Porn censorship is going to destroy the internet

https://mashable.com/article/age-verification-is-going-to-destroy-the-entire-internet

by Teever • 11 months ago

89 126 11 months ago

mashable.com

aogaili3• 11 months ago

More like porn destroyed a generation.

The flood of AI content, social media, and confused articles is destroying the internet.

puppycodes4• 11 months ago

How did porn destroy a generation?

Porn has always been around.

It will easily outlast the idiots writing these laws.

The Wheel: 6000 years old
Porn: 42,000 years old (Hohle Fels “Venus”)

jabedude• 11 months ago

The steel man is that the vast increase in production and availability of porn has never been higher and has created a generation of porn addicts who have unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex. These unhealthy ideas often manifest as anti-social behaviors which lead to loneliness and depression.

bigyabai• 11 months ago

Your great-grandpappy (and mine) ruined the world, paying for their peep shows and burlesque dances. The Great Depression, WWII, 9/11 - modern researchers cannot prove that these things would have happened had porn not been invented. Historians weep imagining what human utopias might have been had we never commodified our petty urge to reproduce.

krapp3• 11 months ago

Porn: 42,000 years old (Hohle Fels “Venus”)

This only seems like porn because we live in a culture founded on Judeo-Christian taboos against sex and the female form. I wouldn't assume it was in any way pornographic in its own time and context.

aogaili3• 11 months ago

Porn was never that accessible at that speed.. there is nothing like it before... you don't know what you are talking about.

normalaccess6• 11 months ago

Correct, and it's to put the genii back in the bottle so to speak. Great video on how AI is being actively used to break the internet. Cause a problem, provide the solution.

https://youtu.be/-gGLvg0n-uY?si=KDEVLayU5ToEEmpL

sunshine-o2• 11 months ago

While there is a lot of things that are ugly about porn I really do not believe it is 5% of the problems recent younger generations face today.

Porn is just the new TV or video games, the scapegoat hidding the real taboo of our society: Parents are happy to believe the society, the government has to take care of their children.

In the 80s they were leaving their children in front of the TV all day long and were blaming the TV programming. Then they bought them video game consoles and games and complained the games were too violent. Now they buy them full HD porn streaming devices with unlimited data and access to the internet to get rid of them and blame porn or tik tok.

rolph4• 11 months ago

consider a future internet that consists of numerous index torrent links that serve HTML and CSS files

Jigsy3• 11 months ago

Wasn't ZeroNet something like this before the developer vanished off the face of the Earth?

rolph4• 11 months ago

yes it was

https://github.com/HelloZeroNet

https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet

perhaps it was too good?

normalaccess6• 11 months ago

Our operating systems are being locked down to the point where you will need an online tracked ID in order to log on. Systems like Recall will be used to track user behavior and drive analytics and control mechanisms designed to maximize compliance to the chosen narrative.

Check the 2023 keynote for Microsoft's Ignite AI conference. Microsoft plans to move ALL compute into the Azure cloud, meaning that they are planning for a future where even your OS in a cloud server.

The GOV's of the world will be on the heels behind the curtain making sure this all passes.

The future is sneaker net.

bigfishrunning• 11 months ago

Only if your OS is windows... There are plenty of other ones. OSX is much less aggressive, and I honestly can't see something like one of the BSDs getting features like this.

joquarky2• 11 months ago

The future is VPN drop boxes.

detritus• 11 months ago

Funny how porn always points the way in tech, one way or another.

Jigsy3• 11 months ago

This was never about "protecting children." It never is. It's always about censorship and control.

The only time politicians ever see children is when they can use them as a soapbox to push an agenda.

bko3• 11 months ago

There are things that are already illegal on the internet. Pirated media is generally illegal, which is meant to protect corporate profits. Most people are okay with such restrictions. But when it's actually about protecting children and forcing these shady companies to enforce their terms of service, it's censorship and control?

The ironic thing is many people who decry forcing these companies to verify age, would be fine with such age verification restrictions on Insta or TikTok.

random97498324• 11 months ago

They are going to start restricting VPN usage as well [1] and I can't even click on a Reddit profile without getting age verification pop up because they commented on a dating advice subreddit once. At the same time I can go on Google images, type "porn" and click filter off without any problems.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo

jibe• 11 months ago

We have had age restrictions on physical pornography (magazines, dvd/vhs) and XXX movie theaters for a century, and it didn't threaten the book publishing industry or Hollywood.

greesil• 11 months ago

The internet includes porn, but is not limited to porn. Likewise the Internet allows the consuming of content, but also allows the production of content. This is where your analogy breaks down. The end user is both consumer and producer. Take this HN comment for example.

init2null• 11 months ago

You want the internet to work like book purchases at cash registers? It isn't. There is no real-world analog for what we've built.

We will never get our privacy once this is widespread. Laws are too easy.

wrs2• 11 months ago

As an adult I can’t remember ever having to put my face into a permanent database and be tracked every time I browsed in a bookstore. So this is not a helpful analogy.

slg• 11 months ago

This was never about "protecting children."

I feel like this narrative is counterproductive. Sure, it is true that some people advocating for this are doing it out of ulterior motives, but it certainly isn't true for all of them. Telling the people with legitimate concerns that they don't actually care about children is going to push them into the camp of the people who want to take advantage of their concern. In order to actually prevent the kind of damage that these censorship systems can inflict, there probably needs to be an actual discussion about the problem these systems are ostensibly designed to address.

People have to remember this is a political issue and politics is about coalition building. Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.

bediger4000• 11 months ago

Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.

On the contrary! Look at Qanon. They've essentially taken over the Republican party. They not only insulted the bulk of the population, Qanons want them dead. It worked fine.

krapp3• 11 months ago

The narrative is necessary because governments advocating for the safety of children are almost always doing so with an ulterior motive, and because people with legitimate concerns are often useful idiots for what turns out to be just another way to ratchet up surveillance and censorship and harass undesirables riding another fever wave of social panic and Christian moralizing.

And large swaths of the general population are nefarious liars who don't actually care about children. If building coalitions requires ignoring that fact, then we're not going to build coalitions. The real world isn't HN, where you're expected to assume good faith at all times, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

doom2• 11 months ago

Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.

This seems to be working okay for the current administration? Among the issues Trump ran on was demonizing a large swath of the population and vowing some nebulous form of revenge.

UncleMeat• 11 months ago

It is more than some. When Project2025 talks about these laws it leads with keeping LGBT content away from children. They barely talk about actual porn.

grishka2• 11 months ago

Internet censorship in Russia started around 10 years ago under the pretense of "protecting children". The initial law was kinda funny and relatively innocent: it banned information about drugs and suicide. Because if this information remains freely available, you know, children would get high and kill themselves.

Today the internet in Russia is utterly broken. A VPN or a DPI bypass tool isn't something nice to have — it's an absolute necessity, especially if you communicate with people in other countries.

Henchman214• 11 months ago

The only time politicians ever see children is when they can use them as a soapbox to push an agenda.

That’s not true. Sometimes they see kids for sex. I mean, isn’t this what Epstein is all about?

duxup2• 11 months ago

Naw I actually think there are orgs who really DO advocate for this stuff because of porn.

spiderfarmer• 11 months ago

As a platform owner I’m dreading the future. People only talk about agriculture on mine, but I’m afraid I’ll run into these silly, expensive requirements just as well.

grues-dinner• 11 months ago

I mean, if you will peddle that cornography...

rolph4• 11 months ago

yes perhaps if minors somehow learn to cultivate cannabis, or mushrooms, etc. from something on your site, you may have liability ?

pessimizer• 11 months ago

What's not going to help is focusing on the suffering of pornographers, when porn is being used as a pretense in order to monitor and restrict communication in general. Most people don't care about the suffering of pornographers. Even the consumers of porn: enough has been made already, it can be copied and preserved forever with no quality loss, we're on the verge of being able to magic it up with AI to match our personal scripts, nobody needs more.

Focusing on how it makes pornographers almost as poor as average workers is almost an advertisement for internet censorship; I may have to call my rape a "grape," but at least a pornographer will have a bad day.

Being against porn is an issue for the base, politicians don't actually care. When you swallow their arguments whole, you've already lost.

normalaccess6• 11 months ago

Related video about the need to control AI with a global ID system to control "misinformation and disinformation" as it will be imposable to tell what is real and what is fake.

We are getting hit from all sides. You will be tracked and it will be used against you.

https://youtu.be/-gGLvg0n-uY

bilbo0s2• 11 months ago

In fairness, you are already tracked. And it will already be used against you.

It's just that right now, though everyone is tracked, only a few people get watched. So even today, the algorithm is already picking out the people who should be watched. It's just that currently the government doesn't always do it on the up and up.

LurkandComment• 11 months ago

Porn is just the excuse to build the infrastructure. Then they expand their scope to censor and control everything they don't want.

orefalo• 11 months ago

No, it will not. I live in the UAE, and I appreciate that my children do not have access to pornography or illegal websites, as these are blocked by the service providers.

This should be adopted by many other countries

woodrowbarlow• 11 months ago

would you prefer to implement your own policies for your own household, rather than subscribe to the values endorsed by your service provider?

Disposal8433• 11 months ago

I live in the UAE

I'm sure you don't. Feel free to disconnect from the internet though, I don't mind. Also, I wouldn't compare the freedom to have porn with the freedom to have slaves, but it's a cultural difference, right?

viridian• 11 months ago

Why would anyone lie about that?

random97498324• 11 months ago

Meanwhile weapons are being sent to Israel to bomb children because they really care about the lives of others. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

diggan2• 11 months ago

Easy to rationalize from their side, similarly to how Israeli settlers are justifying their actions: They are animals, we are humans.

duxup2• 11 months ago

And every article about it flagged.

nickt• 11 months ago

And right on cue as expected, the push for age verification to use VPNs in the UK

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo

1970-01-014• 11 months ago

The smart children will figure it out if they haven't already, and then go and tell the less acute children how to do it properly, without an app and account. Then we're back to basics of domains and ports instead of apps and accounts.

grishka2• 11 months ago

And then what, age verification to get a VDS?

tboyd472• 11 months ago

Sorry, but what on the internet is not already censored?

joquarky2• 11 months ago

Misinformation

tboyd472• 11 months ago

It’s there because the ones in charge want it there.

normalaccess6• 11 months ago

I don't have proof but I have a felling this is the work of Palantir. After Trump made the announcement that they would be working on solving the ID crisis in America not a month later everywhere all at once started pushing for online IDs.

normalaccess6• 11 months ago

The beauty behind that is if they can get all the rest of the world to do it then they can point to that to push it here at home.

Break the narrative abroad and after the frogs are acclimated turn up the heat at home.

runjake3• 11 months ago

Instead of "$x is destroying us", I wish we would focus more on personal resilience, introspection, coping skills, and ingenuity.

No matter how many $x's you conquer, there's always another $x around the corner.

danaris3• 11 months ago

You can't "individual resiliency" your way out of systemic problems.

runjake3• 11 months ago

Which "systemic problems" are you referring to?

EarlKing2• 11 months ago

What amazes me is that this article fails to mention that the slippery slope is already underway. Multiple states have some variation on the "App Store Accountability Act" that requires you present ID just to download apps, including Texas (SB 2420) and Louisiana (HB 570), with several more underway. Then there's the various acts that try to regulate social media by demanding you present ID to be able to post (or else gimp your site to fit one of the carve-outs they have which conveniently ensures that users cannot engage in public posting of any kind towards one another) such as Texas's HB 186 (from 2024).

Put simply: You've all been asleep at the switch while the US-side Internet has been systematically under attack by pornscolds trying to implement Chinese-style censorship, this article's author included.

s1gsegv• 11 months ago

We haven’t been asleep. We’ve been saying no at every turn. But they’re using propaganda, and they will continue until something sticks. It’s an endless fight and we are losing, despite our efforts.

1970-01-014• 11 months ago

If we're honest, this is exactly what it will take for the bots to evaporate into the void. I have always been against 'having a license to internet', but I am very interested in seeing what will happen to all the bots if it does (temporarily) succeed. No bot should be able to pass an ID check, and if one does, its pure legal fuel to sue the system.

numpad0• 11 months ago

That's beyond naive. Nothing will happen to bots because they're not human (and/or) individuals from first world nations. Bot farm runners can either print IDs, post from unrestricted locations, or through bulk posting APIs offered behind doors. Social media operators has less issues with cooperative spams than actually organically trending posts because contents are less original.

It only hurts real users.

bilbo0s2• 11 months ago

What gets me is that people keep voting in favor of this stuff?

It's clear that the HN crowd is a bit of an echo chamber. Somehow, these messages of warning are not getting to people who need to hear them in order to stop voting against their own interests.

Well, now I think about it, people vote against their own interests on all kinds of issues. So I suppose this one doesn't have to be any different?

ryandvm• 11 months ago

I'll be honest. Many of us in the US are tired of fighting with people that vote against their own interests time and again. It's like having a family member that keeps letting a burglar in the back door, over and over again. At some point you start thinking it might be easier to just find somewhere else to live...

kipchak• 11 months ago

The way feel and then vote is a result of the information they are given, which is selected in order to produce the intended result, or “the engineering of consent” as it's put by Bernays.

EarlKing2• 11 months ago

People don't vote for this. Politicians do. People need to be made aware of what their politicians are up to in their name and encouraged to punish politicians for their acts of treachery at the polls, including the credible threat of a recall election. That, however, would require organizations that aren't a clownshow. I've been singularly unimpressed by the actions of NetChoice (who recently got slammed for handing in "expert testimony" that clearly was written by ChatGPT) and Free Speech Coalition (who clearly are the porn lobby and invariably approach every problem with an approach guaranteed to lose in court). The EFF seems content to wag their finger while doing nothing substantial. The FSF is utterly silent in the face of app store regulations that, if you read them carefully, would ensnare them and anyone else distributing software online, to say nothing of making it impossible to manufacture a PC or operating system that doesn't implement these child-detection controls.

TL;DR We appear to be seriously lacking in leadership and organization.

1970-01-014• 11 months ago

I've dusted off the old form. Here you are:

  This advocates a:

  ( ) technical
  (*) legislative
  (  ) market-based
  ( ) vigilante

  ...solution to control explicit or controversial content online. It won’t work. Here’s why:

  Why it fails:

  (*) Can be bypassed with basic tools (VPNs, mirrors, alt accounts)
  (*) Users and creators won’t tolerate the restrictions
  (*) Requires unrealistic global cooperation
  (*) Censors legitimate content (art, education, etc.)
  (*) Lawmakers don’t understand the tech they’re regulating
  (*) Platforms may quietly ignore or undermine it
  (*) Trolls and bots will weaponize it

  What you didn’t consider:

  (*) Jurisdiction conflicts across countries
  (*) Encrypted and decentralized content sharing
  (*) Abuse of takedown/reporting systems
  (*) Privacy and free expression concerns
  (*) Content filters are always one step behind

  And finally:

  (*) Sorry, it just doesn’t work.
  ( ) This idea causes more harm than good.
  ( ) You're solving a symptom, not the problem

Krutonium• 11 months ago

I think the second to last one should also be checked. Most implementations include Government Sponsored Identity Theft.

normalaccess6• 11 months ago

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

general1726• 11 months ago

I agree, there already is a lot of leaked IDs, enough to feed into AI to generate any ID you wish with any name on it. The ID verification system via a picture is dead on arrival.

therealpygon• 11 months ago

I’d say all three in the and “finally” category are relevant. This does cause more harm than good because it is more likely to be weaponized by the government when they start to carve out more exceptions to free speech. It is also solving a symptom (where kids go when they are curious about adult topics) rather than the problem (parenting…not providing a safe space for your kids to ask those questions).

tolerance• 11 months ago

This issue raises one of those odd dynamics where people concerned with the welfare of humanity brush against the people arguing for the longevity of public infrastructure. And against them both are the string-pulling hands who have an advantage if either interest prevails.

Or maybe it’s not that odd and this is a common conflict.

I stand on the side of those indifferent to the material consequences of this censorship on pure moral grounds.

And the funny thing is that there are people who seek to mean well and who find the material trade-off intolerable for their own reasons.

Society as a whole is kept in quite the quagmire by the string of these aforementioned hands, ain’t they?

zingababba• 11 months ago

I mean there are apps now that realistically declothe people. No amount of legislation is going to stop digitally naked people from existing lol.

charlie90• 11 months ago

thats a feature, not a bug

mvdtnz• 11 months ago

While these laws are outwardly about preventing minors from accessing porn sites

Take a look at the Australian age verification law. Mainstream websites aren't even collateral damage, they are explicitly the target.

sunshine-o2• 11 months ago

Stupid question: is there a reason they did not mandate every ISP in the UK to allow the blocking of porn as an opt-in feature? (and make it the default for mobile subscribers under 18yo)

rolph4• 11 months ago

its not about porn, its about the visceral reaction to porn being exploited in order to drive support for absolute deanonymization.

josefritzishere• 11 months ago

We are all bots now.

Molitor5901• 11 months ago

Maybe. I am still not sold on the idea that porn should be so freely available to children, and we can't depend on parental controls - everyone reading this should know that by now. So we either keep our children off the internet, closely monitor their usage, or let them have at it.

As for destroying the internet? No. It may, in fact, make the internet a little better. Less bandwidth usage. Less intrusive advertisements, maybe even less spam.

Age verification for pornography is not the hill to die on. A national internet identification number is the hill to not only die on, but riot.

lo_zamoyski• 11 months ago

The first distinction to emphasize is between moral principle and the practical.

Pornography is not free speech or free expression, unless you assume a totally unhinged and nihilistic/libertarian view of these terms to mean "anything goes". Pornography is morally reprehensible in every imaginable way, and it is the source of too many social and personal ills to list. It destroys human relationships, ruins a person's ability to relate to others in a healthy and respectful way, cultivates habits that cripple intellectual function, involves the mistreatment and abuse of women in the industry, contributes to infertility, stunts moral development and psychological health, the list goes on. There is no real argument for porn, only boring skeptical rationalization and relativist sophistry, and a list of reasons of why it is a bad thing.

That covers principle. What about policy? Here is where questions of implementation are relevant. The fallacy we must avoid is the false implication that if a particular way of containing, reducing, or eliminating porn is impractical, then all means are impractical. (I have given here a general principle that should guide policy. It may very well be the case that the tactics proposed won't "ruin the internet", even if they may shape the internet in ways that opponents don't like. Porn is so odious, that we may need to entertain certain restrictions that bleed into other areas.)

FWIW, I think a more aggressive, categorical assault on the production and distribution of pornography is more sensible. The internet is a medium of delivery, not a producer of pornography, so existing laws criminalizing the distribution or other objectionable content could be expanded to include pornography. Targeting producers, whether corporate or private individuals, is arguably the most fruitful tactic, with the secondary result that there will be less porn being distributed. And we mustn't ignore the chilling effect that criminalization has on attitudes. It is not true that the only laws worth making are those that can be enforced. A law is a kind of declaration of expectations that has the power to shape social norms. Simply knowing something is illegal has a psychological and social effect. It gives the conscience a signal, or at threat to motivate the morally unscrupulous, and it provides a tangible basis for establishing social sentiment and stigmas. There is a social stigma attached to being a criminal, and so by criminalizing porn, you receive a clear social sanction to classify those involved in porn as criminals and therefore worthy of being ostracized. It won't prevent all pornographic activity, but it will create an environment that will reduce its presence and shape attitudes toward it.

Porn censorship is going to destroy the internet

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