Th3 Core

Rethink....

Its no different to walking into a shop or a betting shop. Buying weed or alcohol in most places.  you have to prove your age. 

So there is no reason for online to be different. 

Complete change of heart. I vote yes. Its not something that parents can control.

>>Complete change of heart.

Yeah, I've changed my view on this a lot in the last few years too.

My knowledge of porn is, uh, more theoretical than practical. But as a fr## sp##ch libertarian, I thought, you know, consenting adults, blah blah blah, "Qu'ils voient de la porn!" to paraphrase Marie Antoinette.

My first reaction to the Louisana news was "scary" thinking of it from the perspective of an adult who values privacy, but then I thought about the kids. In recent years I have been seeing articles and hearing podcast interviews about how much this has changed in the last decade or so.

First, porn has gotten rougher and more violent. Lots of choking strangulation scenes for some reason.

Second, it is universally available from a very young age and young people, young males in particular often watch huge amounts. In my youth, for a teenager, "porn" meant pictures in Playboy, not videos of violent sex.

Third, youth are having a lot less sex than 20 and 40 and 60 years ago.

Add all that up and you get kids who are consuming huge amounts of violent porn before their first sexual experiences and they then model those first sexual experiences on what they have seen in the videos. Something like 70% 58% of girls undergraduate women report being violently choked during their first sexual encounters strangled at least once in their life during sex[1]. The kids think that's what sex is.

And, as you say, there is no way parents can bar access.

1. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2022.881678/full

Also from the same article... "For instance, in a recent undergraduate probability survey study, nearly one-third of undergraduate women reported being choked by a partner during their most recent sexual event that included oral, vaginal, or anal sex, compared to only 8% of men"

Also... https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/25/fatal-hateful-rise-of-choking-during-sex

I know there's a lot going on there besides porn, but all signals point to youth porn consumption as a major driver. All of that made me change my view from a "rights" view to a "public health" view.

>users who connect to our site from Louisiana

VPNs are cheap and ubiquitous.

Ergo, I agree with your assessment, I just don't see this as a fix.

But better than nothing.  and thats the alternative.

What would be a better fix?

>>Do I think the government of Louisiana is smart enough

Now you have me thinking of how over and over in industry after industry responsibility is devolved to governments and consumers, when it seems like it is industry's responsibility to figure out how to comply with law. So now you have me seeing this in the context of not just porn, but online gambling, online sales of alcohol, websites that in theory should not be open to under-13s, as well as things like recycling where it seems to be industry's interest to make it seem too complex to implement a system that actually does what it claims to do.

What do you think of the possibility that government just says, "You need to prove that you are following the law. Our job is to create the law and enforce it, not build a system that handles compliance for you."

In other words, at the end of the day, shouldn't it be industry that comes up with the system and runs it, not the state (though subject to state audit of course)?

For most industries, the government has an obligation not to make compliance onerous, but if your goal is to reduce porn, gambling, etc etc, maybe onerous makes sense.

It seems there is a three-horned dilemma (which I guess is actually a trilemma) that includes
 - privacy
 - bureaucracy
 - legality

Going hardline on one tends to force sacrifices in the others. Hard problem.

>>The Drivers licence seems like a simple solution.

Not to speak for LM, but I don't think the problem is whether providing the DL is a good way to prove age. The problem is with who holds onto and manages that information.

With the system in Louisana, everyone has to provide a driver's license and someone has to hold that information. So you get into a situation where someone who is 25 and is doing something that is completely legal and fully allowed by law, is on record as registered with a given website. So when there's a breach, as with Dolly Madison (that was the "sugar daddy" site, right), millions of people have their information exposed.

For some people this could be a horrific revelation. I can imagine school teachers and pastors and youth coaches losing their jobs even though they are doing a fully legal thing.

So the quandry is not so much whether to use a driver's license, but how to use it in a way that a data breach does not ruin lives just because they visited legal porn sites.

While Pornhub claims that it does not collect any data during this process, and that the process is "carried out by reputable service providers who specialize in verifying the age of online users," we can imagine some folks not being too comfortable with handing over official documents in order to access a pornographic site.

The idea of tokens could extend this using something like a public/private key combo. The porn or gambling site or "reputable service provider" would only get the public token, which could not be unhashed into the private token, so a data breach leaves the individual protected.

Still, it seems like the system in place does provide separation between the website and the individual user and I come back to my feeling that if the industry does not like that system, it's up to them to come up with one that's more anonymous and acceptable to the state.

feeds;

"The report confirms that the majority of teen respondents age 13–17 have watched pornography online—and some have seen it by age 10 or younger."

Teens and Pornography | Common Sense Media

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/teens-and-pornography