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It's a balance. Suppose you add this proof requirement. What happens then? It's not as simple as lots of legitimate amateur content producers facing additional
by scarmig 6y ago
It's a balance. Suppose you add this proof requirement. What happens then? It's not as simple as lots of legitimate amateur content producers facing additional friction. Most will make the explicit decision not to have their legal name and address associated with pornographic content. Others will upload their content anyway, without doing an audit of the different platforms' security postures or being aware of the likelihood of and outcomes from breaches.
What happens in a breach? Now, you're probably thinking, just require the platforms to be secure! But you can't simply will that into existence, and I guarantee you it's impossible. So ultimately you've made people vulnerable when they weren't before, and you're setting up a situation where it's pretty much inevitable that they'll be exposed and threatened by stalkers, deranged fans, and ideological zealots.
Let's suppose you bite the bullet, and say turning all the porn platforms into outlets for major porn production companies is the way to go. At least we've eliminated revenge porn, right? No. Large masses of people really hate that kind of mass produced porn, so they jump to foreign platforms that don't require complicated ID verification. These sites end up with the large majority of amateur porn content, along with the revenge porn. But they're now out of the reach of US law enforcement, so the victims of revenge porn would then be in a worse position than they are today.
Now we're getting to even more extreme measures. Maybe the US needs to build a national firewall to prevent the foreign criminals from penetrating our great nation and undermining our morals with porn that's unapproved by the Feds? China is way ahead of the game on this, in that pornography is outright illegal, and it has sophisticated internet security measures that are exceptional in breadth and depth by Western standards. How's its war on porn going? Spoiler alert: it's lost it. Perhaps it could be a moment to build cross-cultural empathy, as Chinese netizens exchange tips with Americans on how to use Shadowsocks to avoid the censors and access amateur porn.
Requiring ID verification is one of those things that sounds good and moral on its face, but has so many unintended downstream consequences that exacerbate the original problem while making things generally worse.
- lostcolony 6y agoSo all professional porn already requires identification and age checks. I'm...not convinced it's the end of the world if amateur ones do too. The considerations are the same.
- scarmig 6y agoPeople appearing in professional porn today are almost by definition those who are most comfortable getting identification and age checks; the ability to maintain anonymity is a key concern for most amateurs. Adding the same verification process to amateur porn is more or less making all porn professional porn, not mildly tweaking the nature of amateur porn. Amateurs would be faced with a choice of 1) effectively going pro, 2) fleeing to a different platform, or 3) exiting porn production altogether. I'm fairly confident that 2) would be the largest proportion of people, closely followed by 3), with 1) a distant third.
- lostcolony 6y agoThere already are professionally produced things with amateurs seeking to maintain anonymity. And yet, documents are signed, checks are written. The paperwork is just kept offline. Yes, it may make it harder for an amateur seeking to upload something they filmed themselves, and who are not looking to build a brand or collect a payment for it. Not sure how many of those there are. But as soon as you're looking to do one of those things, there are existing allegories you can look to to figure out how it might be enabled.
- scarmig 6y agoI'm not arguing that it's impossible to verify people: it's clearly not. The point is that it will end up being a painful and risky enough process that amateurs will respond by switching to other platforms hosted overseas, outside the reach of law enforcement. This will provide a space where the exact same problem as exists now--commingling of legitimate amateur porn and nonconsensual videos--reproduces itself, except with no tools available to expunge the videos that need to be expunged. Every proactive approach has this downside. That's why we should focus more on making it easy for victims to report a video and have it and variations of it removed from all sites nearly immediately, as well as making sure laws are on the books making it easy to prosecute offenders.
- pm90 6y ago
- graderjs 6y agoWouldn't it be simpler to make porn a regulated commodity that only the government, or those it authorises with permits, can produce? Like alcohol. But why stop there? Let's make sex a regulated activity that only the government can approve. This will solve the whole consent problem in the regulated space because every sexual interaction will be pre approved and in writing, with a no harm no foul escape clause if anyone changes their mind. /S But seriously, there's problems. if you want to ID people it might be easier to make every video begin with the actors holding up a placard that's like an anonymous crypto QR token clapper that somehow only government sensors can officially check, that's like a hash of their face id, and it's all in a big government bloom filter for registered porn stars. But then you couldn't stop people prefixing an unapproved video with their identities... Maybe the tech angle of not the right way to deal with this....