As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.
Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
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The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent. This is an easy first step due to the longstanding controversy surrounding pornography.
It’s all about control.
Social media has mostly divided and isolated us. Twitter and some other platforms have been useful communications channels during unrest. But there could be other forms of communication just for that, since it’s all owned by billionaires now anyway, we need to stop imagining them as reliable tools.
in 7 days, that’s what australia will have.
I hope to Darwin social media ends up requiring ID. I believe it would do wonders for democratic discourse. It was only last week, a number of large US right-wing accounts were revealed to be driven from outside the US. Is it healthy for democracies that so many people pay heed to foreign actors?
If you write an op-ed for a newspaper, the newspaper need to identify you as there is an editor who is responsible for what gets written in the paper. This ensures there’s someone who can stand to account for any libellous statements.
With social media we immediately reneged on this and allowed them to wash their hands; “we are just a channel” is a pretty bleak statement to make when the discourse on social media destroys the lives of minorities, encourages suicide, undermines our democracy with AI and troll farm bots.
And we can do this is a privacy preserving way - of course the social media companies feeds the opposite narrative because they don’t want to implicated in the piles of shit they shovel on top of our democracy.
If social media was required to ensure they could tie an account to a real person, which they needn’t reveal unless forced to by a court order, we would know that we were engaging with a real opinion, not something coughed up by a Putin-run AI bot or a Chinese troll farm.
The system required isn’t that complex.
A social media
In a system likes this, the identity company doesn’t know who the person is; that sits with the social media company.
Nor does the identity service know which account is actually posting for this real person, all they know is they verified someone as part of an account opening process.
Social media should be treated like the press - make them accountable for what gets posted and allow them to place this accountability on a real person by labelling posts “op-eds” if, and only if, they know who is doing the posting.
We are letting large, anonymous money-men ruin our democracy behind the veil of “free discourse”. It’s not free to the many people who gets harmed by it.
I’m not going to give up my privacy over your fear of foreign bogeymen.
It’s all fun and games until the government decides that it really doesn’t like dissenting opinions. We’ve already seen serious erosion of 1A rights in the U.S.
It would be one thing to have this in a world with benevolent leadership. But that isn’t the world we are living in.
So, Fantasyland, then. The closest anyone gets to benevolent leadership is their own parents, and that’s only maybe 50-50.
Which just so happens to be the people who should be responsible for monitoring internet usage. This is a job for parents, not the government.
Bogeymen are imaginary. Political troll farms are real.
They certainly are real, but their machinations are misunderstood. They often consist of people in poor countries looking to make a buck. Follow the money. You’ll find that even if you were to build a great firewall for your country of residence, troll farms will still reach you, and that domestic astroturf ain’t any greener than foreign astroturf.
That’s the point.
You, as a common citizen, should not have to. But the moment you feel like to share your thought or opinion, you should be identifiable and made responsible for it.
The current social media outlets shield behind the argument they act solely as channels while at the same time fostering and allowing for “anonymous” groups or individuals to spout whatever views they want, often views that deter from advancing social and civilizational progress. Hence the current state of the world, with authoritarianism on a rise and hight like there wasn’t in nearly 70 years.
When the internet was made of individual websites, the person behind it was automatically made responsible for whatever they put on it. That was fair and reasonable.
Pushes like this, is assigning suspition/guilt before any wrong doing.
I will grant the overall facilitated acess to pornography is damaging the kids. There are already enough studies showing how the early access to porn is related to bad interpersonal relations on social, emotional and sexual level.
But this does not imply you should be identifying yourself to access adult content or anything on the web. Just impose curation. If it’s available to the public, you’re responsible for it.
Old school “dirty” books and magazines stores had controlled access and the really hardcore stuff was well out of reach of who should not get to it. Free porn is nice but there are things available that should be behind pay walls or at least registry, with identity verification.
If your point is to stifle dissent, then sure. Whoever controls the narrative will make contradiction look unacceptable. If your name is tied to an opinion that may be construed as contrary to the dominant narrative, you will hesitate to post it, and if you do post it, then you will be taken down with very real consequences because of that tie to your real identity. Employers already look at social media to determine if your behavior is considered acceptable to them, even if you keep your professional life completely separate. Your proposal only destroys free speech further by making it worth less and less the cost of expressing.
Make no mistake, the excuse of protecting children from pornography is just that, an excuse, to restrict freedom of speech by putting into place the mechanisms to identify people and strike at them for daring to express their opinions. Pornography being in the form of books, magazines, tapes, DVDs, whatever physical media did not necessarily control access. There are many with stories of how they managed to gain access as children, either through a parent’s collection or otherwise. Similarly, this internet ID bullshit can be defeated, but it’ll be backed by stricter and stricter legislation to make defeating it illegal and they won’t be prosecuting children or the companies providing the ID verification service, they’ll be prosecuting adults using tools to defeat these mechanisms to express their opinions.
No, it’s not my point, although there is a difference between expressing ideas, no matter how contrarian or controversial they may be, and spouting hate or other positions detrimental to advancement.
I am aware of what you mention of companies sniffing for the social media of employees and potential applicants. It is a shameful practice. And if it is illegal in my country, has it is viewed as trespassing on one’s privacy, it should be as welll any and everywhere.
Nobody should be ashamed nor afraid of expressing their opinions and ideas. Unfortunately, freedom of expression is often confused with the hability of saying whatever one feels like it, which is not.
What you describe (and fear, I take) is persecution. And that already tells whatever system an individual lives in is already deep into veering towards blatant suppression of rights. The US case is so off the rails it deserves an entire category to itself but it is only one among too many.
On the question of banning access to pornography I am completely against it. Yet I can not and will not deny the amount of evidence that supports that early and easy access to it is in fact tainting how people in general and kids in particular understand how relations are constructed. Pornography is really good at teaching wrong things. Nothing against it per se, it can be fun, but it should be consumed just like sugar, tobbacco and alcohol: in moderation and knowing of its ill effects.
I personally started reading erotic books much sooner than it was supposed. I recognize that curiosity towards sex and sexuality is ingrained in what makes us humans. I’m not advocating for banning adult material of any sort. What I would like to see would be clear boundaries for that specific content, for it not reaching those who are not expected to access it unware. It can’t be written off to caveat emptor. Even less because a lot of it is “free”.
The web is as it is today in great measure due to porn. There was a lot of money being poured into technology to facilitate access to it and in high definition. Let’s be thankful for it but that is it. It can be almost ubiquious nowadays, along with casinos and crypto. It’s too much and too much of a good thing is bad for everyone. Remember death by snu-snu.
I have no illusion we, as a species and a civilization, are going through a very dark period. Again. All the prior should have been able to sink in the lesson but we are either too sttuborn or too stupid to learn. Censoring, wide spread control of ideas, knowledge and thought is detrimental to a fair and free society.
Excuses like “protecting children”, “fighting terrorism”, etc, are, as you correctly said, excuses to make advances on individual rights and liberties. But we should be as concerned by now that companies do whatever they can to reach their goals and we are being force fed too many things that are not good for us. Two wrongs don’t make a right but something has to change. Perhaps ceasing to be afraid of being responsible by one’s own ideas and words would be a good start. Maybe stop feeding social media would be another. And perhaps reigning in companies on bad practices could be another.