critical threshold of interest due to social media and the almighty algorithm, not 4chan. Conflating these things is either ignorant or dishonest.
Lmao, if there's anything that powers up the far-right is precisely algorithmic social media, not uncensored old-school message boards.
>It got us mass shootings
Americans will blame everything but their gun laws.
So now that we've arrived at the far right, it's time to stop decentralized dissent and prevent the pendulum from swinging back? This seems like a terrible idea.
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.
"arrived" and "swinging back"? You sound like an optimist; the dark-enlightenment Neo-Reactionary folk behind this are only just getting started.
"Arrived" because any further and we're into the far reich. "Swinging back" because I have to be an optimist that as the blatant autocratic authoritarianism rises there will be mass pushback.
I do know how deep the sophomorically-justified rabbit hole goes, in that I've read a fair amount of dark enlightenment material. I actually credit Moldbug's writing for helping me go from defaulting to fundamentalist-axiomatic analysis (rightist) to leftist-constructive-qualitative analysis (leftist) - top down hierarchy is utterly incapable of responding to the complexity of the world, and only sounds so appealing post-facto when a singular coherent narrative has been written.
Twitter is worse than 4chan now, at least 4chan is moderated.
4chan was started because posters in the Something Awful anime subforum could not stop posting underage child porn which was obviously against the rules.
To stop these disgusting freaks from polluting the SA forums with their child pornography and degeneracy, Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka closed the anime subforum (ATDRW aka Anime Tentacle Death Rape Whorehouse) and moot started 4chan.
So yeah, 4chans early legacy is ‘a bunch of pedophiles were mad they couldn’t share their abuse images’ which later transitioned into a love of fascism. What a great place… NOT.
P.S. Adults who like anime are fundamentally broken, it’s children’s entertainment.
this is excellent bait
Thanks, I thought I deleted the last sentence but forgot to, oops ;)
The general facts are true, my opinion of anime fans is my own
No the facts are not true, your origin history of 4chan is completely wrong. Moot was a massive weeb who wanted his own western Futaba alternative.
Both of us can be right, moot is a massive ween and I’m sure he wanted a 2ch clone in English but it didn’t happen until ATDRW was shut down in 2003. I was an SA forums member when it happened.
This has nothing to do with what you said before. If you really were a SA member at that time you would know the history.
The discussion will rehash the ideological issues around negative rights vs. positive rights.
And we could call this way… zero-knowledge proof! :)
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...
I bet that in practice, at scale, these zero knowledge proofs end up being a lot more than zero.
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.
VPNs and zero knowledge proof systems are vulnerable to traffic analysis (based on packet size and timestamps) and there's almost no cure.
Mullvad is the only VPN I know of that has a mode that normalizes all packets to the same size (going into the VPN) and sends fake packets that don't get sent as real traffic. But that's only obfuscation and, at low traffic or high bandwidth (videos) or with sufficient heuristics, it can be beaten.
The US has basically zero regulation on selling this data. I can imagine a world where within a couple decades the US has one of the largest blackmail crisis ever seen, as foreign governments target civil workers. Or, I guess, at this point, the US government against the "undesirable" party within this administration.
> VPNs and zero knowledge proof systems are vulnerable to traffic analysis
Zero knowledge proofs are not vulnerable to traffic analysis the same way VPNs are.
It really depends on the implementation around it, how a user conducts themselves, and what data you can buy. While there is zero knowledge inside the proof, its use creates a side channel that reveals information.
For instance: The relying party server needs to call the auth server on novel users. Thats a new, unavoidable indicator!
How large are token batches and how long do they last? Will the implementation force them to wait a time period between redemption and use?
A bad implementation means the user IP will talk to the A server, then it will contact the RP server, who will contact the A server. Because this happens once per connection (or 60 minutes in this bill) and takes maybe a few hundred milliseconds. there's not going to be a huge number of candidates to have to sort through. And that's just the handshake.
> For instance: The relying party server needs to call the auth server on novel users. Thats a new, unavoidable indicator!
Not really. There is no requirement here for an auth server to neccesarily even exist.
That said, your broader point is correct, that the details matter a tremendous amount.
Oh, that's my bad, I re-read the privacy pass protocol to brush up and it does use signing without requiring the RP to necessarily make another call to the original approver server. I also see there's been work on hidden witness ZKP, so the RP may not even know who approved a given token.
Very cool! Always happy to be proven wrong with cool tech!
> VPNs and zero knowledge proof systems are vulnerable to traffic analysis (based on packet size and timestamps) and there's almost no cure.
All comms are subject to traffic analysis except surreptitious, covert channels (which can't be covert if the implementations are widely available).
> I bet that in practice, at scale, these zero knowledge proofs end up being a lot more than zero.
Zero knowledge proof is not a marketing term, its a math term. Maybe sometimes they are implemented wrong, but if they are implemented correctly its pretty rock solid. Certainly more rock solid than much cryptography which rests on sketchy foundations.
Do we expect Apple to implement a special, privacy-preserving age proof for porn viewers? Apple hates porn, when it's on websites like Tumblr.
At the same time they seem pragmatic about putting their mark on standards. It seems to me like we’re at a confluence: a regulatory tipping point where there really is pressure to bring laws to bear on online harms affecting kids; and a socio-technological moment where “gotta distinguish kids from adults” can realistically happen separately from “…by handing over personal info directly to shady random counterparts.”
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.
I expect Apple will implement a general privacy-preserving arbitrary attribute proof, with age proof just one of the things it could be used for, probably using something similar to the library that Google recently released [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457390
Zero knowledge proof smart contract verification called by the site interested in your age. You provide your public key wallet with its government issued soul bound NFT of your identification.
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.
ZKP is all you need. The NFT or blockchain stuff is unnecessary can be discarded.
Yet then again how hard is it to just grab your parents' ids while they're not looking and add it to your phone wallet?
They can require a selfie to compare against, multiple documents, a video, etc. IMHO best bet is to consolidate the validation to a small set of reputable companies, delegate validation to them, then improve regulations around access. Eg non-reputable site needs to know you are 18 (etc) but not see your actual id if they can have a third party do it in a blind-to-them fashion.
Accessing my site after that would violate CFAA, right? Minors are not exempt from CFAA.
Gate it in the touch id secure enclave. Then only the biometrics of the adult can provide the proof that they are over 18.
I'm just saying that if age verification is done via a "smart card" then it shouldn't be hard to just add that to the phone.
Unless of course they're planning on making us go to some facility to ensure our phones get the digital components of the IDs get loaded into the secure enclave? Which sounds dystopian as heck given the scenes coming out of the US right now.
It would be preferable if the prover party that holds the credentials in this scenario weren't Google. If anything I'd prefer a government issued digital ID with some form of local-only cryptographic exchange where neither the government knows someone has verified at a particular site/service and the verifier doesn't get info about one's identity. Just some cryptographic proof that verifies an age ('just' is doing some heavy lifting).
In past HN comments this apparently exists IRL in Germany and/or Canada, where age can be proven via a smartphone without leaking one's identity to the verifier and without any communication back to the government.
Eh. So now I'm forced to have all my IDs stored at an advertising behemoth. Not really a great situation either.
You're practically forced to have a Google/Apple account and a google/apple smartphone to even exist in today's world.
There was a thread on reddit asking the other day what about the modern world bothers you the most
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
Either so few people appreciate the freedom that privacy confers or the perceived conveniences for trading it away are too compelling because of just how little society has done to protect privacy.
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.
The cultural change will only come after society bears a significant cost.
Privacy is required for the mental health of many people, perhaps everyone except the extroverted and naive. Anxiety and fear over people watched, caught, punished, especially innocently. Anxiety and fear over their lack of privacy being abused and harming them, such as currently popularized with identity theft and other crimes, or simple ridicule or bullying. And the resultant chilling effects, where people who wish to speak feel they cannot because they might suffer, especially in cases where this is an actual risk rather than normal existential dread. Without privacy, you can't be inclusive.
That's literally what EU privacy laws are about and guess what...
Anti government folk from the USA hated them and decided they were government overreach.
Please, the EU is trying to ban encryption at this very moment, to say the that EU is pro privacy is a bit of a joke really.
Privacy from companies maybe, privacy from governments and cops, certainly not.
The EU is both pro-privacy and anti-privacy. In many ways, they're ahead of the US - you can opt out of more telemetry, more advertising, more tracking. Good. But then the encryption stuff - bad.
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 trying to ban encryption at this very moment, to say the that EU is pro privacy is a bit of a joke really.
The EU is not a monolith. There are many people pushing in many different directions. Sometimes the result is good, sometimes less so.
After the pushing is done then the resulting regulations are a monolith
> privacy from governments and cops
It is very much not clear to me that you should have privacy from governments or cops. Aren't the whole point of the government and cops that they are the institutions we have created to entrust with this access?
Please feel free to set up a spyware on your phone that records every image you send, every text and email you write and saves all this data somewhere that you will never have access to and for an indefinite amount of time.
That is exactly what the EU is trying to do with the Chat Control law. Targeted law enforcement access to some data is not what is being discussed here.
We are talking about 24/7/365 mass surveillance without warrants and without the suspicion of any crime committed.
Given that Europe specifically has a very sordid history with the use of data collected by government to genocide literally millions of people, no, I don't think it can be entrusted with such access.
What did your MEP say when you complained to them about it?
Mine said the party was taking it very seriously and it's clearly something that is important to me. I trust them to do exactly nothing.
Us techbros like it when Bezos and Zuck and Musk have all the information, because you can “vote with your dollar” and avoid them.
Ah yes, lock you up for Facebook posts UK is the bastion of privacy.
Firstly, the UK is not in the EU. That's what Brexit was.
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?
> 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.
To be fair to OP I don’t think the UK is in the EU
I don't feel as strongly about privacy because "community" is what holds civilisation together.
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.
> We always need to balance freedoms with responsibility.
Sure, but is this a measure that appropriately balances it?
I think the traditional view is that the balance should be: your rights end where they start stepping on another person's rights.
We aren't really talking about someone else being harmed, we are talking about (at worst) someone harming themselves. There is no other person being harmed.
On the other hand, porn habits are a great way to blackmail people. When the identity data gets leaked, it will very easily ruin lives.
From a balance perspective, i don't really think it follows that the benefits are worth the potential harms. I think civilization is best preserved by not doing this.
> I don't feel as strongly about privacy because "community" is what holds civilisation together.
Dude I'm sure most people are okay with their neighbors knowing their names and addresses. We're talking about the governments and megacorps here. Theses are not "communities" in any traditional sense.
> small transparent governments
No developed country has that. Not EU and definitely not the US.
> If you don't trust your government
No one should 100% trust their government.
I appreciate your emotions, but can you explain how it impacts you in practice?
I am never providing my ID to anyone who can store it indefinitely. I am an adult and have no problem showing it in a shop if required as it isn't stored. Unless it can be proven it wont be stored (i.e. the bytes are never sent from my laptop) I will not provide it.
Your ID is effectively stored by the issuer indefinitely. What’s the difference between one and two entities? What’s the difference between two and a hundred?
The more people you give your personal information to, the less personal it becomes.
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.
ID verification does not increase risks for majority of people. Most people don’t use single use email aliases and thus harmful association can happen for them in any leak of their account data, with or without ID details. It is likely that higher compliance requirements will actually reduce the risk of a leak. And of course, chances that every website doing verification will store your ID are very low. It‘s costly, so it will likely be outsourced to a third party provider specializing in this job (which will be much more secure than doing it with some WordPress plugin or other shitty custom solution).
Where I'm from we sorted this out with laws. It's not hard to figure out if one of your workers are associating with a union, but you're not allowed to treat them differently based on that. Laws make sure you don't, even though you technically could.
The tricky part is proving you’re being treated differently and that’s the reason why. Trying to legislate human behavior at that level doesn’t seem to work well.
My company has rules against retaliation. Good luck proving that’s the reason you didn’t get promoted, or were left off of a project. People get left off projects and don’t get promoted all the time. Keeping your job because the company is legally obligated to sounds like an uncomfortable working environment.
What's the difference between a state agency issuing a document, and sending that document to 100 random websites. This is your question, correct?
That’s a strange assumption. ID verification is part of entering the contractual relationship in many parts of this world, it’s absolutely normal thing. You don’t show your ID to random sites, only to those where you want to become a customer. If you don’t want to sign the contract, you don’t show your ID. I don’t know how many places have a copy of my passport (many hotels, for sure) and I don’t care as long as they are compliant with the laws. Tracking via ID is economically much less effective, since most websites won’t require ID verification anyway, so the biggest concern should be identity theft - but there having a copy of your ID is rarely enough in countries with developed government ID infrastructure. E.g. in Germany you must present original ID to open a bank account or change your residence address. In countries with digital IDs and government services identity theft often goes via easier routes by hijacking digital ID accounts.
The difference between one and two is being able to link two things I did. If you know who I am, that barely affects me. But if you can then cross-check whether I also went ballroom dancing, or went to a golf course, or went to a sexclub, or went to a ball-game. Then it starts affecting me.
Just don’t consent to sharing your data to third parties for marketing or research purposes. In civilized world there exist laws which give you this right. It is surely not the problem with ID verification or storage.
Giving your data to a website is the same as giving it to a stranger on the bus. Maybe closer to going to a seedy part of town and giving your ID to random criminal and hoping they don't do anything unscrupulous.
It is not the same, it’s a classic straw man argument. First of all, not just some data, but your ID details - this is important detail. Second, not to a random website, but to a website you wish to engage in a contractual relationship and where your ID is actually required. Third, they are unlikely criminal and there are legal protections in this scenario in most civilized countries. Fourth, the way it goes, it is very unlikely that you will be presenting your ID, instead providing attribute proof through a third party. See e.g. Nect Wallet and similar apps. ID verification will not increase your risks of identity theft etc compared to leaks of other PII. Probably the risk will be lower due to higher compliance requirements.
> All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
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_...
[2] https://www.w3.org/PICS/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...
[4] https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/
PICS and ICRA were not adopted by many due to complexity. RTA [1][2] is a more generic header that can be used on any adult site or site that allows user contributed content and is easier to implement. There needs to be a law that requires clients to look for this header if parental controls are enabled. Not perfect, nothing is. Teens will easily get around it but most small children will not which should be the spirit of the ID verification movement. It's better than what we have today. The centralized ID verification sites will push many small sites to Tor and bigger sites to island nations and tax evasion in my opinion. More browsers are natively supporting .onion domains.
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]
> There needs to be a law that requires clients to look for this header if parental controls are enabled
Would that require MiTM at the network level? Or, is there a custom X.509 RTA that would tell clients not to accept the certificate?
Put it in the parental controls feature of the browser. Parents have to turn it on. Parents get to decide if their kids can watch porn. The government helps parents enforce the rules parents want.
I wonder if I can detect when parental controls are engaged like that.
As of this ruling, all sites within striking distance of South Dakota must take “reasonable efforts” to age-verify, or be certain that no content could ever be politically harmful to the hypothetical minor.
Reasonable efforts in this case would be to send the RTA header. That's it. Done and dusted. If the client is able to browse your site that would mean that either parental controls are not enabled or they are enabled and your site was approve-listed in the client. This of course depends on changing the laws anywhere that require using a third party data-leakage site to verify ID.
> 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.
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.
Don't forget about sex education and literature in general
Knowledge is power.
You’re getting downvoted, likely because the people downvoting you dont realize that Project 2025 explicitly calls for the complete outlawing of pornography and the imprisonment of anyone who produces it. They also frame transgender ideology and LGBTQ+ educational materials as falling under “pornography”, essentially calling for these to be banned.
And when they've banned all of those, they'll be banning r/pastorarrested for pointing out what everyone already knows about these fine upstanding moralists.
> They also frame transgender ideology and LGBTQ+ educational materials as falling under “pornography”, essentially calling for these to be banned.
Close, but it's worse than that -- they don't want LGBTQ+ material merely banned; they want LGBTQ+ people dead, or at the very least banned from all public life. The next step is where they call for the death penalty for child abuse (also in Project 2025). So according to them LGBTQ+ is pornographic -> pornography is child abuse -> child abuse is punishable by death -> therefore existing as a queer person is punishable by death.
Here's the quote about their plans for transfolk:
> Transgender people will see their existence denied and their rights stripped away under Project 2025. The authors equate "transgender ideology" to pornography, calling for it to be outlawed. While the far-right policy agenda cannot directly ban transgenderism, it aims to do so indirectly by labeling it as pornography, and then outlawing pornography itself - effectively erasing transgender identity from the U.S.
Source: https://doctorsoftheworld.org/blog/project-2025-lgbtq-rights...
That's a piece on a third party site. Do you have an original source for the quote?
Skimming the 900+ pages of the primary source (one web copy here: https://assets.glaad.org/m/26f7f002c06fc6be/original/2025_Ma... )
the search term 'transgender' appears 13 times largely in screeds against the things the authors don't like, these are followed by dot point actions to take to eliminate the mote in their neighbour's eye.
.. these are just short excerpts featuring the term. Reading through the FULL pdf (linked above) in those vicinities will provide further planned actions that will restrict rights w/out directly using the term.No, they very much realize that. The people down voting them want these things. HN isn't some bastion of progressive thinkers or the libertarian hacker-minded anymore. It's chock full of wealthy tech-bro neocons who dote on figures like Elon Musk.
Just see how any criticism of dear leader gets flagged in mere minutes now.
The actual point of these laws isn't to stop minors from viewing the material, it's to stop sites from hosting the material entirely. They're using "protect the kids from obscene content" as a wedge to get popular support. Acting like some technical solution to make authenticating as an adult more user-friendly would make the politicians who want this implemented happy is disingenuous. Let's take a look at how Tennessee has legislated their ID check should be implemented:
- ID must be verified either by matching a photo of the user to their photo ID, or by processing private transactional data (i.e. a credit card transaction).
- The user must verify their ID at the start of the session, and every hour the session is active.
- Historical anonymized ID verification data must be retained for at least 7 years.
- Anyone running a site that's viewable in Tennessee without the above ID verification rules is committing a class C felony, regardless of what state they reside in or host their site in.
This is clearly an attempt to stop any content they label as "obscene" (using a very broad definition of "obscenity") from being viewable at all in Tennessee. It's a completely unreasonable set of hoops to jump through that solely exists as a fig leaf because they know that making a law banning the content entirely would be ruled unconstitutional.
7 years is crazy. I can't think of a single plausible justification for that that isn't dramaticallly expanding the purported scope of the law
The pre-red-tape internet was glorious. Only way to get that back is to decentralize everything.
No entity willingly gives up control, and that is what this issue is about.
This is going to impact every book out there, creating an environment where the authors simply can't tell their stories anymore because of someone's moral shock.
Bad things happen in stories to characters, and authors need that flexibility. Its the journey in overcoming these things that makes the story good. The moment you or an author can't express reality without it being a felony, is the moment you no longer have real writers.
Some people don't write for money, and these things impose untenable cost on everyone.
The irony here being that the same people who want this are the ones screaming from the rooftops about the government indoctrinating their kids.
*Also, I can’t wait for the first lawsuit over a breastfeeding page, because you know it’s coming.
Thinking about client vs server, wouldn't it be even less wide-ranging, less costly to enforce, and more appropriately targeted if such mandates are one-time and on the client side - only on device manufacturers and OEM-shipped OS? Suppose new mass market devices are defaulted to parental controls on, until unlocked by an adult at point-of-sale or afterwards through a form of validation? The KYC of who unlocked it could be anonymized or the PII-proving side of the log if it needs keeping could be on-device only (high bar for criminal investigations). There should be a clear exemption threshold for low volume indie products, build your own PC, and open source self-install like Linux - since the purpose is to protect ignorant/apathetic consumers.
Are you ok with all devices considering the user hostile and coming with heavy encryption and locked bootloaders?
> There should be a clear exemption threshold for low volume indie products, build your own PC, and open source self-install like Linux - since the purpose is to protect ignorant/apathetic consumers.
Then everyone will just follow a YouTube tutorial to reinstall their operating system and bypass restrictions. There were TikTok videos teaching kids how to steal cars, would there not be easy to follow instructions to bypass whatever client side filtering is implemented?
I get where you're coming from, but mandated client side filtering has been tried and has been ridiculed as a complete failure every time. Attempts have been made to market and provide filtering products to parents with little effect, with them either being easy to bypass or difficult to use.
It's actually kind of interesting to see the people who were fighting against client side filtering are now advocating for it, because server side restrictions are the next logical step.
This would actually be an effective way to teach kids about technology. If they learn enough to install their own OS, let them have their smut.
I’m hearing more and more how younger generations don’t have what people used to call basic computer skills, because everything just kind of works now. Putting up some road blocks that require research and hands on tinkering to solve, is an invaluable part of the learning process.
While I wouldn't put it that way, I definitely agree that local device technical obstacles are the best conduit for learning as a youth. As a kid and young teen during the 1995-2005 era there were a lot of hoops to figure out and jump through as a gamer with Mac and then Windows ME. There were no video guides or wikis - just print manuals and text forums. Needing to upgrade the family computer RAM from 128 mb to 512 mb to get WoW above 2-3 FPS was a formative experience.
One could say the same of server/cloud obstacles, but because those systems are afar and opaque, it's easy to be content copy-pasting scripts. And there is less sense of progression and ownership since it doesn't involve building up your own environment.
I'm not sure bribing kids with smut to learn computer skills is good branding.
> Are you ok with all devices considering the user hostile and coming with heavy encryption and locked bootloaders?
This might be the least bad option. If it prevents server side enforcement, then settling on government enforcement of the commercial status quo might be less bad.
And what you describe is already the case for almost all devices anyway. The commercial incentives are there. And sadly, from a security PoV it is also quite valuable.
> Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
They won't have to, most websites will use 3rd party age verification. This is basically what Doordash and Uber Eats use to verify your age before delivering alcohol or THC to your apartment.
Rife for abuse? Absolutely. Will these databases get leaked and increase the chances of your identity getting stolen? Yes. But isn't a small increase to an already-existing problem.
Those drivers check my ID at the door.
You didn't have to provide your ID when you enabled alcohol delivery? That's how it works in California, at least.
I have never interacted with the app. I just show ID if those are in the order and I am the one answering the door.
Ah I see, thanks for clarifying that your response was uninformed.
I don't understand your seemingly petty and demeaning retort. What makes me uninformed? It sounds like you were the one who was unfamiliar with the ability to interact with door dash with an ID and not having to upload it.
I have accepted door dash as a non-door dash customer. They check for ID. Just like the store.
It actually wasn't petty, demeaning, or a retort. I was just summarizing.
> 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.
Sure. A government issued certificate that is required to get an IP and be able to navigate the internet. How does that f-+-ing sound?
>Sure. A government issued certificate that is required to get an IP and be able to navigate the internet. How does that f-+-ing sound?
sounds like the solution to me. disallow under 18s from internet access. any parent who allows an underage to browse the internet unsupervised should be penalized to the same degree that they would if they directly provided hardcore pornography to the child, because thats exactly what it is.
I personally would choose this route, handing kids fully internet enabled pornography consumption devices is beyond ridiculous, and the size factor of smartphones (take them everywhere, camera connected directly to encrypted chats with strangers) well the fact that the government even allows this is simply a matter of confusion to my small mind.
What am I missing here? Why do we allow children internet access?
These are Authoritarian Christo-fascists. They do not care. They will demonize everyone involved in anything related to online sex. They are coming for the sex workers, and all of porn too - they stated they would do this in "Project 2025". "Think of the children" is how they justify it.
> there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18
No there doesn't. Why is the burden on ME (as a site owner) to do literally anything at all? The burden should be on parents to control their childrens' Internet use. Install a robust content blocker or don't give them Internet access.
Am I, a site owner, supposed to work with every asinine state and national system for making this attestation system work? How do I know the person behind the keyboard is actually the person whose age is being verified (and not one of their parents')? And as a citizen and consumer, why do I have to go out of my way to get some kind of digital identification that proves my age?
Why does this have to stop at porn? The logical next step is that legislators and parents will demand that sites will block folks from accessing blasphemous content. Or that you need to prove that you're not a resident of a particular state in order to access medical facts about abortion (because if you're looking it up, you obviously intend to get one or help someone get one)?
I don't want people to know how old I am or am not. Or where I live or don't live, or my sexual orientation, or anything else about me. I don't want to have to know any of these things about people who visit my website. And frankly, the idea that I am the one who is responsible for this and not the extreme minority of folks who want to keep certain content away from their kids or whatever is wild.
But I bet that signal would still be a unique identifier. It doesn't have to be, but it will be because that is the point. Not to see who is old enough, but to track every page visit and interaction of everybody all the time.
> Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids.
I mean, they are. But I've never seen a similar reaction on HN or any forum when social media require age verification. Actually, I think most HN users would cheer if the government required Facebook to only allow users over 18.
I feel the general opinion about something on the internet basically comes down to this simple rule: !(do American Christians want that thing?), no matter what that thing is.
This would apply to Facebook just as any other site, and that’s obvious to the HN crowd.
It’s the ambulance chaser section of the article that explains the problem.
American Christians can and should rely on content blockers rather than lawsuits.
I think American Christians should do neither. Restricting a child's access to information in order to indoctrinate them into a set of beliefs unquestioningly is a form of child abuse. Various forms of psychological and physical abuse are extremely prevalent in American Christian parenting practices, and it's something as a society we should not tolerate.
Exposing children to propaganda that they are ill equipped to deal with is also child abuse.
Just because someone can argue better than you can does not mean they are right. Climate change deniers can be very convincing if you don't understand physics.
I think the majority of people on HN are well aware of this. The big question is how to transfer this simple idea to the people in charge at governments.
By a similar argument, why should stores check id's when selling alcohol or cigarettes? Raising kids is not their job either.
The answer is because we live in a society. Society is about families, not just adults. Sure, raising kids is primarily the job of the parents, but everyone helps. Sometimes that results in a bit of inconvenience for businesses.
Excluding kids from businesses that are adult-only isn't very kid-friendly, but it's the bare minimum when there are children around.
The issue is that currently, adding restrictions to what minors can do is expensive, both economically, and politically. It requires the cooperation of a lot of non-government appointed people, and many of them could (locally) sabotage the restrictions.
This limits the restrictions to those with incredibly broad support. Keeping a lot of agency with families on how to raise their children.
Digital age verification, if implemented well, is easy to enact, and hard to sabotage without being noticed. That enables restrictions that 49% of people disagree with. Heck, it enables restrictions that 49% of Congress disagrees with. That could be 60% of people disagreeing.
I don't think it's all that different, because nothing is foolproof. People will still circumvent age restrictions by sharing devices. (For example, borrowing a phone.)
And educating the kids should be, and always has been a collective effort. Even in pre-industrial societies it was true. In the modern world it should be doubly true. I think most people would agree that we need public schools, even though some of them disagree with how sex ed and evolution were taught there.
It’s not the material cigarettes or alcohol that are the problem, it’s lying to get them. Same is true for sins like gambling and explicit romance novels.
The enforcement here is quite twisted: it attracts greedy litigants. Lying is bad, but greed is a mortal sin.
yeah my thoughts are that this is largely a User Experience problem than an onerous liability problem
The blog owner doesn't need to implement an ID check, the browser or OS just needs to tap into a service that has checked ID
Everybody will get a chip implant for 18th birthday. Solved ;)
You can't show porn to kids in regular stores, I'm not sure why it's okay to do it on the internet, such that it becomes "raising" the kids when it's not in the first instance.
VPN.
Oh, don't you worry, they'll come after VPNs next. After all, this makes them accomplices to felony acts.
laughs in residential proxy
If you need an id to buy porn irl why wouldn't you need one to buy it online?
Because 'online' is the entire planet, including sellers in foreign countries. Would you like to have "digital borders" between countries, where data has to show some sort of passport to cross the border?
Again, if I want to import pron from Japan I need to not only prove I'm 18 to the border censors but make sure the pron is legal locally.
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?
They shouldn't, of course. Those existing regulations that you're referencing are equally bad for all the same reasons, and we should get rid of them.
I mean if the alternative is complete lawlessness, then I suppose I do want digital borders. AMA.
This ruling kind of assumes the opposite in some ways, that the strictest law anywhere applies everywhere. It's not digital borders, it's no borders but where the most draconian authoritarian law supercedes everything.
How does it do that? It doesn't seem to mandate age verification when a user from Poland access a server in France. Only when one of the parties (either user or hoster) is within the jurisdiction.
How old are you?
Challenge accepted
The Federal harmful-to-minors laws don’t mandate you check IDs. Only some state laws do. You’re better off asking, “why would buying a magazine here in Michigan have anything to do with Rhode Island statutes?”
I don't even disagree with the spirit of what is being attempted here but it is ultimately pointless.
You aren't going to stop teenagers from watching porn if you have the internet.
All this would do is change the websites that teenagers are using.
It strikes me as just political grandstanding since the people putting forth this idea must know it is completely pointless.
Not to mention, a website is vastly different than a physical store.
> Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids.
This is simplistic. I think you'll find parents are not a uniform bloc in favor of this kind of overreach.
I'm concerned that such validation would need to be proprietary and locked down with some sort of user hostile TPM-like-thing in order to be effective. If this wasn't the case, then anyone could fork the foss tool and create a bypass. The average child won't do this, but a few will and some adults probably will over anti DRM principles and then it's published and widely available.
These are ideological litigious fanatics among a much bigger herd of worried parents. They’ll attack any bypass tool and risk degrading the features of normal stuff like browsers and url parser libraries; totally ineffective at solving the problem but doing something in the eyes of unsophisticated constituents.
> Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids.
(1) Without addressing the general statement, specifically this isn't new. You’ve historically not been allowed to buy pornography or cigarettes or alcohol without age verification or watch obscene content between the nightly news runs. I don't see this specifically as parents wanting the government to raise their kids at all. It’s people without any other real options wanting to make it more difficult for inappropriate material to end up in the hands of minors. When I was 12 I remember getting online with AOL discs and having popups with porn appear in front of me as I’m playing neopets, because some unsavory ad got accidentally “clicked” many sessions ago. How can a parent “parent” that?
> If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should)
(2) These laws already exist, the internet was a loophole. If it’s done right you verify your age when you make your account and the site doesn’t bug you again. Not sure how frequently you’re visiting new porn sites, but I can’t imagine getting over prompted would be a real problem.
(3) There is a concept of using ZKPs to do more things client side. However I think currently people are more excited about selective disclosure. You just give the site a signed claim that you’re over 18 and that’s all they know. It’s more private than handing over your DL at the grocery store 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.
They should, shouldn’t they. But some privacy nut out there will say we can’t have nice things because an advertiser might use it to profile you.
Really though one aspect of digital identity is presence and liveliness checking. The states that issue your ID to Apple Wallet are only willing to do so because Apple ensures that the user presence is verified at time of use.
The question isn’t why should you have to jump through hoops, it’s why should we enforce age restrictions in person but not in the internet—why haven't you had to jump through all the existing hoops to watch internet porn until now?
1) it doesn’t go as far back as you think. Only within my lifetime did the drinking age settle on 21. The Feds couldn’t do it directly, so they hacked highway funds. So that’s a bad example when porno has changed so much. What we’re risking here is parents who haven’t tried any solutions being convinced that litigation is the only way.
2+3. A simple cookie with a birth year ought to work. Why should every site worry about South Dakota’s definitions when checking a cookie seems reasonable effort. Circumvention of that is already fraud.
I said decades not centuries.
A cookie with a birth year is not a cryptographic verification of a digital identity document. Anybody can click “I’m over 18”.
Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.
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.
> parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device
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.
Remember that everything you have is the result of other people bringing humans into this world.
Every human being creates nuisance sometimes. The only winning move in your game is not to live.
With all due respect to parents that overscheduled themselves: Tough. Raise your kids. Don't try to raise mine.
> Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.
I'm going to have to upload 3D models of my face and pictures of my ID just to use the internet because... some people don't like the idea of other people's kids using the internet?
This is a good point of course but that's always the issue, no? You may try to hide violence from your children, but if they see gang violence around them it doesn't matter. You can try to hide sexual content from your kids but if they have friends who share the content, hear people talking about it, or live in an area where prostitution occurs, you can't stop them from being exposed to it.
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
It takes less than 5 minutes to set up NextDNS with the same functionality and it costs $2 a month for unlimited DNS calls. If you download the app it absolutely can police cellular.
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.
Comcast’s Xfinity service doesn’t let you change DNS in their router and blocks queries to other DNS providers if you are using their router.
That really should be illegal. It looks like there might be workarounds, but that defeats the point of being easy to use.
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.
> but that’s way beyond the technical capability of probably 95% of people.
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)
That still seems better than the proposed cure. Connected devices are overrated.
What happens when their friends have them?
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.
Sounds like marketing is the problem. In fact, I'd say 90% of the Internet's more problematic aspects disappear once you get rid of marketing/monetization. We had a good thing. We let mercantilism and surveillance capitalism ruin it.
To some extent, Section 230 is to blame.
> parents that are too busy
If you are too busy to parent, then you shouldn't be one in the first place.
Just as well life is completely predictable over long time horizons making accurate judgement on this matter completely possible.
>Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.
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?
Not the parent commenter, but they just said that most parents don't have the technical aptitude to do so.
Implying that they don't care about their kids, or shouldn't have kids as a result, is a pretty awful thing to say.
In this day and age lack of knowledge is no excuse.
Especially when everyone who would have this particular "problem" has access to various search tools and video websites that would explain "solutions".
I feel like, to say that, you haven't tried helping many older adults — or even middle-aged adults — use technology.
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 feel like, to say that, you haven't tried helping many older adults — or even middle-aged adults — use technology.
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)
Maybe parents shouldn't buy their kids technology they don't know how to use?
Middle aged adults are millennials. This isn't the 90s anymore when middle aged people were raised on type writers.
Then they shouldn't let their kids have connected devices. It's that simple.
doesnt realize theyre the problem
Sorry you're experiencing a bunch of downvotes over a counterpoint from your own experience.
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.
The replies here are disturbing for their lack of concern or even awareness of the fact that some parents have, you know, economic pressures? Like they have to work long hours or multiple jobs? Both parents have to work?
This site can be really gross sometimes. I want to think it's just that the site skews young and people just don't know. I might have said similar things when I was 20.
It’s not gross to want parents to only parent their kids, and to leave the kids of other parents out of it. It’s your responsibility what your kid does on devices that you permit them to have. If you can’t control your kid when they’re not in your presence, or can’t trust them when they’re left to their own devices (pun intended), that’s an issue, but it isn’t a technological problem, but rather a parenting problem.
You’re not arguing it well. There are effective free tools; not expensive ones like you claim. You’re worried about regulation when the Supreme Court is supporting this burdensome patchwork that’ll outlive its usefulness because it’s politically difficult to repeal. And yes somewhere there is an unsupervised kid whose parents are overwhelmed by other pressures, but of all the risks to that kid, if porn is #1 then we’re talking upper middle class or higher.
This is a barrier put in place so that children are less likely to casually access these sites while they're browsing around.
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.
Right, so you're admitting what we already know to be true: it's censorship.
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.
Proving one's age is required for many other activities that are considered unsuitable for children, such as purchasing alcohol and drugs, and watching age-restricted films in the cinema.
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?
The internet is already blocked by age. In order to order internet service, you must be an adult, and you must prove it by showing papers, such as residence and pay stubs.
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.
The internet is not blocked by age. Any child with a laptop or phone, or any other device that can connect to a wifi hotspot, can access it.
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.
Many public WiFi hotspots have content filters. Kids are not going to be seeing porn at the library.
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.
kids shouldn't get internet access at libraries. there are books in libraries. adults can show their ids and get wifi access.
Block kids at the on ramp to the internet, all the problems go away. I just don't understand what I'm missing here, why do we allow kids to use the internet?
There are infinite levels of privacy.
> 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.
> Give me your ID or stop posting on HN. No one is forcing you to post on HN. If you don't want me to know your name and address and age and driver's license number and keep a record of everything you say that I sell to anybody I want and store in an unencrypted hard drive, you don't have to post.
Do you see the problem yet?
Sgould I say "Cambridge Analytica" now or later?
Public wifi near universally implements porn blocks in the first place. I can't imagine there would be much chagrin about promoting that into a law.
> 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.
You should read the article.
Others have said this, I'm sure, but this will move past porn _quickly_. Once there is agreed-up age verification for pornography, much of the professional internet will require identity verification to do _anything_. This is one of the bigger nails in the coffin for the free internet, and this true whether or not you're happy with all the pornography out there.
Already in the works: Australia is quietly introducing 'unprecedented' age checks for search engines like Google - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-11/age-verification-sear...
The difference between the comments there (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44528204) and here is quite funny.
This is why they are doing it. Goverments wants ID-check before anyone uses the internet. So they pick a topic like pornography to get their foot through the door. It's salami tactics.
Sharing/storing child porn is already illegal and punished far more harshly. So it's not like we've gone from zero to one. We've been censoring things people don't like for a little while now.
Sure, but that is a step from banning because it's harmful to the producer to banning because it's harmful to the consumer
We're long past that point. Many (most?) Western governments ban simulated CP, including non-realistic stuff like cartoons or even purely textual descriptions.
Some go further still. E.g. in Australia, "laws also cover depictions of sexual acts involving people over the threshold age who are simulating or otherwise alluding to being underage, even if all those involved are of a legal age."
Maybe if it were the creation of child porn that were illegal but that's not how the law is written.
This doesn't sound so bad. I would much prefer to have discussions about politics, technology, or religion safe in the knowledge that I am not inadvertently communicating with a minor.
I had very passionate talks online about all 3 categories before I turned 18, and I got a lot of feedback, from older folk I didn't previously know, that I shaped opinions and formed new perspectives - and a lot of the talks sure as shit did the same for me. I cannot say I would have nearly the same current passion that I do for technology, aspects of politics, and philosophy (including that of religion) without such exposures during my adolescent years, and I'm sure you'd be hard-pressed to find others young enough that wouldn't say the same - provided they have an adequate baseline of introspection.
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.
> safe in the knowledge that I am not inadvertently communicating with a minor.
Why is that so bad? As a kid I really appreciated participating in mixed-age discussions on many topics. I view that as part of what it means to grow into a "young adult."
Too often I think we (North American society) assume that school, with all it's rigorous age separation, gives kids the space and instruction they need to do well in the world but inevitably we get 18 year olds with no awareness of how the world functions beyond themselves... because they've only ever dealt with people of the same age.
The world is a diverse place; ideologically, racially, and in age. We, adults, need to be comfortable communicating with both children and legal minors because they'll be future citizens of the world [added in edit:] and they need to learn those skills too.
Overall, we keep trying to model a world that filters it's own interactions towards children, which is flawed to begin with, but at some point people stop being children, and where does that leave them w.r.t. their expectations of others? If you've never had to consider that an adult might act in bad faith because your world has been so sanitized, are you prepared for a world with bad actors in it?
I don't care if they are 16 or 68, I discuss about topics, not necesarily with the person themself. the former can be insightful and the latter still be extremely close minded.
I also don't understand why the government should control who I can talk to in a digital space. Maybe start investigating the president's flight records if you suddenly care about children interacting with adults.
Parent said identity verification, not age verification.
And honestly, with the advent of AI spam everywhere, I'd be quite happy to visit a version of the internet where everyone is a certified real person
You won't though. Malicious actors will find a way around this - either purchasing or stealing whatever form of ID is used for this. The only people who will suffer are law-abiding citizens simply trying to browse the Internet.
"Workarounds?" Malicious actors will just operate out of different countries like they always have.
You already have that with Cloudflare checking almost every single website on earth, as you can see, that doesn't work.
Clicking on pictures of motorcycles, while annoying, is a very different thing than having to show your ID.
That's why "AI" founders do stuff like Altman's Worldcoin. First they reap $$$ while creating a problem then more $$$ when "solving" it.
be careful what you ask for.
No idea why you’re getting downvoted when there’s a slow but unstoppable migration of everything into discord or other walled, somewhat LLM-proof gardens.
Walled gardens are only LLM-proof until some AI company makes an offer for the data.
I don’t care about that. I care about the number of DMs I get from ”superhorni420” offering me her nudes
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
>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
Discord just changed management and new managment immediately said they are interested in IPO'ing. If trends emerge, it will indeed get overriden by bots like Reddit did around the time it was preparing to IPO. I see it as an inevitability at this point.
But that's already been happening in discord for years.
The parent’s point is that identity verification would stop that.
Where in this statement did people conclude that all websites require identification? Even if they did, you know the technocrats would just pay a few million to have the government look the other way. I don't see the upside here.
WhatsApp does this. I get added to scam channels
It was a very tonedeaf take, that's why. Most of the internet is concentrated in the top 100 websites, and 80% of them would not be affected by this law. So you'll still see plenty of bots on Youtube, Discord, Reddit, news sites, and so on.
Blogs with a few comments would go from 5 real commenters to 0 or 1. This does not get the desired result.
----
secondly, I assure you there's plenty of classic spam on servers that don't have good moderation. pre-AI spam never disappeared.
GAN style training is only going to get cheaper and easier. Detection will collapse to noise. Any ID runes will be mishandled and the abuse will fly under the radar. Only the space of problems where AI fundamentally can't be used, such as being at a live event, will be meaningfully resistant to AI.
Another way for it all to unfold is maybe 98% of online discourse is useless in a few years. Maybe it's useless today, but we just didn't have the tools to make it obvious by both generating and detecting it. Instead of AI filtering to weed out AI, a more likely outcome is AI filtering to weed out bad humans and our own worst contributions. Filter out incessant retorting from keyboard warriors. Analyze for obviously inconsistent deduction. Treat logical and factual mistakes like typos. Maybe AI takes us to a world where humans give up on the 97% and only 1% that is useless today gets through. The internet's top 2% is a different internet. It is the only internet that will be valuable for training data to identify and replace the 1% and converge onto the spaces that AI can't touch.
People will have to search for interactions that can't be imitated and have enough value to make it through filters. We will have to literally touch grass. All the time. Interactions that don't affect the grass we touch will vanish from the space of social media and web 2.0 services that have any reason to operate whatsoever. Heat death of the internet has a blast radius, and much of what humans occupy themselves with will turn out to be within that blast radius.
A lot of people will by definition be disappointed that the middle standard deviation of thought on any topic no longer adds anything. At least at first. There used to be a time when the only person you heard on the radio had to be somewhat better than average to be heard. We will return to that kind of media because the value of not having any expertise or first-hand experience will drop to such an immeasurable low that those voices no longer participate or appear to those using filters. Entire swaths of completely replaceable, completely redundant online "community" will just wither to dust, giving us time to touch the grass, hone the 2%, and make sense of other's 2%.
Callers on radio shows used to be interesting because people could have a tiny window into how wildly incorrect and unintelligent some people are. Pre-internet media was dominated by people who were likely slightly above average. Radio callers were something like misery porn or regular-people porn. You could sometimes hear someone with such an awful take that it made you realize that you are not in the bottom 10%. The internet has given us radio callers, all the time, all of them. They flooded Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. They trend and upvote themselves. They make YouTube channels where they talk into a camera with higher quality than commercial rigs from 2005. There is a GDP for stupidity that never existed except as the novelty object of a more legitimate channel. When we "democratized" media, it wasn't exclusively allowing in thoughts and opinions that were higher quality than "mainstream".
The frightening conclusion is possibly that we are living in a kind of heat death now. It's not the AIs that are scary. Its the humans we have platformed. The bait posts on Instagram will be out-competed. Low quality hot takes will be out-competed. Repetitive and useless comments on text forums will be out-competed. Advertising revenue, which is dependent on the idea that you are engaging with someone who will actually care about your product, will be completely disrupted. The entire machine that creates, monetizes, and foments utterly useless information flows in order to harness some of the energy will be wrecked, redundant, shut down.
Right now, people are correct that today's AI is on an adoption curve that would see more AI spam if tomorrow's AI isn't poised to filter out not just spam but a great mass of low-value human-created content. However, when we move to suppress "low quality slop" we will increasingly be filtering out low-quality humans. When making the slop higher quality so that it flies under the radar, we will be increasingly replacing and out-competing the low-quality content of the low-quality human. What remains will be of a very high deductive consistency. Anything that can be polished to a point will be. Only new information outside the reach of the AI and images of distant stars will be beyond the grasp of this convergence.
All of this is to say that the version of the internet where AI is the primary nexus of interaction via inbound and outbound filtering and generation might be the good internet we think we can have if we enact some totalitarian ID scheme to fight against slop that is currently replacing what the bottom 10% of the internet readily consumes anyway.
I’d rather have this regulated properly before cloudflare becomes the defacto standard of id checks.
Nothing is going to be "regulated properly" for at least the next 3.5 years, and we'll all be dealing with backwards decline for decades after. That's best case, but i'm guessing It'll be even worse than the "radicals" are shouting about.
What issues do you have with Cloudflare becoming the defacto standard that wouldn't also apply to whatever would come of regulating it 'properly'?
Age verification seems like a subset of human verification so if it gets rid of both bots and captchas then why not?
Pretty sure you can guess a few.
Guess a few what?
Reasons why not.
I still don't see any reason erasing bots and captchas from my online experience is bad. I hate bots and captchas. They add absolutely no value to my life. Conversely there is lots to be gained if imagine if something like X or reddit or whatever can anonymously verify that a user is a person and over 18 or 21 or 30 even (whatever) without having to directly handle identities. It's could be all the benefits of a bouncer checking for a pulse and valid ID without the privacy invasion. If done correctly it can also make fraud more difficult.
Because you're choosing not to see the obvious downsides. Wasn't this community the ones worried last decade about tech companies havesting their data for profit?
But sure, let's explain the downsides:
1. this isn't an all encompasing law. It's only for sites that host adult content. You know what people will do... remove adult content.
2. As we see this year, rules are useless without enforcement. I'm sure X or Reddit or whatever large companies will strike deals and be exempt. This will only harm the little sites who get harassed by vested interests.
3. There's been campaigns to try and assossiate LGBT to pornography for a while now. This will delve beyond porn and be used to enforce yet more bigotry. This "think of the children" rationale is always their backdoor to stripping away freedoms, and I sure don't trust it this time.
4. On a moral level, I care more about retaining my pseudo anonymity than about worrying over bots. I'm not giving my ID.ME in order to interact on a games forum, for instance. The better way to address this (if these people actually cared about it) is to force companies to disclose with commenters are being operated via bots. Many websites have API's so that would eliminate many of them, even if it's not perfect.
5. This execution sounds awful. On a general principle, I do not want people sued over state laws that they do not reside in. Why should California need to comply with Floridian laws? This is why porn sites impacted simply block those state IP's. The Internet is more and more connected, so you can imagine the chaos is this is generalized more, instead of actually taking hold and making federal laws. This is half hearted.
One response to flaws in the law is to oppose them. Another response is to find common ground and embrace and extend.
It won't harm anything. Even now as these things spread nationwide something like Stripe or whatever will pop up and fill the need as a service. It used to be essentially universally required to prove your age using a credit card. There was/is a company that specializes in that. I can't remember its name but it was ubiquitous for porn access for quite a long time. Those over 18 confirmation banners used to be much stronger than the merely souped up cookie notices they have become today. Age verification as a service is trivial (particularly with the rise of phones) and someone will build a system that does a much better job preserving anonymity than credit cards ever did. At this point all you need is something like a passkey or FIDO token and a way for something to vouch age during account creation.
I agree that federal law is preferred.
The article concludes that age verification must repeat every 60 minutes. And when there’s doubt about safe harbor, better safe than sorry. There’s a chance you’ll look back at captchas with relish.
The article starts as
> Just in time for the Fourth of July, last week the Supreme Court effectively nullified the First Amendment for any writers, like me, who include sex scenes in their writing, *intended for other adults*
There you have it. The author already is self-aware of the appropriateness of their creation for minors.
All that's needed is an easy way for the author to click "intended for adults" on whatever material they are creating and the entire article becomes nothing more than yapping into the wind.
Substack can easily build that as a feature for example. Reddit already has that with its "NSFW" flags (but does not currently verify accounts are actually 18yo+ adult humans).
Generally, it seems like silicon valley has become so entitled to taking the mile that the threat of taking back an inch brings out the hysterical Chicken Little fursona.
Substack and Reddit are huge websites. What you’re talking about kills self-hosting. Ironically, your idea for regulating this reinforces the VC-driven Silicon Valley capital-intensive model and kills independent, community driven low/no-capital websites.
I don’t agree, at least as far as legal obligation goes. The average voter is far more worried about porn and other explicit content and not so much about anything else.
This doesn't really track with widespread and normalized use of pornographic materials, including written descriptions, by most adults in this country. There's a pretty wide gulf between "I don't think kids should be able to access this stuff" and "I think we need to supercharge the surveillance state and destroy the first amendment"
This doesn't destroy the first amendment any more than requiring an ID & background check to purchase a firearm destroys the second amendment. Which is to say that it might, but for exactly the same reason, so The People ultimately need to decide on a consistent choice of interpretation.
1A: Congress shall make no law ... Abridging the freedom of speech. (Note: freedom of speech includes the ability to listen to what you want)
2A: ... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Congress making a law that prevents minors from accesing information is a clearly a breach of the first text.
Point of sale ID checks for guns are much less clearly "infringing on the right to keep arms". It is only limiting the sale, not the ownership.
Fine, then ATF Class 3 licenses, which are required to keep and bear some kinds of arms, are a breach of the 2A similar to how the 1A is being breached here.
NFL stuff is actually a pretty good example of largely pointless law considering that what it does is effectively just make the items in question more expensive by taxing them and artificially limiting supply. If you want to own a machine gun, a grenade launcher, or even a fully functional tank in US, you still can so long as you're rich enough to afford it (unless your state has laws banning it). There are no additional restrictions on who can and cannot own that stuff beyond the requirement to pay the tax.
Except one person googling and watching porn has nothing to do with other people, very different from buying guns
It has as much to do with other people as buying guns does. What about the actresses in the porn content; people the world, clearly including you, so quickly forget about? The concerning number of women who are trapped into this industry, usually in third world countries, by men? What about the people on the other side of the personal relationships of individuals who consume this content; the averted gazes, their treatment of women, how that impacts their community and their children?
Asking id from the person watching porn has nothing to do with making porn illegal.
If you think it is harmful to the people doing the porn, then it should be illegal.
If not, asking for id is super useless.
Also if watching porn is bad for the person’s spouse then they shouldn’t do it, which has nothing to do with asking for id
But isn't harm minimization a thing? That's something we practice in other domains, like providing clean needles to drug addicts. After all, if drug use is harmful to the people doing drugs, then it should be illegal. So; making things illegal often doesn't solve the problem. Making it harder to consume porn reduces consumption which reduces the amount of money being funneled into the industry, which might be beneficial to those harmed by it (both producers and consumers). Versus, making it illegal might have a prohibition-style impact, and is, of course, legally tenuous anyway.
I agree but, then they can go after people producing porn, not people that watch it.
This is the same as going after the drug addicts.
This feels like going after the people on the more vulnerable side because it is easy. Which signals it is more about forcing people to not do something instead of trying to genuinely help them.
But going after people producing porn is a no no because they have money and they are organised.
Also imo the intention of people trying implement things like this is just about surveillance and has absolutely nothing to do with protecting the families, children, addicts etc. etc.
There's no evidence that porn addiction is nearly as harmful as drug addiction other than making some religious people feel more shame about it than usual. If the argument is that the people who produce porn are doing something illegal or harmful, then prosecute them. If they're filming consenting adults in compliance with regulations that are already in place then I don't really understand the problem here.
You're essentially saying that you'd like to ban it long term, but since you can't make it happen right away, laws like these can serve as a first step to normalize censorship leading to such a ban.
Thank you for being honest about it and illustrating why the slippery slope is very real.
Did you miss the recent years of some states trying to ban gay/trans books from libraries? Or even just books written by gay/trans authors? It's been part of their playbook for years to try and assosiate transgenderism with pornographic.
You are right, the average voter is not worried about any single enforcement outside of CSAM. The people who will exploit this are not just "your average voter".
> 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.
> 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 an state AG tries to prosecute an entity that has no ties to the state other than content being passively accessible, that's probably another supreme court case if it doesn't get immediately decided in favor of the defendant in the lower courts. You open a big can of worms if entities are required to proactively comply with regulations in states they have zero presence in.
If Texas wants to block content from entities that have nothing to do with Texas, they can build their own great firewall.
> You open a big can of worms if entities are required to proactively comply with regulations in states they have zero presence in.
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?
As far as I understand it (IANAL), this ruling decides that the speech restrictions imposed by the Texas ID verification law are compliant with the 1st amendment. It didn't touch on whether or not Texas can enforce its laws on entities that don't do business in Texas.
IANAL, but it seems like things are already moving in this direction. For example, FL has a similar state law regarding pornography, and the response from many porn sites has been to comply or block FL IPs rather than fight it up to the supreme court. I guess someone will do it eventually, but I suspect there is an assumption that they'd be wasting their time and money to do so.
Yeah I don't think a business is going to try to force the issue when a geoblock is simple to implement. If it happens, it's probably going to be some kind of advocacy group pushing it.
Until someone files suit on the commonly known ineffectiveness of geolocating IPs to try to force ID checks instead.
Isn't this covered by the "full faith and credit" clause? [0]
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S1-1/AL...
Technically anything is possible with the Calvinball Supreme Court, but states can choose not to extradite their citizens. E.g. NY has a shield law for abortion doctors.
https://ag.ny.gov/resources/organizations/police-departments...
This feels helpful, but puts a big burden on the person targeted. I live in California; let's say I run afoul of this Tennessee law and am criminally prosecuted.
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.
That would be one wild case if it did happen. Sucks for whoever it happens to, but that would 100% turn into a high profile case that puts the 10th amendment into question.
To be honest, it would be settled relatively quickly because I don't think any state wants to be the one to set such precedent as of now.
There are constitutional limits on when state courts can exercise jurisdiction over people not physically located in the state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_jurisdiction_in_Inter...
> Personal jurisdiction in American civil procedure law is premised on the notion that a defendant should not be subject to the decisions of a foreign or out of state court, without having "purposely availed" himself of the benefits that the forum state has to offer.
> Courts have held that the greater the commercial nature and level of interactivity associated with the website, the more likely it is that the website operator has "purposefully avail[ed] itself" of the forum state's jurisdiction. [..] In contrast, a passive website that simply makes the information available to the user will be less likely to have a basis for personal jurisdiction.
(By the same principle, even an interactive website can probably avoid jurisdiction if they block IP addresses from the state, and don't encourage people to evade the block or anything like that.)
[flagged]
> especially if the judge finds the text in question particularly or personally offensive.
Pro-censorship advocates will venue shop to find a sympathetic court
First they will find targets, then decide on the crime, then shop the venue.
This is presently happening in China with homosexual literature: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c056nle2drno
Rural police departments decide that a piece of text 'harmed' one of their residents and prosecute the author.
Or now is a good time to build privacy tools into everything.
Unfortunately, this is the law we're talking about. Privacy tools don't do much to mitigate the hardships of life as a fugitive.
It's going to get used against trans and queer people. Someone will try to claim that a trans person in normal street clothes is "corrupting children", or that merely mentions of their existence is.
This is already happening to queer people who dress in drag.
Judges are not the people that prosecute crimes
True, but it's a given that prosecutors will do it since that's their job.
There was a NYT article a couple weeks ago about Chinese morality police doing mass arrests of erotica authors,
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.
The Supreme Court is just doing their part as a part of Project 2025 (which is about 50% accomplished already btw)
Is there a breakdown of this anywhere?
ie, something that shows what was proposed in p2025 and what policies/procedures/orders have pushed a particular part of the plan forward?
https://www.project2025.observer
So, while I agree that this feels foreign and wrong to me as someone who has experienced "The Internet" for so long, I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works.
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.
Flip it on its head.
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.
> 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.
Would you say the same about drugs?
Well, yes. It's exactly like that for drugs too. You can take great time and care to vet every person your kid interacts with outside of school, or keep them monitored 24/7 all you want. But that doesn't stop someone from passing them a blunt in the restroom at school.
It's not about blocking it all. It's about blocking some, removing the monetary incentives to entice children from major players. It's about stopping some of the addiction and damaging effects. Just like we limit alcohol but kids still drink, or vape etc. They still do it, but it requires more effort and that barrier can be a very real barrier to addiction formation.
> It's about stopping some of the addiction and damaging effects
I used to think this was a valid point, but I read something that changed my opinion completely. Pornhub, plus other large sites, have a lot of attention on them. They're a long way from perfect but they do self police, probably far more than anyone here knows, because they don't want to get banned. If you get rid of them, you're boosting smaller and far nastier sites that don't self regulate anywhere near the same amount.
To state it simply, if you block Pornhub, curious children will still find porn, but it'll be far worse.
It's not the same as banning sale of physical items like cigarettes. It's more like if you banned cigarettes but then all the children went and got black market cigarettes that are 50% asbestos.
I don't really believe it. It's the big sites that have the monetary backing to employ the dark algorithmic patterns and monetization schemes.
I don't really see much of an issue with the content of the porn if that's what you mean by nastier sites. To me it's more like if you ban cigarettes and now kids are all buying black market cigarettes without nicotine.
Are they actually just as hard to block though? e.g. I don't see much reason to allow traffic to any Russian or Chinese IPs for any reason from my network. To be honest a default blacklist to any non-American IP seems like it'd not cause much trouble for my family, and then if there were some educational or FOSS or whatever sites in Europe, those could be whitelisted on a case by case basis.
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.
Blocking every country outside the US is simply admitting failure here.
For children though? Supposing we were able to be effective at making it hard to host free porn with no ID in the US, why not make kids access to the Internet US-only by default plus a generous allow-list (it's easy to add exceptions for educational and other harmless sites like say, BBC, foreign universities, etc)
You personally adding exceptions for every beneficial foreign website isn’t so trivial. Using someone else’s software to do this for you is more realistic.
However this is just a cost vs benefit tradeoff. If looking at porn instantly killed a kid or caused significant harm then going to extremes would be worth it, but the benefit of such an approach is minimal. There’s a bunch of metrics that tracked kids as internet porn became a thing and the net impact is effectively zero on metrics like suicide, self worth, promiscuity, age of first sex, etc. Instead the correlation goes in the other direction.
Blocking social media on the other hand is much easier and backed up by a lot of research.
How so? Why would I not default filter e.g. Iran or Chad or El Salvador or most of the world on my home network? I can always unblock a specific IP if needed, but chances are that will never happen.
My kids aren't old enough for computers yet, but I'm mostly of the mindset that a whitelist or curated offline cache (at least for anything on the web) is the sanest approach for younger kids. Outside of .gov, .edu, a handful of discussion forums, and stuff not relevant to them like shopping/banking, there's honestly not a lot of utility to the web. If they end up interested in programming, reference material can be kept offline, libraries downloaded through a proxy repository, etc.
You need to add Canada, UK, Australia, Japan, etc to that list to actually achieve what you set out to accomplish. Which then does more harm than what you’re trying to prevent.
He’ll realistically the US doesn’t make the cut either.
Why? Concretely, what would I be trying to allow in Japan? Don't they mostly communicate in Japanese anyway? The US has things like local government, schools, businesses, clubs, organizations, etc. Because the US is where we live. That makes it inconvenient to default block the US. Australia has what that is relevant to us? I don't see any .au in my browser history. Or .jp. Or .ca. There is some ac.uk, granted, but that could probably be kept to a small whitelist. I highly doubt anyone would notice for years if ever if I blocked Japan or Australia. It's a near certainty that no one would notice if I blocked all non-English parts of the web.
Are US organizations hosting in Canada for some reason? They probably wouldn't go further than that for latency reasons.
There's the separate problem of foreign companies having US points of presence, but assuming these laws expand, I'd imagine that would eventually lead to liability for services like cloudflare providing the endpoint/hosting on US soil.
I assume you buy some non US products and many .com address are hosted outside the US by non US companies.
Gigabyte.com for example makes a great deal of computer parts like graphics cards and it’s hosted at 103.130.100.144 which geolocates to Taiwan, Province of China.
bmw.com 160.46.226.165 Germany
Now some of them will route US users to US servers to lower their ping, but that’s an added expense that not everyone pays for.
That's still not giving a concrete reason. Why would I need to access gigabyte.com? I can't even buy their products there; I'd have to buy them on something like Amazon. Firmware updates? If it works I'm not going to change it. If it doesn't, I'm going to return it. If products try to reach out to their manufacturers on their own that's twice the reason to default block as much as you can.
Looking up manuals, researching products before purchasing them, there’s a bunch of reasons to go to a manufacturer’s website.
Firmware updates can fix compatibility long after a purchase, it’s not just a question of whether something works on day 1 but day 540. IE why isn’t this EV charger taking to the solar inverter so it preferentially charges the car over sending energy to the grid? Firmware fix and suddenly it all works.
Why would little children need to access motherboard firmware updates though? Nobody's saying that grown-ups should be blocked inside a US-only Internet. We're saying that cleaning up US IP space from free no-questions-asked porn would mean that parents could allow children more freedom by choosing to allow traffic only to US IPs by default. Just like you could allow your 10-year-old child to roam around a mall if (but ONLY if) you knew it didn't have stores demonstrating sex toys out in front of them.
> Why would little children need to access motherboard firmware updates though?
Because they're interested in it. I was installing Linux when I was 9 because I thought it was cool.
If my parents had walled me off into a foam internet safe-room, it would have stifled one of my lifelong interests that led to my career, and bred trust issues and resentment against my parents.
Im hosting my site on an IP in the US, just because it was the best hosting option. If the US laws change so that either a) I am liable or b) the hosting provider wont host me. Then of course I would have to move to another, non US, provider. And I wouldn’t be alone so the U.S internet would probably be a lot smaller than it is now.
The fundamental problem—and it's a big one—is that in the physical world, age verification does not result in a centralized log of when and where I was, and what I did. If I buy cigarettes I show my paper id to some dude and then buy smokes. It's transient with no record (except the fallible memory of the bloke doing the ID check).
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.
That's not even universally true, though. I've been to bars where they scan the barcode on my drivers' license. I assume that's more convenient than reading the data off it, so maybe they're just doing it for convenience and aren't storing the data anywhere, but who knows, maybe they are. Maybe there's a database somewhere with a list of name, date, time, location tuples for some of my bar visits from years ago. Creepy.
Yeah, grocery stores swipe ids too. Thankfully I’m too old, they don’t ask. Have to teach kids to not allow it. Definitely stored.
> Definitely stored
Not well-designed ones. I think you overestimate how much retailers want to even possess sensitive information like that.
What's going to be stored is the fact that an of-age ID was scanned, and possibly the DOB. This is to protect honest cashiers and to have a way to punish ones who might sell to the underage. If an underage sale is reported, they check the audit log and it says the transaction had an ID scanned the cashier can be cleared of wrongdoing. Unless it's the same DOB always being scanned, which seems like some kind of dishonesty.
I do not buy that the supermarket chain wants to use your ID card data for any purpose. First of all, they don't need to, they have (most people's) loyalty cards that do a much better job as they're swiped or entered even without buying any beer. Second, again, only downsides come from saving it. If they were to sell the data and be caught, terrible. If they were to get hacked, terrible.
Your comment made sense perhaps only twenty years ago. But today, everyone is desperate for this kind of info. Third-parties provide these services for free or close to it, especially to get access to the data stream.
It's a several hundred billion dollar industry, in the US alone. Retail is definitely a source: https://market.us/report/data-broker-market/
Someone was on here a couple of years ago stating that even "line item" level data on your receipt is now being transmitted in a lot of cases, and growing.
The bottom line today—never expect a company to default to respect of your privacy. Simply too lucrative.
Pot shops in legal states are compiling databases with their compliance CRM systems.
Pot industry needs to anonymize their customer records or stop using SaaS packaged solutions.
Now if China hacks Meadows or something, they have customer and purchase lists which may include security cleared personnel who can now be blackmailed.
If you run a pot shop, or an SaaS solution for them like Meadows, you really have to figure out how to divorce customer PII from purchases.
I am back to the black market in Oregon for this reason!
Several things:
1. In the offline world, the child and media provider are in the same physical location, subject to the same laws. On the internet, they're in different places. This is central, as the argument by SCOTUS seems to be that the most restrictive law anywhere applies everywhere.
2. I don't think "just" is a silly instruction. Your child can do any number of things and we expect parents to have a certain amount of oversight and/or involvement to help children navigate it. I don't see how the internet is any different from anything else.
3. There's an important difference between a child entering a store or library and finding a page on the internet. Entering a store, library, or physical home, or whatever, presupposes a certain amount of effort involved in entering the premises, and that the owner of the store or whatever is present and can in fact monitor each visitor easily; on the internet it's a matter of linking from one text to another. Sometimes I don't think you can draw analogies easily, and this is one of those cases. To me it's less like requiring an ID for purchase of a media item within a store, and more like having ID requirements to view something in a public square, or having ID requirements to publish the media item in the first place. It's a bit like SCOTUS saying "if you publish a book in state X where it's legal, but state Y requires a publisher to be responsible for monitoring every purchaser of their book everywhere, then you have to comply with state Y."
For what it's worth, I think its absurd to have legal age requirements for speech, offline or online.
RE Point 1. All it takes is one of those other peers' parents to allow them to view pornography and then that kid just becomes the porn-distributor for the school, just like some kids in my day passed around porno mags. In essence, nothing changes for the kids, but every single adult is at best inconvenienced and at worst at risk of government invasion of their privacy. Not worth doing, imo.
RE Point 2. They could just use a whitelist instead of a blacklist/filter. They exist already, after all. Fill it up with sites showing the wholesome version of the world you want your child exposed to and they can only visit those places.
Yeah this is the thing everyone here seems to ignore. The moment someone does age verification and downloads a file the whole thing falls apart.
You would have to lock down any electronics device that can be used to bypass the restrictions. In reality the best way to do this is to build a screen based nudity filter into the device, which is not only more effective, it exposes this whole nonsense as an attempt to grow the police state.
Nitpick: currently in the US, most public libraries do not regulate anyone, of any age, from reading “adult” books.
I didn't say public libraries, I was going to say bookstore but picked "library" because I wanted to drive home the point that even a kid whose parents didn't give them any money would be allowed to access the materials. My point: if someone opened a facility to knowingly give kids books about sex acts (and not the "sex ed" kind), we would all agree they are a creep.
They wont allow minors to take out porn. Simply, they wont and it would be illegal for them.
Calvin and Hobbs, the comic strip, has been banned in Tennessee schools on the grounds that it had pornography in the form of Calvin's naked butt being in some cells.
What is adult content? A cartoon butt? A book on breastfeeding? "I can't define porn, but I know it when I see it" has led to Calvin and Hobbs being banned.
I think the point they were making is that a child can walk into a library, pick up any book, and open it. All without any adults being in the loop. They can do that today.
Yeah, and my point is that the "pick up any book" thing is hiding the fact that selection is in fact seriously limited.
And second, underaged kids can not checkout non kid material without adult in the loop. That part is simply not true, the librarian will say no to the child or ask for parents permission.
> hiding the fact that selection is in fact seriously limited
If your goal is "prevent children from accessing adult material", it really isn't that limited.
> underaged kids can not checkout non kid material without adult in the loop
They don't need to. They can read it in the library; that's what libraries are for.
Have you ever been in the library? Cause they really limit minors.
And obviously "adult material" is not referencing cookbooks for housewifes nor antic philosophy nor fantasy books meant for adults.
It does in fact means porn and such.
I have been to my library yes. You don't need ID or a library card (unless you want to check something out or use a computer) and you can pick up any book you like (including e.g. 50 Shades of Grey), sit down at a table, and read it. There are children in there all the time and there isn't an adults-only section.
A minor can walk into any library I've been to, grab any book off the shelf, and read it.
You can read a book without taking it out.
Meaning anyone taller than 4’ can reach tedious essays about porn.
What public libraries have porn?
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?
10 year old me definitely checked out the Clan of the Cavebear books and similar from my local library, no one cared.
My idea of a hot date was looking up dirty words in the unabridged dictionary.
Pretty much none which is exactly why the comparison to libraries makes zero sense.
And yes, there was considerable pearl clutching over same sex kiss. To the point the supposed old school bastions of freedom would not print it, would not put it in the library and would do everything possible for kid not to read it.
The physical world of back then was considerably more restrictive in terms of what kids could access. Whether in the libraries or outside of them.
Also, censorship software is infamously bad at curation. Peacefire isn't around anymore these days, but the sites blocked by local censorship software around 2000 is pretty terrible, whether they used keyword filters or URL lists. See the list of sites in the left column at https://web.archive.org/web/2020/http://www.peacefire.org (peacefire circumventor is a tool I used to use to access blocked sites at school)
> I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works.
From a different angle: many people went into the web in disagreement with how the physical world is managed.
Those who were good at politics also tried to improve the offline rules, but not everyone can.
From that POV, opposing the application of irl biggotery into the online world isn't some illogical or whimsical move. They tried to make a better world for the likes of them, and in a way you're using the success of the platform to explain why they're not welcome anymore.
I'd be sympathetic to your logic if it was for the betterment of the online world, but IMHO it surely isn't and we're looking at bullies expanding irl power to crush other platforms as well.
> 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.
I like this point. I feel like the tech community just figured politicians would forget about the issue. Instead of working together to develop a solution.
By providing technical means to implement such censorship in "more acceptable" ways, you lower the political bar for its passing.
Not only that, but once you do so, you effectively concede that such censorship is valid to begin with, which can and will be used against you to pass further laws along those lines in the future. And if those laws cannot be implemented without ditching all that privacy you worked so carefully to respect in your compromise, well, too bad about that.
Are you assuming the "tech community" doesn't have the right to argue this on morality and thus refuse to provide technical means ?
No. The tech community absolutely has the right to refuse to provide technical means and argue any views they want.
However we're seeing what happens next. Politicians write laws anyway forcing the tech community to do what they want.
I am just saying that in hindsight a bit of cooperation may have resulted in a less privacy invasive solution. I guess with the supreme court ruling it's too late now. The politicians have already won.
> 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.
That's also an argument against an id verification mechanism then, the list of sites to block who don't implement one will be infinite.
> allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn
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.
You're correct, and all the arguments against it simply boil down to "but we can't guarantee a perfect solution so therefore we shouldn't even try".
I would say the best option, if there absolutely must be age verification etc., would be to have a registry of sites that comply with all regulations and by default devices shouldn't access sites off that list. Basically a giant allolist for verified good sites. The internet is already effectively shrunk to less than a dozen sites for regular users, so this won't impact them, and the rest of us can have real free speech and unregulated internet back by switching DNS servers or some similar trivial change.
Or we move everything not meant for the sanitised internet to TOR hidden services.
But we don't need any government intervention for this kind of thing. You can already maintain such a whitelist yourself, and interest groups can collaborate with businesses interested in maintaining their public image to have a centralized registry of voluntary certification for websites (similar to those ratings for e.g. movies that we already have).
Separately from that, if switching DNS servers is an easy workaround to keep access to porn, kids interested in it will quickly learn how to do so, trading recipes and even downloaded content directly. Ditto with Tor etc.
The fundamental problem here is that it is an attempt to censor something for which there is huge demand among the very group that's being excluded. The only way you can do so that would actually work is full-fledged panopticon, where all communication channels are pervasively monitored.
I actually agree with this. One would just need Apple, Google, and Microsoft to buy into this and listing a legitimate site on the registry would be adopted as fast as universal HTTPS was. Keeping pubescent kids from mainly learning about sexuality through the lens of often-disturbing porn is a worthwhile goal.
Still need a solution to age-verify without tracking though, or else people would think of it as something to be turned off immediately since Reddit and X would obviously not be on the registry since they host tremendous amounts of porn.
I don't think that's an intractable problem at all, and I think as technologists we should be putting our efforts into building the most trustworthy system for that instead of just campaigning for nothing to change because it's "the parents' problem." Easy for us to say: We're all either not parents, or we're the type who are equipped to properly filter access to the Internet for our young kids. In reality, the single mom of 3 working 12 hours a day is not equipped to "just" set up a proxy server or figure out how to install internet filtering software on the Amazon Fire tablet she got her 8-year-old to watch Spider-Man.
A bit of a rant on the topic of digital supervision and age verification:
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.
Obviously, there’s a difference between access to programming materials and the unethical majority of the internet.
I had access to the former at about 12 but no access to the internet until age ~23. Was about perfect.
When did you grow up?
Why is the comment downvoted so much? Am GenX.
Not having access to the internet during childhood 30-40 years ago is very different than not having access to the internet as a child now.
I think most people are taking your description of your experience being positive as a recommendation - one that is very unrealistic in modern times.
I’m describing a utopian ideal yes.
I still think the open internet is not a place for children today. People forget the surveillance aspect, not to mention the other dozen negative aspects.
It’s easy enough to download things for their local use.
That Tennessee law is particularly crazy:
> (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.
Interestingly (and I suppose fairly?) the law doesn't seem to make a distinction between male and female nipples. So an image of a shirtless man violates this just as much as an image of a shirtless woman.
I'd imagine that male nipples are exempted due to the line that mentions "applying contemporary community standards".
Of course, that wording is deliberately vague for a reason. Judges, especially conservative ones, have often let states use wording like that to get away with female-toplessness bans, blue laws, religious imagery in government buildings, etc, since that kind of wording lets them avoid including discriminatory language in the law itself, therefore supposedly not violating the constitution.
I also noticed that! Certainly speaks of the intelligence of the people who write these laws :)
Does that also outlaw medical content?
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Tenets.
A tenant is somebody who has a lease, for example to an apartment or one of those big metal sheds for a supermarket, and by analogy, customers of something like Microsoft's "Entra ID" (what was "Azure Active Directory" at least the new name is less confusing)
A tenet is a belief or principle that you believe in absolutely, I think we'd say that this "protects but does not bind / binds but does not protect" idea isn't a tenet of Fascism but instead an observable trait.
Thank you for that, I've been looking for a decent pre-AI/Non-wikipedia summary like that. Unsurprisingly but depressingly, at least 13 out of 14 points are a perfect match.
Well, jury is still out on #14…
Gerry and Mander told me to say hi.
(Seriously, gerrymandering, redistricting weaponization, bribery/campaign contributions, and the like are all forms of election corruption.)
In agreement, just to nitpick a single point:
> These people will never actually ban pornography, because they consume pornography.
Banning porn won't affect them: mainstream porn will find a way (dealing with rulings will just be a cost of business).
And more than anything, making it technically illegal allows for selective enforcement, which means a lot more power for them to decide who wins and who loses.
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This is not the gotcha people think it is. Bible thumpers only pay attention to a few sections of the new testament anyways.
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It happened a few times https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65794363
The Great Bible Battle
https://archive.md/60QZV
These people will never actually ban pornography,
That's what I used to say about Roe v. Wade. "They'll never give up that wedge issue."
They never banned abortions for themselves, just made it more difficult to get if you’re not getting an “acceptable” one (i.e. have the money to go where it’s legal or have a private family doctor who can make Bastard Fetus go bye-bye).
You can see how this model worked in Ireland for example.
Historically Abortion was literally prohibited constitutionally in the Republic. That changed†, one of my friends lived there at the time and she's got a picture somebody made (painted? sketched?) on her wall of the group watching the results come in. But for most of my life, abortion was absolutely illegal in the Republic of Ireland.
So, if you were poor, too bad no abortions, they're illegal. But if you're wealthy you just decide to "go on holiday", maybe a long weekend somewhere nice - and miraculously while abroad you stop being pregnant. No problem
†https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-sixth_Amendment_of_the_...
You’re right that they consume porn, but plenty of them still want to ban it, and not just because of LGBTQ. It’s all about moralistic virtue signaling by immoral people.
The irony of course are stats like these.
From "Data Finds Republicans are Obsessed with Searching for Transgender Porn"[1]:
> So far in 2022, more than 300 anti-LGBT bills have been proposed across 36 states – at least one third of which are directed at trans youth. This surge, especially in anti-trans legislation from Republicans, stands in stark contrast to a startling fact.
> Republicans love transgender porn, a lot.
> With more than 4.7 Million transgender porn related Google searches each month (per Ahrefs.com), do Republicans represent those searching most? The answer seems to be a clear yes.
[1] https://lawsuit.org/general-law/republicans-have-an-obsessio...
> These people will never actually ban pornography
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
...
You have it backwards, Pornhub preemptively blocked access based on geolocation before the bills even passed.
So Pornhub hates money and traffic?
Of course not. Pornhub blocked these IP because they knew it was going to be (and is now) illegal in those states, at least at its current form. I see it no different from said states banning Pornhub.
Pornhub did it in protest[1], hope this helps.
[1] https://www.abc4.com/news/tech-social-media/pornhub-blocks-a...
The bills still passed so what's your point? The protest failed.
That you have it backwards, because you do. Pornhub preemptively blocked states that were considering implementing ID rules, and states are not actively blocking Pornhub.
You don't seem to grasp the argument.
From above:
> These people will never actually ban pornography
> Not sure how one can say that with a straight face when there are US states that literally block pornhub, but okay
You then say, well actually they weren't blocked by the states, they were blocked by the sites themselves to protest a bill that passed.
The issue is this clarification is totally irrelevant given the context of the above comment.
The root comment claims in this domain, the right wing is targeting "anything other than heterosexuality". Not sure what their evidence of that claim is. I would think anyone with even a basic familiarity re the right-wing American culture warrior would know this isn't the case. They are simply following the standard far right modus operandi, which is to start their cultural attack on the most vulnerable at the margins where it is easiest.
Similarly, passing age verification is essentially a strategy to enact an effective ban, because it is a demand that cannot be met and is easier to pass than an outright ban. So the comment suggesting it's not serious to suggest this is simply or _only_ about "anything other than heterosexuality" is correct, or at least, not impeached by your conclusion they have it backwards by essentially hyperfocusing on some rather irrelevant pornsite protest tactic which entirely misses the point. If anything, the fact they passed the bills after the self initiated “bans” simply bolsters the rejoinder to the root comment.
Here's the OP I'm responding to:
> Not sure how one can say that with a straight face when there are US states that literally block pornhub, but okay.
Note the word "literally" in the statement that US state are literally blocking Pornhub.
That is not the case. Pornhub blocked the states preemptively, not the other way around.
Hope this helps.
I get it and yes, you are technically correct that they are not "literally blocking" it. I just hope you can also see where I'm coming from. In context of the larger comment thread your reply felt like a nitpick that missed the point, and focused on that nitpick to the detriment of the larger point of that OP, which imo has some merit. Or at least some merit you didn't address. But I understand you are correct on this particular point. As a suggestion, maybe next time you could reply more as providing context rather than seeming to suggest their entire take was "backwards". Thanks for replying.
Thanks. Can't put it as eloquently myself.
Breaking news: VPN stocks skyrocket.
Note that pornography is not banned here in Texas at least. You just have to provide age verification, and PH elected not to participate in that process. It doesn’t seem like that wild a thing at face value.
> much to the chagrin of people whose power comes from harming LGBTQ+ persons/treating them as scapegoats.
To their "chagrin?" Huh? The meaning of the word is the opposite of whatever you're trying to communicate, I think.
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> conservative Christians are trying to eliminate ALL sexually-related speech online
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.
You might not be pushing for it, but certainly your fellow conservative Christians are.
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.
No, some of them are. More evangelicals than my crowd.
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.
> I don’t see how you can ignore the massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men
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.
This is actually a pretty sound framework and I mostly agree. Usually it's justifiable to intervene when somebody is harming someone else and not before. I think it's a bit oversimplified, though. Do you think it might contribute to the incel epidemic and the associated violence? In that sense one could make a similar line of argument to that of the temperance movement's talk of alcohol contributing to wife-beating (which it did). I don't believe that indirection leaves a clear enough link to justify state violence to ban something, but there do exist less explicitly moralistic arguments for it. Not really my position but it's not constructive to reduce every criticism to "moralizing".
> Do you think it might contribute to the incel epidemic and the associated violence?
No actually I don't, not at all. I blame the patriachy and feminism for the creation of incels. Not in the sense that feminism is bad, but the contrary.
What I mean is, incels have always existed. However, our tolerance for widespread misbehavior of men has grown thinner over the last 70 years.
When I was in college, it was typical to hear "oh man, don't go to that frat house, they roofie!" Looking back, it's almost comical. What? They... roofie? Is... anybody going to do anything about this? Should I tell someone? No, evidently - just don't go there.
Of course, it used to be worse. Men used to be able to just beat women, and nobody cared. Financial abuse was not only common, it was mandated by law.
We've come a long, long way. And, we've left a lot of men behind. Before, you could be a piece of shit and still be almost guaranteed a marriage, or at least sex. Our standards for behavior are much higher.
Men have been, understandably, slow to evolve. It's a much less sweet deal. This is compounded by the fact we've really never had a progressive movement for men. To this day, there are infinite ways to be a heterosexual woman - but there's only one way to be a heterosexual man. Men are closed in, trapped, by social expectations. We carry all the baggage of the patriarchy and misogyny of days gone, but we reap few benefits. We are not so liberated, not so open-minded.
It's a fine line. You must evolve, but not too much so that you may reject the performance of masculinity. You must be progressive, but not so much so. You must be traditional, but only in the right ways. Some men, even a lot of men, cannot keep up or fit into what is expected of them. And, there's no moving back.
> Men have been, understandably, slow to evolve.
It's true, and for all the reasons you list, men are in fact genetically inferior.
At this point all male babies should be aborted or otherwise discarded at birth. Babies born with two X chromosomes can simply transition into the gender identity role of "man" during puberty, if they so choose.
Bio-essentialism is an inherently patriarchal belief. I'm sure you're being sarcastic, but no - obviously men are not born evil. They're socialized in such a way that sets them up for failure, and they have to actively work to overcome this. Those that don't, fail.
For the record, I'm a man. If you want to argue against the things I say then actually address the things I say, instead of some obviously hyperbolic strawman.
Come one man, it would be trivial for me to credibly argue that your religion has given scores of young men an absolutely dysfunctional relation to sexuality, woman, their own body, etc. Anyone could make that case as easily as your case about pornography (arguably with more proof in my case). Should we legislate both the same way?
I agree that some "purity gospel" teachings have made people uncomfortable with their own bodies. For example, I don't find myself bent out of shape by girls wearing shorter shorts and don't agree with the degree of taboo applied to nudity in America. I also think this only contributes to over-sexualization rather than reducing it.
I just don't see that as "my religion". That's not what I believe. In a certain sense an Eastern Orthodox Christian and a Missouri Synod Lutheran both have the "same religion", but for practical purposes they do not.
Yes, but "his religion" is over 2000 years old and has found ways to reform itself many times to re-centre itself towards the core teachings of Jesus Christ, namely compassion and piety. The Christians who sold indulgencies are not the Christians who burned witches are not the Christians who help those in need. It has existed for twenty centuries across continents and anyone who can corrupt it effectively wields the power of God. Of course it has been used as justification for heinous acts. Pretty much anything that has existed that long and is that powerful has been used that way.
It is irrational to hate the entire religion because of select elements, past or present. You are in effect committing the same act of hatred you are accusing Christians of.
I was pointing out that similar arguments could be made about the “badness” of both religion and porn to show that these arguments are facetious in both cases
Pauline Christianity, which represents the vast majority of Christian denominations worldwide including the more liberal ones, has little to do with "core teachings of Jesus". Starting with the claim that Jesus is God, given that the guy literally never once claimed to be one.
Haven’t all the reforms of christianity specifically brought the church away from the core teachings of Jesus Christ? Isn’t that why there are coptic and orthodox christians at all? Because they feel the catholic church out of Rome did not follow the core teachings of Jesus Christ?
> massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men
Can you provide any source for this?
> Most adults I see are fat, thus gluttons, thus are committing a sin.
This is not how fatness works.
Some people are genetically predisposed to gaining weight easily. Some people are literally just hungrier and have a higher satiety threshold. This is why "just eat less" is horribly ineffective.
Diet and exercise help but are more Band-Aids than a true long-term fix. Many people gain MORE weight after a period of intense dieting and exercise than before. There's a saying that summarizes this conundrum well: "Nobody knows more about diets than fat people."
I am sure that you mean well, but please understand that this is a very complex topic.
This is, as a matter of fact. Both sides of my family are essentially universally obese. I grew up with it. I saw lots of it. I am probably genetically predisposed, but I'm not giving my DNA to one of those sketchy testing companies, so I can't say for sure.
It's not an issue of metabolism. I've walked in on people sneaking a junk food binge at 1:30AM too many times to believe this. I've seen all the sneak-eating, all the extra oily sauce when they think "well it's a salad", to believe that.
Diet and exercise are actually great long-term fixes, they're just not easy. We can see this pretty well by how reducing appetite via a GLP-1 agonist helps to decrease body fat, even with older-generation drugs that act almost entirely by just reducing appetite and increasing satiety rather than by additional mechanisms. There are also benefits like increased muscle mass increasing one's BMR so the same-size meal might no longer cause one to gain fat.
I understand that it's complex. It doesn't mean I want to blame or castigate people. I can empathize strongly with struggling against impulses to sin.
Both sides of my family also have extensive history of alcoholism. This has caused me to be very, very careful around alcohol, because despite a predisposition, drunkenness is still a sin. Somebody may have anger issues, but clocking somebody is still a sin. Many of us will have all these impulses or commit these sins. Most of the time, my reaction is to sit and empathize, particularly for "victimless crimes" (rather, sins where the only victim is one's own soul.)
> Many people gain MORE weight after a period of intense dieting and exercise than before
That's because a period of intense dieting is unsustainable non-sense.
Diets as a temporary thing can only give temporary results. Permanent results require permanent changes.
I come from a small town and know many conservative Christians. They are pushing for this. Like you said, it is easier to blame external sources than to accept you need to do better as parent.
Many of them are. I just don’t see any reason to say “I disagree with the conservative Christians pushing this” rather than “I disagree with the people who support this.” There are secular folks who also support such legislation. It hints at a generalized animus towards religion and likely in particular towards Christianity, kind of like Fox News boomers complaining Obama wouldn’t say “radical Islamic terrorism”.
The majority of people pushing this in the USA are evangelicals who are moving more and more to christofascism over the years. Now they are mixing in government more and more and dropping the traditional values of Christianity and replacing them with fascism and prosperity gospel
People need to understand that there is a radical Christian element trying to impose its beliefs on everyone. They should be called out continuously and especially when they successfully modify any laws, state or federal.
There is a radical proportion of American Christians which believes this, yes. I'm fine with calling out those beliefs. That's not my issue here, more tarring Christianity broadly, or even specifically those of us who hold conservative social beliefs but don't believe in imposing those via state coercion.
I don't see any moral benefit to forcing people not to sin. There's no virtue when there's no choice.
I understand what you're saying but when you have Trump and his cohorts fake praying in the oval office with the support of conservative Christians who abandon all of Jesus' teachings of love and compassion and embrace Trump's hate, you might understand why people take a specific issue with that.
I'm fine with criticizing that, and actually agree with that criticism. "Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven."
> I don’t really appreciate this framing.
The framing is objectively accurate. Perhaps you should reconsider the group you identify with.
You're the one identifying me with them. That's my point. The group you dislike is "people who support this policy" or "Christians who want to enshrine their social policy via legislation." That's not what you said though.
What people do in their private time is none of anyone's business. Period.
Especially the government.
Did something I wrote read like I disagreed with this? What children do in their private time is their parents’ business. What children do can sometimes be the business of the state; there’s tons of precedent for it acting in loco parentis. I just don’t find this to be the best solution.
If you look at the goals of christofascists this is really just the beginning of incrementally becoming a theocracy run by them rather than a democracy with a diversity of thoughts and freedoms. That is the antithesis of what they want.
The thing most people misunderstand with weed getting strong is that in the past people would smoke way more. They’d smoke joints like cigarettes. Unless you’ve built up a tolerance you are smoking far less today to get high. And once you’ve built a tolerance that hardly matters too you just smoke more.
normalization of what I view as degenerate sex acts
Those "degenerate sex acts" were normal enough when the Bible was written that they were included in the Bible.
Most of our ancestors would regard modern Americans as hideously prudish.
Something being normal doesn’t make it right. Obesity is normal. Shoplifting has become normal in many places. People getting drunk is normal. Normalcy doesn’t equal moral rectitude.
Why do the opinions of my ancestors bear on that, and which ones are you talking about? Most of the ones I can think of, unless you run back to the days of tribal europe, would see the culture today as hideously liberalized. Regardless a lot of my ancestors probably did a lot of things I don’t think are right. Heck, I’ve done plenty of things I don’t think are right. None of that effects what actually is and isn’t morally good.
If I’m not running around telling off couples who leave the bar together, what do you care?
Hijacking this comment because it seems to be the most recent. I’d love to start a private email thread with you if you’re willing to do so.
After the previous election, I felt wildly out of touch, and I’ve been trying to find people who I can talk to who might be able to help me improve understanding of my (metaphorical) neighbors. I suspect that our beliefs will be quite different, but I appreciate your willingness to provide long-form, respectful responses to so many comments here.
If you’re up for it, my email is in my profile
Most of the BS from modern christians is a byproduct of the church trying to control every aspect of a person's mind and body rather than being an expansion of their spiritualism. Traditional religion does not like free thinking amongst its worshippers. Puritans were amongst the worst and they have a huge influence on early Americans and their religions.
I agree with this to an extent actually, which has led me to conflict strongly with the structure of most denominations. There are a few exceptions (the Roman Catholic Jesuits are a good example) but I'd actually say the Roman Catholic Church contributed far more to the Church-as-a-power model than Puritans overall. That aside, some days, I get as much from reading Eckhart or Kierkegaard as a Newman or Aquinas.
Would you also understand impetus behind any proposed hypothetical ban on alcohol, tobacco, firearms, or anything else that causes harm to the society?
Yes, I would. Just like with proposed bans on alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, I understand the motives (particularly when I look at the rash of wife-beating that encouraged the temperance movement, for instance) but oppose the proposed solution (banning those things).
Alright, you seem receptive to arguments so I'll take a crack at this.
> 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.
I'm not sure if that's the intent of everyone backing this; I think part of it amounts to parents who are legitimately worried. I may not agree with their means but I can understand that. I haven't personally met anyone who talked about baptizing the internet but that doesn't mean it isn't happening, and I'd oppose that.
I strongly agree with you on escapism and consumerism. I see pornography as a nasty end-stage manifestation of this, but not as the root issue. I've also seen peers spend way too much time rotting in front of netflix or tiktok or videogames, or addicted to shopping, or spending their money traveling to highly-instagrammable destinations and posting it. I have a huge beef with what you're describing, very true, and consumerist hellscape is a great characterization. Sticking with the drug analogy, I think it's like cocaine vs. fentanyl. It seems like many fewer people can consume is "recreationally" without some level of harm if they do it repeatedly over time. I also tend to key on it more because it so explicitly pertains to what I see as some of the most beautiful and sacred elements of creation (love, sex, marriage). But it's absolutely one manifestation of a greater issue.
I tend to agree with you that "purity culture" is bad and that America has a weirdly-victorian air about it that almost seems to tempt people more. I see alcohol as another example of this; I'd prefer my kids didn't drink until they were older and in the right place/at the right time, but our current set-up just makes most kids get blackout the first half-dozen times they drink.
To be honest, it's still not something I'd be comfortable sitting and discussing personally, but I think there's a difference between "not polite dinner-table conversation" and "God forbid anyone mentions it ever."
I agree with you that lawmakers don't care one whit about children, families, or people. I wish some of my fellow Christians weren't so quick to assume that "their guy" is actually going to fix anything, and see it as a way to disclaim responsibility for working on their own families and communities in particular. I think I've noticed more of this amongst my peer group, a basic distrust of particularly the federal and state governments across the political and ideological spectra. I hope this drives us to focus on fixing what we can. Work on our families rather than calling state assemblymen, work more to feed our homeless rather than expecting the feds to implement a perfect nationwide solution. And I hope rather than politicization, Christianity in America focuses more on the Second Great Commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself."
People need to touch grass instead of blaming everyone else for their failure to do so haha.
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If the Supreme Court agrees they are constitutional then they clearly are constitutional, unless you think the constitution doesn’t apply
The Supreme Court considered internment camps and segregation constitutional, until it didn’t.
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.)
> The Constitution of the United States was a layman's document, not a lawyer's contract. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-constituti...
The Supreme Court is not the ultimate decider of what the layman's document means. It was wrong when it decided, for instance, Plessy v. Ferguson. The law that the Court upheld patently violated the Fourteenth Amendment and was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court was simply wrong.
It can both be wrong and the ultimate decider.
That doesn't make something Constitutional or not, especially when they choose to ignore extremely plain and direct language.
By definition, the Supreme Court does decide what is Constitutional. It doesn't decide what is right or moral, but it does, according to the Constitution, decide what laws conform to the Constitution.
That is their job, yes. But they don't always do their job, especially in a compromised government. Let's not pretend that Trump didn't stack the courts.
We've drifted pretty far from the Constitution and what the Founders envisioned.
The reinterpretation of the Commerce Clause was the start of a downward spiral.
I'm hoping the Convention of States will succeed and fix this, even if it means rebuilding many institutions at the State level.
> I'm hoping the Convention of States will succeed and fix this, even if it means rebuilding many institutions at the State level.
Amendments proposed by a convention would still need to be ratified by 38 states. That's a pretty high bar for what you're suggesting.
I think it's more likely we'd see term limits and balanced budget amendments. Possibly even the power for states to override federal laws, with a supermajority.
I'd like to see other things, like the commerce clause returning to its original meaning, but like you said, it's already a high bar.
>the Convention of States
when will that happen?
When at least 34 states call for a constitutional convention. Potentially as early as this year if at least 15 of the 21 states with proposed legislation enact the laws which call for a convention (currently 19 states have enacted laws which call for a convention). Thirty-eight states would need to ratify any proposed amendments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendmen...
Let's not pretend that the current federal government isn't completely compromised.
Not really. The Supreme Court believes some rulings to be wrong the day they were decided:
> “The dissent’s reference to Korematsu, however, affords this Court the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: *Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided*, has been overruled in the court of history, and to be clear ‘has no place in law under the Constitution,’” Roberts said, quoting Justice Jackson’s 1944 dissent.
If Mommy says I can't eat carrots because they are bad for me, I have to listen to her. But I don't have to listen to her because she's right, it's because she's mommy.
The fact that some people model the government as patriarchal or matriarchal is one of our biggest issues today, because under that model we accept that all sorts of moralist values must be legislated, and we patronize the hell out of our citizenry, and it really defeats the entire point of the Constitution.
>defeats the entire point of the Constitution
The point is not what most people think it is, the point is to give that illusion that there is the some rule of law. This illusion ensure that the potentially revolting masses are somewhat kept in check. Meaning the constitution is meant for the rulers, to serve their purpose, and not of the people.
Quiet frankly I don't give a shit what a judge says is constitutional when they are acting in direct opposition to the stated goals of the constitution and I don't think anybody else should either. I believe the Founding Fathers both expected and wanted people to stand up in defiance against legal rulings and laws that many find unjust, even to the point of violence after some time. The Constitution starts with "We the People", which means if the people don't agree then the judges are wrong and should be opposed in every aspect.
The US legal system has gone out of control and it is getting to the point where people need to defy the law as a matter of principle and fight for their rights. The preamble of the constitution is pretty clear in its general goals, and working against the people's will, restricting the peoples rights, committing what the people believe are injustices, and causing social turmoil among them, are all blatantly opposed.
And this is compounded by the efforts of multi-generational corporate brainwashing to the tune of trillions of dollars. A critical threshold of people are compromised and this is then used as proof that the "will of the people" is uncontested authoritarian fascism.
Tor might be wildly popular in a few years.
Tor doesn't protect against traffic correlation last I checked.
Mixnets/Nym are better for actual privacy.
(I've not audited Nym, not an endorsement)
Tor over DAITA? Especially with multihop over multiple non-cooperating legislators.
Two hundred and fifty years of jurisprudence would suggest there has never been a right to obscenity.
Two-hundred and fifty years of piwertripping lawyers with their heads up their own asses, ignoring the plain text of the constitution.
Why would I dedicate time to improving lives of people who actively want to destroy themselves?
What on earth are you talking about? Surely you're not displaying prejudice against 340+ million people?
No thanks, I'm not going to work on technology to enable the publishing of "obscene filth".
We don't get to selectively decide when a Constitutionally recognized inalienable human right is applied or not.
If you don't protect the right for Americans to share obscene material, you open the door for the first amendment to be trampled over time by the authoritarian ratchet.
A more effective solution would be to implement HTML tags for explicit sexual content (or any other kind of child-sensitive content) and allow the OS or browser to authenticate the user before showing that content, if parental controls are enabled.
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.
I like this, already got face ID built into our devices including PCs these days... tap into that. That curbs the whole issue of sending your identifying information to third party websites.
The rub is how you authenticate the user. Most such content is already behind an age verification check. If the risk is that people who shouldn’t be doing so are clicking “yes I am 18” then whatever you need to do to authenticate the user otherwise to counter that sort of circumvention are going to be really ugly from a privacy standpoint.
It shoudn't be the website's responsibility to authenticate viewers of sexual content, not unless it's paid sexual content.
This proposed solution allows the parent to choose whatever authentication he/she wants for the device. Windows login, browser login, 3rd party filtering proxy in the router, etc.
I know what you're about to say: What if the child gains access to an unrestricted device? Well, if you put it that way, what if the child gains access to an old stash of porn magazines? What are you gonna do? Sue the publisher?
Same as it ever was. The government has been congenitally unable to strike a rational balance between free speech vs indecency statutes. "I know it when I see it" has been a meme since 1964 when it was written by the Supreme Court. In handing control of that balance over to the states, the federal government is just giving up. But it won't work. The issue still needs to be resolved. We're going to see many, many, many more Supreme Court cases on indecency vs free speech.
That is because the false balance is complete bullshit. Free speech means free speech. Obscenity is just special pleading "but it is icky!". The same thing has been happening for centuries. They came across a good idea as a foundational principle and the dumb fuckers wearing dresses we call judges refuse to see it. They then prove that they are all lawyers by constructing elaborate rationalizations. They also did the same thing to the Fourteenth ammendment's equal protection under the law working as grounds barring corruption and injustice.
We've had kids accessing an Internet without any working age barriers for over 30 years now.
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
Its really sad to see this getting attacked, now, after all that's transpired, after so many years. You'd think if it was that dire, again maybe 10 years in there would have been more action. But again its not genuine, so its really about the ulterior motives. Not even to mention the 1st amendment issues, which again don't just magically dissapear when a bunch of people stick to party lines.
Alas, we are in an age of hyper over-regulation though and this is just another example. I could come up with countless others in wildly different fields which have one astonishing commonality. That business has been running fine for ages and all of a sudden, we need to regulate.
Content restrictions should just be an option with the ISP: to make the entire modem/phone disable adult content and/or require age verification. This, I would disable (presuming `on` by default).
>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<=
So, you're saying that children/adults nowadays are not negatively affected by early sexual exposure?
These are some of the negative effects, what early sexual exposure can cause:
- unrealistic or harmful beliefs about sex, intimacy, and gender roles
- sex disconnected from intimacy, respect, consent
- anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, body image issues
- broken families (one parent missing), divorce
- problems with emotional regulation, impulse control
- attention control problems, aggression, withdrawal
I say, all of these are on the rise and are a big problem.
Wait until you hear what issues the ubiquitous dihydrogen monoxide can cause! https://web.archive.org/web/19961031232918/http://media.circ...
These points would greatly benefit from being put into perspective
You can't seriously think a significant percentage of people are emotionally unstable because they looked up porn of their own will at an age of their own choosing, even if I trust that it can be listed as a contributing factor for some infinitesimal fraction of those with that issue
You can’t be serious thinking it has NO bad effect on people, especially children.
Would you let your own children watch porn?
I assume I would if I had them. Similar to keeping offline and online bullying in check (no matter if they're the victim or perpetrator), until a certain point I guess I'd keep an eye on what they're up to (less and less as they age, assuming it goes well). If I see sites super unsuitable to their development stage (e.g. afaik girls mature slightly earlier so I may stop monitoring their media consumption sooner, I'd do my research if I were a parent) then sure we can have an uncomfortable talk and see what action I need to take. But if they're a horny 13-year-old, heck no I'm not looking into their pornhub pageloads, they have their privacy too. I'd be super weirded out if my parents had done that until I was 14 or whatever the legal consent age is where you are! Would/do you do that to your kids?!
Anyway, I guess the more relevant question is whether I think it has no effect whatsoever. Nah, of course it does, potentially some good and also potentially some bad effects. I just thought many of the points on your list had a negligible risk level (where risk=chance*impact), since it's e.g. not like most people who've grown up with the internet freely now are aggressives without impulse control
I'm not an expert on the topic and I'm happy to look at studies that update my worldview. Yet it's evidently not the case that anyone born between ~1990 and ~2000 (widespread internet and thus porn but not yet social media) has the issues you've mentioned. Maybe elevated levels, and maybe some research can disentangle the various environmental effects to point to porn as a partial culprit, but clearly it's not a majority of the population and, among those who are affected, it seems unlikely that porn is a typical significant contributor
Yes!
Without restrictions, any age?
This article is incorrect.
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.
The article is, in fact, correct.
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...
As an ambulance chaser, I can assure you that suing out of state defendants for out of state activity has become nearly impossible. See Daimler AG v. Bauman (2014), BNSF Railway Co. v. Tyrrell (2017), Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court (2017), Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District (2021), Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co. (2023)
Sounds like the article isn’t incorrect? The first two criteria depend on which community is doing the judging. New Yorkers will have à different norm than people from say a quaint 5k-person town where there’s an 8:1 church:supermarket ratio. The third criteria is vague, but vagueness cuts both ways.
Who defines an artistic work? If I produce a porn film, why isn't that my artistic commentary on sex? Laws cant be this subjective because subjectivity implies subjectivity in ruling which is objectively awful.
In the legal sense, a judge would.
That’s an issue
Yes, I know
Ah nvm, you sounded supportive.
The jury
The article would seem correct since "obscene" could be twisted to mean whatever they want. As the people making the ruling can say the average person believes x.
The article sounds very correct.
Anything can be perceived as “obscene” especially when you leave that interpretation open to any particular group.
A man in drag is considered obscene by some people.
Nope. A key aspect of this ruling is that it's about "sexual content that is obscene to minors but not to adults". "Adults have the right to access speech obscene only to minors [..] and submitting to age verification burdens the exercise of that right. But adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification."
The Texas law at issue takes the same three factors you quoted and lists them verbatim, but tacks on "for minors" to each factor, e.g.:
> (C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
There's no precedent yet on what it means for something to "lack [..] artistic [..] value for minors", but it's almost certain to be interpreted as a harder standard to satisfy than the normal one.
kissing is obscene :)
In many cultures, it is. Especially kissing in the public.
Solution: build technologies which make government statute effectively irrelevant. It must be uncensorable even by a nation-state adversary, and must hide its users and their activities. The future is software technology designed to thwart the ability of prosecutors to introduce evidence into a court. We must fight against the state's War on Crime with everything we have; the state has abused that war for centuries to justify its expansion. Courts should only bless victims taking revenge or retribution, offer an optional institution of rehabitation and recompense that the convict can voluntarily ascend to, else if the convict chooses to be free then he's at the mercy of the victim and whatever the victim chooses to do to the convict. Court cases should not result in involuntary imprisonment but only voluntary, incentivized by not being assaulted/killed in public as an outlaw. (Elected oath taking office holders excepted, prison should be a real possibility.)
It matters more to restrain and limit the state than it does to punish bad behavior. Furthermore the state has committed countless crimes in its treatment of the customers they chose to condemn, and ought to be dissolved entirely down to the office clerk. Unfortunately, the only way that happens is law of the guillotine.
"Party of free speech," my ass.
Virtue signalling Christian values, obviously that overrides free speech.
Free speech for me, not for thee
I worry that young people across the political spectrum increasingly no longer see free speech as a foundational value. Both sides pay lip service and deploy it strategically but are quick to sacrifice it when it conflicts with other values and goals.
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.
>They are more concerned with social progressivism than the liberal foundations of our democracy
That's absolutely not true
In 2017 they filed a lawsuit defending conservative / far-right Milo Yiannopoulos [1] and spoke up for suppression of Trump [2]. Defended someone wishing death to gay people [3]. Filed an amicus brief supporting the NRA's free speech in '18 [4]
And tons of other examples every single year after that: https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/defending-speech-w...
[1] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-sues-dc-metro-over-...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/donald-trump-has-free-...
[3] https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2017/06/aclu-defending-guy-calle...
[4] https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/new-york-state-cant-be...
You're citing ACLU's PR and one source from a progressive site, most of which is pre-2019. Meanwhile, recent articles say things like this:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/aclu-johnn...
There's a lot more where that came from but I don't need to lie by citation. The reality, as the electorate saw it, was that most liberal organizations in the 2020's suffered from mission creep. Planned Parenthood went on record supporting defunding the police, the Sierra Club redefined environmentalism as antiracism(?) etc
> 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.
Quite the opposite. I stopped donating to the ACLU after a few years of the last trump administration because I could no longer stomach it given the clear direction trumpism is taking the country. I still support the mission ideologically but can't back it up with my money. Seeing trump this time around I'm glad I haven't wasted the money - the constitution is dead.
The GOP under Trump has considerably changed from the GOP under Bush. There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives. Perhaps a shift might be coming with the next economic downturn, which seems inevitable given the risk-off investment climate across most industries stemming from Trump’s erratic, unpredictable trade and economic policy. Things don’t look bad just yet, but it takes a while for the full impact of such enormous changes in sentiment to ripple down through the entire economy.
Reagan and Bush were constrained by much more liberal supreme court justices of the previous era. The current Supreme Court justices were clerks and lawyers during Reagan and Bush presidency. If Reagan and Bush had the current justices in their bench I can almost guarantee they’d be pulling the same stunts.
Bush wasn’t exactly a steward of free speech
> There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives.
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.
> it’s so weird to see two political factions that agree on 90% of policy get shellacked and overruled by their respective extreme wings
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.
> These parties have primaries and Republicans are choosing—by a majority—the crazies over the “traditional” wing.
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.
Most moderates don’t vote in the primaries. The hardcore extremists vote unfailingly.
Primaries are primarily voted in by crazies. Regular people have lives and jobs.
>The faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush.
How are you defining "deficit-reducing"?
>Over the four years of President Biden’s term – from January 2021 through January 2025 – we estimate that he approved $4.7 trillion in new ten-year debt through legislation and executive actions.
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-did-president-biden-add-...
That rate of debt increase is neither responsible or sustainable - though such irresponsible behavior has now been adopted by both parties. Both parties seem to have become radicalized and are catering to their worst instincts.
> How are you defining "deficit-reducing"?
There are two ways to lower the deficit: increase revenue or lower spending.
As you say, neither party does particularly well at lowering spending.
The moderate Republican approach to raising revenue is typically but not always through regressive taxes. The general theory since Reagan (and before) has been taxing the upper brackets hurts economic growth. The ideal of this is a flat tax or “fair tax.”
The centrist Democrat approach to raising revenue is typically but not always through progressive taxes. The general theory is that wealth inequality is overall bad, and since purchasing power is more or less logarithmic in dollars, the upper brackets suffer relatively less from higher tax rates. The ideal of this is the post-war 90% top bracket.
Of the two, I think only the second offers any real hope of deficit reduction. The middle and lower classes are already tapped out, metaphorically speaking. Household debt is already frighteningly high and the savings rate very low despite relatively high interest rates. If the goal really is to reduce the deficit through increasing revenue, I think it’s likely that revenue must come from the upper classes in one way or another.
Of course this is all written in very broad strokes and there are a hundred nitpicks one could make on this general point of view, but this is a forum comment and not a dissertation on political economics.
I would disagree with your characterization of the two approaches to increasing taxes but like you said this is a forum comment.
>...Of the two, I think only the second offers any real hope of deficit reduction. The middle and lower classes are already tapped out, metaphorically speaking.
Many people point to the high government spending in some of the OECD countries, but what they fail to recognize is that the US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the OECD. The difference is that in those other OECD countries, the middle class pays a higher share of the taxes and there is more money available because there are a lot more middle class tax payers than high income payers.
>If the goal really is to reduce the deficit through increasing revenue, I think it’s likely that revenue must come from the upper classes in one way or another.
The tax to GDP ratio has remained fairly stable for decades: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
The effective tax rates paid by the high income earners is fairly close to the highest it has ever been.
Your original point was:
>The faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush.
Again, I have a hard time considering a party that increases spending so much that debt will be increased by $4.7 trillion to be one that can be called "deficit-reducing". (Nor can the R party be called that either of course.) Just because the D party talks about raising revenue doesn't really mean anything.
The Bushes and Reagan were a little more genteel but that's it. Reagan even gave the wink wink nod nod speech about States' Rights at the Neshoba County Fair. The difference between them and Trump is sortorial.
Libertarian and Democratic parties ought to feel right at home for any refugees from the GOP who have conservative principles. Democratic party is right of center.
> There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives
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.
Neither of the two parties is very much in favor of free speech. The left has cancel culture and policing pronouns while the right has blocking books with gay characters and age verification laws.
There are two common definitions of the phrase "free speech" that I think you are conflating:
1. The Constitutional right to free speech under the first amendment (i.e. specifically that the government may not use its authority to limit or punish its peoples' expression of ideas)
2. The vague notion that others should not be able to criticize you for something you've said or written
In this thread we are more concerned with the former. No one on the left is trying to enact laws to punish anyone's impolite use of pronouns. At worst, maybe someone has asked you to be considerate in some non-official setting (which has little to do with the first amendment).
There is a massive difference between other people reacting to your speech and choosing not to associate with you or propagate what you say, and the government banning your speech and prosecuting you for it. You can exercise your freedom of speech, and other people can exercise their freedom of association to want nothing to do with you.
The left was kinda annoying about it but nobody was going to throw you in jail for misgendering someone or whatever.
I've noticed that cancel culture and policing pronouns is far stronger on the right. What Democrat has been canceled as much as Liz Cheney by Republicans? Certainly not the sex pest Andrew Cuomo, heartily supported by the Democratic Party leadership.
What Democratic president has issued an executive order anywhere equivalent to Trump's order requiring pronouns match the gender "at conception", and the anti-scientific claim that gender is a male-female binary?
The right also wants to block books which have nothing to do with gay characters, including “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, “Maus”, “The Handmaid's Tale“, “Of Mice and Men“ and “Brave New World”.
“Cancel culture” is not government policy (and never was).
Cancel Culture is actually just the free market, the invisible hand, at work.
What is a boycott but cancel culture? The idea of the free market is that good behaviors and products emerge because consumers "vote" with their wallet. If a company has bad values I don't support then I don't shop there. Enough people do that and the company collapses. So, what remains is an economy where every company acts virtuously.
Theoretically. Then enters propaganda and the GOP. They tell you this invisible hand is bad, and companies should be able to do anything. At a glance this appears to be free speech, but it's not - it's the exact opposite.
You see, they can say anything they want, but we can't. We may not criticize them. Our opinions are not valid, they're "Cancel Culture".
Interesting argument. But I think cancel culture often has more in common with a lynch mob than a boycott.
A lynch mob is a boycott, especially when they aren't lynching. Lynch mob used to mean something literally, when people did lynching. Now it just means "a bunch of people don't like someone and don't financially support them".
That's a boycott.
People still get actually lynched.
I point out to self-described "classic liberals" that what they call "cancel culture" was instead described by John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty" as an essential component of liberty:
"We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement."
This is ignoring difference between individual distancing from such person and cancel culture campaigns, whose characteristic pattern is transitivity (boycotting third persons just because they do not participate themselves in boycott). Amplifying effect of such transitivity creates a social coercion in the form that Mill warned against in chapter 1. That is why he mentioned "though not to parade the avoidance" - to not induce society-wide coordination leading to social coercion.
Mill distinguishes between natural penalties (which are just results of others distancing from the person) and artificial punishment:
"It makes a vast difference both in our feelings and in our conduct towards him, whether he displeases us in things in which we think we have a right to control him, or in things in which we know that we have not. If he displeases us, we may express our distaste, and we may stand aloof from a person as well as from a thing that displeases us; but we shall not therefore feel called on to make his life uncomfortable."
I think it is clear that actions like urging an employer to fire such person are more on level "make his life uncomfortable" than "we may express our distaste and we distance".
The "displeases us" you quoted is for "the part of a person's life which concerns only himself". For example, "No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk."
For actions "which concerns others" Mill writes:
"The evil consequences of his acts do not then fall on himself, but on others; and society, as the protector of all its members, must retaliate on him; must inflict pain on him for the express purpose of punishment, and must take care that it be sufficiently severe. In the one case, he is an offender at our bar, and we are called on not only to sit in judgment on him, but, in one shape or another, to execute our own sentence: in the other case, it is not our part to inflict any suffering on him, except what may incidentally follow from our using the same liberty in the regulation of our own affairs, which we allow to him in his."
Yes, but in the first chapter, Mill is clear that even public speech falls into sphere of liberty, the part of person's life "that affect only himself":
"But there is a sphere of action in which society, as distinguished from the individual, has, if any, only an indirect interest; comprehending all that portion of a person’s life and conduct which affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only with their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation. When I say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first instance: for whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself; and the objection which may be grounded on this contingency, will receive consideration in the sequel. This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty."
"It comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological."
"The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it."
(Also note that your original citation was also related to judgements based on actions that concern only the judged person: "Though doing no wrong to anyone, a person may so act as to compel us to judge him, and feel to him, as a fool, or as a being of an inferior order")
No, but it is endemic to American colleges and universities which are government or government-funded institutions.
Furthermore, spend a little time on BlueSky and you will find huge support for the hate speech laws found in other countries.
Finally, the distinction between government regulation of speech and private regulation of speech is key in the court of law, but it is almost irrelevant from the point of view of a philosophy that values open inquiry, debate, and dissent as indispensible to human dignity and progress.
Except it was. It was the government who ordered Twitter to ban or shadowban people like Prof. Jay Bhattacharya.
The government didn't do that.
"The primary weakness in the record of past restrictions is the lack of specific causation findings with respect to any discrete instance of content moderation."
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-411_3dq3.pdf
The government had no capacity to “order” Twitter to do this, in stark contrast to this law.
And yet they did, and twitter did comply.
I'm genuinely curious. The parent buys the phone/laptop. And when little Timmy logs in to his phone the account should be in a family/group as a child account.
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?
Timmy's friend in school has parents who have no idea about family/child accounts. They just give him a phone and let him do whatever he wants.
Timmy's friend is really popular in school.
Timmy's friend has a big brother that lets him use his ID. There will always be ways to circumvent this. The only functional difference between a simple setting in the browser and requiring ID attestation is how much surveillance it allows the government to do.
According to this logic, why ban anything? There is always someone who can help you overcome the ban. So, let children buy alcohol and cigarettes, why not also drugs?
Identification verification doesn't solve that either. His friend could still hand him his phone after logging in and verifying, right? Unless they're doing facial scans the entire time the user is reading adult content.
It seems more like verification theatre.
It's a matter of time before the US system crumbles if these assaults on the federal system and civil liberties continue.
I live in state with a population of 40 million who gives $83 billion more to the federal government than gets back. It's absolutely insane we have to be ruled by afar by what is effectively a small minority. This will come to a head not only in Censorship, Immigration, Tariffs, Abortion access (banning abortion medication federally), Industrial policy, etc.
At a certain point California is going to say, "No Thanks" and peace out.
Funnily enough, this was pointed out by the very people who established our federal government structure. Hamilton, Federalist Papers #22:
"Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Deleware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last."
(https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed22.asp)
Since the civil war it’s been clear no one is getting out alive.
ACW was the minority revolting against the majority.
Wtf is acw?
American Civil War
Armed forces aren’t giving up their CA bases without an ugly fight
A variation of “no taxation without representation”?
I feel so bad for the teenager whose mom is parading him around as a permanently defective ruined form of life. Could that be damaging to a kid do you think?
Munchausen's for sympathy and fame isn't new, but it is pretty tragic when you see it.
Hopefully someone kept a snapshot of the country's configs before this year began. I feel like we're going to need it. This is ludicrous - as so much is lately.
Unfortunately, the S3 bucket we use to host the backups is gone... the compliance department complained about it, but now they're gone, too...
The land of the free. Where every moron can get and use a firearm and the rest of the world only knows the country even has educational institutes because of all the school shootings. But let's outlaw trans, drags and writings for the poor religious conservative inbreds in the South. Because that's the real danger in the world now. Yikes
It's interesting that we, as humans, are all so neurotic about sex, and especially about allowing our kids to understand that sex exists, that we rush to outlaw any depictions of it that our kids could potentially see. While at the same time making sure adults are still able to see it, of course. Because everyone knows that when you're 6569 days old, seeing someone have sex will cause life-long scarring, but when you're 6570 days old it doesn't matter anymore.
We also outlaw the depiction of any crimes related to sex, and here we find it easier to justify the ban, but in our haste we clump together actual crimes committed against a real victim, and imaginary crimes such as e.g. a cartoonist drawing a rape scene. In the latter case we close our eyes to the fact that we claim to support something called "freedom of speech" and, in our neurotic hunt to ban things sex-related we trample our principles.
Same goes for e.g. CSA, but in that case in particular, logic and consistency seems to go out the window and principles are sacrificed in the blink of an eye. It makes me a little depressed to see.
As for individual countries trying to enforce their local socio-cultural norms on the rest of the world, that is of course equally silly. The US is great in many ways, but introspection and ability to follow principles is sometimes lacking for sure.
I wouldn't be surprised if our sexual neurosis is what makes an AGI finally decide that we're not competent to captain the ship anymore.
Not "we, as humans". Only for we, as third world country
I'm in Sweden, and we behave the same way. We just don't focus on exactly the same things. The attitude towards sex in general is more relaxed, but when it comes to CSA we would love to impose our views on defining and policing it on the rest of the world, see https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
Is there anything we can actually do to combat this? Im short of ideas, tho the 33% rule can be potentially worked around by generating loads of fake content similar to a previous poster who generates fake content for scrapers to eat Im in the UK and they recently passed a similar law banning any explicit _imagery_, which I already thought was bad but the land of freedom beats us out again, the literally surveillance state, at least that's that's enforced top down by ofcom instead of an army of injury lawyers so it works at ofcom's speed
Why can’t we just have a meta tag that declares that content on a website is not suitable for minors?
Or is it because, as others have mentioned, it’s not really about protecting minors from adult content?
Because then: whose computer is it? If it's my computer, it does my bidding. If a child is currently on the computer, should the computer decide and refuse to work as in "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" where the operator (Dave) is deemed a threat to its objective? In this case, the computer's programmed goal would be preventing any minor from seeing content with this tag. It has to decide if you're a minor whenever content is marked as such. If you can't override its programming, it's your computer no longer
It's ironic that the faction that's usually talking about "personal responsibility" is now saying we can't put this horrible burden on parents to control their kids' device use --- or even just teach them how to make healthy decisions and interpret what they see in a healthy manner. I seriously doubt that reading smutty stories online is going to scar a kid for life.
It's not ironic, rather it's hypocritical. At this point it's painfully clear that they only invoke lofty ideals to trick reasonable people into supporting their backwards authoritarian agenda. The real aim is simply for power, and open hypocrisy is one aspect of demonstrating power - rules for thee, not for me.
Remember personals and missed connections on Craigslist? Remember when they took those down, and why?
This goes back a long ways.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/business/craigslist-perso...
That has always been the problem with advocating free speech - that eventually you have to protect the rights of the writers of nazi furry slash fiction and similar fellows. And are really soft and fluffy target.
If there's going to be strict rules around sex, then I'd like to see similar laws around distributing violent content. What we need are age verification requirements before kids can see violence on News programmes or be subjected to the threat of gun violence (e.g. in schools).
> The public library in rural Donnelly, Idaho, at only 1,024 square feet, had no practical way to create an enforceable “adults only” section and no budget to defend against lawsuits. Therefore, to comply with the law, they decided to make the entire library for adults only. The library has banned minors from entering the library (even to use the bathroom) unless they are accompanied by an adult, or holding a waiver from their parents.
This is absurd. It does look like they're suing, with help from a lot of publishers, at least.
I spent a lot of time after school in the library to avoid my abusive cult guardians at home. If this avenue hadn't been available to me in my small town, I'd likely have committed suicide. But, I'm an atheist, so me committing suicide would probably be seen as a win for these evangelical freaks.
Yeah, me too. It’s very chilling to see the resurgence of a very broad conception of parental rights, which can in some cases permit the wholesale physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children without recourse.
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.
I shared this experience before on a recent thread about the role librarians play in counterculture and a user made a throwaway account in order to tell me to kill myself all sorts of creative ways and that he's glad I was abused, etc. etc.
I've talked to enough people who explicitly believe that children are chattel (sometimes in the same breath as complaining about abuse they suffered from their own parents) to know this isn't hyperbole.
The Republican party has worked to kill public libraries and public education for years, so this fits right in line.
FTA: "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."
No, they can't. That's not how jurisdiction works in the U.S. If states could do stuff like that, GOP prosecutors would be charging out-of-state Democratic politicians with made-up-crimes all the time. They're not doing that. It's not because they don't want to; it's because they can't. (And also, the legal justification that would allow them to go after their political enemies like this would allow politically-opposed prosecutors to do the same to them.)
States are already trying to police abortions outside of state lines. If you helped someone get an abortion in another state, they want to be able to arrest you for it.
The Supreme Court is eroding the credibility of the institution of law faster than they can make laws. They really want to see how the public reacts to overreach?
Someone missed the responsibility step: parents are responsible for their kids not rando strangers across the world, and when kids get old enough they're responsible for themselves. Unless they need carers, then the carers are responsible.
This article doesn't really go into any detail about the Supreme Court decision it discusses, instead reserving its detailed discussion for the laws this decision permits. Anyone have a link to the opinion, or an article discussing it specifically?
Does it have to be written? Does it apply to video and audio contents of similar manners?
I don't think it has to be written or even particularly raunchy, just has to be deemed "damaging to children".
Looking at banned children's books should fine you an idea of the offline precedent here.
Next comes continually redefining “pornography”.
Unfortunately, these laws are working exactly as intended. If they discourage all forms of sexually-explicit material, the laws are working as intended. They are not really about "protecting the children." They use that as an excuse to make it too legally risky to publish pornographic/sexual material under any circumstances.
If I was a publisher, would I trust an age-verification system to protect me from 15 years in prison or an "investigation" that results in nothing but destroying my life? Nope. So eventually the legitimate website operators just give up.
Or how about the ISP who now simply refuses to do business with any website that publishes sexual material just to avoid legal consequences for themselves?
Working as intended.
This is insane. Literally goes against the first amendment. What recourse is there for this nonsensical decision? Mass disobedience? Leaking verified IDs until they stop this?
One of the goals in Project 2025 is to make teachers, librarians, etc. that purvey "pornography" into felons, and jail them for a long time. That starts with labeling things as pornography.
Before you know it, anything that mentions LGBTQ+ topics will be labeled as porn.
Question for all the people who say that the government should not do this -- how do you protect your children accessing these sites?
You may find this helpful, it is a non-partisan summary of the decision and its affects: https://sivic.life/free-speech-coalition-inc-v-paxton-no-23-...
As an outsider seeing the US destroy everything people associate with America in a couple months is sort of morbidly funny...
Most people's associations with the US were fanciful and unrealistic to begin with. It's just that now the reality has diverged so far from their mental images that they're forced to acknowledge the disparity.
While we do produce a lot of porn, remember that the pre-US colonies were founded by conservative religious people who were too conservative even for Europe at the time.
When it comes to nudity and sex America has always been puritanical.
Blood and guns, sure. Freedumb
> The First Amendment effectively no longer applies if your speech is online, contains sex scenes, and not behind an age verification wall
The First Amendment doesn’t apply to obscenity, so I’m not sure what the complaint is.
How exactly do these laws work if the servers are hosted outside of the US?
They don't, of course. These laws aren't here to protect children. They're just a step on the road to one of their (conservative Christian) goals: banning pornography entirely in the US.
Sounds like a great reason to set up a Great Porn Firewall and demand ID of anyone attempting to gain access to any IP outside of the USA
They will try blackmail hosting country with tariffs.
If the goal is protecting kids, why not jail the parents who allowed their child to have unlimited access to internet rather than the publisher?
I’m a porn abolitionist, and I still hate these laws. Requiring digital identification online is an incredibly chilling step. It is a direct assault on anonymity.
It's an attempt to get a list of people for a future Gilead like government to prosecute. It's not about protecting children, it's a way to get a list of nonbelievers and sinners in the hopes they can set up their theocracy and punish the non-believers.
Wow. Porn abolitionist. That's a fascinating position. One I can't begin to fathom, so it's very interesting.
To be clear, my view is not one rooted in moral judgment, and certainly not directed at sex workers.
Rather, it’s grounded in trauma ethics. The statistical prevalence of CSA amongst sex workers is incredibly high — nearly universal.
Sex work itself is quite often a form of trauma reenactment, and the degree to which they engage in disassociation in order to perform is staggering.
I believe that in a very real and ethical sense, pornography and other forms of sex work entails the commodification of disassociation, and the consumption of maladaptive trauma responses rooted in CSA.
In effect, it amounts to taking pleasure in the psychological aftershocks of abuse.
I’m not convinced that porn abolition is even possible, but that it is important to be honest about the ethical fault almost universally implicit in sex work.
I'm still wrapping my head around the consequences of this, which almost seem too big to believe. It sounds like there are hundreds of millions if not billions to be made on filing these kinds of lawsuits, which means change is coming hard and fast. What if anything prevents the following?
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?
I think people are putting far too much of an ideological lens on this ruling. As a "matter of law" this seems like the right decision. The supreme court is not a board of dictators making societal decisions based on their flavor of the day. Their job is too see if the ruling is consistent with all other laws we have and the normal function of a modern society. Pushing the envelope one way or another is not their job even if they end up doing that. At the end of the day the (elected) state governments have decided to create a policy that reflects what their constituents want. The supreme court job is not to question the logic of that. They did not run for office or win elections. They just need to make sure that what being done is reasonable and not violating any existing laws. As a tech guy I think these laws are stupid but this case was not the right hill to die on. What needs to happen is that these laws get enacted, costs and unintended consequences happen and THOSE parties sue on the supreme court on that basis
This would be all correct if we didn’t have one particular set of laws above the others – the constitution. And it is unclear if rights guaranteed by constitution (freedom of speech in this case) aren’t infringed by this particular law. There is no such thing here as “if they passed a law let it be”. It can be true if they passed the constitution amendment but they obviously didn’t.
Now we can talk about real issue here - how correct the trade off the court is taking between freedom of speech infringement and this law. And as you can see in original post - author there thinks this trade off was taken wrongly by the court. I, personally, think the same.
So which state's ISPs do we need to IP-ban?
IP banning Tennessee would be an interesting form of protest. Seems like these laws are usually super unpopular, but the general public doesn’t usually find out about them enough to get upset. If it doesn’t airtime on Fox News, my dad will literally never know it happened.
Putting up a big “Tennessee might try to put me in jail if you access this site” would get people’s attention.
Not that any business that gets a real amount of traffic would ever do such a thing. Nobody visits my shitty personal site lol
Pornhub has in fact been doing such a thing.
https://www.pornhub.com/blog/age-verification-in-the-news
This should nudge browser makers to include user age information in the headers.
The EU is far ahead of Texas on this. Spain is launching a “porn passport” system (Cartera Digital Beta) using government-issued digital ID to verify age, and France has already attempted something similar. Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, platforms—including porn sites—must implement age checks for EU users regardless of where the site is based. And this isn’t being led by “conservative Christians”—Spain’s Socialist PM Pedro Sánchez is pushing it. I know we’re talking “America” here, but this isn’t some puritanical American concept.
This article overreads the Supreme Court’s decision. It upheld a narrow Texas law requiring age verification to access adult content, applying intermediate scrutiny and emphasizing in-state regulatory authority. It didn’t grant states power to prosecute across borders, nor did it change existing limits on state jurisdiction.
The argument relies on a stack of fallacies:
Post hoc — assumes the ruling causes harms that depend on future, hypothetical laws.
Slippery slope — claims this leads to extraterritorial prosecution, which the ruling doesn’t support.
Appeal to fear — frames state level regulation as existential threat without legal basis.
That's a great moment to start a company whose only focus is blackmail erotica authors into giving them money
Who knew giving kids unlimited porn would have negative consequences.
any kid that has unlimited porn is a kid with poor parents, and they were gonna get into things much worse than porn anyway since parents aren't around and being negligent.
That's an interesting line you're drawing. I'd not say my parents were negligent or that I'm any worse off for having a computer to myself
I heard later they talked about porn and decided that if I seek it out, I'm probably ready for it and otherwise, if I find it icky (I remember feeling that way as a child), I'll just not go back to it. Looking back, for me at least, I think it really was that simple: some things are icky to me still today and I don't seek them out, but I don't remember ever wishing I hadn't seen something that I had looked up
The second thing is that my mom was concerned about my computer use, but then at some point saw that I also created things (probably HTML pages). She later told me that this was when she decided it could be good for my development to continue down this path and learn more about computers. I now work in IT. I don't think she was wrong
Keeping my computer use supervised just isn't feasible when it's most of my free time (after maybe 13 years old, idk). I don't think these considerations mean my parents were "not around". They were 100% there for me when I needed them and then some. You can call this negligent but that's neither their nor my opinion, more than ten years after leaving their supervision and looking back at it and how others are raising children currently
What seems harmful to me is the helicopter parenting style that movies and online (news) media portray the USA as doing. Idk to what extent that's actually real though, a lot of it seems really far out there
If you can’t configure content filters and dns servers then what right do you have to be a parent.
You shouldn’t be a parent if you can’t enforce a mobile device policy better than an average Fortune 500 corporation.
Just to double check, this is a joke right? Because you suggested upthread (if I'm reading the sarcasm right) that consumption must be curtailed, but clearly this comment about not having a right to be a non-tech-savvy parent is a joke...or?!
Tome to move to Tor
The strategic objective here is to authenticate all web traffic.
So no bounty because it's not a security problem. But the MV3 API they are deleting, they say...is being deleted for security reasons. Not at all to hobble ad blockers.
I'm puzzled by this 33% thing. Can I just host two videos of wholesome AI slop for every porn shoot? Like, if Pornhub adds a Christian section they can continue as-is?
It's a foot in the door law, newer laws will only become more draconian. Slow frog boil tactics are not uncommon with fascists. Look what Orban is doing, setting up fascism one step at a time, rather than an overwhelming military coup type of takeover.
"Some people who mourn Alan Turing would continue to kill him if he came back, some Christians would continue to crucify Christ if he came back."
On a sociological level: good. I personally believe that easy-access porn has been detrimental to society.
It really hasn’t and there’s absolutely no evidence to support this at all
So you're saying that human relationships in our society are working really well, have no problems and should continue without changes?
Porn is one of the big contributors to many negative effects we see today. Seeing how many problems porn sites cause, I say should be banned immediately.
Of course, people watching porn/addicted to it, won't want it to go away. Similar to drug addicts don't want drugs to be banned.
You really can't see any way in which it could contribute?
I immediately scrolled to the bottom of the HN comments so I could find a comment like this to upvote.
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I can't take a post seriously when it uses AI images. How do I know the rest of the content isn't AI slop?
exactly as predicted. you all didnt want online ids back when we could have done it right. now you get the bad version. consequences.
The government is just another religion, another church. Sometimes they are right, but usually they are just dangerous like any other group of religious bigots.
So now we can out up porn and harvest IDs? Love it.
I really didn't expect that from the land of freedom. /s
>ELLSBERG
Meh they can take the bottom 64bits of your IP address and then put your biometrics in there. Why do you think they made the address space so big in the first place. I've been saying that's what it was for for at least a decade.
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> TeH iNtErNeT
Don't do this on HN. It's sneering and snark, and thus against the guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe but it was part of my point, that the internet gets a pass for a vague variety of reasons.
We’re just trying for something better here, and this is only a place where people want to participate because of the people who make the effort to make it better.
I guess this is the one place I have to actually voice my complaint.
The entire thread is full of sneering and snark — dark allusions to fascism; unfounded (by logical necessity) allegations about the true motivations of people involved; and attempts to tie together all sorts of ideological enemies into a single outgroup, roughly labelled "Republicans". It is absolutely waging ideological warfare and it only seems to pass muster because it goes along with the community consensus rather than against it.
This has been happening on seemingly every vaguely politically-relevant, popular post for months. It didn't seem to be happening when I joined the site, months before the election. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ... seems like relevant reading here. With a note that this is from the previous cycle, and nobody has apparently learned a damned thing.
I hear you. The problem is it's just the way the world is at the moment, and HN is part of the world.
We don't like the kinds of things that are posted in these threads, and we try to minimize how much day-to-day political rage fodder gets front page space. At the same time, we have to recognize that these are issues that people care a lot about, and if people find that HN is a better place to have these discussions than elsewhere, then maybe we're offering something worthwhile by having these discussions here when they're about major developments.
But the guidelines still apply and if people are attacking others and engaging in political/ideological battle, you can help us by flagging comments or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com to let us know about the worst stuff you see.
We certainly wouldn't want HN to be like this forever (it's no fun to moderate, that's for sure). We'll keep doing what we can to move things in the right direction.
> We certainly wouldn't want HN to be like this forever (it's no fun to moderate, that's for sure). We'll keep doing what we can to move things in the right direction.
Isn’t the work of manual moderation largely no fun to begin with, when the rubber meets the road and you need to formulate a novel response, I mean?
I don’t mean to minimize your role here, as all the mods are awesome, and I can’t speak for others out of respect, but I can be trying and have definitely made more work for you all at times.
But all that said, what do the mods do here? What does moderation of HN look like on a good day? What makes the job fun in the first place? Can we build in more fun for users and mods? (Meta-moderation and its points system on Slashdot were peak internet message board user voting and moderation for me, I’ll admit. But Slashdot isn’t Slashdot anymore either.)
I guess I’m trying to understand what you can do and are doing to move things in the right direction, and what that means for HN, and more importantly, how we all can make HN more fun for all involved, hopefully even mods.
In practice this is going to be utilized to shut down sex education and other content deemed "harmful to children".
States have had these laws for a while now. Is there evidence that this has happened?
A bit off base. He's basically having a meltdown over what's actually a pretty narrow ruling about age verification.
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.
Dismissing this as a “meltdown” ignores the real First Amendment stakes. Requiring ID to access legal adult content isn’t like buying alcohol. It introduces surveillance and self-censorship, especially with vague thresholds like “one-third explicit” or “harmful to minors.” That legal ambiguity alone forces smaller publishers to self-censor to avoid risk. Unlike alcohol, speech is a constitutionally protected right, not a regulated commodity. Buying beer doesn’t create a permanent record of your interests or route through third-party identity brokers.
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.
The "chilling effect" argument here is pretty weak. You're basically saying that because some small publishers might get confused about legal requirements, the whole system is unconstitutional. That's not how First Amendment analysis works. Courts don't strike down laws just because some people might overreact to them.
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.
Chilling effects are settled doctrine, not hand-waving. SCOTUS struck the CDA (Reno v. ACLU, 1997) and COPA (Ashcroft v. ACLU, 2004) precisely because vague “indecent/harmful” standards plus stiff penalties make rational speakers self-censor. Courts don’t wait for carnage. The predictable chill itself is the constitutional flaw.
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.
Intermediate not strict scrutiny
This isn't only about H.B. 1181 specifically, it's about precedent for any law like it having teeth across state lines.
The ruling was not about anyone being prosecuted over state lines. So there was no precedent set.
It's a foot in the door law. First they just "ask for ID", then they "save it permanently for warrants", then they "must upload all ID to Texas' ID servers and a list of all pornography viewed" to protect the children from known deviants. These sorts do not stop at "ID verification", they want to morally control every aspect of your life down to your bedroom activities.