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The right wing has seemed to gain some ground on the porn-being-viewable-by-children issue. North Carolina has passed some legislation requiring age verification for adult sites. I remember Matt Walsh at least advocating for this quite strongly. Not only that, but it's not the first state to do this; laws in Louisiana, Virginia, Utah and Montana also require age verification. Pornhub's response is to block access to its website in these states, stating the following:
That statement by itself actually boosts my opinion somewhat of Pornhub; a device level safe search would probably be the best approach to this. Parents could set the birthday of the child in question, a password locked setting, and the phone could then block access to many of these sites. There probably exists some amount of parental options like this, right? I have no knowledge of them, but I doubt they quite reach the level I'm talking about here. If any of you know anything about child safety tools currently available to parents for Android or iPhone, let me know. I'm sure there's a ton for Windows and Linux, and maybe macOS too. You could even get pretty scary and start talking about algorithms that determine if local files are porn or not.
There would certainly be some ways to skirt this, but as always there are ways around any law, really, if someone is motivated enough. Even with a border wall, some Latino illegal immigrants would manage to climb or swim around it, or get in some other way. Despite all the background checks in the world, one could choose to 3d print their own gun. When lawmakers create legislation, they're not counting on that legislation stopping everyone; just stopping most people is satisfactory.
However, none of that is on the table right now. What is on the table are these current laws; Virginia doesn't specify how the sites should verify that users are 18 or older, but others like North Carolina require an external commercially available database containing user age information. The porn sites check with this database and verify the user. At least in theory, if sites like Pornhub and e621 don't decide to self-immolate in response.
I think the arguments for this are pretty obvious. For conservatives, porn is pretty obviously bad for kids, and as that article says, over half of 13 year olds have seen porn by that age. Pretty bad! Requiring some ID would at least nail the mainstream sites that they use. That alone could do a lot. And asking for this database isn't too much; we ask for IDs in various other contexts. Alcohol and cigarettes come to mind. And buying porn in person would require the same. I'm pretty sure you can buy tobacco online, though I do not know the method for verifying the age of customers.
But there's plenty of ammo for people to dislike this law, too.
What I'm mostly disappointed in are these redditors that seem to take it for granted that the legislation is a bad thing. Because they assume it's just about exerting control and the Republicans are fascist dictators and Reddit has porn anyway and it's all performative theater. I don't think these are convincing arguments. The people passing these laws are probably the same types that go for things like the Brady Campaign, they're not supervillains doing evil things for the sake of it.
PornHub (or more specifically MindGeek, the parent company) has long been maneuvering to monetize and potentially monopolize the age verification services in the UK, so their preferences for a specific framework of age verification is probably not motivated solely by principle or interest in protecting children or even themselves.
More generally, there is a tradeoff here: where server-level enforcement requires every server to behave, device-level safe searches require very strict limits on how a device can be used and how heavily it can be sandboxed. iOS 'solves' this by running nearly anything related to web functionality through Apple's browser, and the extent it doesn't or can't due to app functionality have lead to a ton of Apple's decision-making driving the rest of the world into censorship regardless of age (cfe tumblrpocalypse). This is kinda okay for phones, where most parents just want their kids using them as phones and maybe a few limited other uses. But doing the same for desktop would be a massive undertaking, and one with major repercussions and a huge lockdown on the ability to run (or write!) unvalidated code. JonSt0kes has written on the AI variant of this problem from a social conservative view, but it's far more general than MLgen.
This is further augmented because you don't just need to protect your kids' hardware. If anyone in their classes are unblocked or is able to bypass the blocks, flashing other students with stuff those other students weren't even looking for is a common attack/bullying tactic -- and that's something that seems much worse.
Kinda. iOS has an automatic birthday-based approach and a manual selection, but it's very similar in level to Google SafeSearch -- not just hard to know what will be blocked, and fairly arbitrary, but even once something is blocked it's hard to know why. Android just uses SafeSearch directly, though in turn it's less effective since Android is less locked-down by default.
More effective approaches are usually going to involve domain- or IP-level blocks enforced at a router level, along with blocking tunnel- or vpn-like connections, but that's still nowhere near perfect, and they can only cover limited areas.
I'd also note that they might chase something porn down: an alternative to looking for it elsewhere to look instead for something that falls through the cracks. There's a lot of people who got into vore because all of the obvious 'normal' sex stuff was the sort of thing that was unacceptable to examine or consider, and even when they escaped physically that they didn't really stop getting distracted by it, for something at the milder end of the scale. Nothing wrong with a vore kink itself, but I doubt it's better as an introduction to sexuality.
There are problems well before leaks. I'm old enough to remember when Corbin Fisher used some pretty aggressive legal threats and threats of outing to go after people who torrented their porn -- and it made me a lot more cautious about who got my address, name, and age moving forward, since they were one of the first I ever subscribed to.
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