Popular porn sites now display unproven health warnings thanks to Texas law::Popular online adult film sites in Texas are posting health warnings about watching porn, despite the fact a law requiring them to do so was blocked in August.
“potentially biologically addictive” and “proven to harm human brain development.”
These warnings should be required for all social media sites every time you open any webpage or app.
Or printed on every bible.
Bible should have a schizophrenia warning on it.
While they’re at it they could add “potential to cause spontaneous human combustion” or “potentially damaging to time-space continuum.” Potentially. I’m no porn fan, but my understanding is the evidence on the addictiveness claims is super weak.
The causal arrow between porn and the brain development thing could easily go either way. It’s hard to tell.
Surely porn is known to California to cause cancer.
It must, that label is on everything, so it effectively means nothing. This exchange happened between my wife and I a couple months ago
‘oh honey look…this pink Himalayan salt, which expires in…2 weeks?!? is known to the state of cancer to cause California. Ah, science. What a time to be alive’
The amount of lead in Himalayan salt (it’s mined from mountains in Pakistan) can be above allowed limits, and especially can cause developmental issues in children. Europe has same or possibly more stringent lead expectations.
I guess the two takes could be “ugh California has warnings on everything so it’s meaningless” or “wow, FDA really doesn’t give a fuck and allows all this stuff to go unchecked”
What if the label itself is what causes cancer?!?
They’re usually vinyl (PVC), and it probably does. At least it would if you ingest or burn it. Burning it could release chlorine, too, so the cancer might be the least of your worries.
Don’t forget the reproductive harm!
Shhh don’t give them any ideas!
I mean, there’s such a thing as being addicted to porn. I fall to see how you get such an addiction without looking at it
Yes, but there’s such a thing as being addicted to sex, too, and pretty much any pleasurable activity. It’s generally pretty rare.
Causation vs. Correlation. Porn addicts have obviously watched porn. But that doesn’t mean that watching porn causes porn addiction.
It’s like saying drug addicts have obviously used drugs, but it’s only correlated to their addiction
Not really. Drugs do have psychoactive components that can, provably and physiologically, cause addiction with a single use. Opioids famously have been observed to cause neural changes in rats consistent with addiction after a single dosage.
It’s more like, gambling. Millions of people gamble, a portion of them have a gambling addiction. Does that mean that gambling causes addiction? well, obviously, yes, but also, no. Or else how to explain the millions of people who can even take a vacation in Las Vegas but don’t feel a constant compulsion to gamble all of their money away. Equally, almost every single human being has sex in their lifetimes, but only a small portion of the population suffers a compulsion to have sex constantly. Does sex causes addiction? the question is in itself way too simplistic and disingenuous. Addiction involves so many other factors that it can’t be reduced to “being exposed to porn causes addiction”.
I think it’s more of a continuum between purely psychological and purely chemical, and most things fall somewhere in the grade.
Marijuana is a drug that does not cause physical addiction from one use. Yet people get addicted to it, even though most don’t. Would you say using marijuana causes addiction?
So, you didn’t read my comment. Noted.
Please don’t the 17 attempts for me to surrender my cookies are already exhausting my willingness to use the web.
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These popups are worse than the actual pop-up ads - at least those were in separate windows or tabs and so could be closed easily with keyboard shortcuts.
I often decline their cookie bull, they’ll just keep asking with every new page i load from that website. Preferably with a pop-up that covers 2/3rd of the screen.
I think but haven’t done any proper investigations, that some sites only store your cookie response if you accept a certain kind of cookies. Basically every site now divides cookies up into functional, optimisation and marketing, and I have at least observed:
- go to website, receive prompt
- decline all non-required cookies
- go to next page within website, receive prompt again
- decline all but functional cookies (or similar wording
- go to next page, no prompt.
You’re probably right about this.
If you can figure out which script is responsible for the pop-up, it’s usually possible to block it by, for instance, feeding its URL to your ad blocker. Just takes a bit of patience.
Today’s Internet is so much worse than the Internet a decade ago… Exponentially higher speeds, yet everything runs way slower and you have to dig for anything you want out of a sea of that
All this on news sites and when you refuse everything you get into a paywall
*It looks like you searched with Google!
Would you like to log into Google?
Would you like to log into Google?
Would you like to log into Google?
Would you…
Would you…
This sounds like it’s going to further erode people’s trust in the health systems and the advice of doctors.
I’m sure that’s a side effect that Texas is happy with.
Who was out there discrediting doctors during the pandemic? The exact same people pushing for those kinds of laws and making those bogus health claims.
It’s always projection with the right.
The people that are already not following doctors orders are not going to do it regardless
They should preface the warnings with something like “Texas lawmakers require us to say the following:”
If you’re a resident of Texas, please be aware that watching porn is bad for you, jacking off will make you blind and that you’re a filthy person for coming here. If you’re from the rest of the world, why are you reading this instead of watching porn?
Here I am, unzipped, and a little bruised, but standing at attention, and you’re kink-shaming me?
Lucky me - that’s my fetish too! Who needs porn!
Username… checks out?
Well that was more a friction thing, but if the oversized shoe fits…
Masturbation makes hair grow on the palms of your hands - it’s science people.
You’ll go blind
Maybe you should not point it towards your eyes
Don’t kink shame me.
Dad I’m over here
I heard something along the lines of your hand becoming pregnant in the afterlife. I think he was some Middle Eastern Muslim (don’t recall if the Muslim part is true), so it’s basically fact.
/s
I had to re-read because a Middle-Earther Muslim doesn’t seem very common
“…is known to the state of Texas to cause…”
Well… porn probably causes less abortions so they should be actively encouraging it.
You can’t expect internal consistency among conservatives. If stopping abortions was a top priority, they wouldn’t be so anti-gay. It’s all about controlling outgroups.
Oh, I know. I just like calling them on the shit.
Probably get a “gods will” reply or something.
I don’t think repressed gay people have that many abortions, do they?
That’s why I was usually jealous of my gay buddies, they have the fun practicing to get pregnant without the risks of 18 years to life that comes from breeders practicing a little too much…
Solution, give gay women dicks and gay men wombs.
This is a bad solution but im sure some kinky ass motherfuckers will enjoy it.
Hsee? That’s why repressing gay people works! /s
No no, you see, porn is bad because it keeps men from focusing on snaring a woman and making sure she fulfills her obligation to produce worker bees for God and capitalists. Also, sex is bad, unless you’re a guy. If you’re a women, sucks to suck I guess, get married and make babies.
- Texas religious leaders, probably
There’s two schools of thought about this. One is that porn extinguishes sexual desire and Poe replaces sex, and the other that it only feeds the desire until people actually go out and have more sex. There’s competing studies on the topic.
Porn is not a substitute for sex though.
No, but if it stops me having a drunk hookup with a random it has the same effect.
Good old steak v hotdogs arguement
Are you saying horny people wouldn’t fuck because porn exists? It’s a masturbatory aid, not masturbation itself. I cannot for the life of me think of an occasion where it would affect reproduction.
“I’m not going to go out tonight, guys. I’m going to watch porn instead.”
“I as a 16 year old would rather watch porn than get laid”
"I know we’re really hitting it off and it seems like we’re going to bang but I’d rather go whack off to a few videos on the internet "
Your comparison is more like hotdog vs a fork.
if only it could have been proposition 40
I love how republican law makers who want small government and non governmental interference and stop interfering the second it’s something they are against.
Really shows their true colors. They don’t give a shit about small government, they LOVE government interference. They just don’t want you to stop them using slavery, they just don’t want you to know about practices in slaughter houses, they just want to be able to pollute every part of the world except where they live and they just want to be able to tell you how to live your life.
Is that so much to ask?
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The smallest form of government is a dictatorship.
They oppose communism, of course they don’t want small government
American Taliban
Y’all-Qaeda
That’s fucking hilarious
Because I didn’t see it written in the comments yet, here is the warning:
“The sites display unproven claims that porn impairs ‘human brain development’ and ‘increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography.’”
cuz that’s not retarded.
and ‘increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography.’"
Idk, when I’m watching adult porn, I don’t think to myself “wow, I wish these were children instead”.
I don’t understand how Texas expects to enforce such a law, unless these companies have physical offices in the state.
For Texas, possibly by having vigilantes kidnap them from other states (or in the case of Aylo (PornHub), across international borders) with reward money attached. I wouldn’t be surprised at this point.
This reminds me of BANNED IN CHINA!!! The warning label is how you know your porn is extra. Rated XXX+XX!
“unproven” because it’s Texan. Fuck The Verge, Internet porn addiction is as real as those beetles that have sex with beer bottles because they’re brown and perfectly glossy like an ideal mate.
those beetles that have sex with beer bottles because they’re brown and perfectly glossy like an ideal mate.
Um. What?
There are things every mating creatures brain is hard wired to look for, as signals of a healthy and breedable mate
Like the caricatures of sexual perfection in porn, the brown beer bottle happens to be the anime girl of a species of beetle whose males will regularly get carried away trying to reproduce with manufactured human garbage creating an actual risk to the species
Man without the beetle analogy I wasn’t going to be sold on your personal and admittedly weird crusade, but now
I wasn’t kidding. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-giant-jewel-beetle-1968152
Imagine an alien species bombarded the planet with real-dolls, we basically did that to this species of beetle
This link is the highlight of my week
Nobody disputes it when social media addiction is the topic du jour, but internet porn addiction has been around even before social media became big. And I’m basing this on the number of downvotes you got - I guess these are all the people that went on Pornhub, saw nothing enticing, and moved on.
I agree porn addiction has been around for a long time, but it’s very different not that we’re reaching a point in time where people who are expected to be adults and functional in their mid 20’s grew up in a world of ubiquitous Internet access and had smart phones.
So while porn addiction existed since photography, this is the first time we get to see the effect of population-wide unrestricted access to these things from a very young age.
It’s actually probably better now with parent-child account management and the like, which didn’t exist at all 15-20 years ago. Also 15-20 years ago CSAM, death imagery, real rape and mutilation videos were all on the front pages of openly accessible .com’s anyone could visit.
Remember when people on the Internet generally universally agreed that it was bad when the government (or anyone) regulated or censored the Internet?
I want those times back. It isn’t any better whether it is because of left wing causes like “misinformation” or “hate speech” or right wing ones like the thing this article is about or “piracy” or “terrorist propaganda”.
See those downvotes? Yes, that’s because those times were conditioned by the Internet being a niche thing. You can’t expect such adequacy today even here.
That aside, legally fighting “misinformation” is outright obvious censorship, not even trying to pretend to be something else.
I am 100% fine with censorship of known falsehoods. Let them appeal it in court. Even the tools behind 1/6, besides the biggest tool at the top, won’t even risk perjury and probably contempt, in court, with the risk of jail, unlimited fines, and permenant censorship from mass media on the line.
I would prefer the falsehood to left up, colored a deep red and shrunk down to like 8pt font with a pop up on your curser that comes up when you hover over it, stating the fact of what it is; such as ‘unproven’, ‘demostrably false’ hyperlinked to evidence, ‘conjecture’, or ‘MTG - Jewish Space Laser crazy’.
Pick up social issue, it doesn’t matter your stance on it. Chances are, there is a science behind it that clearly takes a position. Facts over feelings.
Changing your mind when given new information is a strength, not a weakness. Doubling down on error…? That’s some flat earth, you are definitely going to an old folks home now, kind of shit. That’s how it looks. Onset dementia.
I apologize to those with real onset dementia, we know you didn’t choose it, you’re still worthy of respect.
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I once hoped that if the Internet were more popular, society at large would become more like the Internet.
Hahahahahaha no
It’s not censored, it’s a warning label you can click past.
Internet porn addiction is a genuinely harmful thing.
I’m sorry, I’m having a hard time find porn addiction, or even sex addiction, in my DSM-V. Could you tell me which page(s) it’s on?
As you’re undoubtedly aware, DSM-V is a decade old and the next revision is set to include improved criteria on dependencies (including non-drug ones) and obsessive-compulsive spectrum (which this could likely fall under), as well as adding other “new” conditions like hoarding.
So, not an addiction?
Most sex researchers have noted that actual compulsive sexual behaviors are very, very rare, and that what many people think of as a porn “addiction” comes more from a place of values judgement–especially religious values, whether they recognize them as such or not–rather than from the behavior being significantly outside of the norm in any way, or even damaging to the person.
Mormons–“Fight the New Drug”–have done a fantastic job of convincing people that porn and sex are terrible, and that any consumption at all is problematic.
“I’m not addicted, I can quit whenever I want.”
I hear that all the time. Keep denying the downsides of porn.
This is why I also mentioned “regulated”, not just “censored”.
In my teen years I was convinced that the government shouldn’t have any business telling us what to do on the Internet and thought that that is what the future would be like, that we were then living in a temporary situation where governments were still trying to do so but eventually the Internet would win.
That turned out different. I really wish I knew how to help achieve a utopia of free worldwide communication.
That was before someone on Twitter’s best addition to the conversation was to call me “a caribou diaper baby” … which while a very creative insult … is pretty ridiculous conduct.
I agree the government regulating speech is a fine line. We don’t need real information being suppressed, but we also need a way (with checks and balances) to shut people that are entirely full of shit (or people that if the Internet was a real establishment would be kicked out for being deranged and unhinged) up.
I think the concept you’re looking for is that moderation is different from censorship.
Thank you for caribou diaper baby, its getting added to the list alongside baby piss goblin and wailing flesh Muppet.
Shit state gonna shit state. What an embarrassment
Crappy article. They quoted the popup but didn’t show it at all. I just wanted to see what it was.
If only they’d told you the sites to visit!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The move comes after a US appeals court temporarily overturned an order blocking a Texas law that required porn sites to verify users’ ages and display government health warnings.
Though they don’t require age verification, every Vixen Media Group site — which includes Deeper, Blacked, and Vixen — now displays factually debatable disclaimers warning that porn is “potentially biologically addictive” and “proven to harm human brain development.” The warnings appear to users within the state of Texas.
It’s not clear how long the disclaimers have been online, but they appear to be a reaction to Texas’ HB 1181, which was initially scheduled to go into effect on September 1st but has been hotly contested in court.
HB 1181 requires adult sites to display disclaimers and verify users’ ages with government-issued identification.
However, a district judge agreed to block it in late August after a group of adult entertainment activists and companies — which included Pornhub, Brazzers, and the Free Speech Coalition — filed a complaint arguing it was unconstitutional.
The lawsuit criticized the law’s required health warning, calling it a “mix of falsehoods, discredited pseudo-science, and baseless accusations” and “a classic example of the state mandating an orthodox viewpoint on a controversial issue.” District Judge David Alan Ezra agreed, rejecting both the age verification rule and the health disclaimer.
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