Published December 6, 2024
In the mid-1990s, while America was waking up to the intoxicating new experience of being online, lawmakers were waking up to the perils the new medium posed, especially for children. As pornographers raced to stake out valuable real estate in cyberspace, Congress rushed out the Communications Decency Act of 1996, designed to keep anyone too young to buy a Playboy magazine from accessing Playboy.com. Civil liberties advocates, however, quickly mobilized against this specter of “censorship,” and the Supreme Court, valuing adults’ right to porn above children’s right to innocence, quashed the law. A second congressional attempt, the Children’s Online Protection Act of 1998, lasted a bit longer, winding its way through the courts for six whole years before again falling prey to the remorseless forces of free speech absolutism.
By then, pornography of every description, including video depictions of violent and grotesque acts, was well-entrenched on the increasingly high-speed World Wide Web. By 2020, porn sites received more website traffic than Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Zoom, Pinterest, and LinkedIn combined. The top porn site, Pornhub, is the 10th most-visited website in America. Even the 10,000th-ranked site gets 4 million views a year globally. The industry’s No. 1 market is under-age 18, a majority of whom now have their first sexual experience with a paid or coerced performer online—an experience that frequently shapes their whole subsequent sexual development, leading to addiction, depression, sexual violence, and sometimes suicide.
For 20 years, it looked like our society was content to simply look the other way in the face of this systemic child abuse, sacrificing the next generation on the altar not of Molech but of Asherah. That may finally be about to change.
Click here to continue reading.
