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Opponents say laws preventing underage porn access are vague, pose privacy risks:
After decades of America fretting over minors potentially being overexposed to pornography online, several states are suddenly moving fast in 2023 to attempt to keep kids off porn sites by passing laws requiring age verification.
Last month, Louisiana became the first state to require an ID from residents to access pornography online. Since then, seven states have rushed to follow in Louisiana's footsteps. According to a tracker from Free Speech Coalition, Florida, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia introduced similar laws, and laws in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Virginia are seemingly closest to passing. If passed, some of these laws could be enforced promptly, while some bills in states like Florida and Mississippi specify that they wouldn't take effect until July.
But not every state agrees that rushing to require age verification is the best solution. Today, a South Dakota committee voted to defer voting on its age verification bill until the last day of the legislative session. The bill's sponsor, Republican Jessica Castleberry, seemingly failed to persuade the committee of the urgency of passing the law, saying at the hearing that "this is not your daddy's Playboy. Extreme, degrading, and violent pornography is only one click away from our children." She told Ars that the bill was not passed because some state lawmakers were too "easily swayed by powerful lobbyists."
"It's a travesty that unfettered access to pornography by minors online will continue in South Dakota because of lobbyists protecting the interests of their clients, versus legislators who should be protecting our children," Castleberry told Ars. "The time to pass this bill was in the mid-1990s."
Lobbyists opposing the bill at the hearing represented telecommunications and newspaper associations. Although the South Dakota bill, like the Louisiana law, exempted news organizations, one lobbyist, Justin Smith, an attorney for the South Dakota Newspaper Association, argued that the law was too vague in how it defined harmful content and how it defined which commercial entities could be subjected to liabilities.
"We just have to be careful before we put things like this into law with all of these open-ended questions that put our South Dakota businesses at risk," Smith said at the hearing. "We would ask you to defeat the bill in its current form."
These laws work by requiring age verification of all users, imposing damages on commercial entities found to be neglecting required age verification and distributing content to minors online that has been deemed to be inappropriate. The laws target online destinations where more than a third of the content is considered harmful to minors. Opponents in South Dakota anticipated that states that pass these laws, as Louisiana has, will struggle to "regulate the entire Internet." In Arkansas, violating content includes "actual, simulated, or animated displays" of body parts like nipples or genitals, touching or fondling of such body parts, as well as sexual acts like "intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation, flagellation, excretory functions," or other sex acts deemed to have no "literary, artistic, political, or scientific value to minors."
When Louisiana's law took effect last month, Ars verified how major porn sites like Pornhub quickly complied. It seems likely that if new laws are passed in additional states, popular sites will be prepared to implement additional controls to block regional access to minors.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Thursday February 16 2023, @07:12PM (8 children)
And I'm looking at you, parents.
Be a parent and monitor your kids' 'net usage.
Don't push your responsibilities off on the state government!
What I find most amusing about the whole thing is that those who run the states looking at/passing such legislation are the first ones to proclaim that they're for "getting the government off your back!"
Hypocrisy writ large. And more's the pity.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 5, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 16 2023, @08:10PM (1 child)
Preventing businesses from dumping carcinogens into the local rive: NANNY STATE!
A government mandated version of software that's literally called Net Nanny: FREEDOM!
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday February 17 2023, @04:47AM
As long as we make sure everyone is above 18 years of age when they're dumping carcinogens into the local river, then we're good.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by crafoo on Thursday February 16 2023, @09:23PM
and here I am like a sucker paying federal taxes so single mothers can raise criminals and rapists
hmmmm there must be another way. It wasn't always like this.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday February 17 2023, @03:44AM (3 children)
Also, bear in mind that there's little actual evidence that kids are harmed in any way by seeing pr0n, and even less evidence that they're harmed by seeing nudity. The alleged innocence of kids usually lives in the minds of their parents more than anywhere else.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2023, @06:22AM
I see much more murder, mayhem, and just pure wanton destructiveness, often done by respectable ( looking ) people on the public news.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday February 17 2023, @04:09PM
Also bare in mind whether pr0n is more harmful to kids than having their schools turned into shooting galleries. Watching their friends die. A kid saying I wiped my dead friend's blood on me and pretended to be dead. (Uvalde)
We must protect the kids from pr0n!
Again I must say it is interesting how other countries don't seem to have a big problem with school shootings, or mass shootings in general? If only we could figure out why that is?
Think of the children!
Computers could be mandated to have credit card reader devices as standard equipment. I used an older computer and tried putting my credit card into the floppy drive slot, but it would not accept it for payment.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday February 18 2023, @10:57PM
Sorry for the late response. You won't get any argument about that from me.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 4, Insightful) by helel on Friday February 17 2023, @02:55PM
For the fascist hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug. Their ability to force you to submit to their lies is a sign of their power. It's the same way with their entire platform, from declaring that we must balance the budget while they create trillions in deficit to declaring that democrats are the "real racists" while they ban books about the holocaust and teaching that slavery was a thing that happened.