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Mom sues porn sites (Including Chaturbate, Jerkmate, Superporn and Hentaicity) for noncompliance with Kansas age assurance law; Teen can no longer enjoy life after mom caught him visiting Chaturbate

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Mom sues porn sites for noncompliance with Kansas age assurance law | Biometric Update
204 comments

  • Am I the only one that thinks there’s something positive to stricter control of pornography?

    Even if you love porn and grew up exposed to it as a kid, you gotta admit that there are psychological effects on avid adult viewers and more on minors.

    Think about what was available as a kid, too. Wait 10 min for a 3 minute to load or just search pics. Now it’s a completely different overstimulating world that transforming how people relate to sex and themselves.

    • There's absolutely something to be said for trying to ensure that people don't have access to porn as kids, but that doesn't come from what these legal battles inevitably want to impose, which is ID check requirements that create a massive treasure trove of data for attackers to target to steal IDs, blackmail individuals, and violate people's privacy, while adding additional costs for porn sites that will inevitably lead to predatory monetization, such as more predatory ads.

      The problem is that parents are offloading their own responsibility and education off themselves and schools, and instead placing an unworkable burden onto the sites that host and distribute pornographic content.

      We know that when you provide proper sex education, talk to kids about how to safely consume adult content without risking their health, safety, and while setting realistic expectations, you tend to get much better outcomes.

      If there's one thing I think most people are very aware of, it's that the more you try and hide something from kids, the more they tend to try and resist that, and find it anyways, except without any proper education or safeguards.

      It's why abstinence only education tends to lead to worse outcomes than sex education, even though on the surface, you're "exposing" kids to sexually related materials.

      This doesn't mean we should deliberately expose kids to porn out of nowhere, remove all restrictions or age checks, etc, but it does mean that we can, for example:

      • Implement reasonable sex education in schools. Kids who have sex ed generally engage in healthier masturbation and sex than kids who don't.
      • Have parents talk with their kids about safe and healthy sex & relationships. It's an awkward conversation, but we know it keeps kids healthier and safer in the long run.
      • Implement a captcha-like system to make it a little more difficult (and primarily, slower and less stimulating) for kids to quickly access porn sites. Requiring certain somewhat higher level math problems to be solved, for example. This doesn't rely on giving up sensitive personal info.

      Kids won't simply stop viewing porn if you implement age gates. Kids are smart, they find their way around restrictions all the time. If we can't reasonably stop them without producing a whole host of other extremely negative consequences, then the best thing we can do is educate them on how to not severely risk their own health.

      It's not perfect, but it's better than creating massive pools of private data, perverse financial incentives, and pushing people to more fringe sites that do even less to comply with the law.

      • I understand and agree with what you’re saying. I think people should need licenses to have kids, but that’s a different story.

        The conflict that this often boils down to is that the digital world does not emulate the real world. If you want to buy porn in the real world, you need ID, but online anything goes. I love my online anonymity just as much as everybody else, but we’ll eventually need to find some hybrid approach.

        We already scan our faces on our phones all the time, or scan our finger on our computer. How about when you want to access a porn site you have to type in a password or do some biometric credential?

        I think 50% or more of the resistance of restricting porn is really just that people really love porn and are ashamed of what they view. There’s a whole other social psychology that needs to change in regards to how we view sex and I agree with more education.

        • The conflict that this often boils down to is that the digital world does not emulate the real world. If you want to buy porn in the real world, you need ID, but online anything goes. I love my online anonymity just as much as everybody else, but we’ll eventually need to find some hybrid approach.

          The problem is that because the internet is fundamentally different from the real world, it has its own challenges that make some of the things we do in the real world unfeasible in the digital world. showing an ID to a clerk at a store doesn't transmit your sensitive information over the internet to/through an unknown list of companies, who may or may not store it for an undetermined amount of time, but doing so on the internet essentially has to do so.

          While I do think we should try and prevent kids from viewing porn at young ages, a lot of the mechanisms proposed to do so are either not possible, cause many other harms by their existence that could outweigh their benefits, or are trivially bypassed.

          We already scan our faces on our phones all the time, or scan our finger on our computer. How about when you want to access a porn site you have to type in a password or do some biometric credential?

          Those systems are fundamentally different, even though the interaction is the same, so implementing them in places like porn sites carries entirely different implications.

          For example, (and I'm oversimplifying a bit here for time's sake) a biometric scan on your phone is just comparing the scan it takes each time with the hash (a processed version) of your original biometric scan during setup. If they match, the phone unlocks.

          This verification process does nothing to verify if you're a given age, just that your face/fingerprint is the same as during setup. It also never has to transmit or store your biometrics to another company. It's always on-device.

          Age verification online for something like porn is much more complex. When you're verifying a user, you have to verify:

          • The general location the user lives in (to determine which laws you must comply with, if not for the type of verification, then for the data retention and security, and access)
          • The age of the user
          • The reality of the user (e.g. a camera held up to a YouTube video shouldn't verify as if the person is the one in the video)
          • The uniqueness of the user (e.g. that this isn't someone re-licensing the same clip of their face to be replayed directly into the camera feed, allowing any number of people to verify using the same face)
          • And depending on the local regulations, the identity of the user (e.g. name, and sometimes other identifiers like address, email, phone number, SSN, etc)

          This all carries immense challenges. It's fundamentally incompatible with user privacy. Any step in this process could involve processing data about someone that could allow for:

          • Blackmail/extortion
          • Data breaches that allow access to other services the person has an account on
          • Being added to spam marketing lists
          • Heavily targeted advertising based on sexual preference
          • Government registries that could be used to target opponents

          This also doesn't include the fact that most of these can simply be bypassed by anyone willing to put in even a little effort. If you can buy an ID or SSN online for less than a dollar, you'll definitely be able to buy an age verification scan video, or a photo of an ID.

          Plus, for those unwilling to directly bypass measures on the major sites, then if only the sites that actually fear government enforcement implement these measures, then people will simply go to the less regulated sites.

          In fact, this is a well documented trend, that whenever censorship of any media happens, porn or otherwise, viewership simply moves to noncompliant services. And of course, these services can be hosting much worse content than the larger, relatively regulatory-compliant businesses, such as CSAM, gore, nonconsensual recordings, etc.

    • you gotta admit that there are psychological effects on avid adult viewers and more on minors

      Citation needed when we're talking about implementing laws and opening up lawsuits suing for $75k+. Multiple robust peer-reviewed citations needed. Preferably not funded by a Catholic church group.

      Also it's a leap to say top-down privacy invading laws are the way the state or federal government should handle it instead of the concerned parent monitoring computer usage. There's so many free and subscription based parental control tools out there. Comprehensive sex education would be a potential alternate way for the state to support parents and teens to educate them on porn consumption and safe internet usage.

      FYI, NCOSE, the group joining (likely funding) the lawsuit, is against comprehensive sex education.

      • You’re talking about a few separate things here.

        1. I never said this is how it should be implemented. I just said stricter guardrails on porn would do some good.
        2. evidence is needed when creating laws. Yes
        3. when a law is already in effect, breaking the law does not require evidence to prove the law should exist. It requires evidence that the law was broken.

    • Even if you love porn and grew up exposed to it as a kid, you gotta admit that there are psychological effects on avid adult viewers and more on minors.

      No you don't. That is right wing propaganda completely unfounded by science. That porn addiction nonsense so many Americans babble about is a product of that propaganda, and doesn't actually exist.

      • Wow. You don’t think porn addiction exists? Said like a true porn addict.

        • If every person who disagrees with you counts as further evidence that you're right, then you're thinking in an unfalsifiable manner, which is the basis for many a flawed conclusion. It doesn't necessarily make you wrong, but you should really make sure to find justifications for your beliefs that are based on falsifiable reasoning instead. That's the best way to know if what you're believing is right or wrong, because you can try to falsify your beliefs in the way that you know them to be falsifiable, and if they still couldn't be falsified, then you can say "Well, I tried to disprove this, and it still passed that test!"

          So, let me ask you this, what would, hypothetically, suffice to prove or at least suggest evidence that porn addiction does not exist? If your answer is "nothing", then you're in unfalsifiable territory.

          • It goes both ways. People are gonna find whatever study supports whatever they want to believe and just cling to that. Denying porn and, even sex addiction for that matter, doesn’t exist is denying the basis of addiction and the human brain. Dopamine.

            • So then can anything that produces dopamine be addictive? Can I get addicted to hugging my girlfriend, or addicted to reading books, or jogging? Or is there some threshold? Does the intensity per time matter, or just the intensity, or just the time? What about the frequency of exposure? Does any amount of dopamine release make me slightly more addicted to whatever it is, or is there some threshold that needs to be exceeded? Do dopamine-based addictions produce physical withdrawal symptoms, always, never, sometimes? Depending on what? And are physical withdrawal symptoms necessary to constitute addiction or are there different tiers of addiction?

              You see what I'm getting at. There's sooo many questions that need to be answered before just saying "this produces lots of dopamine therefore it's addictive and bad and should be limited". While I appreciate and empathize with your sentiment about people cherry-picking the studies they like (sounding like an LLM here lol), it's not as if science doesn't know how to deal with that problem, and it certainly isn't a reason to stop caring about or citing studies at all, or say "well you've got your studies and I've got mine". Just because both sides have studies that give evidence in their favor doesn't mean both sides are equally valid or that it's impossible to reach an informed conclusion one way or the other.

              My next biggest question (and what I'm trying to drive at with the semi-rhetorical slew of questions I opened with) would be what makes something an addiction or not? Am I addicted to staying alive, because I'll do anything to stay alive as long as possible? That seems silly to call an addiction, since it doesn't do any harm. And how do we delineate between, say, someone who is addicted to playing with Rubik's Cubes vs. someone who just really likes Rubik's Cubes and has poor self-control? Or what about someone with some other mental quirk, like someone who plays with Rubik's Cubes a lot due to OCD, or maybe an autistic person who plays a lot with Rubik's Cubes out of a special interest? Does the existence of such people mean that "Rubik's Cube Addiction" is a real concern that can happen to anyone who plays with Rubik's Cubes too much? Or perhaps Rubik's cubes are not addictive at all, and it is separate traits driving people to engage with them in a way that appears addictive to others.

              I know I've written a long post and asked lots of questions. It's not my intention to "gish gallop" you, just to convey my variety of questions. The Rubik's example is the one thing I'm most curious to hear your thoughts on. (There I go sounding like an LLM again)

              • Come on man. You can look up what addiction means. This is proving why there need to be stronger restrictions. If you can’t look up a definition parents can’t work parental controls.

                Here’s part of what makes something addiction:

                Continued involvement despite physical, psychological, social, or legal problems.

                Porn could easily fall into this not only rolled into sex addiction but think about somebody who is jerking it all the time and this has an affect on their relationship, or they’re watching violent porn and this affects how they treat women, or they see the infantilization or submission of women in porn and think women should be like children or that they’re entitled to women’s bodies.

                I get it. Yall love porn, but we also need to be responsible and not be in denial.

                The Rubik’s cube example is an easy question for neurotypical people when you take the above criteria into account. It can be addiction of solving this Rubik’s cube is affecting their life in a negative way. Have you ever seen My Strange Addiction? Lots of different addictions other than drugs and alcohol.

                The inclusions of mental conditions is a whole different story. Autistic or OCD compulsions would generally not be addiction because it’s an anxious thing instead of tied to dopamine reward. It is an interesting intersection, but not what we base laws that control society on.

    • Not enough to warrant uploads of your fucking license.

      Also I really think its kind of goofy so many people are upset about porn when kids are exposed to violence in the media all the time.

      Not that I think violent video games are the devil, my first memory of a game was GTA III lol, but I think seeing violence is probably worse than seeing sex.

      At least if you take the American Puritan mindset out of it.

      Either we chill the fuck out, or the next logical step is every rated 'M' game purchase or rated 'R' movie will require a license in a digital copy of your drivers license. Who knows, maybe next it'll be req'd for age-restricted social media content.

      If you don't want your kids watching porn don't give them unfettered internet access.

      If your a first worlder below the age of 45, and don't know how to do that, that's probably on you for not being able to intuitively use UX after decade of using computers in school and the workforce. Yes I expect modern humans who've been exposed to computing their entire life to use basic smartphone features, no hitting the pretty icons in the right order is not hard

      If that you find that to be challenging god help you in raising an entire human child.

    • I was sex-negative until recent years due to Catholic conditioning mixing with unlabeled asexuality. Seeing the rising movements against porngraphy has driven me to veer strongly sex-positive, especially after the 2024 USAmerican election.

      An "anti-pornography" movement is incredibly dangerous because it can leverage that label to steamroll through anything "for the children" and ward off all but the strongest and loudest criticism. It's a lot like "Mothers Against Drunk Driving". Every Politician fears being the lone dissenter on a "for the children" bill; No judge wants to seen as soft on "children accessing porn".

      Porn may be "transforming how people relate to sex and themselves". The anti-porn movement is working to rip away digital privacy, trying to destroy LGBTQIA+ lives, and will squash free artistic expression. Think of any work of art that ever includes nudity, or ever depicts sex - through text, imagery or video. Now imagine defending its "artistic value" to an armed soldier who stormed in your house, or being badgered by a prosecutor in front of a judge and panel of 12.

      "Anti-porn" or "Anti-kids accessing porn" legislation are the legislative equivalent of setting off a firecracker in your mouth to stop a toothache. I remain baffled every time I see support for this from "progressive" online spaces and voices, especially considering that we are living under the Republican regime, Right Now.

    • Not sure why you're getting down voted. Porn can absolutely become a behavioral addiction.

      I used to work at a place where we had a lobby guard that watched porn on his phone all day (sound off). Not sitting there trying to jerk it, it was a compulsion. He would just be watching it while talking to other people, standing by the door...it was weird. He eventually got fired because he genuinely couldn't not watch porn.

      That being said, I'm a huge privacy advocate, and while there are actually ways to anonymously be on a website and verify age, that's not how anyone is doing it. Things like signing up for an account on a site and scanning your ID are just abysmally stupid. There's a zero percent chance that this system as is doesnt lead to data theft and possibly even extortion.

204 comments