[slibhb]

If you extend this policy to "consuming a video/image/text message," that would be dystopian. But this is about porn. Maybe it'll be a slippery slope but I doubt it.

I wouldn't vote for this policy but I get it. Lots of people don't want kids watching porn. And it's not just social conservativism, people across the political spectrum think porn is addictive, psychologically damaging, and leads to sexual dysfunction.

[maxbond]

> [P]eople across the political spectrum think porn is addictive, psychologically damaging, and leads to sexual dysfunction.

I think everyone acknowledges it can be, but it's a pretty distinct cohort that holds it necessarily is. Definitely not that it inevitably leads to sexual dysfunction, that's just patently untrue.

Most adults consume pornography, and for the vast majority of them it isn't a problem. Every adult who's sex life I know anything about, watches porn. They're fine.

[User23]

> Most adults consume pornography, and for the vast majority of them it isn't a problem.

Got a source for this? Because everything I look at suggests that much like alcohol, a relatively small number of habitual users account for the vast majority of consumption.

[maxbond]

Not to hand. That's my belief from my observation. I looked for statistics for about 10 minutes, but didn't really find good information. I suspect this area is under researched. Happy to look at any sources you want to link.

Both of these can be true, however. I imagine most adults sometimes drink alcohol too. Personally I might go weeks or months without watching porn, it's not something I generally do everyday. People who do would blow my usage out of the water (which, to be clear, is fine, you do you).

As a thought experiment - we all agree that lots of people watch porn, right? So if it leads to addiction or sexual dysfunction at even a rate of 1% or 2%, that would be an epidemic. If there are tens of millions of porn consumers in the US (which I think is very conservative), we'd expect hundreds of thousands of people to develop issues.

So - where are they? Do we have a source for that?

[shadowgovt]

You know, the organizations most likely to have that information are the ones with the big data on access and source IP address, who could make an educated guess on the scale and variety of consumers of pornography.

... In other words, PornHub.

[maxbond]

Do you think anonymous surveys wouldn't work here? (Genuinely asking and not being snarky, I expected to find lots of people doing surveys in this area but didn't readily find it, so I'm open to there being something I'm not understanding.)

[shadowgovt]

I have no idea. Broadly speaking, I don't trust self-reporting on anything taboo even when it's anonymous; people both lie to themselves and have justified paranoia about precisely how anonymous any collected data is.

... But it's real hard to fake the actual server requests and human sourced usage patterns to the service provider at scale.

[notatoad]

"porn" is poorly defined and has definitely been used to censor things before that aren't necessarily pornography.

whether or not you agree with the blocking of that sort of content, supporting these sort of restrictions on pornography means supporting a policy that lets the government gate content they deem objectionable behind an id check. i guarantee you there's at least some content out there that you're not going to agree with the government's definition of pornography. or even if you agree with the current government on all their content moderation choices, you might not agree with the next one.

[boppo1]

If I like BDSM, and that is cataloged, I can easily see that being leveraged against me.

We should focus on tools and systems that empower parents to guide their childrens' internet experience. Maybe a token of some sort sites can use to self identify as 18+ so parents can set up strong filters.

[stephen_g]

There is already one - it’s called RTA (‘Restricted to Adults’) and is a meta tag that should filter out sites if you have parental controls enabled. I expect it’s one of the things Google etc. look at for SafeSearch to remove those results too (among other checks).

Of course, the irony is that only those that would label their sites as RTA already (so are already easily filtered) would comply with any ID requirement, so these kinds of laws achieve very little!

[maxbond]

I mean, just talk to your kids about sex. You're not going to succeed in censoring their internet activity. Any more than you'll succeed in stopping them from sneaking out and going to parties or drinking with their friends - did your parents try to stop you from sneaking out? Did it work? Because I got really good at scaling fences and climbing out of windows.

But in the effort you will send the message that there is no trust between you and your child, and they won't feel safe talking to you should they need to. If you take the attitude that sex is something illicit, they will take the message that it's something to keep secret from you.

[ethanbond]

I mean a town in Tennessee recently outlawed homosexuality in public. I can easily see this being applied to anything with LGBT material, sexual or not.

That said, yeah, I get the motivation. I put this in a similar category as the regulatory response to Airbnb/Ubers of the world: it seems like a better outcome may have been possible if the companies didn’t totally and flagrantly shirk their social obligations to begin with.

[sqrt_1]

I don't think a town in Tennessee recently outlawed homosexuality in public,

They just added: "No person shall knowingly while in a public space engage in indecent behavior, display, distribute, or broadcast indecent material, conduct indecent events, or facilitate any of the foregoing prohibited acts."

Problem was that the referenced indecent statue definition included homosexuality, which was then removed from the definition even before it blew up on social media

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/11/22/ten...

https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/nov/28/did-a-city-in...

[sapphicsnail]

What do you think the intent of the ordinance is? My aunt recently moved to Tennessee and as a trans woman, I am terrified of stepping foot in that state. It is clear we are not welcome there.

[ethanbond]

It was removed in response to a lawsuit. Strictly speaking, yes they did recently outlaw being gay, but it was (allegedly) due to forgetting to change a statute definition rather than expanding it.

I guess they get kudos for removing “homosexuality” from the definition of “indecent acts” in 2023!

In any case, the question is whether there’s reason to believe this will be a slippery slope. There’s obviously a pattern of increasing moral regulation throughout the country including book bans. That this particular instance of moral regulation was a bit complicated in its implementation and (allegedly) accidentally overzealous in its scope doesn’t negate the trend.

[estarkio]

Now I want someone to start The Church of Jesus Christ, Drag Queen, and say that reading the gospel to children is the Lord's calling and a religious requirement.

[ClumsyPilot]

> If you extend this policy to "consuming a video/image/text message," that would be dystopian. But this is about porn

Eho decides what is porn? There is portln on Twitter, will all of twitter be monitored?

Kids suicides inceased 10x because they arent alliwed to go outside any more and have no friends - if we actually cared about kuds we'd be solving that.

Western boomers grew up in a better world than kids today

“Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children & teens to play, roam, & engage in other activities independent of direct oversight & control by adults.”

license to walk home alone from school dropped from 86% in 1971 to 35% in 1990 and 25% in 2010, and license to use public buses alone dropped from 48% in 1971 to 15% in 1990 to 12% in 2010.11

Homework, which was once rare or nonexistent in elementary school, is now common even in kindergarten. One study revealed that the average amount of time that US children in school, ages 6-8 years, spent at school plus school homework increased by 11.4 hours per week between 1981 and 2003, equivalent to adding a day and half to an adult’s work week.

those who could play freely in neighborhoods spent, on average, twice as much time outdoors, were much more active while outdoors, had more than twice as many friends, and had better motor and social skills than those deprived of such play"

[defrost]

> Kids suicides inceased 10x because ...

What country, which ages, and when?

That didn't happen in either the USofA nor Australia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crude_US_suicide_rate_by_...

https://viz.aihw.gov.au/t/Public/views/CoD_Tableaus_2022/S6a...

as "10x" would imply suicides per 100,000 rose from ~10 per 100K to ~100 per 100K (depending on country | age bracket, etc).