Internet Porn Censorship

Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, issued a written statement cancelling the government's current plans to require age verification for porn. She wrote:

The government published the Online Harms White Paper in April this year. It proposed the establishment of a duty of care on companies to improve online safety, overseen by an independent regulator with strong enforcement powers to deal with non-compliance. Since the White Paper's publication, the government's proposals have continued to develop at pace. The government announced as part of the Queen's Speech that we will publish draft legislation for pre-legislative scrutiny. It is important that our policy aims and our overall policy on protecting children from online harms are developed coherently in view of these developments with the aim of bringing forward the most comprehensive approach possible to protecting children.

The government has concluded that this objective of coherence will be best achieved through our wider online harms proposals and, as a consequence, will not be commencing Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 concerning age verification for online pornography. The Digital Economy Act objectives will therefore be delivered through our proposed online harms regulatory regime. This course of action will give the regulator discretion on the most effective means for companies to meet their duty of care. As currently drafted, the Digital Economy Act does not cover social media platforms.

The government's commitment to protecting children online is unwavering. Adult content is too easily accessed online and more needs to be done to protect children from harm. We want to deliver the most comprehensive approach to keeping children safe online and recognised in the Online Harms White Paper the role that technology can play in keeping all users, particularly children, safe. We are committed to the UK becoming a world-leader in the development of online safety technology and to ensure companies of all sizes have access to, and adopt, innovative solutions to improve the safety of their users. This includes age verification tools and we expect them to continue to play a key role in protecting children online.

The BBFC sounded a bit miffed about losing the internet censor gig. The BBFC posted on its website:

The introduction of age-verification on pornographic websites in the UK is a necessary and important child protection measure. The BBFC was designated as the Age-verification Regulator under the Digital Economy Act 2017 (DEA) in February 2018, and has since worked on the implementation of age-verification, developing a robust standard of age-verification designed to stop children from stumbling across or accessing pornography online. The BBFC had all systems in place to undertake the role of AV Regulator, to ensure that all commercial pornographic websites accessible from the UK would have age gates in place or face swift enforcement action.

The BBFC understands the Government's decision, announced today, to implement age-verification as part of the broader online harms strategy. We will bring our expertise and work closely with government to ensure that the child protection goals of the DEA are achieved.

I don suppose we will ever hear the real reasons why the law was ditched, but I suspect that there were serious problems with it. The amount of time and effort put into this, and the serious ramifications for the BBFC and age verification companies that must now be facing hard times must surely make this cancelling a big decision.

It is my guess that a very troublesome issue for the authorities is how both age verification and website blocking would have encouraged a significant number of people to work around government surveillance of the internet. It is probably more important to keep tabs on terrorists and child abusers rather than to lose this capability for the sake of a kids stumbling on porn.

Although the news of the cancellation was reported today, Rowland Manthorpe, a reporter for Sky News suggested on Twitter that maybe the idea had already been shelved back in the summer. He tweeted:

When @AJMartinSky and I broke the news that the porn block was being delayed again, we reported that it was on hold indefinitely. It was. Then our story broke. Inside DCMS a sudden panic ensued. Quickly, they drafted a statement saying it was delayed for 6 months

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed legislation that institutes penalties for nonconsensual, sexually explicit digital videos, tagged deep fakes.

The legislation, Assembly Bill 602, targets companies and individuals who create and distribute the videos in California without the consent of the individual being depicted.

The issue is particularly pertinent in California as Hollywood and US TV stars are very much those targeted by the deep fakers.

The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) is a union representing many of the film and TV stars.

SAG-AFTRA has commended California Newsom for signing the legislation into law. The group said that the legislation was meaningful recourse for the victims, many of whom are members of SAG-AFTRA. The group's president Gabrielle Carteris said:

We are absolutely thrilled that Gov. Newsom stood by the victims, most of whom are women, of nonconsensual pornography by signing AB 602 into law. I want to thank the governor; the bill's authors, Assembly member Marc Berman and Sen. Connie Leyva; and all the California lawmakers who unanimously voted for this legislation. AB 602 is a victory for all Californians. Deepfake technology can be weaponized against any person. Every person deserves the basic human right to live free from image-based sexual abuse.

Update: A second deep fake bill protects politicians from having words put in their mouths

7th October 2019. See article from technologyreview.com

Governor Gavin Newsom in fact signed two bills into law that limit what people can do with deep fakes. The second law makes it illegal to make and distribute a malicious deep fake of a politician within two months of an election.

Presumably the lawmakers are worrying that politicians can be depicted as saying thing that they did not in fact say.

However this bill seems a little ahead of its time as deep fakes are not really being used for this reason so far. A new report by DeepTrace, a company that builds tools to spot synthetic media. The company says that it has identified 14,678 deepfakes on the internet but most of them weren't created to mess with elections. In fact 96% of the deepfakes were still plain old fake porn.

BangBros explained in a statement on the now defunct pornWikileaks.com website:

In the current world we live in, as we all know, once it's on the internet, it's forever. For too long, this site has unfortunately been a resource for hate, lies, and sensitive information. Many of us have had our real names online for the world to see. Over 15,000 performers real names were listed here. Some had phone numbers, addresses, even family members names posted as well. That type of information wasn't voluntarily submitted. It was stolen from anyone that had it posted.

BangBros had enough. We have purchased this site with the intention of shutting it down and removing all information associated with it. There's no catch. No hidden thing to getting your personal stuff off of it. We simply didn't want it out there for the world to see anymore. Yes, it's that easy. While shutting this site down doesn't purge the internet of all possible ties to real names and what not, it does make it one less place to harbor and find these things easily. A forum that had 300,000 posts on it, most of them negative and hate-filled, has now disappeared.

If you had anything ever posted on here, it will be removed and deleted forever from here. As well as BangBros nows owns the domain. Nothing will ever be up here besides this page that you see now. So you don't have to worry about it coming back either.

This industry has weathered a lot and at the end of the day we rely on each other more than we think. Sure, we all have competitors-BangBros has plenty in itself. But making enemies doesn't make us a stronger company. Treating others well and innovating does. So our innovation this week, while not groundbreaking, hopes to make the internet a little bit better for all of us involved.

Pornhub, the premiere online destination for adult entertainment, today announced the launch of its Dirtiest Porn Ever campaign to help clean the world's dirtiest beaches and to raise awareness around the growing pollution problem. As part of the campaign, Pornhub is debuting a video starring Leolulu, one of the internet's most popular amateur couples, shot at one of the world's dirtiest beaches. Each time someone watches the video in its entirety, Pornhub will make a donation to Ocean Polymers, a nonprofit that has developed a solution to collect and process plastic waste in the world's ocean and seas.

To showcase how plastic and waste can ruin an otherwise beautiful scene, the Dirtiest Porn Ever video features amateur couple Leolulu having sex on the beach amidst mountains of litter that are obstructing the view of the couple's naughty bits. After a few minutes, a cleaning crew will begin to clean up the beach, slowly revealing Leo and Lulu in all of their naked glory.

To bring the Dirtiest Porn Ever campaign to life, Pornhub worked to create the video and a landing page which features tips on what people can do to help. Additionally, the campaign encourages other porn stars and amateurs from around the world to shoot similar scenes, in an effort to inspire change within their own fanbases.

For more information on the Dirtiest Porn Ever campaign, to view the video and for tips on what you can do to help clean our oceans, please visit www.dirtiestporn.com

In 2007, the pornography website Pornhub averaged 1 million visits per day. By 2018 this had increased to 92 million visits per day -- or 33.5 billion views over the course of a year.

As an interdisciplinary group of sexademics, we're interested in porn's cultural role and impact. A common question we hear is whether this growth in porn consumption is good or bad for society.

Of course, the honest-but-unsatisfying answer is: It depends. But sometimes studying various aspects of porn consumption can change the way we think about it.

You might have heard, for example, that porn fuels misogynistic attitudes and sexual violence.

If this were the case, you would think that people who consumed a lot of porn would hold particularly negative views towards women.

So we decided to study a group of men whom we've dubbed porn superfans -- those who are so enthusiastic about porn that they'll attend the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas. We wanted to compare their attitudes about gender equality to those of everyday Americans. Profiling the superfans

Our study was inspired, in part, by the journalists and politicians who have said that porn consumption is at epidemic levels -- so much so that it constitutes a public health crisis. They write and speak of the perils of porn addiction and objectification, how porn encourages hatred of women and sexual toxicity.

Would this play out in the results of our study?

The 294 expo attendees we surveyed certainly differed from the general population in a number of ways.

Their average age was 44 years old. Almost half -- 47.3% -- indicated that they watched porn less than once a day, but more than once a week. Over one-third -- 36.1% - indicated they watch porn every day. In other words, over 80% of the attendees in our sample watched porn multiple times a week. Only 34.1% of them were married, but they were highly educated: 60.5% had a college degree or higher. A scene from the 2017 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. Paul Maginn, Author provided

We compared these results to the results from the General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey conducted every couple of years that charts social trends.

This survey only asks whether people have seen an X-rated movie in the last year, and 37.6% of the men indicated that they had. Just over half of the men in the General Social Survey sample were married, while just 28.7% of them had a college degree or higher. Misogyny unmasked?

But we were most interested in comparing the gender attitudes of each group. So we asked the expo attendees the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with four statements from the General Social Survey:

• A working mother can establish just as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work.

• Most men are better suited emotionally for politics than are most women.

• It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.

• Because of past discrimination, employers should make special efforts to hire and promote qualified women.

After parsing the results, we discovered that male porn superfans actually expressed more progressive attitudes towards gender equality on two of the questions. For two others, they indicated just as progressive -- or, said another way, just as sexist -- attitudes as the general population.

Over 90% of porn superfans -- compared to just over 70% of the GSS sample -- agreed that working mothers can have just as warm and secure relationships with their children than non-working mothers.

For the statement that men and women should hold traditional gender roles within a family, 80% of porn superfans disagreed. Nationally, 73% percent of respondents disagree with this statement.

A similar proportion -- 80% -- of AVN Expo attendees and General Social Survey respondents disagreed with the statement that men, rather than women, were more emotionally suited for politics.

Although a majority of porn superfans and General Social Survey respondents -- 72.4% and 74.5%, respectively -- agreed that women, due to past discrimination, should get special preference in the workplace, this was the least supported statement we tested. Notably, however, this level of support is higher than a recent national poll indicating that 65% of Americans support affirmative action for women. Porn crisis or moral panic?

These findings challenge what porn scholars call the negative effects paradigm, which sees porn as an inherently bad thing that cultivates harmful attitudes.

Our survey isn't the only one that upends this way of thinking. A 2016 study based on General Social Survey data found that male porn consumers held more egalitarian views on women in position of power, women working outside the home, and abortion than those who didn't view porn.

And while most porn is produced and consumed by men, a growing number of women -- straight and LGBTQ -- are producing porn and consuming different genres of porn, a trend that's largely been ignored.

For now, it's probably best to pump the brakes on the idea that pornography causes negative attitudes toward women. The evidence just isn't there, and much of today's rhetoric about pornography seems to be more of a moral panic than public health crisis.

New Zealand's Children's Minister Tracey Martin has been calling for ideas to modernise internet censorship laws to protect kids from porn.

So the country's Chief Censor David Shanks has been on the campaign trail seeking to grab some of those powers to censor internet porn.

Shank's made an interesting pitch when invited on to the AM Show on breakfast TV. Speaking of ideas for porn censorship he noted:

Tracey Martin says all options are on the table. There are ethical dilemmas involved in cutting the supply, however. Are we going to become like China, in terms of state-imposed restrictions? And who decides where the limits to those are? These are difficult questions.

He said he once stood in front of a room full of people at a conference and outlined a scenario and said:

'I'm the chief censor. Imagine I've got a box with a button on it - a big red button - and if I push that button, I've terminated all access to pornography for everyone in this country. Should I push the button?'

There was a stunned silence from the room, then someone said, 'Who gets to decide what pornography is?' I said, 'I am! I'm the Chief Censor.' But I think that highlights some of the issues underpinning these questions.

No one in the audience urged him to push the button.

A working party has been set up to investigate what can be done, involving the Office of Film and Literature Classification leads the group, and other agencies involved are Netsafe, the Ministry of Health, Internal Affairs, the Ministry for Women, the Ministry of Social Development, ACC and the Ministry of Education.

An adult website that specializes in hentai porn left a database unsecured that exposed the details of about 1.2 million users.

It was vpnMentor's researchers who discovered the issue with Luscious.net. While the breach is now closed, hackers could have accessed users' personal email addresses, their usernames, blog posts, followers, uploads, likes, and locations.

While around 20% of luscious accounts use fake emails, that still leaves a large number of genuine addresses exposed. Some users included their legal names as part of their emails, which makes them prime targets for criminals.

The database had been exposed since at least August 4 until it was closed on August 19. While there is no evidence of it being accessed by hackers, users should beware of phishing attempts, or extortion.. As a security measure, members are being advised to change their Luscious usernames and associated email address.