Age verification laws designed to block children from online porn sites are sweeping the US, Io Dodds writes. But do they actually protect children, or is there another agenda at work?

Summary

Several U.S. states have enacted laws requiring pornography sites, such as PornHub, to implement age verification to prevent minors’ access, prompting the site’s parent company, Aylo, to block access in affected states.

Proponents argue these laws protect children, while critics highlight privacy risks, inefficiencies, and potential censorship.

These measures reflect growing social conservatism, with some advocates aiming to restrict adult content broadly.

While privacy-focused age verification methods exist, regulatory clarity is lacking.

Critics warn these laws may suppress responsible platforms, favoring unregulated alternatives, and escalate broader culture wars around sexuality and LGBTQ+ rights.

  • @[email protected]
    3•19 hours ago

    There’s no reliable way to verify age without extensive face verification with liveliness checks. A child can easily upload a parent’s or some other adult’s id card photo to get ‘verified’. Also nothing stops kids to explore porn corners of social media (including lemmy) and thousands of porn sites operated not by the Big Porn. Porn is fundamental to internet.

    Edit: I purposefully omitted vpn, that being the most trivial solution.

    That’s all besides the point however.

    If a young kid is motivated by highschool seniors to watch porn, it is s parenting issue. If some adult encourages some child to watch porn as a grooming technique that’s a much more serious case of child abuse. If a teenager is porn addict and doesn’t do anything else, it is a major mental health concern, not a porn concern itself.

    It is kind of accepted fact that many late teenagers are familiar with porn and explore it like any other sexual aspects of their life. Whether that’s harmful is upto debate but teenagers/adults do many things harmful everyday and banning everything with law isn’t realistic either. It is not end of the world if a teenager has sex or watches a porn movie. Children have greater dangers in general where they get abused by their relatives, teachers and even by their own parents and are continuously attempted to be programmed not to critically think by the religions.