Pornhub to leave five more states over age-verification laws
Pornhub to leave five more states over age-verification laws
Pornhub will block access to its site in five more states in the coming weeks.
I'm fairly sure if they took porn off the internet, there'd only be one website left, and it'd be called "Bring Back the Porn!"
-Dr. Cox
VPN business must be so hot right now
Unfortunately they'll go after that next.
I'm legitimately surprised at the number of pro-government control comments in this thread, though. We are truly doomed because of the people in the back.
There's also websites hosted in countries that don't care about US law. We can access those even without a VPN, for now...
In addition, the porn business is hot right now! So many people just got cut off and are now paying for content.
As a Virginian, I hadn't subscribed to a VPN until our legislators decided to pull this shit.
Over the past year, Pornhub had to make the difficult decision to block access to users in numerous American states due to newly passed Age Verification laws (Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, Mississippi). In July 2024, we will unfortunately be blocking several more states who are introducing similar laws. (Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky and Nebraska.)
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That's a pretty red list there. Congrats to the mouthbreathers with two brain cells fighting for third place that get their porn from humping their cousins.
Musta hit a nerve with a maga mod.
Hard times for kids in those states.
That's basically the idea behind these laws.
Conservatives want to make porn illegal, which isn't easy under traditional means, so they're taking the "Putin" approach as I put it, make viewing porn hard, unattractive or even dangerous and make delivering porn to people hard, unattractive and dangerous.
Requiring an ID from the government to view porn means the government can tell who is watching what. If one of those people happens to run for office or get a little too campaigny, their porn history can be named and shamed.
And porn providers know this, and know that will drive people away from their sites, and on top of this implementing this will likely be bureaucratic and likely expensive, so they'll stop serving an area.
And when this is applied to non porn sites that have porn like Reddit or twitter or Tumblr, well guess what's going to happen, those sites will ban porn from their site.
It's basically banning porn by making it impossible to get porn in a way that doesn't end up with you getting blackmailed. Children have nothing to do with it.
*human porn.
Google can't even block yiff with safe search, lol. AI has incredible difficulty with evaluating furry porn. Which means that Mitch McConnell is going to live out his final days looking at anthropomorphic hyenas that could benchpress a fridge and have 11 inches of freedom, lmao.
Generations of southerners and people in the central US are going to be looking at considerable amounts of yiff if conservatives have their way.
"Land of the Free" my ass
Is there a database of "this IP belongs to this state" these companies use? Or do they just use GeoIP stuff? I don't want my Lemmy server to accidentally violate American laws and get in trouble/banned, so I may need to start doing some IP filtering myself.
Only the biggest websites are even acknowledging this, it'll get torn down as soon as it actually goes into effect, can't keep the Mormons away from their porn.
Easiest solution IMO if you're already using CloudFlare, even the free version: you can filter out certain countries. Otherwise, there's probably other alternatives, even open source ones. Good terms to search for with your cloud provider or self hosted software may be middlewares, firewalls, serverless, edge functions, etc.
TBH I kinda agree with the states here.. I started watching porn waaayyyy too early and it's fucking me up.. without a doubt.. I shouldn't have seen all the things I looked for and now I gotta put up with it.
But I also agree with PornHubs decision. There is no way to verify age without exposing your identity. There isn't even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone's age.
There really isn't a middle ground, the only way to protect kinds (like little me) is to block the porn. But websites go on and offline every few minutes, VPNs and Tor are free and hard to blacklist.
How do we censor internet porn?? ¯\(°_o)/¯
How about less "control everyone else" and more "control your own damn kids".
My daughter didn't get unsupervised access until she proved responsible enough to trust. I want to say around 13.
Just because "I grew up with it unsupervised and it ruined me" doesn't immediately equal "everyone will have this experience". Sorry your parents didn't understand what you were doing. Sorry you saw stuff that bothered you. Don't punish everyone else for it.
I'm far from a helicopter parent... Instead, my kid has come to me for help in resolving uncomfortable or problematic interactions. We've always been clear and honest about why we've asked her to avoid certain things. Even when it made us uncomfortable. Especially then.
She's 20 now. Most cheerful kid I've ever met. No idea how that happened directly, but I know I can trust her.
the only way to protect kinds (like little me) is to block the porn.
This is false.
Parents have a number of options available to them that do no need to involve the state.
Parental controls exists, and it’s on the parent to use them. Easier now than ever before.
Yeah, something like Adguard family DNS protection or any other family protection DNS service exist which works at the device level or even the network level and is simple to setup on smartphones and latops/computers or even the router.
YouTube won't even load comments saying restricted mode if I browse through Adguard family protection DNS server.
There is no "middle ground". The solution is to talk about sex. Early and when it's prompted aka when children start asking questions.
Stop treating sex as if it's something holy, special, taboo, and assigning a bunch of value to it. Trying to shield children from it is precisely the wrong thing to do. It's exactly the same with this fairy tale bullshit about relationships, marriage, and kids. Media makes it seem like the epitome of existence, that there's nothing greater than finding that one special person, and that there's only one special person forever and ever, and that it has to be of the opposite sex in order to procreate.
The more you hype something up, and that includes trying to hide it, the more it tantalizes people.
Again, answer questions honestly and truthfully that pertain to sex, attraction, relationships, and so on. Teach how to tell the real from the fake. Normalize knowledge and understanding of intimacy. It'll make for much healthier children and even healthier adults.
Education is the silver bullet.
The issue here, I'm sorry to say, is that your parents dropped the ball. They were the ones responsible for your health and the safety of your environment.
You’ll never be able to properly block it
You can just go to Reddit instead. Same thing.
There isn't even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone's age.
It depends what you mean by this. If you mean in terms of a way to trust that the third party is doing its job correctly, that's as simple as using the government itself to do the verification after seeing some proof of age.
If you mean in terms of privacy, you can't protect the privacy of the fact that someone got verified, but you can protect the privacy of their browsing after the fact. It's a neat cryptographic trick called blind signatures. The end result is a token that the user holds which they can hand over to websites that tells the website "a trusted third party has verified I'm over 18" but would not have to reveal any more information about them than that. But even if the government was that trusted third party, and they asked the websites to hand over all their logs, the government would still not be able to trace your views back to you, because the token you hold is one they never saw.
This is, in my opinion, still a bad idea. I am in no way advocating for this policy. There's still the mere fact that you have to go up to someone and basically register yourself as a porn viewer, which is fucked up. Maybe if these tokens were used in other ways, like instead of showing your licence at bars, it could be less bad (though there are other practical reasons I don't think that would work) because the tokens could be less directly associated with porn. But it's still an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Not to mention the cost that adding all this would put on the government—or, if they charge for these tokens, the people using it—for what actual gain, exactly?
I'm merely pointing out that from a purely technical perspective, this is quite different from when governments request back doors into chat encryption. This actually can be done. It just shouldn't, for non-technical reasons.
Pornhub is only pulling out to punish the states for trying to stand up to them. In classic American monopoly fashion they go on the attack as soon as any legislation targets them.
Pornhub claims the reason is because they dont to collect government ID but Pornhub collects user data and understands who their customers are. Adding government ID to their data would hardly be anymore of a privacy invasion and it's not like they are forced to store it.
I've never, ever seen anyone lick boots harder than this.
OK
Adding government ID to their data would hardly be anymore of a privacy invasion
Are you listening to yourself?
Lets put name to the IP address. Yup, that is the same as just the IP address that can be shared by multiple devices.
Imo this law is actually in a way pushing for a porn monopoly, if you by law need to provide an id, are you gonna trust some random site with that info or the big one everyone uses
attack
They just pull out of those states. How is that an attack?
Law maker enacts legislation towards a company. The company is able to comply but instead the company pulls the service or severelyndegrades it. Then when users are pissed off the company will point to the law maker and say "they forced us to do this". The law maker then suffers the blacklash of companies service withdrawal.
Apple tried this with the EU usb c but eventually backed down. John deer tried this with right to repair. There are many cases where companies use these tactics to try and bully law makers away from regulating them and I think i know it's legal and their right to do so but I find it gross.
I don't think the law makers should be solving the "problem" this way but I also don't think pornhub should deny service from an entire state because they want an an ID check implemented.
Pornhub as a monopoly??? Wow lmao. Someone never got creative with the search bar and it’s very apparent.
Lol wuht
heh, pulling out
"Social media" is next and many people here already support it.
To be honest.. A lot of social media should actually be banned.
Yep, people sadly are bad at extrapolating how restrictions on something they dislike can be cross-applied to limit things they don't dislike, by others.
Good riddance. Fucking weirdos, every other site figured it out.
It's easy to search for an alternative.