A letter I sent my senators, please consider similar.

[Ken]

What is with your obsession with pornography?

Because I have multiple friends who were exposed to it at a young age, with a lot of damage from that. It really hurts young children. I have 2 friends who opened up to me and told me there were exposed at the age of 9 or 10. They simply had normal access to the Internet.

Paid pornography is already behind paywalls.

That doesn’t do anything about stuff that is free, which is what young children get exposed to.

And pornography is already banned from every major social media platform. Porn sites are also easily filtered. If you want your kids to live porn-free lives, then just let them stay on TikTok and Instagram full time. They will encounter no porn there.

I don’t use TikTok and Instagram specifically because of a lot of the obscene material I have casually encountered there.

Every study and survey about the dangers of social media to children and teens doesn't even mention pornography. Porn doesn't even make the list. It is a whole lot of other concerns.

I don’t think children should be using social media either.

And as far as blocking porn and adult content? I can easily do that on my kid's phones using the Verizon family control app. And I can also easily do it on my home network using Google's Family Web Option. And it is already blocked on their school WiFi and school Chromebooks. Is it perfect and 100%? No. But no government-run age-based ID system will be perfect either.

Here’s a better idea: stop having open access to pornography on the Internet. Make pornographers accountable just like tobacco companies are.

We used to let children freely buy tobacco and the tobacco industry first claimed it wasn’t harmful to kids, then claimed they didn’t market to kids, then claimed it would violate some kind of rights or freedoms to have strict age verification. All of these claims turned out to be false. We now have an orderly system where adults can purchase tobacco but children don’t have access to it.

You do realize that age restrictions are only going to limit access to paid sites anyway. No age verification paywall on pornhub will prevent kids from finding porn on some random web site in Moldovia. That is just a reality of the internet. The existing filters available for for cell phone providers and Google WiFi are about as good as you are going to get.

The people you are calling "pornographers" are the people trying to make money off porn. They have robust paywalls already because they don't want free porn leaking out. All the free stuff you are complaining about it just stuff that random people have posted up to random web sites. It would be impossible to block all of that without turning off the entire internet or building an entirely government-run and government-filtered internet as they have in China. That's just the reality.

[Josh]

You do realize that age restrictions are only going to limit access to paid sites anyway.

Tobacco companies used to give cigarettes away for free.

They don’t give them away for free to minors anymore, and would be in serious legal trouble if they got caught doing so.

Pornography is no different.

No age verification paywall on pornhub will prevent kids from finding porn on some random web site in Moldovia. That is just a reality of the internet. The existing filters available for for cell phone providers and Google WiFi are about as good as you are going to get.

Then block pornography from outside of the U.S. if they can’t adequately age verify it.

To give you an analogy, children can’t mail order cigarettes or liquor from other countries. It isn’t allowed across the border. The Internet is no different.

The people you are calling "pornographers" are the people trying to make money off porn. They have robust paywalls already because they don't want free porn leaking out. All the free stuff you are complaining about it just stuff that random people have posted up to random web sites. It would be impossible to block all of that without turning off the entire internet or building an entirely government-run and government-filtered internet as they have in China. That's just the reality.

Reality is that no child in America should be subjected to pornography. Big Tech can come up with solutions. There is a wide array of technology available to solve problems. And the tobacco industry has already done it.

[temporal1]

.. And the tobacco industry has already done it.

i guess many have forgotten what a major ruling/legal precedent this was.
i can only imagine today’s opportunists “rue the day”.

1994 / Mangini v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, et al.
https://www.tobaccocontrollaws.org/liti ... pany-et-al

Plaintiff sued a number of tobacco companies, alleging that their use of a cartoon character on advertisements for Camel brand cigarettes had caused the sale of Camel cigarettes to surge among minors. Plaintiff asserted, among other things, that the defendant violated the Federal Cigarette Labeling Advertising Act (Act) by not including warnings about the health risks of tobacco use. Following the United States Supreme Court's revised interpretation of the Act, the cigarette companies claimed that the Act preempted the plaintiff's action. A trial court agreed and dismissed the case.

However, the Court of Appeal reversed, allowing the plaintiff to amend her complaint to allege that the advertising campaign constituted an unfair business practice insofar as it had targeted minors for the purpose of inducing them to illegally purchase Camel cigarettes. The defendants appealed the preemption issue to the Supreme Court of California, which affirmed the Court of Appeal decision, ruling that Congress did not intend for the Act to preempt states from protecting minors from advertisements that encouraged them to illegally buy cigarettes.

P.5 / Joe Camel

[RZehr]

In the pre internet era, society saw value in rating movies as PG, PG-13, R. And if you were not old enough to see the given rating, society stepped in and told you that you were not allowed to rent the movie, or you were not allowed to enter the theater.

[Ken]

In the pre internet era, society saw value in rating movies as PG, PG-13, R. And if you were not old enough to see the given rating, society stepped in and told you that you were not allowed to rent the movie, or you were not allowed to enter the theater.

So you want the government to rate all internet content as G, PG, PG-13, R, and X?

[RZehr]

In the pre internet era, society saw value in rating movies as PG, PG-13, R. And if you were not old enough to see the given rating, society stepped in and told you that you were not allowed to rent the movie, or you were not allowed to enter the theater.

So you want the government to rate all internet content as G, PG, PG-13, R, and X?

Yes.

[Ken]

In the pre internet era, society saw value in rating movies as PG, PG-13, R. And if you were not old enough to see the given rating, society stepped in and told you that you were not allowed to rent the movie, or you were not allowed to enter the theater.

So you want the government to rate all internet content as G, PG, PG-13, R, and X?

Yes.

The motion picture studios typically release between 400 and 500 movies per year. How many web sites do you think there are on the internet?

And on what criteria? Political misinformation? Medical misinformation? Russian misinformation?

[RZehr]

So you want the government to rate all internet content as G, PG, PG-13, R, and X?

Yes.

The motion picture studios typically release between 400 and 500 movies per year. How many web sites do you think there are on the internet?

And on what criteria? Political misinformation? Medical misinformation? Russian misinformation?

They can figure that all out, that’s fine with me. Maybe they can use that newfangled AI.

[Josh]

The government didn’t rate them. The movie industry self regulated… mostly to avoid boycotts from Catholic and Christian people.

Governments did require that theatres couldn’t show obscene material. Larry Flynn took this to the Supreme Court so he could get a “right” to flood communities with pornography.

[Ken]

The government didn’t rate them. The movie industry self regulated… mostly to avoid boycotts from Catholic and Christian people.

Governments did require that theatres couldn’t show obscene material. Larry Flynn took this to the Supreme Court so he could get a “right” to flood communities with pornography.

Exactly.

Which is exactly how things are today. The social media platforms self-regulate and keep porn off of their sites. Try posting porn on Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram and see how far you get.