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?
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.
This is absurd. It does look like they're suing, with help from a lot of publishers, at least.
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.
> 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.
On a more serious note: HN tries hard to stay in its lane, but there are quite a few people on here that are engaging in political activism, but that every now and then make a (sometimes even useful) tech comment to avoid the activism ban hammer.
Personally I don't really see the difference between 'curious conversation' vs 'click bait' and 'rage bait'. Examples abound, but the balance as it is struck right now picks a reasonable median between 400 hour work weeks for the people involved and some kind of manageable work/life balance. It works, but barely and it is still worth reading but I find myself getting more and more cynical reading HN. Oh, and of course we really don't do humor.
And some people here really do care about both privacy and freedom, and some people are not absolutists but rather see that there are reasonable limits to both of these. Another thing to remember is that HN is global, you're going to find a predominantly English speaking audience here but so many people around the world manage to express themselves reasonably well in English that you will find all kinds of cultures represented here, including ones that have entirely different ideas on subjects such as freedom and privacy. And then there are the tech bros who want freedom and privacy for themselves and less of both of those for the rest of us.
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 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
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.
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.
If you feel like antagonizing an entire community, maybe you should consider just leaving it and finding your own group. It'll be hard for us but we'll make it here without you.
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.
Anti government folk from the USA hated them and decided they were government overreach.
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.
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.
Its the parents job to curate access to the inernet. I say that as a father of three.
Not that gay erotica seems that harmful, even for a 10 year old. They probably don't seek it out as much as you thing they do. If they do, it is probably a beneficial step in their development given what they learn about themselves in a safer environment than the probable alternative.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This goes back a long ways.
> "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."
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
If Texas wants to block content from entities that have nothing to do with Texas, they can build their own great firewall.
This is not a slippery slope fallacy, it's basic pattern recognition.
Since I'm not American I don't have a good idea of what 1024 sq feet is: it's about 95m². I laughed out loud when I realised just how small it is. To suggest this is large enough for a strictly separated adult and children section is profoundly unserious.
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.
"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."Key and verification passed to verifier
Verified list is published
Site pulls list and checks its number has been verified
Site doesn’t know who it is, and verifier doesn’t know which site was verified against
Privacy from companies maybe, privacy from governments and cops, certainly not.
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S1-1/AL...
If the verified list is tied against identity, there is only a simple law change required to de-anonymize everything.
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.
You can get an anonymous, cryptographically signed, certified legal bearer token confirming your age only, or identity or whatever by a centralized service, be it government or high trust private organizations who need to verify your identity anyway like banks. With some smarts you can probably make such a token yourself so the root bearer token issuer doesn’t have the one you use to browse pornhub.
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.
https://ag.ny.gov/resources/organizations/police-departments...
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?
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?
That's not entirely true - once you look old enough most places will stop asking for ID.
As for why: because there is (or at least, was) no other system to identify whether someone is underage and, by extension, more likely to underestimate the consequences of their actions, make worse choices under the effect of alcohol, and suffer its effects more strongly. Same reason why the legal system makes a difference between minors and adults.
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
With that said, even now, it’s normal that liquor stores only look at IDs without transmitting or recording the information anywhere (in the absence of fraud concerns), so if the purchase itself is made with cash, it has most (not quite all) of the same data privacy and security consequences as a true anonymous purchase.
This is very different from the online porn age verification proposals.
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
other iOS applications that have registered themselves as an Identity Document Provider.
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.
Of course conservatives are hypocrites. All they care about are their end goals, and they will say and do whatever they need to say and do in order to achieve them.
One of those goals involves enshrining Christian values into law. Christian values themselves are often hypocritical and contradictory. And inconsistent: ask 10 Christians to weigh in on a thorny moral issue and you'll get 15 different answers.
And on top of that, the conservatives in power have a fetish for using those power structures to enrich themselves and their cronies, under the guise of "small government" and "free markets".
I don't think exposing conservative hypocrisy is a winning or useful strategy anymore. Conservatives are masters at cognitive dissonance, and at hand-waving away inconsistencies in their views, or the very real, very negative consequences of their policy plans. I'm not sure what the right strategy is, though. And perhaps this is why liberals fail to win hearts and minds when it matters.
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?
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.)
> (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.
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.
>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<=
Dig a little deeper, and you'll see that particular submission ("US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law") was visible on the front page for barely five minutes [0] before something abruptly exiled it to to the end of the second page and a slide into obscurity.
In contrast, I randomly picked something from several pages down today that which looks bland with triple-digit comments, and got "A Typology of Candianisms." Turns out that has even more comments (327!) and was visible on the front page for about twenty hours [1].
Quite a difference, isn't it? I'm not against the idea that HN needs to guard its content-mix, but we should not live in denial about it happening.
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.
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_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...
We know that very few organizations are capable of effectively controlling confidential information that they're legally bound to keep confidential. Requiring things that are going to lead to large stores of ID images is asking for trouble.
When you show your ID in a store, the clerk generally doesn't retain a copy of it, and if they do, it's apparent because they take the card to scan it... regardless, they can't take the scanned copy and present it at another store, because the other store will detect that it's not an original.
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.
> In practice this is going to be utilized to shut down sex education and other content deemed "harmful to children".
Many of the books on the lists I linked, and many other such lists, are in fact educational in a variety of ways. Often they're banned precisely because they cover topics that people in power don't want there to be any education on.
(And, to be clear, this comment should not be interpreted as in any way supporting the idea that a book should need to be "educational", or have any other redeeming quality, in order to not be banned.)
"Sex education" is not so narrow as to only include an approved/mandated textbook (though those and their content do get affected by these attitudes as well). Having e.g. healthy relationships (or for that matter unhealthy relationships) depicted or described in fiction is part of a well-rounded education.
It's also remarkable, and ironic, how often depictions of dystopias, particularly dystopias that restrict books and other access to information, get banned.
And, frankly, banning something misses the opportunity to contextualize it and talk about it, and instead makes it more appealing.
Implying that they don't care about their kids, or shouldn't have kids as a result, is a pretty awful thing to say.
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 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.
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.
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]
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...
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.
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.
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.
https://www.access-board.gov/ada/guides/chapter-6-toilet-roo...
For what it's worth, chatgpt and random reddit comments claim you'd need closer to 50sqft for a compliant bathroom. Maybe that's nonsense.
In any case, their Facebook page is full of recent pictures of children in the library, so it seems that they were indeed unsurprisingly just posturing.
"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 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
Now, I still hate the idea that any corporation is storing my ID, but it's not every Tom Dicken' Harry porn site you might be viewing.
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.
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.
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.
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).
We know it's bad for moral reasons, but moral reasons are stupid and I don't trust them. But is it actually bad - like in the real world, with tangible effects, not made-up ones? I don't know, and it looks like you don't know, and OP doesn't know, and the people who are pushing this age verification don't know either.
Sure, two girls one cup is disgusting. It's vile. It's immoral. But is it harmful? That's a different question.
That's a huge problem. You see, we're attempting to solve a problem which we haven't proved even exists.
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.
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?
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 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.
The EU is not a monolith. There are many people pushing in many different directions. Sometimes the result is good, sometimes less so.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Moral reasons are stupid and you don't trust them.
Go find a ten-year-old and show them the video yourself. Then see if they feel up to letting you stick around them long enough for you to figure out whether there were any real-world, tangible effects.
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
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.
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.
If I drive a car without a seatbelt, that has real-world effects. I can get ejected and die, as well as hurting other people.
But pornography doesn't split my skull. It doesn't crush my fingers. It doesn't make me poorer. It doesn't make me sicker. It doesn't hurt me physically, or financially, or even socially.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
"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."
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.
I'm not a proponent of the discipline per say, and maybe because of this, my impression that the entire field of psychology is meant to partially address the real-word, tangible effects of things that do not cause apparent physical harm is naive.
If I'm accustomed to women getting indiscriminately reamed and pinned and prodded at my own discretion—even casually—I am at a detriment.
I'm going to leave out a more accessible or agreeable example because I want to give you the benefit of the doubt that you can come up one on your own.
I don't mean to be condescending, but I want to assume that you're arguing in good faith.
Have you, or any one who you know, seen something disgusting, vile or immoral that didn't cause physical harm but had a negative consequence on how you feel about yourself or the world around you?
Why are we quick to champion the value of the "good" things that don't offer any material benefit (i.e., physically, financially, socially) but criticizing the "bad" requires graphs and groups and variables and peer reviews?
I know, and I figure that you know too. "Good" and "bad" exist in quotations marks and only count among the people who don't need them to use them with each other.
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)
No, save it (don't save it, this is rhetorical), because apparently every generation is screwed up in their own way that begets the ills of the next.
And if we happen to be cohorts (which I suspect we may be), then I think we made out as worse as any.
And is it wrong to assume that there isn't any difference between either kinds of footage? That one goads the other in either direction?
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...
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
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.
You're practically forced to have a Google/Apple account and a google/apple smartphone to even exist in today's world.
That's a boycott.
> 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 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.
> 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.
Yes, which is why we are not in the early internet anymore and fully into surveillance capitalism, algorithmic social media.
As a society we collectively tell kids they can’t have destructive, addictive substances until they’re a certain age and I believe social media and smartphones belong in that category.
To answer this, it's because of how modern societies view rights. Namely, you can do whatever you want, until we can prove it's to a detriment to other people. Before doing something, we need not prove it is good.
On an individual level, it is a very good idea to have some guarantee something is good before we do it. But on a societal level, we don't do this, and for good reason. Before we censor or restrict, we must assure we have good reasons for doing so.
> If I'm accustomed to women getting indiscriminately reamed and pinned and prodded at my own discretion—even casually—I am at a detriment.
I might agree, but sexuality and sex is very complex.
I can argue that it's not that simple, and sex exists beyond the bounds of what you do - it's part of who you are, and not much in your control.
For example, I am a homosexual, I'm gay. Naturally my sex involves anal intercourse with other men. To many, this is disgusting. Gross, unsanitary, distasteful.
My life would certainly be easier if I did not have this affliction, but simultaneously I cannot control it. I've tried, as has every gay man or boy at some point in their lives. And, I do not know what has caused it. If I never viewed pornography, ever, I am 100% confident I would still be gay.
I do not know how it works for heterosexuals, but I imagine, to some degree, their sexual proclivities are, too, not under their control. I don't think removing pornography would remove those sexual proclivities.
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.
> 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.
As moral positions go, it's actually quite eccentric.
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.
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.
My point again is that these “rights” you’re talking about are built on our social contract. There is no premise that “porn is free speech,” in fact, quite the opposite, again, for centuries.
The existence of porn on the internet was the result of legislation, not right. That legislation is changing, we need to organize to make sure it remains legal.
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?
That's what I used to say about Roe v. Wade. "They'll never give up that wedge issue."
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
...
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?
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.
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.
Virtual reality simulates physical reality.
In some cases, like violent video games, they assuage traumas. Whether it's a recording on a screen or not, can our brains tell the difference?
Something is going on, spooky and subtle in the mind that makes whatever is on the screen meaningful to us.
I don't want to get us trapped in this false interpretation that in the year 2025 there is a difference between how human beings are affected in the physical and digital world. To be frank, it's stupid to think like this, meaning that it's an insult to the intelligence of the person who thinks this way and it needs to be called out as such in order to encourage them to think critically about the matter.
If this whole interaction is just some woopdy doo, willy nilly, be that as it may sort of engagement with media, what compels us then to entertain the things that we don't (or don't want to) attribute to the hard things in life?
I'm going to assume your gender and your age to some degree here:
Middle-aged men have a tendency to Wednesday Night Sitcom Dad their way out of confronting things that bring their own vulnerabilities into question and collectively make them accountable for figuring out what to do about these things, especially if it comes at the cost of comfort that they're trying to preserve that are the accessories to their vulnerabilities.
What we're discussing isn't as simple as the "close your eyes to avoid cyberbullying" quips of yore: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tyler-the-creators-cyber-bull... (in which I make a more blatant attempt at guessing which generation you belong to and consequently expose my own).
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.)
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.
[1] https://www.abc4.com/news/tech-social-media/pornhub-blocks-a...
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.
> 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.
Our brains can’t tell the difference, but that’s not what I said. What I said is that it can be turned off. Social media cyberbullying comes along with entanglements that keep you on the site. For a shock video, I think the suburban dad has a point. To be clear, if someone came up to me and said they had really struggled with what they’d seen in a shock video as a kid and that it was really messing with them, I wouldn’t dismiss that or make fun of them or something. It’s just that the opposite has been my experience and the experience of those who I’m close to.
Before you know it, anything that mentions LGBTQ+ topics will be labeled as porn.
And if you’re still opposed to it, the solution is regulation - not criminalization.
I agree with you that systems that store those IDs are ticking bombs.
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.
Or we move everything not meant for the sanitised internet to TOR hidden services.
It's why there is an age of consent that no kid can waive.
It's why kids aren't allowed to do lots of things, like vote, drive, drink etc.
There needs to be a compelling reason to make an exception for one politically charged thing that comes with irreversible physical changes.
There also needs to be a compelling reason why that decision cannot be deferred until age of majority.
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?
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.
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...
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.
Do you think it's appropriate for random people to tell a 10 year old how to take their insulin? I don't.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
Pro-censorship advocates will venue shop to find a sympathetic court
We don’t even come close to the bullshit that happened in the past.
Not that it makes the present any better.
Question about your good faith:
Do you have a problem with puberty blockers when given to non-trans kids? I.e. for precocious puberty
> “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.
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.
Do you have any counter-evidence?
I hope it didn't seem like I was advancing premises that you never proposed outright. I was derived that premise on my own. I take full ownership of the words that you put in my mouth by the virtue of what you did say being thought-provoking.
And I ask you, if our brains can't tell the difference then what does turning it off actually achieve? If your self esteem or your sheer will to live is broken offline, going online does not solve this problem on its own. I'm speaking unconditionally and not in a way that can be made subject to circumstance.
If you feel ugly, or feel like dying, or feel anything, in a way that resonates with you at the very core of your being (and I know, I know, who's to say a supernatural "core of being" exists right?) then it's a wrap for you. It's going to take about as much effort to redeem yourself as it would if you were physically harmed in the street.
At the end, I don't think that what I'm saying is spectacular for anyone who has basic qualities of self-awareness and empathy (and I'm not saying that you're not one of them) or psychology (of which I am no savant and would even follow your lead to some extent if you have any trails to offer).
The point of contention is a matter of belief—ideologically and morally—and the depths that we're willing to go to scrutinize what gives us pleasure and why. In a way I think that this runs counterintuitive to the notions of "civil liberty" that pervade modern thought and any attempt to distinguish right from wrong on a scale greater than the individual makes the powder-wigged patriot in us quiver in our britches.
So there's that. I'm tapped.
I want to believe that your lack of discernment in one area betrays what suggests sound judgment in another. Unless the latter holds true only on occasions that satisfy your gullet.
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.
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.
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.
Religion is about believing things you have no evidence for, that's its whole thing.
What does the parent's opinion have to do with it? Their opinion is equally ignored when it comes to statutory rape, no?
This is not a "this is a private matter between the child and the parent" scenario. Some things are, but a clear majority of people do not feel that this should be one of those things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
So, what is it that you're actually looking for?
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_...
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?
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.
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.
For a trans kid, going thru the wrong puberty is harmful. The best thing would be hormones at puberty. But given issues around informed consent, puberty blockers are a valid compromise.
Calling them harmful without considering the harm of the alternative is not honest.
I had access to the former at about 12 but no access to the internet until age ~23. Was about perfect.
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?
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!
“The Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria Study (1972–2015): Trends in Prevalence, Treatment, and Regrets” (DOI: 10.1016/j.jsxm.2018.01.016).
The word “many” is misleading – it’s less than 1 %. It’s not nothing, but it’s low.
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.
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.
Just see how any criticism of dear leader gets flagged in mere minutes now.
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.
Do you see the problem yet?
Sgould I say "Cambridge Analytica" now or later?
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.
This conception of the "wrong puberty" as something that needs to be blocked is as absurd as all that "born in the wrong body" ideological nonsense.
Most importantly, children can't meaningfully consent to having their sexual function permanently damaged.
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.
This isn't the desistence rate of children, this is the regret rate of adults who transition.
The older I get, the more I understand people who prefer quality of life, over longevity.
All the studies among gender dysphoric children who are not prescribed puberty blockers show desistence rates over 70%
There are studies that show very low desistence rates - many in the single digits. But those are studies among children that are given puberty blockers.
Why do you think you can’t experience the wrong one? Also, unless you are saying there is only one sex, how could there only be one puberty?
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.
*Also, I can’t wait for the first lawsuit over a breastfeeding page, because you know it’s coming.
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.
Given the definition of maturity is being fully grown, this comes across as an inherently unhelpful thing to ask. If we say “only once someone is fully grown they are able to determine if they experienced the incorrect puberty” then this makes it impossible to help children who are going to experience the incorrect puberty. Unless we have some way to determine a child is trans without any input from them, there becomes no way to help them.
To their "chagrin?" Huh? The meaning of the word is the opposite of whatever you're trying to communicate, I think.
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?
https://apnews.com/article/uk-transgender-health-care-childr...
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.
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.
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.
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?
Reading their comment charitably, one might want the trans youth to also get their information from actual medical professionals and groups rather than random internet strangers.
Analogously, sharing information about DIY at-home abortions with people on the internet is also dangerous as hell and will hurt people. In the world we currently live in it may be better than the alternative, but in a better world both of those are not pieces of information that anyone should need to find online.
This is not an acceptable comment on HN, as it's a disguised personal attack. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.
That comment was unacceptable and I replied to them to say so, but it's also not OK to comment like this on HN, no matter what you're replying to. If we want others to be better we need to be better ourselves.
> 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...
Don't do this on HN. It's sneering and snark, and thus against the guidelines.
Secondly, it's not clear which group you're bigoted over—trans folks or drag queens
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.
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.
Ignoring that, they don't even need a room. They just can't let kids access it. A locked armoire near the checkout ought to suffice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Rural police departments decide that a piece of text 'harmed' one of their residents and prosecute the author.
Here's more information: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12874-025-02581-7
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?
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.
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.
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.
That began in 1906; it's hardly something we've "always done".
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
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.
He’ll realistically the US doesn’t make the cut either.
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.
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.
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.
Who are we to question God's natural order? If a 9 year old girl with precocious puberty is uncomfortable being oggled by old men, that's just fine because puberty can never be wrong.
Besides, she can't meaningfully consent to medically delaying puberty, anyway.
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.
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.
> Overall, 33% underwent transmasculine procedures and 67% transfemenine procedures. The prevalence of regret among patients undergoing transmasculine and transfemenine surgeries was <1% (IC <1%–<1%) and 1% (CI <1%–2%), respectively.
That's less than the regret rate for life saving surgeries lol
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".
All comms are subject to traffic analysis except surreptitious, covert channels (which can't be covert if the implementations are widely available).
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
Here's what more reliable studies from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest professional group of pediatricians in the country, say[2]:
> Gender Identity 5 Years After Social Transition
> We found that an average of 5 years after their initial social transition, 7.3% of youth had retransitioned at least once. At the end of this period, most youth identified as binary transgender youth (94%), including 1.3% who retransitioned to another identity before returning to their binary transgender identity. A total of 2.5% of youth identified as cisgender and 3.5% as nonbinary. Later cisgender identities were more common among youth whose initial social transition occurred before age 6 years; their retransitions often occurred before age 10 years.
[1] https://downloads.regulations.gov/ED-2022-OCR-0143-141953/at...
[2] https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/150/2/e20210...
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.
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.
Yikes dude.
> …to back up what I’ve consistently observed with my own eyes
People have observed everything UFOs and demons to ivermectin curing their COVID. None of it is real but yet people continue to swear up and down on these things gs.
> ...given the speed at which research sometimes move
Filling in knowledge gaps with imagination is not a substitute for actual data. Ever.
> and particularly since any concern over perceived “sexual liberation” attacks one of the sacred cows of progressivism
Hard disagree. You yourself can go study human psychology and sexuality then perform studies. If you can assemble real data the scientific community would be forever grateful for your contributions. The real barrier is not “liberals”, it’s that it takes years upon years of hard work to get there. Unlike your comment, which is backed up by “my own eyes”.
> I know the research is there and has been if you’re actually interested
Leading with “I don’t need citations”, then promising that they’re “totally there” at the bottom doesn’t really sit right with me.
Anyways, it’s not the role of the state to legislate morality. That always ends poorly. If porn is bad for kids, then parents need to step up. Maybe the state could offer resources for parents - I’m not opposed to that. If it’s bad for adults, they those with chronic habits should seek help.
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
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.
The study uses the DSM-III and DSM-IV criteria for gender incongruence disorder, or GID, now referred to as gender dysphoria. The sample ranges from 1989 to 2002 and those were the contemporary iterations of the DSM. The DSM-V wasn't published until 2013. At most the criteria is outdated by one decade, not "several decades". Furthermore, the author of the study would later write the criteria for gender dysphoria in the DSM-V. The criteria are not particularly different, and the author of the study I linked has stated in interviews that most of the sample would meet the criteria for gender dysphoria under the DSM-V (which, again, he wrote so this opinion should carry some weight). In short, the idea that if the psychologists had used the DSM-V the results would be substantially different is not likely.
And this isn't just one study that found low rates of persistence:
> In Green (47), the percentage of persisters was 2% (total n = 44; Mean age at follow-up, 19 years; range, 14–24); in Wallien and Cohen-Kettenis (52), the percentage of persisters was 20.3% (total n = 59; Mean age at follow-up, 19.4 years; range, 16–28); and in Steensma et al. (51), the percentage of persisters was 29.1% (total n = 79; Mean age at follow-up, 16.1 years; range, 15–19). Across all studies, the percentage of persisters was 17.4% (total N = 235), with a range from 0 to 29.1%.3
Are all these other studies finding low rates of persistence also tainted in some way?
The study you linked is among a group that were treated with an affirming model of care, where cross sex gender identity is actively encouraged, and a sizeable chunk of the sample were put on puberty blockers. This comports with what I have written: when gender dysphoric children are met with an affirming model of care and given gender affirming care, very few of them desist in their cross-sex gender identity. When they given a neutral, observational model of care not not prescribed puberty blockers, the majority of them desist. The study you linked just reinforces the former but does nothing to disprove the latter.
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.
Look, if you want to debate your theory of contagious trans-ness, you should be open about that from the get-go.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Not at all
I just think that the clothes you choose to wear shouldn't have anything to do with gender identity
They may be related because it might relate to how you choose to express your gender
But the fact is that clothes are clothes, not genders
What are you going on about "contagious trans-ness"? Gender dysphoria isn't spread by a bacterial or viral infection. I have no idea what you mean by "contagious". The second sentence reads like a total non-sequitur.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
(Seriously, gerrymandering, redistricting weaponization, bribery/campaign contributions, and the like are all forms of election corruption.)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendmen...
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".
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.
- 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.
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.
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 enforcement here is quite twisted: it attracts greedy litigants. Lying is bad, but greed is a mortal sin.
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.
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?
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.
Visa and MasterCard disallow content depicting CSA, rape, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, scatological erotica, torture, extreme sexual violence, and revenge porn.
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.
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".
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.
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 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.
Very cool! Always happy to be proven wrong with cool tech!
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."
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.
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.
If you REALLY don't want to know, it might be best to remove this comment, in case somebody decides to grief you.
(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?
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.
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.
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.
On The Right of the media economy, you surface the best narratives, and there are no penalties for being inaccurate. Because everything is opinion and rhetorical tricks, saying “It’s terrible what happened in this Dem state. Here’s how the dems caused it” and then being able to say “we never said that dems were monsters”, while platforming fringe theories like pizza gate.
If you go against the narrative you just dont get airtime and attention - meaning you get no revenue or political power. Worse, you might get primaried.
Hammering the truth means nothing, because you would only be selling it back to the center and the left.
The right is interested in facts, only to the point that they support their goals. It’s a protected market.
You can’t really outcompete rackets, but you can’t really restrict speech without getting hit by free speech arguments.
It’s a problem worth solving though, and its a problem worth learning about.
One thing that seems to work isn’t counter speech, its angry speech. It’s not the pro-vax group that gets credence vs the anti-vaxxers, it’s the anti-anti-vaxxers who do it.
I wish people had better ideas, but its hard to even realize the specifics of the market failure.
Plenty of devices have parental controls and it is your duty as a parent to look into this and understand the consequences when you hand a device to your child that allows them to consume a global diet of media and connects them to a majority of the global populous. It is not unreasonable to expect device/software manufacturers to provide the power to parents to do this and we already have had the free market provide options for this for decades.
To me, it is not any different than to expect a parent to consider the potential consequences of children playing in the streets, etc. and take action. Thus, to me, the people pushing this kind of legislation are either sloppy thinkers or dishonest in what aims they hope to achieve.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is ideological nonsense.
Coulda said the same about homosexuality ~30 years ago. It’s a bad reason then, it’s a bad reason now.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
So should everyone under the age of 25 (roughly when your brain becomes fully developed) be prohibited from talking about any kind of medical treatment?
Also, how do you expect people to develop critical thinking skills if they’re never presented with challenging concepts or, you know, required to think critically about things?
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.
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?
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.
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.
(1) by transition i mean socially transition and go on puberty blockers if they want them.
If you read the article there is a direct quote from Vought, one of the chief project 2025 architects, about how this is really a path to banning pornography. Which the project 2025 folks believe includes any discussion of lgbtq+ lifestyles.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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 think most people are taking your description of your experience being positive as a recommendation - one that is very unrealistic in modern times.
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.
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.
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.
Now sure if the identity provider and the site work together they could negate the anonymity, but given that for the identity provider anonymisation would be the key selling feature they wouldn’t want to risk that. Mullvad I’m sure would be trustworthy enough.
"You can always transition as an adult" is that other edge, not "you can always block puberty as an adult".
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.
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.
Drag queens are men who prefer to dress as women sometimes but who identify as men. Like, FBI director Edgar Hoover.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Luckily, as you've said, we already have HPV vaccines, so maybe it's time to stop cutting off pieces from little boys' penises?
Would you say the same about drugs?
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...
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).
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...
"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")
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.
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.
You shouldn’t be a parent if you can’t enforce a mobile device policy better than an average Fortune 500 corporation.
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.
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.
> 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.
Perhaps a system like Privacy Pass would be ideal. Where a verifier generates a verified client a number of redeemable signed tokens for a session, but when presented by a client, the site doesn't know who that token was issued to, but they know they authenticated this person and can verify they made the token. Therefore they get access.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It seems more like verification theatre.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My photos only, go back to the 80s and you can buy porn, but not if you are a kid. Obviously it was a lot easier to enforce because it was physical media, but the principle here is that these laws were not unconstitutional.
I honestly think kids seeing porn is no big deal, but again, the folks in this thread comparing distribution of pornography to free speech are really, really reaching for something that just isn’t there. All of the precedents say pornography is not free speech.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
ID.me for one is doing full identity verification by looking at your face and your ID card (and I assume having a human check up on it if the algorithm doesn't work). If Apple can do their fancy cloud-AI server thing with provable attestations that they aren't saving your information, someone could build a version of this which has those kind of safeguards and which passes back an emum (UNDER_18, 18_TO_20, ADULT) rather than a name or ID number to the caller.
Whether people would trust it is again, shrug. Most people barely understand how any kind of cryptography works so at the end of the day you do your best and people make their choices on whether to trust you. But the fact is that if the system actually IS designed properly, there isn't any risk of "oh no, 2029 fascism, now Supreme Commander Trump knows what porn sites I use" because that data was never saved.
Instead, I only offer a gentile reminder of the Hacker News guidelines, along with a genuine wish that you are having a fulfilling day. :)
This is disinformation that is easily shown to be false if you read the final report.
In fact this lie was so widely disseminated that the authors felt they had to address it in the FAQs on the Review website: https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-r...
> Did the Review reject studies that were not double blind randomised control trials in its systematic review of evidence for puberty blockers and masculinising / feminising hormones?
> No. There were no randomised control studies identified in the systematic reviews, but other types of studies were included if they were well designed and conducted.
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.
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.
I can say “I think kids seeing porn is no big deal” without insisting that pornographic speech is protected speech (which I don’t think is true).
I’m really confused as to why it’s not clear, but oh well, I’m just trying my best.
-note: “my photos only” in the previous post was an autocorrect typo.
> Besides, she can't meaningfully consent to medically delaying puberty, anyway.
Yes, indeed she can't.
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.
To take female puberty as an example, this is the growth and development of the uterus, ovaries, labia and breasts to reach their mature form and function. Most importantly, the menstrual cycle begins, making pregnancy possible.
If a boy has testosterone blocked and is given estrogen instead, he doesn't experience any of this, except perhaps some breast tissue growth and redistribution of fat. His penis and testicles will not develop further and he will probably remain sterile.
However, he doesn't have a female reproductive system, so this is not more similar to female puberty. What he's experiencing is stunted male development, a pharmaceutically-induced eunuch state.
There is no option for him to go through female puberty rather than male puberty, because he lacks the type of reproductive system that would make this possible. As female puberty is not an experience available to him, it makes no sense to describe male puberty as being the "wrong puberty" for him.
Likewise for girls and the impossibility of experiencing male puberty.
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 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.
If that's the society we are heading towards, count me out. I shall sit on my hands to the best of my ability.
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.
Americans will blame everything but their gun laws.
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.
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.
Either way, I'm not going to engage your other points. I'm old enough to know a Fox News viewer when I see one.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the source you linked most of the references in scripture were from the Old Testament. I am a Christian, which means I am part of a new covenant with God. Just like I can wear mixed fabrics, I believe that owning slavery is a flagrant violation of the Second Great Commandment: "Love your neighbor as yourself."
All but one of the New Testament sources were from sources besides Christ. Fallible men, whose words hold some value but are certainly imperfect. I realize this belief separates me from a majority of Christians, but it's far from the only objection I have to particularly Paul's Letters.
As for the quotation from Luke, I read this in the same way I read, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's," as a rebuke of petty earthly concerns. In that verse, he certainly wasn't endorsing taxation, as he later spoke of tax collectors in Matthew 9:12 as among "they that are sick".
I'm not sure why you infodumped a landing page at me or why you think I'm a fan of slavery, but you left multiple (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44548475, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44548632) so I'm going to consolidate responses. The Ten Commandments were obviated by the New Covenant, so I don't understand why you think God would need to add a new commandment. The Roman Catholic Pope is also not "my pope"; I don't believe in that concept at all and am not a Roman Catholic.
To your question, "are you for not either changing it or renouncing that religion?" I have thought about renouncing Christianity in the past, yes. I had a very long questioning phase, and continue to question. Much of that questioning has led to fruitful conversations with friends from a number of different religious backgrounds and shaped by beliefs. It has also led me to break with the structure of most denominations.
Lastly, why I'm not "doing something?" I already allocate my time, talent, and treasure to a local charity I co-founded some years back. I deeply believe in its mission and know all those resources go to good use, unlike with many large, international NGOs. It helps people from my town, if mostly from the other side of it. I believe in rightly-ordered love, and in working to take care of a problem I can see and understand and work to remedy, thanks to the advantage I have being present in this town, before looking elsewhere.
If you want good evidence that this is hard to study well, even if you maintain that political concerns are a non-issue, around 11% of men report some agreement with the statement, "I am addicted to pornography." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7044607 Of course, another analysis found that just 51.7% of men used pornography, which seems optimistically low: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11234758/ See the concerns I mentioned around getting truthful data, which are also well-known within nutrition. 17.4% of those men were "problematic" pornography users.
I'm back on a laptop now so can pull this up a little easier, but I don't think you're defending this from the right angle. It's the same as when the marijuana legalization advocates say "it's basically medicine lol" or deny that addiction is possible and that it's known to somewhat increase risk of schizophrenia, because they are scared that admitting that something is bad means they are somehow supporting a ban on it. There are a lot of bad things people consume and I support banning very few of those. Pornography is not one. Please don't mistake my position.
I'll also point out that my original comment explicitly stated that I didn't see it as the role of the state but of parents. I'm not sure with whom you're arguing here about that.
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 don't see any moral benefit to forcing people not to sin. There's no virtue when there's no choice.
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
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Learning about adverse side effects by talking about their experiences is LITERALLY what you’re advocating for a ban on. I’d say by any basic morality you’re not allowed to cite that as evidence if you want it banned.
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.
CRITICALLY APPRAISING THE CASS REPORT: METHODOLOGICAL FLAWS AND UNSUPPORTED CLAIMS
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-health-and-wellness/horm...
And on the subject of the (methodologically trash) cass report:
https://osf.io/preprints/osf/uhndk_v1
CRITICALLY APPRAISING THE CASS REPORT: METHODOLOGICAL FLAWS AND UNSUPPORTED CLAIMS
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.
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.
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.
Fair enough. I chose my example poorly. My point still stands: personal anecdotes are a terrible way of understanding most anything.
> It's the same as when the marijuana legalization advocates say "it's basically medicine lol" or deny that addiction is possible
100% feel you here. Even as a user.
> There are a lot of bad things people consume and I support banning very few of those. Pornography is not one. Please don't mistake my position.
I appreciate your clarity here and I apologize for being a bit of jerk. So often it feels like people choose views purely on their own internal personal morality. Not a larger live-and-let-live attitude. Which kinda ties into the cannabis legalization thing above imo. The truth was fudged to make the moral argument easier - because that convinces people.
So, again, apologies for jumping down your throat and I appreciate the links.
Yes there is and we all grew up in that world.
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.
> 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.
What's next, gene therapy because the embryo might want to be a different race when it grows up?
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.
The general facts are true, my opinion of anime fans is my own
> 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.
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.
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.
Would you like to try again?
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.
> 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.
I am talking about d6e
I'm vehemently against the "transing" of anyone who exhibits behavior or preferences that are outside of cultural norms for their biological sex
They might be trans, yes. But they might not. I'm very very very against putting people in the trans category when they shouldn't be
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.
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?
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.
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."
Thank you for being honest about it and illustrating why the slippery slope is very real.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
I have accepted door dash as a non-door dash customer. They check for ID. Just like the store.
You and I are on the exact same page. If you still don't think so, please make the distinction clear.
>...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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
> 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.
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.