The disastrous social experiment of age verification has landed in Nebraska as Pornhub blocks yet another state to protect users.
The push for age verification continues to be a disaster across the United States. Courts have repeatedly ruled that such laws are likely unconstitutional and the matter is also going to be heard at the US Supreme Court. Observers note that the court is hearing the case after a bizarre ruling that suggests that such laws are constitutional – a rarity. That, of course, raises the possibility that the reason the Supreme Court is hearing this case at all is because they may be looking at overturning that ruling.
Of course, the practical implications of laws being passed in several states are continuing to be felt. state after state is seeing that Pornhub is blocking their respective populations over the security concerns that such laws create. Specifically, the law requires sites to hoover up vast troves of highly sensitive information on their users for the purpose of verifying their age. That raises serious security concerns for users. So, in response, major adult website, Pornhub, have taken to blocking numerous states. As we’re learning today, Nebraska is the most recent state to get added to the list.
Last month, Nebraska passed their own age verification law, thus making it official that their state would be participating in this social experiment. In response, Pornhub said that it intended on blocking that state in response to that bill. From KETV:
LB 10-92 will require online porn companies to verify users are over 18, before granting them access to content.
Age verification will be done by scanning IDs or drivers’ licenses.
The bill says it intends to shield kids from the dangers of exposure to pornography, but opposers of the bill worry that it doesn’t clearly state what could be considered ‘harmful’ material; and that this could infringe on first amendment rights.
Earlier this year the CEO of smart gen society, Amie Konwinski, said this bill only provides a false sense of protection.
“Many times, age verification is just not an effective way to protects minors and content,” Konwinski said.
LB 10-92 goes into effect next month. Pornhub recently responded saying it won’t assume the risk of loss of privacy to its viewers.
The site now intends to block all Nebraska users after the bill goes into effect.
Today, the news about the situation in Nebraska is that it is now official. Pornhub has blocked Nebraska. From Gizmodo:
Nebraska Legislative Bill 1092 went into effect on Friday making it a requirement for sites that show adult content to verify the age of users. This usually means some form of identification needs to be uploaded to the site to confirm the person using the site is 18 or over. Pornhub’s parent company Aylo refuses to obtain these kinds of personal documents from its users so, as it has done in Texas and other states, it banned access to the porn site as of Monday this week, according to a report from the Nebraska Examiner.
“Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults,” the company told Gizmodo back in April. “Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy.”
Aylo stressed that it doesn’t want adult material to be seen by minors, but the company claims users just go to sites that don’t comply with the law. VPNs like NordVPN are also a way to get around the age verification laws and searches for them tend to grow in states that have passed these kinds of laws.
As internet censorship continues to grow in the United States, more and more are turning to things like VPN services to circumvent this government induced censorship. What’s more, as various state level governments get a taste of internet censorship, they are likely to move in other directions to increase that censorship to other areas. In Australia, lawmakers have called for the internet censorship regime to expand to include video games. So, the threat of government censorship creep is certainly there.
All this, of course, is fantastic news for criminals and malware developers who want to build up their botnets and infect people’s computers. They can build a porn site quickly and put drive by downloads somewhere on their websites before making off with people’s personal information and stealing people’s identities before making off with who knows how much money. This thanks to idiot lawmakers who went full stupid when passing these laws in the first place. Indeed, the bad guys are sure popping the champagne these days with those lawmakers incredible gift to them.
What’s worse, lawmakers so clueless, they are actively celebrating Pornhub blocking their citizens like it’s somehow a good thing. The problem is that this offers a powerful incentive for more people to look into actively using VPN services. So, when they go to try and block even more content on the internet, they’ll find that to be an even more difficult task to do because fewer and fewer people would be impacted by such blocks. So, this isn’t even close to being in their nefarious interests as well.
At the end of the day, only bad guys win. They can financially feast off of the low hanging fruit while everyone else loses. As a portion of America seemingly continues to sleepwalk into a dictatorship with some of those Americans actively cheering this on, it seems almost inevitable that internet censorship and free speech crackdowns are going to continue to be more and more common in the years ahead.
