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.

  • Uglyhead@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    “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.

    • totallynotarobot@lemmy.world
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      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.

        • SoylentBlake@lemm.ee
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          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’

          • BossDj@lemm.ee
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            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”

            • frezik@midwest.social
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              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.

      • iopq@lemmy.world
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        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

        • FishFace@lemmy.world
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          Yes, but there’s such a thing as being addicted to sex, too, and pretty much any pleasurable activity. It’s generally pretty rare.

        • dustyData@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Causation vs. Correlation. Porn addicts have obviously watched porn. But that doesn’t mean that watching porn causes porn addiction.

          • iopq@lemmy.world
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            It’s like saying drug addicts have obviously used drugs, but it’s only correlated to their addiction

            • dustyData@lemmy.world
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              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.

              • iopq@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                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?

    • CrowAirbrush@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Please don’t the 17 attempts for me to surrender my cookies are already exhausting my willingness to use the web.

      • FishFace@lemmy.world
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        • Do you accept cookies?
        • Bonus GDPR consent because we couldn’t be bothered rolling cookie consent into it!
        • Subscribe to our newsletter!
        • Enable notifications!
        • Log in to Google!

        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.

        • CrowAirbrush@lemm.ee
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          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.

          • FishFace@lemmy.world
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            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:

            1. go to website, receive prompt
            2. decline all non-required cookies
            3. go to next page within website, receive prompt again
            4. decline all but functional cookies (or similar wording
            5. go to next page, no prompt.
          • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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            1 year ago

            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.

        • laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          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

      • Uglyhead@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        *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…

  • Otter@lemmy.ca
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    This sounds like it’s going to further erode people’s trust in the health systems and the advice of doctors.

    • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
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      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.

    • ByteJunk@lemmy.world
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      They should preface the warnings with something like “Texas lawmakers require us to say the following:”

  • elvith@feddit.de
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    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?

  • arc@lemm.ee
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    Masturbation makes hair grow on the palms of your hands - it’s science people.

      • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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        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.

      • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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        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
      • SulaymanF@lemmy.world
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        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.

        • HappycamperNZ@lemmy.world
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          No, but if it stops me having a drunk hookup with a random it has the same effect.

          Good old steak v hotdogs arguement

          • Embargo@lemm.ee
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            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.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    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?

  • figaro@lemdro.id
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    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.’”

    • KrummsHairyBalls@lemmy.ca
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      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”.

  • EatYouWell@lemmy.world
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    I don’t understand how Texas expects to enforce such a law, unless these companies have physical offices in the state.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      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.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    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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