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.

Archive: archive.today/uZB13

I’m prepared for my downvotes. I have often joked that in the not-too-distant-future people will look back upon the early days of the internet like we look upon the 1950s view of smoking. What do you mean kids shouldn’t do it? It’s fine. You know how it is, watch a kids cartoon, look at some memes, two girls 1 cup, email the fam, those two Mexican dudes who had their heads cut off with a chainsaw, research Ghana for a school project, sneak in some porn after the parents go to bed, and cap it off with some chat room conversations about Picard’s superiority to Kirk while some kid across the country goes on about shooting his brains out because mom and dad either doesn’t love him enough or love him too much. Maybe download some credit card spoofers and Diablo hacks for online play if you aren’t quite ready for bed. The early internet, and even the internet now, is a fucking wild concept. Take everything that people think, not just what we know, but what we fucking think about while we are taking a shit, and make it available for anyone look at without guidance or context. We can even watch police shootings in real time and pretend to be detectives during terrorist events, consequences to real people be damned. Should parents know better? Sure. Is the internet an effective babysitter while they grind out a living? You bet. If we restrict this dumpster fire behind age-verification and eliminate anonymity through tagged identification, the effect on privacy and anonymous online activism will be severe. However, CinnamonRingCumGlaze86 will be significantly less able to use their 6th grade reading level to convince people that modern medicine is bad because Pre-Historical Witches didn’t have AIDS bro. #flatearth #zoroastrianismwasasteptoofar #onceagaintherealproblemiscapitalismandwearelookingatthewrongthingbecauseofmanufacturedoutrageandobfuscationcreatedbytheoligarchy #worldofwarcraftclassic I will not be responding to comments.

CinnamonRingCumGlaze86 will be significantly less able to use their 6th grade reading level to convince people that modern medicine is bad because Pre-Historical Witches didn’t have AIDS bro. You don’t need accounts tied to ID to ban such content.

I’m not banning the content, I’m just making sure that when someone tells you something on the internet, you can tell that they are actually a fucking moron.

That doesn’t make any sense. You wouldn’t have access to their ID.

Okay. Imagine if there were no anonymous internet handles. If you just had to use your name and stand by what you said. That is more what I am talking about. Regarding the assessment of idiocy, I suppose I would base it on the quality of their posted content.

Not hard to imagine, people already have to manicure their facebook and other social media accounts because employers look at them. Just because you don’t want something attached to your name, doesn’t mean it’s stupid or bad. There are consequences for unapproved behavior and opinions, even if they’re not wrong or harmful. If you think anonymity is stupid, feel free to set your display name to your real name right here on lemmy.