As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.
Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
Archive: http://archive.today/uZB13
I know that anonymity is the way it is and don’t think that me changing my display does anything about one way or the other. I definitely shit post, because I can. There is literally no consequence. If I somehow hit the right combination of words and someone commits suicide, I would never know. If I share something that someone looks views at their workplace and then gets fired, I would never know. The entire thing is just people collectively shrugging responsibility for their behavior and that has a net negative effect on society.
I’m not going to change my name over to my real name, although that is generic enough that would not be identifying, but I am going to point out that people do shitty things with anonymity and that the world would be better off without it.
Except those who control the narrative will not face consequences for harmful messages they spread. For example, the trump administration spreads a lot of anti-trans messaging. They’ve been going after the funding of schools for what they deem “CRT and radical gender ideology” (https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5113202-trump-schools-executive-order-crt-gender-ideology/). Now imagine they go after online commentators which will be super easy because they’ve got their real names attached to their posts.
I get what you’re saying. However, I don’t think that the solution to that is hiding identities online, but rather killing the politicians.