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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.
How is that a bad argument? Do you just mean that the people supporting the law are sincere in believing it will be effective? Because yes they're presumably sincere, the vast majority of political campaigns are, but Reddit seems like a pretty good example of why it will be so ineffective.
Either the law doesn't include general-purpose user-generated sites like Reddit/4chan/Imgur/Twitter and it does nothing to prevent access to pornography, or it does and ends up requiring blocking most of the internet when they don't implement an account system and ID verification just to view their sites. I don't know the statistics but I wouldn't be surprised if general-purpose sites were more popular sources of porn than dedicated porn sites. Further complications include how to treat sites that ban porn but still have plenty of it, like post-2023 Imgur - some sort of bureaucracy to judge their moderation practices? And piracy sites like thepiratebay or nhentai are even less likely to implement such a system, so you have to block them and their mirrors, something institutions have been pretty bad at doing even when focusing specifically on piracy.
They're sincere, yes, and also it will have an effect beyond just theater. I'll take Reddit as an example, let's say that the lawmakers decide to require ID verification to view NSFW content. There will still be tons of porn on Reddit, but they'd have to search for something not tagged NSFW, which would eliminate the majority of mainstream porn subreddits.
If you want to say that that's not going to be terribly effective, I agree with you. People will definitely still be able to find pornography if they want it. There's more than enough untagged porn on reddit, and kids (really, we're talking about male teens and preteens here, right, so I suppose saying "kids" is a little misleading) asking for porn could get themselves into trouble, and there definitely would be teenagers asking for porn or where to find porn in this hypothetical. But it would dissuade a good amount because the low hanging fruit would be eliminated. And call it misguided if you want, but these aren't the actions of fascist dictators or people who just want control for control's sake. They just don't want kids watching this crap.
Yeah, I'm pretty much always frustrated by "the law can't stop all [x]" arguments against a given law, because it's a fully-general argument against laws in general. No society has ever caught all murderers (indeed, in the current US, only about half get solved). No law will ever stop all thefts. And speed limits certainly don't keep huge numbers of drivers from speeding. Yet, few people if any ever use this to argue for doing away with laws against murder or theft. (I have seen a few libertarians use it to argue for doing away with speed limits, though.)
What matters is whether or not it deters enough people, not some unachievable ideal of total deterrence.
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Eh... I'm skeptical that this is the extent of the social conservative movement on this topic. Minors getting exposed to adult content is the most immediate driver (and for some things, like the problem of minors getting bullied by people flashing porn at them, I can pretty strongly agree with), but there are definitely social conservatives that think adults having reduced access to porn is a "good thing".
If ID laws intended for minors also incidentally reduce adult porn usage, of course most conservatives will be completely fine with that, if not celebrating it. I'm sure some of them would want to implement more restrictions that also affect adults explicitly, but that's not the majority, and I don't think you'll see legislation doing that any time soon barring some religious revival.
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