While I strongly disagree with this NC law, and others, your analogy is a bad one.

As a society I think we've accepted that some things (cigarettes, alcohol, sex, etc.) should be restricted from children. That's a far cry from requiring ID every time I go to the grocery store. But, as long as I've been alive, you have had to show ID to purchase alcohol, and the sky hasn't fallen.

Again, I think these types of laws are particularly poorly thought out, but I don't buy the "slippery slope into dystopia" arguments, and I think there are better arguments against it.

>What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater? What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message?

  1) entered a grocery store - No, at least not since peak-pandemic. Face recognition?
  2) a library - Yes, to borrow books or on demand from security. Needed govt. id to get a library card.
  3) movie theatre - Yes, mine no longer takes cash.
  4)  tracked each time you consumed a video - Yes. Every single streaming service.
  5)  a still image - Everything on the web. Every book w/ photos I buy. Can hypothetically still look at books we own, was given, found, lent, pirated or stole in privacy.
  6) Audio - spotify, youtube etc.
  7) a text message - Your phone IS a device you pay for and maintain which is designed and regulated to spy on you. Signal is the only possibility for any privacy at all here.

>This is the sort of dystopia that librarians and others focused on liberty have been fighting for what seems like forever.

How is that fight going, do you think?

A Turnkey totalitarian state exists, who is going to turn that key?

You have to show government-ID-linked payment card information to shop at most shops in airports, or to buy plane tickets.

Most people use a SIM card that is tied to same. Their web activity is similarly tied to ID.

Most USians voluntarily provide that payment card (with full name in the magstripe) whenever they shop at a grocery store or movie theater.

I’m not sure why people think this sort of surveillance isn’t occurring. We’ve known since before Snowden that the feds have been receiving this data in bulk in realtime for decades.

> What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater?

What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a bar, a strip club, or a (R-rated) movie theatre?

> What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message?

You already are.

> What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message?

I mean you mostly are already

[flagged]

If you extend this policy to "consuming a video/image/text message," that would be dystopian. But this is about porn. Maybe it'll be a slippery slope but I doubt it.

I wouldn't vote for this policy but I get it. Lots of people don't want kids watching porn. And it's not just social conservativism, people across the political spectrum think porn is addictive, psychologically damaging, and leads to sexual dysfunction.

Thank god for those librarians fighting for our liberty. Read a book everyone!

Reddit had a lot of dark subs and users for a very long time, and they kinda just swept it all under the rug.

/r/spaced*cks, ViolentaCruz, others I cant recall, and the infamous /r/cannibals controversy with a reddit founder and CEO.

Yeah, weird times - not its many bots - and interestingly, in the last year, a boatload of .in India subreddits for various aspects of their culture (like IdianMotorcycles, Weird train behavior, their version of /r/idiotsincars, lot of bollywood and movie and celeb gossip subs.

Maybe need a comment filter that hides anything that a non-sequitur or perhaps comments that have < (N) syllables, words or sentences?

i think they don't want to respond as to avoid being the crosshairs.

i'm surprised that the app stores let them on though since it isn't that hard to view it

The law says it applies if more than 30% of the content is adult content. So won't apply to reddit or Twitter at least but I could see this still leaving plenty of gray area for other sites.

As someone who considers himself a relatively informed netizen, I hadn't even heard of e621.net until now, and I don't know whether I should be proud or ashamed of that.

And here I was hoping some poor intern at Fox had visited such a site and had to explain what it was to their superiors

It's because I'm a furry and it's the only 'porn site' (not all the art is even explicit) I care about. And Inkbunny too I guess.

I'm perplexed that someone would name a pornographic site with the same name as a very popular food additive.

Perhaps its an example of horseshoe theory?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

US State legislators tend to be more politically extreme these days, AFAIK.

Or just good old "save the children," I guess? Where either party is afraid to make themselves look bad.

I guess a lawsuit could be filed arguing that showing a minor a video recording of loving consensual sex between two adults is not harmful.

Perhaps one could even argue that it is beneficial, by helping dispel sexual repression or discomfort around sexual matters.

They sell an online subscription. Some states consider there to be a nexus if you’re selling to residents in the state. NC doesn’t tax digital software, so that would complicate things, but it wouldn’t be as cut and dry as “we don’t have a physical presence there.” Fighting the government, even if you’re right, is very expensive.

Not much. But it would be problematic for them if they ever have business dealings there.

No, I just don't care about PornHub personally.

The internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.

They will quickly learn what VPNs are.

Generally you get more of what you subsidize, so my bet is that this will lead to less porn consumption, an absolutely massive win.

Too complex. If I had the time and resources I'd love to work on a good internet "captcha" system for age verification. Basically training ML with responses from different age groups to certain patterns, text or imagery - not sure what exactly. It would not be perfect, one cannot classify "18 year old" accurately across the globe, but I'm quite sure a good AI, somehow, could get a ballpark maturity answer that would block age-sensitive content in the majority of cases, which would be much better than what we have now.

I think it depends on the porn in question. Would I be upset if I discovered my teenage son had some playboys stashed in his room? Probably not, no.

People are upset about the privacy and free speech aspects of this law, as well as the annoyance of having to hand over your personal information for something as basic to human nature as your sexuality. I think there's a 100% chance that there will be a data breach at some point and a bunch of people will have their porn habits leaked to the web. Not to mention the chilling effects when it comes to something like looking up more taboo kinks and not wanting your ID associated with that.

It's not just porn. I'm a member of the furry fandom. I regularly publish fiction in that community, I have life long friends in that community, it's a community that has helped me through a lot of dark places in my life, a community where I can explore taboo subjects in a safe setting. For most people it may just be 'porn', material they use to jerk off, but the fandom is a major part of my life. E621 and other sites aren't even necessarily 'pornographic', I rarely look at 'furry porn' to masturbate as a matter of fact. I'm being 100% honest when I say I follow the artists I follow for the art. It's just that in the furry fandom things like depicting sexuality aren't necessarily taboo.

Preventing other people from participating in this community, whether it's fear that their identity is going to be leaked correlated to their fursona, concern over increased tracking of possibly undesired sexual minorities, or just the pain in the ass required to take that first plunge and sign up for E6, feels like an attack on a major part of my life.

And personally, I don't feel like I should have to take responsibility for some parent who freaks out every time their kid sees breasts, but isn't willing to install parental controls on their fucking computer.

Pornhub is one of the most visited websites on earth [1]. So, my question to this comment is how do you define value in this case?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites

That's no way to talk about people from North Carolina.

It does exist, it's very popular, and people won't let go, just because the gummint says so. So, the prohibited thing will go underground. It gets more extreme, organized criminal activity will increase, people's trust in others and in the establishment weakens. That I'd definitely call a blight on society. Now, which blight we pick is the question. Doing the harmful thing in the open, in controlled ways, or doing it in the dark, in uncontrolled ways? I don't think the latter has much success, if a generally nicer society is the goal.

I think that porn might have no positive purpose for you. But for me, it's been huge. I've met some of my best friends though furry conventions coordinated on 'porn sites'. I'm in several telegram groups where artists are pushing the state of the art with AI, integrating it into their workflows to make really beautiful pieces, this catalyzed some of my own interest in AI and is the main reason I'm learning more about Stable Diffusion and following these StatQuest videos on neural networks with the hope of eventually pivoting my career in that direction.

Finally, I'm a MAP and I use (drawn) cub pornography as a way to alleviate my sexual urges, helping me remain a productive non-dangerous member of society. Are you really saying that for someone like me porn has no positive purposes?

I am going to say something that is not popular to say but has been on my mind for a while.

Why is it bad for our kids to see two humans have sex?

When you say porn is bad for kids, I think you mean that mainstream porn can be misogynistic, addictive (like most pleasurable things), and give people unrealistic body standards and expectations about what sex is like. All of which I agree with.

Okay, so, if I had a website that just showed consensual sexual relationships between a husband and wife in a committed relationship, just doing normal sex like people do, would that be okay for kids to see? Would it be okay for me to show my kid if they were curious about what sex was like? What if that was something I /wanted/ my teenager to jerk off to as opposed to something I wasn't curating? Wouldn't it be better for me to be able to say "Here's what normal human sex looks like, you'll experience this yourself when you're older and ready for it, but I was a young teen and I know young teens get horny too, just don't spend all day masturbating to it" rather than letting them stumble onto whatever they find on PornHub? I mean we educate kids about every other aspect of human existence, but sexuality is some weird taboo...

I'm just confused here, I mean, are we saying that young people are irreparably harmed by visual exposure to the human reproductive system? If so, why would we as a species have evolved that way? And if not, then how can we justify a blanket ban on young people seeing all forms of recorded sexual activity?

If you look at my comment history you'll see I'm not a normal person, and I don't really understand 'normal' views on human sexuality. Maybe it's because I lived so long in a clothing optional community...I don't really understand why it's okay for parents to show their kids extremely violent media but showing two people having sex, even if it's educational, is considered some form of abuse. But then again, as I said, maybe I'm just mentally ill or something...

[Victorian time portal detected]

Ah yes, Prohibition, a classic American success story. The most freest we've ever been! I love how our culture, which is centered around the idea of freedom, would be protected by removing the choice to look at something that some people may find harmful! It's just such a beautiful irony.