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As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.
Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
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But gun control is too hard. smh
I’m just over here in “hellscape” California enjoying the freedom to not have to do this, and I can walk down the street to the weed shop, and my girlfriend still has basic human rights over her own body.
Do any other states, like Texas, need some of our freedom? We’ve got some to spare.
I think California recently passed the Digital Age Assurance Act, which was backed by Google,Meta, and OpenAI. I think it goes into effect in 2027.
That’s not the freedom these people want. They want their own freedoms that don’t include those things and the freedom to stop other people having freedom. (Old testament Christian-only the bits I like) God bless America!
The most important issue facing the world: Someone might be jerking off in the privacy of their own home.
Porn is just the foot in the door to force ID for connecting to the Internet. This is techno-fascist dystopian police-state shit, and the “don’t tread on me” crowd is just bending over and saying “Please, sir, may I have another? No lube this time!”
This is the future you all dreamed of.
Here come more spikes in VPN usage.
Lo and behold, ladies and gents, the land of the free, where even jerking off is chargeable…
Just posting on social media using your face to speak against the state in México gives you the privilege of being doxxed on national TV by the president, I can’t imagine what they would do with something like this
Nice try CIA guy. Don’t you have more gen Z protests to schedule?
Nice try croquetero, don’t you have state propaganda to share on social media?
Not downplaying that this is real dumb, but “half the US” is meant to be misleadingly attention-grabbing. The states that are doing this are not the most populous states. No law like this exists in NY or CA, for example.
I don’t know the amount of the population living under these laws, but it is not nearly half, even if half the states have passed such laws.
I did the math and it’s 49.37% of the population, based on the 2024 census data, or 49.94% if you exclude Puerto Rico and D.C. I suppose mostly due to Texas and Florida being in the list, but also Ohio, Georgia and North Carolina with over 10M people each.
Here's the raw data
Based on the table from Wikipedia, and the list of states in the article.
State Population (2024) Requires Age Verification Population Requiring Age Verification California 39,431,263 0 Texas 31,290,831 x 31,290,831 Florida 23,372,215 x 23,372,215 New York 19,867,248 0 Pennsylvania 13,078,751 0 Illinois 12,710,158 0 Ohio 11,883,304 x 11,883,304 Georgia 11,180,878 x 11,180,878 North Carolina 11,046,024 x 11,046,024 Michigan 10,140,459 0 New Jersey 9,500,851 0 Virginia 8,868,896 x 8,868,896 Washington 7,958,180 0 Arizona 7,582,384 x 7,582,384 Tennessee 7,227,750 x 7,227,750 Massachusetts 7,136,171 0 Indiana 6,924,275 x 6,924,275 Maryland 6,263,220 0 Missouri 6,245,466 x 6,245,466 Wisconsin 5,960,975 0 Colorado 5,957,493 0 Minnesota 5,793,151 0 South Carolina 5,478,831 x 5,478,831 Alabama 5,157,699 x 5,157,699 Louisiana 4,597,740 x 4,597,740 Kentucky 4,588,372 x 4,588,372 Oregon 4,272,371 0 Oklahoma 4,095,393 x 4,095,393 Connecticut 3,675,069 0 Utah 3,503,613 x 3,503,613 Nevada 3,267,467 0 Iowa 3,241,488 0 Puerto Rico 3,203,295 0 Arkansas 3,088,354 x 3,088,354 Kansas 2,970,606 x 2,970,606 Mississippi 2,943,045 x 2,943,045 New Mexico 2,130,256 0 Nebraska 2,005,465 x 2,005,465 Idaho 2,001,619 x 2,001,619 West Virginia 1,712,278 0 Hawaii 1,446,146 0 New Hampshire 1,409,032 0 Maine 1,405,012 0 Montana 1,137,233 x 1,137,233 Rhode Island 1,112,308 0 Delaware 1,051,917 0 South Dakota 924,669 x 924,669 North Dakota 796,568 x 796,568 Alaska 740,133 0 District of Columbia 702,250 0 Vermont 648,493 0 Wyoming 587,618 x 587,618 343,314,283 169,498,848 49.37% I apologize in advance for how pedantic this comment will be but “half the US now requires” obviously refers to half the administrative units (states in this case, could be counties or municipalites etc) while “half the US is required” would refer to the population, so technically the post title is not wrong because of the population distribution.
I’m going to wash my hands now so that my fingers forget they typed this.
That’s actually useful pedantism.
Thank you!
I don’t know the amount of the population living under these laws
And yet you felt the need to comment on it anyway.
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EXON
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KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK
CHUCK SCHUMER
JAMES COMEY
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JARED KUSHNER
GARY COHN
STEVE MNUCHIN
SAM NUNBERG
NELSON BUNKER HUNT
LAMAR HUNT
MICHAEL FLYNN
DAN SCAVINO
ERIK PRINCE
WILBUR ROSS
STEFAN HALPER
GEORGE SOROS
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inslaw#Development_of_PROMIS
You forgot AOC, the Clintons, the Obamas, etc.
Are we just naming people now or what?
deleted by creator
AOC
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half of states does not equal half of americans
It is 49% of the population. I did the math: https://lemmy.ca/post/56198025/20385158
Good thing I know how to use VPNs
Yeah, I will never show my ID to a fucking porn site, get real
fucking porn site
No need to be redundant
Then you can’t offend god by watching it and masturbating, like we intended!
-The Puritans pushing this legislation.
I can’t possibly see how this ends poorly.
All the public restrooms and back streets are going to packed with trafficked people.
I dont understand
in the 70s and early 80s there was a lot of public sex. when the internet came out people just did whatever in their homes.
I’m not against proper age verifications as such, it would be like carding people in a store or a bar. But I just haven’t seen an implementation of it that isn’t prone to being a privacy nightmare and surveillance state shit.
I know there’s some systems that generate a token that verify that you are 18 and you give that to the site, so neither side directly meet so to say. The site knows only that you have a valid token for being 18 and the app or service you use to generate the token knows just that you wanted to token for something. I think Spain was figuring out a system like that.
Clearly, no-one involved in making these laws has ever heard of OAuth. Not every single site needs to manage your identity / credentials. The government already has this info, they can be the identity provider and use OAuth to grant access to age-gated resources without giving any personal data to the platform. Someone mentioned id.me, and I’m pretty sure that’s how that platform works, though they’re a private entity if I understand their site correctly.
I know most politicians are comically tech-illiterate, but it’s so frustrating to see them constantly implement terrible solutions to already solved problems without asking a single expert who knows how this shit works.
That being said, California passed a bill with a not perfect, but better approach. User age is configured on the OS level when a user account is set up, and then it will tell platforms what age category the user belongs to, and nothing more:
(a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user:
(A) Under 13 years of age.
(B) At least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age.
© At least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age.
(D) At least 18 years of age.
(3) Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title and shall not share the digital signal information with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.
I think iOS already does this, actually.
The CA bill is also dystopian nightmare fuel… The US isn’t going to build an enormous firewall like other countries have, we are just going to pass a bunch of stupid laws and threaten companies to block our citizens from access instead. Put the burden of building the wall on someone else, the modern American Way™!
An entire generation of fuck-wad parents that just gave their kid a tablet and zero supervision instead of actually raising them are now using their failings as an excuse to control the population; control their devices, control their habits, control their knowledge, and control their thoughts.
The bill I mentioned actually relies on parents configuring their kid’s devices. The system it describes just gives online (and even offline) platforms a standardized way of asking the OS what age category a user is as defined at account setup–hardly “dystopian nightmare fuel”…
This isn’t going to stop unsupervised children, which is it’s own problem that technology doesn’t (and probably can’t) solve.
It requires every Operating System and “App Store” to know the user’s age. It requires every piece of software installed to receive the age-range token. It could be catastrophically bad for the open source community - the bill does nothing to define how these tokens are communicated and received. The largest players in the industry can use their market share to exert control over how it happens and bully anyone that doesn’t get on board. For example, Google could tie it to the Play Integrity/Services and effectively kill 3rd party roms and possibly even open source app stores like fdroid, or all side-loading entirely if it was tied into the Play Store enough.
The bill isn’t specifically a privacy dystopian nightmare, but it is still a dystopian nightmare. We need the government and mega-corps to have less influence and control over our devices, this gives them more.
While true, a government IDP would still be able to track what sites you’re using your tokens at, which is not great.
Agreed, but you’d think they would prefer that. The way it is now, they have no way of knowing which platforms have your government IDs.
Though, let’s be real, all they need to do is pay a data broker for the tracking data that’s already being collected everywhere.
I wonder how different Linux distros are going to implement this
By creating a plaintext dotfile in $HOME, I’d reckon. Minimum effort, gets the job done. Users can lie when setting up the account so protecting the file against tampering is pointless.
But more likely, not a single distro will implement anything by default because it doesn’t make sense to change your internationally-distributed OS because one state in one country passed a stupid law.
the easiest thing would be making the internet as a whole 18+.
under 18 would be restricted to a firewalled version and age info would be part of the cellphone or internet plan. on a family plan…? under 18s get a firewalled plan. home internet? have a family and home internet? owner of the service gets a pin to disable the firewall. when everyone in the house hold is over 18, the service is unlocked.
the truth is that none of this is actually about porn or kids, its about the new world lifestyle of surveillance state getting a foot in the door. thats why all this bullshit aligns with other aspect of modern political and business tech agendas
Also the fact no companies are ever held liable for losing all your personal info, I sure as hell don’t trust this, it can backfire at all.
Incompetence is one big reason why current style systems are just a no-go for me.
Same.
When you are carded at a club the staff doesn’t scan your card and keep it on file. They simply look at it and return it.
As someone who worked similar jobs and would have had to look at tons of IDs every day I can assure, I dont have the time or interest in remembering all of them.
That’s really what the whole rest of my reply was about. We need a system more like carding and less like giving them copy of your passport.
The UK experienced a major data breach with all their government info from their ID checks not long after the law kicked in. How many fucking data breaches do we need before people catch on?
Exactly. Just have a system that has basically no other info than “they had a valid token showing they’re 18”. Nobody does anything with that info if there’s a data breach.
I think people don’t realize just how dangerous this shit is until they have been affected in some noticeable way, and even then they will not link just how the incredible amount of surveillance they are under every day is the cause of it.
I worked in tech support for 7 years, and one thing that will never cease to astonish me is how tech illiterate people are. Do you have any idea how many people called me and demanded that I make modifications to their account and refused to tell me any verifying information? While some might have been malicious actors , most aren’t. Most of them were genuinely expecting me to do everything for them and they wouldn’t even tell me what their name is. They fully expected that somehow we would already know they are just from them calling…
Some of them called me on a number not recognized by the system but they fully expected me to pull up their account (fucking how?) Without any information at all.
When you have worked in this field long enough you will know why there is so little effective opposition to all this shit. It is not just because they dont give a damn if we are literally in a 1984 scenario with active cameras and microphones in people’s homes, but they just dont understand what that really means. Even younger people who grew up with these devices from early childhood don’t fully understand just how much they are being observed. If anything Gen Z and Gen Alpha are more fucked since they are the first generation of people whom the algorithms and data brokers have had some profile on since early childhood.
As an elder millennial who grew up in a techie family with computers from childhood. I am fortunate in that they have nothing on me from early childhood to teen years. By the time I hit 20 the internet was still too chaotic and underdeveloped and algorithms weren’t the norm yet (and I was never a Google guy to begin with). But people born within the last 10 years can’t have that privilege.
The US government already uses a clearing house service, id.me, for it’s own verification systems. Why is this not used for this purpose as well instead of forcing the site owners to collect and protect that data? It’s stupid and unnecessary. There is literally already a system in place that they aren’t even considering using.
I would like to dispute the primary supposition here that pornography is harmful. The use of pornography is nearly universal, and most of the harms that it supposedly causes are symptoms of other issues, or are invented to impose control of sexuality. The ability to reach out with the power of the law to impose religious edicts or project sexual hangups is one of the most esoteric, yet effective, forms of political control available other than violence. If you can control the way that people express their sexuality, you can probably also control their views through the monetization and restriction of sex.
Sexuality and privacy are human rights, and the creation of and access to pornography is protected by the first and fourth amendments under which so-called “age verification” is an unnecessary and excessive burden. If the idea is to prevent access to children, ask yourself why now all adults must now have their access prevented or interrupted.
Furthermore, it is not the state’s role to control childhood sexual development, and the idea that porn is harmful to minors is debatable at best and dubious at worst. Access to objectionable material is solely at the discretion of parents. The fact that they cannot effectively manage this is a symptom of another problem.
When Meta shows teenage girls makeup ads after they delete their selfies, or streaming apps are flooded with violent movies that are easily accessible to minors, this is acceptable. But when I want to watch porn it’s now my job to “protect minors” by compromising my privacy and security?
The real “danger” here is the availability of ideas that do not align with state power.
Feels like half the country wants to outlaw gay marriage and reimplement sodomy laws, so we’re not exactly coming at this issue from a great place right now.
I think i agree for the most part.
These energies would be better spent ensuring that porn stars aren’t being exploited and have access to appropriate support.
No offence to anyone, but this post strikes me as coming straight from a spokeperson for Aylo (formerly MindGeek). A mix of baseless claims and straight up misinformation, that happen to align with the company’s business model.
You speak as if porn sites are analogous to social media and it’s perfectly normal to record your experiences and post them online. Which it absolutely isn’t, anywhere in the world. ‘Expressing your sexuality’ and porn are entirely separate and have very little to do with each other.
It is widely known and confirmed that pornographic content comes with a broad spectrum of negative effects, especially for children and adolescents. The latter really should be common sense in 2025. Watching porn isn’t always bad and can be beneficial in some ways (as some sources below even highlight), but those cases represent a small minority.
Below are some quotes and just a few out of countless sources providing much more reliable information on the topic of pornography’s effects. I strongly recommend reading at least some, because this comment is like ignoring decades of scientific literature and traveling in time back to the 1700s.
Prolonged exposure to pornography is known to lead to habituation, resulting in blunted processing of pleasurable stimuli and greater sensitivity to negative stimuli (21). Continuous use of pornography impairs emotional processing capacity and flattens affect, reducing emotional connection to real-life sexual experiences.
Source: Impact of pornography consumption on children and adolescents
Research shows that frequent porn use hijacks the brain’s reward system and changes the brain’s structure, much like addictive substances.
This means that prolonged pornography use can weaken natural pleasure responses and reinforce compulsive behavior.
A 2014 study found that heavy porn users showed significantly reduced activity in critical areas of the brain responsible for motivation and impulse control, suggesting long-term neurological rewiring.
Source: The Hidden Cost of Pornography: How It Shapes Your Brain and Behavior
Age of first exposure was significantly associated with reported need for longer stimulation and more sexual stimuli to reach orgasm when using pornography, decrease in sexual satisfaction, and quality of romantic relationship, neglect of basic needs and duties due to pornography use, and self-perceived addiction in both females and males. (…) In the opinion of most of the surveyed students, pornography may have adverse effects on human health, although access restrictions should not be implemented.
Additional sources:
Prolonged exposure to pornography is known to lead to habituation, resulting in blunted processing of pleasurable stimuli and greater sensitivity to negative stimuli (21). Continuous use of pornography impairs emotional processing capacity and flattens affect, reducing emotional connection to real-life sexual experiences.
Source: Impact of pornography consumption on children and adolescents
This is disingenuous. This issue is caused by prolonged use, as in unhealthy addictive behavior. Framing it as a result of porn access in general is flagrantly dishonest.
Actually it seems like all of your points regard excessive and unhealthy usage. You’re portraying these as results of any level of exposure and that is blatantly dishonest.
Assuming what you’re saying about the harms of consuming pornography, is it the state’s responsibility? Is it a top priority? Do we trust conservatives to implement a solution in good faith?
The answer to all of those I think is no.
There’s no analogous ID check for violent media, so far as I know.
There could be a raging wildfire and I would hesitate if a Republican said “let me deal with it”. They are fundamentally untrustworthy.
That’s on top of the deep irony of the same party that goes on about “small government” and “parents rights” is typically the same one pushing draconian anti-porn laws. It’s a joke. “A government small enough to fit in your bedroom”. Their motivations are so corrupt I am extremely skeptical of anything they propose.
