Internet Porn Censorship

A new Washington state law will make it illegal to share fake pornography that appears to depict real people having sex. Advancements in artificial intelligence have made it easy to use a single photograph to impose someone's features on realistic-looking deepfake porn. The new Washington law, which Gov. Jay Inslee signed last week, will make it a gross misdemeanor to knowingly share fabricated intimate images of people without their consent.

People can be prosecuted if they share deepfake porn of unconsenting adults more than once. 

The trouble is that such images and videos are already widely available on the internet and it seems horribly disproportionate to persecute people for passing on interesting snippets they come across.

Indiana's Republican governor, Eric Holcomb, has signed into law the state's version of the age/ID verification bills being sponsored around the country by anti-porn religious conservatives.

SB 17 requires age verification for material that Indiana deems harmful to minors. The new law will take effect July 1.

This bill stipulates that any website that displays 'material harmful to minors,' is required to use an age verification method to guarantee only adults are accessing the website, the civil liberties group wrote. If the website fails to do so, the parents of a child harmed by the website's content can sue for damages. And, as passed in the Indiana House, the bill would also allow the Attorney General to sue companies who fail to follow the law.

SB 17 will undoubtedly have a chilling effect on free expression online. The legitimate fear of having personal information exposed may deter adults from accessing legal and consensual adult content, thereby limiting their freedom to explore and express themselves in a private digital space, the ACLU of Indiana concluded.

Indiana is the ninth U.S. state to pass a law mandating age/ID verification for viewing adult content.

Meanwhile in Texas, Pornhub has decided to voluntarily withdraw its content from the state. Texas was one of the earlier states to inflict age/ID verification but its enforcement was delayed by a legal case. That legal case has just been lost so Pornhub has reverted to the self blocking policy implemented in other states with age/ID verification requirements. A judgment on March 8 from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas can enforce a new law requiring age-verification systems on porn websites .

Viewers who attempt to visit Pornhub.com are met with a statement from the site's owners, Aylo Global Entertainment, explaining the block:

you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website, the statement reads in part. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas' stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.

A moral campaigner who has been waging a one-man War on Porn in Germany, and who developed an AI tool that scans online content to identify porn images, has now exported that technology for use by a Belgian media censor.

Tobias Schmid, director of the State Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia, announced the tool after supervising its development himself. He named it KIVI, a word play referencing surveillance.

A spokeswoman for the State Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia confirmed to NetzPolitik that there were exploratory talks taking place regarding expanding the use of KIVI across Europe. Last week, it was confirmed that Belgium's Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA) is also automatically searching the Internet, looking for freely accessible pornography, among other things.

KIVI was developed for Schmid by Berlin-based Condat AG and is currently being used by all 14 state media authorities in Germany. In addition to pornography, KIVI is also trained to detect categories like extremism, hate speech, swastikas or the glorification of drugs.

Belgium's CSA is now scanning X.com for adult content, Meineck reported, noting, From September to December 2023, around 5,000 suspicious activity reports were collected. Examiners viewed around a fifth of it, and around 90% of this content was 'clearly' pornographic, and thus should not be accessible without strict age controls.

Legislators in the US have introduced the DEFIANCE (Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits) Act of 2024 aimed at censoring deepfake content on the internet. This legislative response comes in the wake of a disturbing incident involving Taylor Swift, whose likeness was exploited in AI-generated explicit images that circulated widely on social media platforms.

The DEFIANCE Act takes holds creator accountable for the dissemination of digitally forged, sexually explicit content. The primary focus of the legislation is to empower victims, particularly women, allowing them to seek legal recourse against those responsible for creating and spreading deepfakes.

US Senator Josh Hawley, a key proponent of the DEFIANCE Act, emphasized the importance of protecting innocent individuals from being featured in AI-generated pornography. He stated:

Nobody--neither celebrities nor ordinary Americans--should ever have to find themselves featured in AI pornography. Innocent people have a right to defend their reputations and hold perpetrators accountable in court. This bill will make that a reality. Safeguarding Victims

The UK Government's Department for Science, Innovation, Technology and Censorship has called for evidence to inform the final recommendations of its 'Independent' Pornography Review. The government writes:

The government wants to ensure that any legislation and regulation operates appropriately for all pornographic content, and that the criminal justice system have the tools they need to respond to online illegal pornographic material, and exploitation and abuse in the industry.

The Independent Pornography Review involves a comprehensive assessment of the legislation, regulation and enforcement of online and offline pornographic content, and is overseen by Independent Lead Reviewer Baroness Gabby Bertin.

The review will take an evidence-based approach to develop a range of recommendations on how to best to achieve the review's objectives:

• understand the prevalence and harmful impact of illegal pornography online, and the impact on viewers of other forms of legal pornography, including emerging themes like AI-generated pornography, and the impact on viewer's attitudes to violence against women and girls;

• assess the public's awareness and understanding of existing regulation and legislation of pornography;

• consider the current rules in place to regulate the pornography industry, comparing online and offline laws;

• determine if law enforcers and the justice system are responding to illegal pornography sufficiently, and if change is needed;

• find out how prevalent human trafficking and exploitation is in the industry, before recommending how to identify and tackle this;

• use this knowledge to set out what more can be done to provide those who need it with guidance on the potential harmful impact of pornography.

To ensure the review's final recommendations are robust, it is important that a broad range of views and evidence are considered. This call for evidence invites:

• members of the public

• the government

• subject matter experts

• organisations

to contribute to the review.

The call for evidence closes on 7 March 2024.