Pornhub Sues Texas Over Age Verification Law
Pornhub Sues Texas Over Age Verification Law
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Pornhub Sues Texas Over Age Verification Law
246 comments
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My parents had a porn blocker, and all it made me do was learn enough about computers to circumvent it. Even if they put age verification in front of every porn site in the world there's still torrents and chat rooms and forums all over where you can find it, and kids will find it. Next thing they'll mandate is putting toothpaste back in the tube.
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Trying to stop people from doing something is a sure fire way to guarantee they will do that thing.
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Not only will they find it, they'll end up going to the sketchier sites that don't do the age verification because they're not well known enough and not following the laws and they'll likely get something infected on the computer/network or worse.
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Not only will they find it, they’ll end up going to the sketchier sites that don’t do the age verification because they’re not well known enough and not following the laws and they’ll likely get something infected on the computer/network or worse.
It's like that time we declared a war on drugs and then there were no drugs. Wait, actually that led to a massive black market and tons of violence.
Point being, you're not gonna stop it. You're just gonna make it less safe.
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Yep. Who among us as idiot teenagers hasn't downloaded "$currentstarlet full nude sex tape.exe" from some shady site?
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Funny you should mention putting toothpaste back in a tube, because I actually helped someone do that last night. It's possible, but also a huge pain in the ass. That's not a commentary on anything besides literal toothpaste.
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When my wife insisted I put a porn blocker on the internet, I did some simple DNS tinkering, then told my son not to let his mother catch him bypassing the "blocker" I put on.
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toothpaste back in the tube
Well now there's an apt metaphor... :-P
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I just think of it as a safety net to prevent (or at least reduce the risk) of young children accidently stumbling upon something nasty or graphic that they didn’t mean to.
This should also be done by proper parenting and supervision but as technology and internet devices are friggin everywhere I don’t think it’s a bad idea for parents to also have some decent filters on their internet connection.
Doesn’t stop someone who even knows half way what they are doing, but by that point hopeful parents will have talked and educated their children about things before there’s a concern about intention seeking stuff out.
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Porn sites have had "Confirm you are over 18" since the dial up days. That's about as much of a safety net as I think is necessary or practicable.
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What happens when the data in this "safety net" is breached and tons of peoples IDs get leaked? So safe.
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I am a parent and I have decided not to worry about this stuff. Teens will look at porn and that is just a fact about our existence. I don't have to like it or approve of it or concern myself with it.
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Mine straight up used Spyware. I learned to make multiple copies of older sessions to cover up anything I wanted, then I replaced current sessions just like they did on security cameras in the movies lol.
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America is such garbage lol. You guys should really focus on the important stuff.
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Religious zealots shouldn't be dictating what I watch, read or do.
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Especially when they're watching this stuff too
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Even if there was some secure, hardened way of verifying people’s ages without handing over PII to random websites, these age verification laws are still utterly ridiculous.
It’s not the government’s job to parent your kids on the internet. If you don’t want your kids visiting specific websites or viewing specific content, you take 15 minutes out of your goddamn day to do your job as a parent, and set up a content blocker on your home network.
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you take 15 minutes out of your goddamn day to do your job as a parent, and set up a content blocker on your home network.
Or, I don't know, talk to your kid?
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Oh absolutely but that's a parent's decision. They might decide to be a crap parent and do the minimum amount of effort possible but if they're going to do that then they should be the ones to install the blocker not the government.
I remember when they tried to introduce a similar law in the UK and absolutely nothing ended up happening because it's utterly unworkable.
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Can't you just use a VPN to get past a content block? Sounds exactly like a project a 14 year old me would research
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Like the average person has a clue how to configure a content blocker. LOL
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Not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. The average parent has no idea how to block their kids from visiting pornhub. I don't think that's an excuse to make age verification required. Parents should educate themselves on this stuff.
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Nah, it's easier if I have the state do it for me while inconveniencing everyone else. /s
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The sicko in me hopes they spend the next two weeks linking every policymaker in the state to their pornography habits and just dump the whole dataset online. Yeah, it would probably counterproductive and not great for democracy but I wouldn’t it be the sickest burn of all time?
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Ironically it would be so much easier to do that if they actually implemented the law they're suing over, which demands they record the ID of everyone who uses the site.
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Hmm, the article is a little confusing, but it sounds like they're mostly just complaining about the age verification, not really suing over that specifically. The real sticking point, and the one they actually stand a good chance of winning in court is about the warning they're being required to display that's both libelous and factually false. Texas for better or worse is within their rights to require age verification, even the very odious version of it being proposed that would require collecting state IDs, so it's unlikely that they would actually win if that was their only issue with the law. Fortunately Texas (and others) massively overstepped by trying to slap a health and safety warning a la cigarette packages onto porn sites since they let a bunch of nutty politicians write the text of the message rather than actual medical professionals (probably because they couldn't find any respectable medical professional that would endorse their wacky notions).
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Exactly. Malicious compliance, while reminding people exactly why they shouldn’t be so quick to give up their anonymity on the internet.
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I see what you're saying about it not being good for democracy...we shouldn't have politicians making decisions based on their personal use, and trying to avoid scrutiny of that use...but at the same time, we have that anyway. Honestly, at this point, burn it all down. Make the entire apparatus of government so transparent that the shitheels currently in office can't justify staying on. Make it to where the only people who can function in elected positions are political monks.
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Get them and Grindr to do a collab.
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I strongly support this and would activly do it if I had the means
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I think a lot of these states are going about this wrong. We should be helping parents restrict access for their children rather than trying to verify identities of adults who likely want to remain anonymous.
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I am pretty sure these laws have nothing to do with "protecting children"
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It's the same rhetoric that the UK government are using to get a backdoor on messaging apps with E2EE.
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Yeah, anytime you see somebody making the "think of the children!" argument, look at what the possible end goal could be with that removed. Protecting kids is a favorite smokescreen because kids can't speak up for themselves in these cases.
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Yeah I think that's the proper route. Parents who want to restrict what their children see need to take responsibility for doing so and not try to make the government do it for them at the expense of everyone else's privacy.
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I’m of the opinion that protecting children has little to do with the actual intended purpose of laws such as these.
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Make a kid safe tld that requires whatever government certification. Done. Now parents, if they choose, can filter all but the kidsafe tld. Trying to instead blacklist is never going to work.
Whether companies choose to certify and publish there is something those who want this type of thing should provide incentives for.
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Creating a parallel internet for children is a very intriguing idea
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"You show me some lazy prick who's laying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis and I'll show you someone who's not causing any fucking trouble"
-George Carlin
Republicans really believe shit like this and banning abortion will be successful at restoring the nuclear family... at gunpoint.
What it will really do is increase sexual assault, suicide, violence in general...
Of course that will be everyone else's fault for not submitting to their attempts at coercion correctly. Republicans insist on personal responsibility, exclusively for their many enemies and explicitly not for themselves.
The funniest bit is, they are the reason for the death of the nuclear family and the reason it won't be restored. If you give the owner class all the money out of the asses of the working citizens that would have kids, herp derp they won't have kids.
If they really wanted the "traditional American family" to come back, they need only restore tax levels to pre-reagan levels, and actually enforce them. Instead they'd rather threaten everyone for masturbating instead of making new wage slaves they can't afford to raise so Republicans can also get that dopamine hit of schadenfreude by calling them irresponsible for having kids they can't afford.
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You want to restore the nuclear family? Make it financially viable for us to have one.
One of the main reasons I don’t have children is because it’s too goddamn expensive.
Also I’m sterile. But there’s nothing anyone can do about that.
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Fertility issues are also massively on the rise, probably just another side effect of all the pollution we let oligarchs inflict for private profit.
And
NeroBezos/Walton/Buffet/Koch/etc counted while humanity burned. -
I want kids. But I need government programs like Universal Healthcare, real paternity leave rights, and maybe even extreme stuff like subsidized surrogacy to make that happen. My family in Japan has that. My SO in Canada has that. Why can't we have that here in the US?
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None of my 4 kids, ages 16 - 23, want to or plan on having children.
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Porn hub should make a VPN and offer it for free to people in texas They could call it VaginaPenisNards
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They offer a VPN called VPNhub
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Guess a state with a big enough user base finally tried this horse shit lol.
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Republican states really want everyone to be as miserable as possible.
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If everyone is miserable and all vices are banned, there will be nowhere else to turn to but religion and that's exactly what they want. Religion is authoritarian by default and the main message of it is comply or else which fits right into the Republican's plan for us all.
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The irony of this lol 🤣
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Let them go back to jerking off to the underwear catalogue then.
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I'm pretty disturbed by the attitude of lot of the comments on this thread. While this law is probably not going in the right direction, this knee jerk reaction of calling any regulation of porn "puritanical" and an infringement of your rights is crazy to me. I feel like access to internet porn is not a fundamental human right, and it's not puritanical to maybe want to prevent kids from being unwittingly exposed to a shitload of porn at a young age.
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Regulations that require you to expose your personal data for no benefit are all those things and more.
Educating children about sex so they can consume porn in a healthy manner (because spoiler alert: these laws do nothing to stop them watching it) is 100 times more productive and positive than invading the privacy of law abiding adults. But that would actually require time and money which none of these law makers want.
It's never about protecting children or making the world a better place. It's about moral posturing and pretending you're doing something so you can get votes.
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I'm all for educating children about sex, and I'm also sympathetic to the plight of data privacy.
However, I also feel like the internet right now is a pretty bad place for minors. Like, there's so much porn and other harmful content that's so easily accessible, to the point that it's easy to find yourself stumbling into it on complete accident. And with the speed that the internet evolves, it seems pretty unreasonable to me to just kinda expect parents just to be able to fully keep up with it.
I don't think I support this law in particular, but I also don't know what could possibly be done to any real effect.
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Of course kids would still try to access porn, there's always ways around walls on the internet. Just like how banning guns wouldn't prevent everyone from accessing guns, and banning sale of alcohol to minors doesn't make minors stop getting drunk.
In that sense, I do suspect that if there were more boundaries to accessing porn, children would watch it less, and would maybe be less likely to be exposed to it without their consent.
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Has any site actually tried implement this bullshit?
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Here in Lousy-ana, pornhub has a popup a id verification page.
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I think the mormon cultist state has that too now.
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Any other sites? Sounds like pornhub is the only one since they are so well know.
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I thought they just blocked it in Louisiana and just had some sort of video telling you to call your rep to fix it. I'm too lazy to find a VPN endpoint in Louisiana to confirm though. So the article I read may be out of date.
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No, what Pornhub denounces is mandating that thousands of sites across the internet are being legally mandated to collect citizens private, identifiable information, and correlate it with their porn watching habits. It’s a prime example of government overreach. Y’all should stop using the “protect the children” excuse for your facist policy and actually develop a rational, logical argument.
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People can just not visit the site if they don't wanna look at porn. That also works, lol. There are things that I think are morally repugnant that I just ignore.
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246 comments
Jesus, at this point over half the country will ban porn because of religious extremists who hate freedom. Fascism and anti free speech.
Rivers is a Vampire Bear Ghost, 2023
and then those same people who want it banned close their curtains and start watching it.
Like all these child protecting puritans who end up being pedophiles and sex traffickers lol
Ban curtains!
Age verification for pornography has something like a 70% approval rating. It’s not a religious extremism issue, it’s a “normies don’t want or care about their freedoms issue”.
I think there's a lot of vague support for keeping porn away from children that evaporates in the context of the actual issue at hand where porn sites are being mandated to collect and store the IDs of every visitor.
The concept is not terrible, the implementation is. Passing this law with no secure way of proving identity is where it’s clearly just a Christo-fascist power move.
It's kinda tragic too. I do agree with the sentiment behind age verification, it is in the kids' best interest that they not be using porn at that age. But there's really no way to effectively enforce this without violating basic rights. There is no good solution. Given that dilemma, all we can do is try to better prepare parents to deal with this in their home.
"Are you over 18: Yes/No"
Think nobody is arguing against that. I'd rather not give 1000 different private companies my government ID who get hacked all the time. The same people passing these laws had nude magazines growing up too.
70% approval rating but what's the base? If it only surveyed 10 people and 7 say yes, it is 70% but means nothing.
Genuinely curious where you're getting these numbers. I can't seem to find any formal public opinion polls on the enacted or proposed bills
The only porn left will be yiff, because sites struggle to classify it as porn (it even makes it past google's filters). And a new generation of furries will be born. Their ban will be their undoing, lmao.
"The elder scrolls told of their return. The defeat was merely a delay."
The less furry porn lore I know the better
Oh, don't forget kosa, it has bipartisan support
They want to hold sites responsible for children accessing NSFW content on them. Which means ID of some kind
It would also apply to user posted content
I doubt it could be actually banned. The US had this fight decades ago and Porn was given 1A protections. If they could ban it they would but they can't so they are doing the next best thing by making it inconvenient and uncomfortable for people to get to.
The problem though is that all those things we fought for before and being rolled back. You could have said the same about abortion, but then we regressed because of religious extremists.
Coomers crying fascism because kids can’t jerk off to sexually trafficked women.😐
If you think these bills will do anything to stop teens from accessing porn or women from being trafficked, I have a bridge to sell you. And if you think Republicans actually care about the health and well-being of vulnerable women, I have an even more luxurious bridge to sell you.
Meanwhile Nick Fuentes wants a child bride...it's almost as if sad excuses for sacks of shit republicans want to control the sexuality of children...
https://twitter.com/brymicrab/status/1665115820140134402/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1665115820140134402¤tTweetUser=brymicrab
Think you meant to sign up on lemmygrad.ml
LOL, you went with a strawman & personal attack because you know your actual argument is garbage.