Pornhub goes dark in Arkansas after age verification law kicks in

Pornhub blocked all users in Arkansas after the state’s new age verification law went into effect on Tuesday. The law requires porn sites to verify that users are at least 18 years old. Pornhub argued that requiring ID verification actually harms users’ privacy and puts children at risk. MindGeek, Pornhub’s operator, has decided to block access from states with similar age verification laws. After complying with a similar law in Louisiana, Pornhub traffic dropped by 80%, so they decided blocking access entirely was preferable to implementing age verification.

States they have blocked for similar laws: Virginia, Utah, Mississippi.

In Louisiana the first state to do this they tried to comply and their traffic decreased by 80%.

Uniquitous,

They’ll be fine so long as they still have their cousins.

cupcakezealot,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

This is a terrible day for Sarah Huckabee’s husband

shiveyarbles,

VPN’s getting popular in Arkansas

6daemonbag,

Louisiana government just recently got hacked and I’m absolutely sure the porn verification stuff got leaked along with it.

acastcandream, (edited )

spoilersdfsaf

circuitfarmer,
@circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I sense a lot of pastors who now have to be reading the bible like they said they were

fades,

But now where will these fascists find their LGBT porn?

DeadGemini,

4chan

LastOneStanding,

So, you know, I was a child in the 1980s, still had access to porn. In magazines, on VHS. They won’t stop making porn. If it’s out there, the people will access. The people who made these laws will access, no doubt. So dumb.

joenotjim,

The problem is not access, it’s unlimited instant access. We had to wait until our parents weren’t home to raid Dad’s stash. Or catch a tape from someone’s uncle at a sleepover. It’s a world of difference.

That being said, blocking is not the answer. Blocking the major sites just pushes people to smaller sites, which may be more likely to harbor revenge porn, underage content, nonconsensual content, etc.

LastOneStanding,

I really don’t see the difference. Instant access versus delayed access… sounds like a Freud book I read about once about the pleasure principle. It’s all silly. The timing has nothing to do with anything. As a matter of fact, you’ve just argued yourself out of your own argument and made my point all over again. You can see it tomorrow, you can have it today. You can delay your pleasure. You can choose not to delay your pleasure. You can delay your pleasure because that’s what pleasures you.

jarfil,

According to the cookies experiment, learning to delay instant rewards in exchange for higher future rewards, is a skill usually acquired at a young age that leads to higher success rates later in life.

Applied to sexual pleasure, the choice might be less relevant in adults, but growing up and getting used to instant unlimited gratification, sounds like a way to end up with an incel/rape culture mindset.

LastOneStanding,

Yeah, that makes sense.

fuzzywolf23,

I think it’s dangerous and disingenuous to substitute your imagination for evidence when describing a trend that doesn’t appear to exist.

Reported rates of rape are the same in 2020 as in 1990

jarfil, (edited )

Let’s substitute your comment with the actual data, in case someone can spot a trend:

https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/d268f194-8cf8-4aea-bfa4-37efda68e112.webp

fuzzywolf23,

That downward slope there? That’s the prime years of the first generation coming into their own with internet porn; pornhub launched in 2007. 2014 is clearly subject to some effect – there’s reason to think it’s increased rates of reporting – but we’re literally back at 1990 levels in terms of reporting. If you’re going to blame 2014 on porn that had been around 15 years, then how do you explain the early 90s?

jarfil, (edited )

I’m not going to claim having an explanation for all what’s going on there, but coupled with reports from people who are supposed to know more than me (watched one on the other day on addiction, Internet, and sex… as applied to Spain, but still), there are some worrying observations:

  • For 20 years it seemed like whatever we were doing, was working. Then, about 10 years ago, it got a hard rebound, and we still don’t know about how bad the post-pandemic trend is going to look like (government officials might already have some data, though).
  • Parenting since the widespread use of the touch screen (2007 and further), has changed to allow kids at ever younger ages unrestricted access to all media on the Internet. The average age to get a smartphone in Spain, has fallen from 14 to 10 years of age, with some 6 year olds already getting theirs, particularly among families with parents who are already too busy to spend time on proper parenting.
  • In recent years, after a group assault got wide media coverage to the point of changing some laws, an alarming number of assaults have been reported where groups of ever younger kids (as low as 12) would target an even younger victim… then record it on video and share it.
  • Social media algorithmic optimizations (like Instagram, plugged into Facebook’s algorithms in 2012), have led teens down a path of addiction to sharing more and more, including bypassing age restrictions for adult content on networks like TikTok or OnlyFans (both launched 2016), where they get monetary gain from “fan service”. An impactful piece was seeing a barely adult girl, after 6 months of therapy, still argue against letting go of her OnlyFans account with $3K on it, clearly made on underage content.

I would really wish it was just increased reporting, but it definitely looks like something more serious is going on.

You mentioned the 1990s, that’s where I can speak from first hand experience:

  • We had a hard time getting access to any porn until 18. There was some, sneaked from parents, uncles, and older brothers, but it was considered a “rare stash” that would pale in the eyes of stuff freely available to anyone with a browser and a search engine.
  • “Kids would be kids”, and in 6th grade we already had both the compulsive self-preasurer, and the girl who’d do “live fan service” after class. They were the odd cases out. High school is where stuff started to happen for most.
  • “Social media”, was going out on the street and talking to each other. Kids would talk about all sort of stuff, knowledge would always trickle down from older to younger siblings, but they were only slightly bombarded by ads to buy this or that product, not to influence how they interacted and exploit them on a massive scale.

Anyway, we could speculate a lot about what were the key changes, but since this is not supposed to be the place for such speculations, I think we can at least agree that something has changed quite dramatically.

SkepticElliptic,

“me too” happened and women started reporting it more often.

jarfil,

started in 2017, the large jump in the graph happened in 2012-2013.

Kajo,

In sustained French, “verge” is a synonym for “penis”. So, it made me smile to see an article about Pornhub in TheVerge.

burningmatches,

Sustained French?

NuPNuA,

Ouiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Kajo,

Looks like I was betrayed by deepl…

I meant formal/elevated langage.

balls_expert,

Call me greatness the way I’m always on the verge

I_Miss_Daniel,
I_Miss_Daniel avatar

That's a cocky observation.

jarfil,

For extra linguistic amusement, they also mention the state of Virginia, etymologically descending from “virgin” from Latin “virgo”, which descended from “virga”, which happens to also have been an euphemism for “penis” in Latin, from where it descended into the French “verge” keeping the meaning, and from there to the English “verge”, where initially did also mean “penis”, but lost the meaning over time.

So, when reading about PornHub in Virginia on TheVerge… you can smile twice, or more 😉

Kajo,

Thank you for linguistic enlightenment, and for the extra smiles.

runiq,

Thank you for making the article ~20% cooler

Nepenthe,
Nepenthe avatar

So...not that I will ever be for such an idea, but how is requiring ID putting kids at risk. I thought that was a misquote, but no, that's what the article itself says. Are we really just saying whatever random words come to mind these days?

bane_killgrind,

Probably kids will increase risk to themselves by using less secure sites, using chat platforms to source pornography, or uploading their real ID to people providing photoshopping services.

LastOneStanding,

It means nothing, like you have made clear.

mojo,

It’s puts everyone at risk. How do you expect that to be securely checked? Not only is it basically privacy invasive to the maximum, but you’re giving your government ID to multiple different sites who now have the job of securing your ID. With how many hacks go on nowadays, your ID is the last thing you want to get leaked. It’s not much different from getting your SSN hacked.

bane_killgrind,

Government run Oauth is the only real way to implement this, with zero PII being provided to the porn sites. All they get is an anonymised token when you log in.
Then again, the government Oauth service needs to be hardened in that case, but presumably government web stuff has government level security practices.

brothershamus,
brothershamus avatar

They're still running Windows. It's a bad idea.

Maestro,
Maestro avatar

Their personal data will need to be stored somewhere for this to work, and it will leak. Eventually. Security always fails. And with these government age ID systems built by the lowest bidder it will fail sooner rather than later.

theodewere,
theodewere avatar

lol @ the morons who vote for the idiots making these laws.. and at the ones not voting against them..

Pratai,

Oh no… people will have to visit one of the other 3,000 or so porn sites that are carbon copies of PH.

mojo,

PH isn’t the villain here… Also those sites would legally be required to block access as well.

mateomaui,

Oh were those the cries I heard in the night?

unconsciousvoidling,

Well if you live in Arkansas it wasn’t your neighbor watching porn.

mateomaui,

Some dude is marking up his vhs collection for a tidy profit.

JCPhoenix,
@JCPhoenix@beehaw.org avatar

Mmm Analog Porn. I’d say HiFi, but as a kid, I, uhh, “accidentally” stumbled upon my dad’s porn VHSs. They were anything but HiFi.

mateomaui,

I assume it’s all classic, traditionally rooted porn aligned with good ol’ day family values so it should be fine for them.

I_Miss_Daniel,
I_Miss_Daniel avatar

Nor was the one I found - at least not after I lugged the second VCR out of my room to make a copy.

t3rmit3,

Good. Let all the conservative boomers who can’t figure out VPNs get pissed at their legislators for trying to push this b.s.

If they get this to be normalized, next up will be “well there are other sites we can’t control, so now you need to put in your ID card into a reader anytime you’re online!”

TheOtherJake,

I’m sure they will eventually try to force ID’s because it would be profitable for criminal data theft ads stalkers. This is all about corrupt money and exploitation. Billionaires are worthless parasites that have no right to exist in a Democratic system. Fuck the US fascist oligarchy party.

cobra89,

Small d democratic system. And funny how all the states that have enacted these laws have something in common. And it isn’t the big D…

DarkGamer,
DarkGamer avatar

Republicans would love to have their own version of WeChat and their own great firewall. That's what Musk is planning to do with whatever he's calling twitter now, after all.

SkepticElliptic,

That’s what Facebook’s plan was as well, they called it the “Metaverse.” Everyone thought it was a VR thing, but they want to have their own version of the Internet that people use instead of separate services.

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