The EU Is Now Targeting Porn Sites
from the the-eu-is-horny-for-overseeing-porn-sites dept
Back in April we noted that the EU had designated 17 sites as “VLOPs” (Very Large Online Platforms), the “ROUSs” (Rodents of Unusual Size) of the internet. Some of those sites are still contesting the designation, but in the meantime, the EU Commission has dug deep into its porn viewing habits and designated three more sites, all adult content focused, as VLOPs. Pornhub, Stripchat, and XVideos (not to be confused with ExTwitter’s videos), are all designated as VLOPs, and needing to comply with the DSA’s VLOP obligations by February 17th of 2024.
Pornhub, generally recognized as the largest adult content site around, has suggested that it disagrees with the designation, telling the media that it only has 33 million users in the EU, which is below the VLOP threshold. So, it would not be surprising to see one or all of these sites challenging the designation.
Given some of the controversies around adult content sites and how well they handle certain content, the much more stringent requirements on these sites may represent a pretty big challenge.
Most specifically, the DSA’s requirements regarding “strong protection of minors” may represent a challenge, not because the sites don’t want to protect minors, but if you are required to protect minors, you first have to identify minors using your service, which means age verification. And most age verification tools actually put children at more risk, so if the only way to “protect minors” is to put them at risk, it’s a bit of a conundrum.
The adult content industry has been leading the pushback on age verification laws in the US, noting that they’re not against making sure kids don’t access their sites, but they want to make sure that it can be done in a way that isn’t a privacy/speech nightmare, which they feel is using device based identification, rather than site-based (there are tradeoffs with this approach as well, but that’s a separate issue).
Still, while the industry has used the 1st Amendment to fight these issues in the US, it obviously doesn’t have that weapon to use in the EU. So, at least from what’s been said so far, it sounds like they may just fight the designation based on thresholds first.
Filed Under: adult content, dsa, eu, eu commission, porn, vlop, vlops
Companies: pornhub, stripchat, xvideos
Comments on “The EU Is Now Targeting Porn Sites”
most all governments impose some type of very subjective Morality rules upon the populace — that urge is almost irresistible to those with political power
U.S. GOVERNMENT is chock full of Morality legal commands
Someone give them the port ranges assigned to the government & let the data speak for itself.
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Of course they’re against preventing children from accessing their platforms. In fact, they’re against preventing children from being exploited to produce depraved content for their evil sites!
Just this week a class action lawsuit against Pornhub’s parent company alleging they profited from sex trafficking and did not take steps to ensure PH videos did not contain victims of child pornography or rape was certified in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
That this blog regularly opposes preventing the involvement of minors in the porn industry by any means necessary is truly loathsome.
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What the hell are you talking about?
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Every piece that this site publishes in which they denounce and oppose age verification is a post in which they make very clear that they do not unconditionally support keeping kids safe from porn. Very evil.
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There are solutions for keeping minors away from porn online.
Age verification is a very bad solution that creates more problems than it solves, especially when the government gets involved. Let the parents be parents; they can educate their children on how to use the Internet responsibly, and they can use device-level filtering as needed.
Most parents know what’s best for their kids. The same cannot be said for government officials.
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Every person who demands age verification is against anonymous use of the Internet, especially as it will either end up with one or two age verification sites and a tracking cookie to prove your age, or age verification every time you follow a link to a different site. Also, child safe DNS services exists, if only parents would spend a few minutes on the Internet to find out how to set up their children devices to use them.
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That’s because there’s such a thing as nuance, something you clearly lack the understanding of.
There’s no effective age verification system that wouldn’t, in some way, infringe on the privacy rights of children as well as harm online anonymity.
You may be okay with that, but some of us aren’t.
And really, the first line of defense between kids and porn should be their parents, anyway.
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…fucking what
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You know what the best way to unconditionally keep kids safe from porn? You lock them up in their room that has no windows and they can’t access any kind of media you haven’t vetted first. They also aren’t allowed to go outside either because that carries the risk of them stumbling upon porn, they shouldn’t be allowed to have friends either because the risk is that their friends may expose them to porn due to their friends parents may not be as punctilious about protecting their kids.
I hope you support this method because it unconditionally protects them from being exposed to porn. If you don’t do this you are evil per your own argument above.
Of course, some people may consider this unconditional method being evil and child abuse, but what is that compared to the unconditional protection of kids?
Now, someone who isn’t a complete idiot will realize that every time someone uses “think of the children” to bolster their argument its for 2 reasons. The first reason is that they are stupid and don’t understand the ramifications of their proposal. The second reason is that they are actually using it as an excuse for political expediency, because simpletons and idiots always buy into such excuses.
TL;DR: Only idiots and simpletons believe in unconditional methods and they are the ones paving the road to hell.
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You forgot about chastity devices! Children can create porn of their own!
Re: Re: Re:3 If protecting kids from porn means the end of humanity so be it!
Not going far enough as they would almost certainly find a way to remove the device, rather the only way to unconditionally keep kids away from porn is to stop having children entirely after locking up the current ones in isolated rooms until they reach adulthood.
Only when there are no kids will the existential threat of children seeing porn be solved once and for all, and anyone who disagrees can only be motivated by the desire to want children exposed to the most vile and reprehensible porn available.
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I’ll tell you what I support: putting pornographers to death and briefly sending porn consumers to re-education camps (unless they opt to pay a not-insignificant fine).
That this blog doesn’t even support preventing children from accessing porn online is deplorable.
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I’m sure you do, but fortunately we don’t let murderous psychopaths like you decide anything, usually we just lock you up in mental institutions and drug you.
That’s a misconception because aside from being a murderous psychopath you are also a simpleton and too stupid to understand the discussion.
Now, go and lock up your children so you can unconditionally protect them and the rest of us will just wait for the cops and social services to swing by and rescue them from a mentally unstable parent.
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rocky it’s hyman a known right winger troll that’s into revenge porn and is also a nazi and has revealed that he’s fine with spreading csam so basically a pedo
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Really, I give you Trump, and all authoritarian rulers.
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flag this comment
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flag this troll comment
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Consider your trolling flagged.
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You will not prevent our access to children. We will tell them of the penguins who adopted a rock and there’s not a thing you straight freaks can do about it.
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You can keep trying to hide my comments, Matthew Bennett, but love will win.
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To protect children from drowning you can take two different approaches:
Either:
In the long term, one of these approaches is both more practical and much more effective than the other.
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just flag this ac it’s obviously jhon or hyman
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First, not providing unconditional support for something just means that it’s not the number 1 priority.
Second, opposition to age verification doesn’t mean opposing preventing minors from accessing porn.
Seriously there’s a lot of nuance involved here.
None of this is evil at all. It’s noting that “protect the kids” doesn’t justify every law, especially when it doesn’t even succeed in doing that.
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I know the days are getting colder over your way, but the size of this strawman would keep the twit building warm for a year, if they set it on fire.
Of course, if they set themself on fire, they would keep themselves warm for the rest of their life.
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“Uh-oh, Hill kids! They’re going to burn us alive!” “Technically, we will only be alive for ze first half of ze burning.”
(Anyone who gets that reference gets a double-sized No Prize. 😁)
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Just because some problem exists does not mean that all proposed solutions are equally good. By far the best way to solve the problem of minors accessing porn is for parents to install device-level filters, and this is actually a solution that MindGeek (PornHub’s parent company) supports! Education goes a long way as well. Age verification systems create far more problems than they solve, especially if the government gets involved.
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dude are you high
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just report this low life troll it’s obvious its hyman or jhon
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https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/08/my-distaste-for-your-solution-does-not-mean-disregard-for-the-problem/
Seriously: fuck off. I am all for keeping kids away from porn, but age verification systems don’t do that and put kids at risk.
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Why? There seems to be a real shortage of evidence that it’s any threat to children, both in terms of potential for harm and the likelihood of them seeking it out. Kids mostly are “away from porn”, without any help.
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Until they reach puberty, and then they need parental advice and guidance to help the navigate their way into adulthood.
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Fair enough, but those going through puberty have been viewing such material (and enganging in the depicted activities) covertly since the dawn of time. People making efforts to “keep kids away from” it aren’t likely to be giving good advice or guidance.
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And there you have it, the short-sighted reasoning that prevents you from seeing the obvious threat. I’ll explain:
If age verification (which means everyone, not just minors) is instituted, then all of that personal information is floating around the ‘net, and not just in one location. No more anonymity for anyone, including you. All it will take is a smart cookie to hack one or more of those data stores, and everyone’s info found therein will be subjected to ID theft… for starters.
Kids in particular will be exposed to all kinds of crap, starting with either enticement to illicit stuff, or harassment of the suicidal kind. Again, just for starters. And the kicker is, all of this can be avoided by simply NOT implementing age verification. Everybody wins, including the kids you want to protect.
So now’s the time to ask the most germane question of this discussion – what is the most damaging thing that can happen to a kid that you most desire to prevent?
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That they’re brainwashed by school employees into believing that they might’ve been “born into the wrong body” (which is insane and deranged, but a major tenet of progressive education policies throughout the U.S.).
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ok transphobic troll
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When I referenced the “shortage of evidence that it’s any threat”, I meant “it” to refer to “porn”—not age-verification programs, which are indeed harmful (to everyone). Apologies for the confusion.
More we are in control of society, so we should be in charge of the Internet from politicians.
for all the rigormarol...
Considering the USA got the CC companies NOT to deal with about 1/2 the porn on the net.
We got a Bit of PURIFIED Porn.
And Soon its going to be CLEANER, and missionary, and CERTAIN PARTS Blocked out(love Japan) or never seen from any angle.
HOW clean(Puritan) do you want. The Gov. isnt supposed to be BIASED.
In theory, the Charter of Fundamental Rights is supposed to be the “parallel” to the Constitution in the E.U.
Within the Charter, there is a “right to free expression” and a “right to privacy”. Common sense would dictate that the DSA is a brazen attack on freedom of expression, although:
1) The Charter is fairly new without a lot of case law.
2) Who knows what the Court of Justice will cook up. There’s a lot of pretending that the DSA doesn’t do what it is clearly intended to do. That is to chill expression.
'Hey, great idea, YOU FIRST.'
In their shoes I would be so tempted to tell the EU governing bodies that I’d be willing to consider age verification, however in return each and every time the filter caught a government ID accessing the site a public announcement would be issued on the front page of the site saying which IP range it was, where it came from, and what they were searching for/watching.
Somehow I doubt they’d be fine with their privacy being eliminated and viewing habits made public like that, even as they demand it of everyone else.
Right, “kids” will always be “at risk” of learning about life, especially when they reach puberty, which is, you know, exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. (Same old EU hypocrisy.)
Still don’t understand one aspect.
I’ve heard this before and elsewhere but haven’t seen anyone explain this premise.
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That’s a you failure, given your long history of willful blindness to basic obvious facts.
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Porn sites are for those 18 (or 21 or 17 or 25) and up. How can supplying identification hurt a child?