The UK’s Online Safety Act doesn’t just age-gate porn; it blocks material deemed “harmful” to minors. Days after the law went into effect, reports of non-explicit content on social media getting blocked in the region started to crop up. Subreddits from r/IsraelCrimes to r/stopsmoking are now walled in the UK. Video games, Spotify, and dating apps have instituted or will institute age checks.
Given the SCOTUS age verification decision [June '25], Stabile fears that people [in the US] will go “mask off” in the fall and spring, when state legislatures start getting back together. “People are going to attempt to restrict the internet even more aggressively,” Stabile said. “I think people are going to work to restrict all sorts of content, particularly LGBTQ content, but also content that is broadly defined as any sort of threat or propaganda to minors.” Other experts Mashable spoke to agree with him.
“I’m going to jump to the end step,” [Eric Goldman, law professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law] said. “The end step is that most online users are going to be required to age authenticate most of the time they visit websites. That’s going to become the norm.” In a paper he wrote, Goldman called these statutes “segregate-and-suppress” laws.
The stated reason behind these laws is to “protect children.” But as journalist Taylor Lorenz pointed out, in the UK, age verification is already preventing children from accessing vital information, such as about menstruation and sexual assault.
“When we see crackdowns on spaces on the internet, we’re essentially stripping away that potential for self-actualization,” Goldman said. We’ve reached the dystopian stage of the internet, he added.
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Here’s the thing. When prohibition took effect in the US, anyone with half an idea on how fermentation and distillation worked made their own alcohol (I made my own ‘prison hooch’ at home using EC-1118 yeast, sugar, and fruit juice. It is fucking EASY to do). The problem with stuff like this is that some people often produced toxic stuff, since they had no idea how to separate ethanol from methanol and other toxic byproducts during distillation, and this shit got people killed. Not only that, the complete lack of regulation (since it was 100% illegal after all) meant that people adulterated the booze with all manner of bullshit. It was a common trope in prohibition era and post-prohibition films to showcase it.
With porn? Look, the porn industry is rife with abuse for everyone involved. But having a legal industry and legal sites like pornhub and many others means one thing: The shit isn’t going to be illegal. There were actual porn videos featuring underaged girls on pornhub, and those were removed almost immediately upon discovery. Dark web stuff is… holy shit! One main reason why I don’t do much dark web stuff is very specifically that I fear I will click on a link that’ll take me to some child porn site… and the stories I heard on true crime videos show just how horrific many of those pornographers are. They are far more than just naked kids posing, some of them involve almost killing children.
And banning porn will only make it that there are no protections whatsoever against anyone, be they adult or otherwise. If there is one good thing about modern porn is that a lot of it (and I would even say the best) is amateur made. With the people involved all willingly making the stuff to post online.
It’s not about protecting the children and never has been with the Party of Pedos. It’s about control.
Outlaw porn. Then start calling LGBTQ folks pornographic. Now it’s illegal to be gay. You KNOW they are going in that direction.
Stephen Fry’s character in V For Vendetta is a perfect depiction of this
Comrade, it seems you have just committed a thought crime. The thought police are already coming for you. Please do not resist. :)
Pornographic content is literally & figuratively the canary in the coal mine of the internet.
We need to consider building on and spreading the word about other protocols like Tor, Yggdrassil etc etc. Show people that the Commons cannot be stolen again.
No. None of those or other prptocols are above legislation or javlass politics. This starts and ends with the public amd who they vote for. Just moving the goal post isnt going to stop this.
'Need" means what? I can’t hear you.
“Cotton” swabs his ear with a Bowling Pin
I think the problem is that most of the people who have casually heard of Tor already associate it with CSAM
good thing there are alternatives, like the aforementioned yggdrasil and i2p, though ygg doesn’t guarantee anonymity
“Poorly Implemented Attempt to Censor Porn will Ruin Corporate Internet”
There, FTFY
Poorly implemented? There is no good implementation of censorship or any other restriction on freedom of expression. All attempts to do so are dangerous, existential threats.
Yeah, but it’s like it’s total slop on top of the censorship part. It’s literally adding insult to injury.
The first time this PII is leaked about some politician’s online search history, it will all get repealed.
Wanna stop this? Get some whale to buy up the data and find people pushing this shit and any mass adoption for these things will die. Politicians like to eat up religious lobbyist’s shit until it’s used to expose their less savory activities to the greater population.
Kids shouldn’t use the internet without a parent or teacher monitoring them. We can blame big tech for targeting our most vulnerable and pandering to them, kids are very easy to manipulate vis-à-vis a great target to advertisers, they will fill participation metrics, they will sit on one site for hours. And our solution is to keep the unsafe pseudo kids park online while handing power to faceless corps who we are to trust with our private and identifiable data? Roblox for example is an open pedo network targeting kids, this won’t be fixed. The sad truth is many children are encountering sexual content through these online play grounds made for kids.
Blaming is literally just relabeling the excuse to do what they accuse you of “not doing” while actually brainwashing anyone not paying attention.
Usually because they just left their third job and are driving to their first. Apparently they all forgot what to sleep was and never woke the fuck up. Pun intended.
Now it’s all gone. I’ll have to buy from resellers, like I’m some kind of drug addict lol.
They will come up with any excuse for total control. I can just see how they look at China and they are burning inside like how come they have everything under control, and our peasants still have freedom of thought, how should this be understood?
“This isn’t the end of a battle,” he said. “This is the beginning of one.”
I love that line so much, it goes hard and is kinda punk as fuck.
Dicks are going to destroy the internet, regardless of pr0n.
We have the dark web as backup.
It was porn watching that initially pushed the internet technology to be better. Everything comes full circle.
Age verification isn’t really age verification: it’s identity verification. And once you have given your identity to one or two websites, data brokers will ensure that all your other activity on the internet will eventually be tied to it. Burner devices and anonymous VPNs could help, but only until those become illegal too.
This will have a chilling effect on not only every kind of discourse the fascists hate, but also political organization and people’s ability to resist. You won’t be able to organize a protest online without the police knowing in advance who is likely to come and finding a pretext to intimidate or pre-arrest them.
That’s the most insightful and chilling comment I’ve read in a while. I especially like the “it’s not age verification; it’s identity verification” part. (That messaging needs to be more commonplace.) The key(s) for organizing data about individuals online will shift from email addresses only to enough stable identifiers to impersonate someone or maybe even steal their identity. Data leaks and fraud will probably increase dramatically given the value-add of these data.
With the level of quashing dissent these days - eg UK police arresting hundreds of nonviolent people with placards denouncing genocide; military deployments in LA and DC - no wonder certain states/ governments support online identity verification laws.
“No Kings” protests are already a non-story in mainstream news today. Tomorrow, they can be prevented from happening in the first place! /s c/aboringdystopia
And one key thing. Fascists and fascist collaborators will claim, “everything you do online and already tracked to your real identity.” But the truth is, if that were already the case, then there wouldn’t be a push for these identity verification laws.
Age verification isn’t really age verification: it’s identity verification.
I agree. And I think this is the most important reason why big tech companies are either supporting, or not commenting on, age verification laws. Being able to reliably link all a user’s online activity to their real identity is a big data wet dream.
And even if that’s somehow protected, I’m really uncomfortable with the government having that data.
You won’t be able to organize a protest online without the police knowing in advance who is likely to come and finding a pretext to intimidate or pre-arrest them.
That’s been true for a while. But it was “The FBI can put a pin in it” true before. And now it feels like “LinkedIn is going to have a second secret file on you” true.
Fun fact:
That was the plan all along.
The guy who founded LinkedIn… Paypal mafia
The guys who invested in Facebook. . PayPal mafia
The guys who founded YouTube… Paypal mafia
The guy who founded Square … Paypal mafia
The guy who ran doge and got all your us gov datasets, has literally half of all satellites in orbit sucking up your location and data… Paypal mafiaThe guy who decides who attends the bilderberg group, is ceo of the ai that is used by nearly every police force in the USA, and has contracts with military, who funded trump and Vance… Paypal Mafia
These guys have literally created the techno society we are now slaves to.
They are just getting started.
They are just getting started.
Idk, man. Seems like they’re wrapping up. Not a whole lot left to do when you’re this far up on the board.
My friend, you have no idea of the hell that awaits… There’s always a deeper layer…
Sure sure sure. Modern American politics is just the Shepherd Tone.
idk what that is. Also, I’m referring to the global state of things, not just North America; the identity-tracking mania, as far as I know, began with the EU, no?
Time to start making zines and locally organizing i guess
18+ to shop at Walmart. I don’t want my children exposed to harmful things like books, my boys shouldn’t be exposed to cleaning supplies or see women’s garments and my girls shouldn’t have to see that other girls are allowed to pick out their outfits or do manly things like play sports.
In the UK some supermarkets charge extra for children to buy products. You need to register an account for them to harvest even more data and if you don’t then some products can cost a lot more. Children can’t register as they can’t collect that kind of data on children.
I shop at Aldi instead because they don’t do this shit
Those store loyalty cards suck. When I’m forced to use one, I just enter my parents’ number or something because I don’t want yet another company to spam me with calls and texts.
And they dont even have any valid excuses, because its totally possible to implement anonymous age verification that cannot be fooled. These systems already exists and work perfectly, but it was never the plan to do it this way. It was always intended as a political tool of censorship.
What systems are you referring to?
The EUs eID system. https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/european-digital-identity_en
Depending on the use case, varying amounts of information can be transferred like only age or nationality or everything.
Ive used it for signing EU petitions but also local bureucratic things like residency stuff.
The eID system is kind of overkill if all that matters is age verification. You could build a suuper lightweight system just for that which would make checking the source code much easier.
Does the system know what service is requesting the age verification?
or we could just ban their ip range from every website idk
The very instant a website wants me to verify my age by providing PII, I’ll just blacklist that website from my network. There isn’t a single website that I can’t go without.
What if it ends up being all discussion boards?
Oh no, where can I go in order to be made to feel outraged by chronically online children, bots, and foreign intelligence services.
/s
reddit?
Sure, blacklist those goobers too
Lemmy?
I think it’s too early to talk about it, but it’s still worth being on guard, since anonymity is questionable here.
