Bess Can't Go There, Redux: YouTube's Big ID Grab

I’ve written before about the irritating censorship of the Internet, and it’s gotten worse. Pornhub, in response to various states’ insistence on collecting people’s government ID before letting people view pornography, has blocked its site from being visible in those states. (And no, little kids are not out there looking for a site called “Pornhub.” Grow up.) YouTube, because Google gave up its old motto of “Don’t be evil” over a decade ago and now strives to be as evil as possible all the time, has jumped on the “You must give us your actual government ID in order to view adult content” bandwagon.

To be 100% clear: I do not believe children should be looking at porn sites, because I do not believe that children under 12 should have unsupervised Internet access in the first goddamn place. The Internet is not for little kids. If you hand your child a smartphone or tablet without serious parental blocks in place, you are the problem. Seriously, stop that. Read to your kids. Encourage them to play with actual, physical toys like kids are supposed to do. But I digress.

The main point of doing things on the Internet, for the vast majority of normal people, is that you don’t have to attach your government name to anything. Seriously. Go through this entire site. Is my government name anywhere there? NO. Because it shouldn’t be. Until about 2010 or thereabouts, the vast majority of people on the Internet did not use their real name for anything that wasn’t directly work-related.

Facebook ruined the Internet in a way we are still coming to terms with when it, as the largest social-media website of the time, insisted that everybody on it use their real government name. The Internet is for anonymity. We all have shit that we don't want our employers, our grandmothers, or our church groups to know. That doesn't mean that these things are bad, just that they're, you know, private.

Having to give out my actual government ID to look at adult content of any kind does all of the following things, none of which are good:

  1. It tells large corporations that John Doe of 123 Fake Street likes specific kinds of pornography. This is absolutely nobody’s business, certainly not that of the corporations. Ask me under my government name, on any kind of public record, what my kinks are, and you will hear absolute radio silence because YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW THAT.
  2. Big websites are hacked, and personal data leaked, all the damn time. So now, John Doe’s boss knows what kind of pornography John Doe likes to look at when he’s not on the job. If John Doe’s boss is a certain kind of Christian, that means John Doe is out of a job for things his boss had absolutely zero business knowing about.
  3. Corporations are constantly selling all of our data to the highest bidder. It’s disgusting, and it means that the second I put my government name on something that isn’t squeaky-clean, every single major corporation will know about it. Every single one. In a world where everything is provided to us by a dwindling number of corporations—or in other words, MONOPOLIES, this is a horrifying prospect. Corporations should not have anything to do with what consenting adults choose to do in the privacy of their own bedrooms.
  4. It causes the ads that John Doe gets, which up to now have been clean and relatively non-embarrassing, to be full of whatever Weird Shit John Doe is into in the bedroom. So now John Doe can’t show his household anything whatsoever on the Internet, because it’ll be covered in ads for, I don’t know, sexy feet or something. (Is that a thing? I’m not into feet, so I don’t know if that’s a thing.)
  5. As a knock-on effect of #4, John Doe also can’t let his kids ever use any device that he accesses the Internet on. ANY device. Sit down and think about that.
  6. Since the Christofascists currently in charge of the US government are very strongly anti-porn, anti-sex, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-fun-of-any-kind, John Doe could one day be prosecuted for having looked at That Foot Video on Pornhub one time.

This is worse than the Bess-ification of the Internet. The big websites no longer allowing porn just means you have to go to other, smaller websites. The big websites attaching the porn you watch to your government name in such a public way is a violation of privacy. All I can guess is that they want old-school pornographic magazines to make a comeback, because you can still buy those with cash if you know where to look.

So why is YouTube asking for my particular government ID on this particular day? Because I wanted to watch an AMV of the song "Manga Maniac" by S.E.X. Appeal. An AMV, I hasten to add, that I watched in college 20 years ago with zero interference of any kind because it is PG-13. I can easily access the song itself, which is not age-restricted. But no. YouTube wants my government ID to watch a silly video about a guy who's way too into anime. So instead of watching a silly video, I just spent a half-hour writing this essay.