A completely absurd and clearly biased article trying to defend the impossible. Age verification is somehow supposed to be bad for online porn content providers (even though it is already mandatory for real-world porn content providers, for obvious reasons) because... it would hurt their profits and is not 100% effective. Child labour laws also severely hurt company profits and are not 100% effective; so much so that companies choose to delocalize production plants in the opposite part of the world, just to be able to continue exploiting workers. I guess child labour laws are bad too, and must be stopped.
My favourite and most out-of-touch part of the article was the one in which they argue it is "a fallacy" to think pornography can be harmful to teenagers because "research into pornography’s impact on children is limited and inconclusive — prompting calls for further study". I actually laughed out loud at this part
classified · 25m ago
Could you please point us to credible sources about how online porn is supposed to be harmful to teenagers beyond “If they knew I'm watching this, they'd laugh at me”?
As for the bad article, it was clearly AI-generated.
ckbkr10 · 2h ago
I wish there was a honest discussion, I am with them about parents not giving a shit and pushing away responsibility. The idea of supervision in education institutions is good as well.
The kids in my family were well protected and supervised, they got into contact with hardcore porn at the age of 6 when other kids had access to smartphones and exposed them to it.
I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.
In my 20s I was promiscious and lived what I saw in pornography, only later in life I learned about normal sex.
In germany we had a state sponsored porn flick once produced by ZDF Neo, maybe that is the approach to expose the kids to material that shows sex as a respectable flow rather than an extreme fantasy.
jakobnissen · 1h ago
But kids (and adults) are exposed to all kinds of fantasies. War is not like Call of Duty. The Mafia is not like GTA. Monarchy is not like in the fairy tales. Romance is not like Twilight. BDSM is not like 50 Shades of Grey.
For all these things, we rely on people's world experience and common sense to figure it out. I think it's pretty obvious that sex is not like porn, and I don't understand why so many people are convinced that people can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality in this domain specifically.
jjcob · 1h ago
People can't tell the difference in any domain. People copy what they see. It's why James Bond stopped smoking in movies, and people smoke far less now.
Mainstream porn sites show a lot of weird practices (what's up with that strangulation fetish??) and I do think it has a bad influence.
I don't think age verification is a good solution, because we don't become immune to influence at age 18. Adults are just as vulnerable to copying poor behavior as minors.
I think we should do the opposite: Remove stigma associated with sexuality. Why can't more movies just include everyday sex scenes? Why do we need to make this distinction where you need to go to a different site if you want to see something more explicit than a nipple? Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.
jolmg · 1h ago
> Adults are just as vulnerable to copying poor behavior as minors.
Adults can be vulnerable, but I don't think just as vulnerable. Youngsters with no initial idea of how a given thing works have nothing with which to compare and contrast and potentially reject the first idea presented to them. Generally, the younger, the more impressionable.
> Remove stigma associated with sexuality. [...] Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.
I do agree with loosening the stigma. If there are parents that are giving their children unrestricted access to the internet, and those children may expose things to others that have better parental controls, then the straightforward solution is to have some form of earlier sex-ed. Doesn't need to cover everything, but enough to prepare them against the bad influences they'll apparently encounter. "Something steamy on Netflix" may be a positive counterexample to help them reject nonsense fantasies on porn sites.
high_na_euv · 1h ago
>. It's why James Bond stopped smoking in movies, and people smoke far less now.
Lol what, what makes you think it was caused by James Bond, not countless other anti smoking initiatives?
chii · 1h ago
It's a feedback loop - smoking was advertised as being cool way back when, which led to movie characters smoking to appear cool, which then reinforces the advertising.
When there was a push to regulate smoking in advertising, it cut the original feedback loop which made film/tv characters not use smoking as a sign of being cool. This led to advertising (if it were allowed) to be less effective at portrayal of coolness via smoking.
It's not a simple one-to-one cause and effect.
bgarbiak · 1h ago
It was cool to smoke when all the cool guys in the movies were smoking. One of the reasons it’s not cool anymore is that the cool guys in the movies don’t smoke nowadays (although they do it more often now than they did ten years ago; which is worrying).
Characters in movies stopped (or reduced a lot) smoking pretty much across the board.
close04 · 1h ago
It’s not that people stopped but that they didn’t start. Smoking was no longer sold as cool so kids didn’t learn of it as a cool thing.
Kids and even adults pick up cues from games, movies, books. War is like CoD and heroic war movies (why do many 18 year olds go to the army expecting glory and come back with trauma and broken dreams?), sex is like in porn, and gangs are like in GTA. Until they gain practical experience and slowly realize some things are vastly different. Maybe a couple will love “porn sex”. Most others will break a leg having shower sex and reconsider the “teachings”.
Al-Khwarizmi · 1h ago
It's different. One big part of the reason has already been said in sibling comments: taboo. Kids know that the huge jumps in martial arts movies are impossible because they jump when they play, they have seen their friends and classmates jump, they probably have tried flying kicks when playing so they get an idea of where the limits are. Nothing of this happens with sex, plus often they aren't exposed to anyone talking about it, except of course in porn.
The other part is the huge insecurities people have in this domain. You will meet a lot of people who aren't afraid to tell you that they dance like crap, or have no musical ear, or are in bad shape, etc.; but even if you meet people who talk about sex, no one is going to tell you that they last one minute in bed.
maccard · 1h ago
We shouldn’t be giving 6 year olds access to call of duty or GTA either. PEGI ratings (although overzealous) are a god starting point. I wouldn’t withhold an average 10 year old from a 12 rated game, but I wouldn’t give them access to an 18+.
Also, we (usually) talk about these things - video games are not the only source of discourse of violence or conflict, but sex is such a taboo topic that it’s highly likely most or all of someone’s knowledge will come from what they’ve learned on the internet
Aeolun · 2h ago
> I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.
Only if they have no other exposure to this pretty damn normal thing. If all the adults in their life refuse to talk about because of some misplaced idea it is shameful, where are they going to get that info?
Not saying that’s the case for you, just that it’s the impression I get from many people.
Retric · 1h ago
> I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.
There’s a bunch of studies on this and at the individual level it seems to do a bunch of stuff, but at the population level it has at most an effect so small it can’t be measured. Which IMO suggests causation goes in the other direction. IE if you’re entering puberty early you may seek both porn and sex at a younger age.
That said, I’m not an expert and have only briefly looked through the literature.
happymellon · 1h ago
Why don't they do things that are within their control.
Such as mandatory site filtering options. So the same place you pay your bill, you can also set which sites you want to be blocked by an "admin" password.
Or are they afraid that people will add tracking.facebook.com to the block list?
The chances of the kids stealing the admin password are about as likely as the kids stealing your age verification password that you needed to set up to access Reddit.
blitzar · 1h ago
Parents dont want to be the "bad guy" or parents in any real sense.
edu · 1h ago
I think it's more the case that many parents are not tech savvy enough to even know that's possible or how to do it. Also, this create a safety net which seems too fragile, as you just need one family that doesn't do it to potentially expose all their friends.
lukan · 1h ago
Hm .. there is porn and there is porn. Of course the professional casts are fake, but there is usually for example a amateur porn category, a bit closer to reality. So if you blame porn for you being promiscious ... I would say you had the choice what kind of porn you watch. And likely rather, what kind of friends you hang around with.
edu · 1h ago
But from your own case, how do you protect your kids from other kids accessing hardcore porn at the age of 6? That would be a great argument in favour of blocking access unless age verification is provided so you reduce the chance of the "weakest link", otherwise as much as I can content block any device used by my kids the surface of having some other kid whose parent don't care/know how to block it would be enormous.
michaelt · 55m ago
> I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.
It's extremely difficult to get solid evidence of this stuff, as it all happens so slowly it's inseparable from many other gradual forces in society.
Are people getting married and having children less, because porn has undermined their ability to form healthy adult relationships?
Or is it because of a successful campaign against teen pregnancy? A rise in women's education levels making them want to wait to start a family? Contraception and pre-marital sex removing a major incentive to settle down? Society's infantilisation of men, who should put away childish things at a much younger age? A housing crisis and hollowing out of the lower middle class meaning people can't hope to afford a family home until middle age? A preference the man out-earns the woman being incompatible with a world where women out-perform men in education? Fears about the future, like the climate crisis? A decline in religion and traditional family values? The rise of online/app-based dating?
Our main tools for disentangling these influences are, as far as I can tell, vibes and anecdotes.
anal_reactor · 1h ago
> I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.
Honestly I'm really surprised that the generation that grew up on free access to internet porn and turned out fine is suddenly acting so prudish. As a kid I really believed that when my generation grows up, we'll be "the cool parents".
Of course porn distorted my view of sex, but let's be real - this damage is absolutely nothing compared to American family movies where a family of four with one adopted token black kid has a minor issue and then resolves it and everyone lives happily everafter. Those sold me the fantasy that as an adult I'd have lots of friends and a loving family and a satisfying job, and when none of that happened, I spent years feeling deep disappointment, which I still haven't processed.
Meanwhile hardcore porn I watched... look, that's the absolute least of issues I had as a kid. Growing up gay in a conservative country never gave me a chance to learn about proper relationships, I was immediately pushed into the underground world of hookups with shady people. Not to mention the plethora of other, unrelated issues, like constant bullying at school which nobody gave a fuck about, abusive parents, or ghetto community promoting criminal lifestyle. Or thinking even larger: what about whole generation that enters job market into recession, what about whole generation that will never build capital because they're trapped in a cycle of poverty, what about the constant fear that WW3 might be happening, what about social connections dissolving and people becoming more and more aggressive towards each other.
But those are difficult problems to tackle, so let's focus on kids seeing a naked titty instead. For sure that's a great use of our limited time.
edu · 1h ago
But I think a big difference is that while the current parent generation grow up with free access to internet, our access was limited usually to the family computer.
For us internet access was a bit of a ritual—find a computer and got some privacy. Or you could risk getting caught at the computer lab.
Now, the internet is ubiquitous and many kids have access to connected devices all the time (computers, tablets, smartphones) and it's harder to overview their use.
Also, the amount of content and extreme content available has exploded.
anal_reactor · 18m ago
But I think a big difference is that while the current parent generation grow up with family computers, our access was limited usually to porn magazines.
For us magazines were a bit of a ritual—find one and got some privacy. Or you could risk getting caught at the library.
Now, the internet is ubiquitous and many kids have access to connected devices at their homes (computers, landline phones) and it's harder to overview their use.
Also, the amount of content and extreme content available has exploded.
---
I leave as an exercise for the reader to one-up this argument regarding the introduction of porn magazines themselves, porn drawings once paper became a commodity, as so on, dating all the way back to the first human sculpture (fat woman with giant boobs).
edu · 8m ago
I totally agree on the easiness of accessing content
nomilk · 2h ago
The choice citizens have now is between an 'internet licence' (submit ID's to myriad sites), or an 'internet tax' (VPN).
Super annoying!
Given Australia doesn't even require Age Verification on porn sites (only on social media sites), the incentives hint this was strongly supported by legacy media (90% of Aussie media is owned by two companies, Newscorp and Nine Entertainment).
The internet licence will make it difficult for both authors and readers on alternative media platforms. And it will outright prohibit young people from getting information from non-permitted sources (of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources). (I've long said, to try to think clearly after watching 'the news' is akin to trying to operate heavy machinery after consuming alcohol).
general1465 · 1h ago
> Given Australia doesn't even require Age Verification on porn sites (only on social media sites)
Am I only one who sees loophole in creating a social media site, which will be a porn site first? FaceHub or Pornbook.
Freak_NL · 1h ago
FetLife? It exists, and is subject to the same laws and regulations. Any legal site will have to comply to a load of regulations, supplemented by the inscrutable rules laid down by Visa and Mastercard.
blitzar · 1h ago
It's called X.
nomilk · 1h ago
X is one of the prohibited sites for under 16's in Australia (falls under 'social media'), but someone should seriously tell Elon about this, because it may work and would be hilarious.
lordhumphrey · 42m ago
The 'internet tax' will not last, either, I fear.
Loads of VPNs are simply, someone other than the local ISP gets your data. Mullvad seems trustworthy, as an exception to this, and who else? And even then, Mullvad faces issues from websites and censorious countries trying to block it and bother its users all the time.
littlecranky67 · 11m ago
Proton includes a VPN in their office365 competitor Proton Business Suite. While big sites like Netflix don't want you to use VPN, I am sure porn sites are very happy to let you through once your VPN address is not longer in a jurisdiction that requires AV.
Aeolun · 2h ago
> The internet licence will make it difficult for both authors and readers on alternative media platforms
Not really? Like the article says, they’ll just go to sites that don’t require age verification.
nomilk · 1h ago
Hard to argue that isn't an inconvenience. In other words, the outcome is the same, but thanks to government intervention, everyone's worse off.
A good example of where social media can really matter is for say, gay kids in a religious households, where they might not be able to talk to someone in person. Social media makes it easy to create a dummy account and visit forums for advice or reassurance.
delusional · 2h ago
> of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources
What a silly idea. The modern world was built while traditional media existed. The decay and backsliding conicides with modern day social media. How does that point to traditional media being the culprit?
nomilk · 1h ago
In the extremes, both ideas are right. In terms of timeliness, relevance, quality, rigour, variety, discussion and debate the worst content on social media is orders of magnitude worse than the worst content on mainstream media.
But the inverse is also true: the best content on social media is orders of magnitude better than the best content on mainstream media.
An individual should be able to choose what works for them, not have the government disallow swaths of sources.
Telemakhos · 1h ago
I don’t understand what “traditional media” means in this context. Before the internet, kids didn’t have access to porn. It just wasn’t there when I was growing up. I’m sure someone out there had 8mm or 16mm porn films, but I as a child had no clue where to find those, and the physical stores selling them were not accessible: I didn’t have transportation to them, and they checked ID at the door. I heard of Playboy through friends at school, but I had zero access to it myself. I don’t think that was unusual.
Today every eight year old can browse Motherless for free with the same tablet he uses to watch whatever slop it is parents let their kids watch instead of educating them. That’s not a difference between “legacy” and “modern” porn but between zero access and full access.
verisimi · 2h ago
> And it will outright prohibit young people from getting information from non-permitted sources (of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources).
While I'll immediately believe their complaints about political shenanigans and publicity stunts going on in the EU commission, this post very obviously intentionally ignores good-faith efforts at building out privacy-preserving age verification using ZKP. They're laying into a strawman - with gusto - when they attack age verification methods that are objectively worse than the commission's best proposal.
It's hurting their own case by giving the EU commission the easiest retort imaginable. If you really don't want age verification, that's bad, because they usually get the last word in.
Better to respond in good faith to the commission's strongest possible argument, rather than do this, which is going to get brushed aside while handing them a win.
littlecranky67 · 8m ago
Love how the articles tiptoes around "Porn users don't want to be identified", yet later in the article they disclose that their current tracking method is able to uniquely identify users and their behaviour.
txrx0000 · 1h ago
It's much easier to implement user-configurable client-side filters at the application and OS level than censor the entire Internet.
But of course that's not what it's about.
Online age verification and content moderation was never about protecting anyone. It's about controlling the masses and tricking them into believing that it's for their own good.
edu · 1h ago
I agree that client-side filters would be a great solution, but I see two issues there:
1) Not everybody would know how to do it
2) This creates a weakest link problem, where in a class of say 15 kids, just having one with a non-blocked device would allow for all to see.
I don't know what would be good solution, maybe something intermediate... for example, filtering at the ISP level and making it mandatory for them to inform and request the settings for all their customers? Just a form, so they can block it. But then, maybe I want to block porn for my underage kids but not for me or my partner.
jolmg · 15m ago
> usually, us and Pornhub
Who's "us"? This blog doesn't seem to have an About Us.
cpa · 1h ago
I got the French version and was really confused, since it randomly mentioned autonomous vehicles on the page. Turns out, Age Verification = AV = Autonomous Vehicle.
That's why you do quality control on AI-generated content :^)
No comments yet
freddie_mercury · 1h ago
So the argument is that, even though age verification is required for this line of business in the real world, online it shouldn't be required because their ad-supported model won't be profitable?
precommunicator · 1h ago
Most important part:
> Device-level parental controls have existed for years, and can actually block a million sites. But politicians can’t take credit for them.
UrMomsRobotLovr · 2h ago
This age verification stuff is really poorly designed by law makers. That said, the article points out the number of free VPN services with ad blockers are a problem. Couldn’t they run their own free VPN services that enables access and keeps the ads?
Seems like porn VPN would be popular.
decimalenough · 2h ago
No, because law-abiding companies can't offer tools to circumvent the law.
As the article says, all this means is that law-abiding porn sites (that, for example, respond to requests to delete CSAM and revenge porn) will go bankrupt and everybody will be driven to sketchypron.xxx instead.
delusional · 1h ago
> law-abiding porn sites will go bankrupt
How would that work? Can PornHub not exist without the "lucrative" market of children watching porn?
Meneth · 1h ago
More like, they can't exist without the lucrative market of the 90% of current customers who will refuse age verification and go elsewhere.
ngruhn · 2h ago
Google can probably infer what I had for breakfast from
the way I move the cursor. Can't we have ID-less age verification somehow? Sure, it won't be 100% accurate but keeping out 90% of the kids is a win.
Freak_NL · 49m ago
Already possible! Banks know who you are, so what if there was a safe way to let a site know that you are over 18 — and nothing more than that — through some common API?
This was exactly what the German public transport service Mopla did when I registered an account there. It needed to know my name to be able to sell me the personal Deutschlandticket. To verify my identity their web application forwarded me to list of countries, where I selected the Netherlands, and then my bank from the list there. That forwarded me to my bank's digital environment, with the request to share my name with Mopla (and just that one attribute). I then used my bank's auth system to approve sharing that claim.
Simple, transparent, and at no point did Mopla have to do anything with ID cards or AI or whatever.
I would expect systems like this to become more broadly available in the near future. In the EU for sure.
kcrwfrd_ · 1h ago
They should just do something like have parental controls that can configure the user agent with the user’s age, and require adult websites to not serve underage users.
It wouldn’t deter kids if you want to let them have unsupervised root access to a computer (like I enjoyed when I was 12), but I think it would be fairly effective for a walled garden like an iPhone
octo888 · 2h ago
No, let's not encourage Google and the rest of the ad industry
modernerd · 2h ago
Google launched ID-less age approximation in July in the US:
> Age verification: If we incorrectly estimate a user to be under 18, the user has the option to correct their age, including by uploading a photo of their government ID or a selfie.
Hopefully false positives won't be set high and this abused as an excuse to obtain sensitive personal information on their users.
ngruhn · 1h ago
Amazing, that's exactly what I had in mind.
nine_k · 1h ago
How about the scam of lawmaking disconnected from reality :(
Introducing laws that are going to be relatively trivially circumvented, which do not provide the protection they purport to provide, and which burden citizens with rather useless but onerous duties, should be called out as a failure at lawmaking. I think the best defense against such laws is to show thoroughly why and how bad and useless such laws are, so that large enough political constituencies (that is, us, citizens) would become interested in fixing or repealing them, and would vote accordingly.
littlecranky67 · 1h ago
The article is a bit one-sided (yes, they have an agenda):
> But that comparison is dishonest: on a gambling or merchant site, users already expect to submit personal data — credit card info, name, phone number, address. They are paying for something.
On a free site, users do not expect to hand over private data. They simply refuse — and move on to other sites. Why wouldn’t they?
the success of OnlyFans destroys this argument. It is not that people do not pay for porn - the authors try to uphold their free, ad-based model. But looking at OnlyFans, people absolutely seem to be OK submitting their personal data incl. payment details.
prmoustache · 1h ago
It is not like kids/teenager who currently visit the big porn sites like pornhub will say: "Oh I can't, let's read a book instead"
They'll just get it somewhere else, private chatrooms, torrents, etc and from probably even less regulated and more nefarious sources that also serve stuff super hardcore or completely illegal.
edu · 57m ago
But it will be harder for them, the same way it's harder to get alcohol if you don't have a proper ID, and just that will prevent a good number of them of accessing it or at least accessing it in a regular way.
prmoustache · 26m ago
Well in the case of alcohol and tobacco it is a bit different, it is an hardware good that can't be cloned infinitely and distributed through many medias. If you don't want your kids to have access to the internet at home and fap all afternoon it is quite easy. If you don't want them to look at smartphone from other kids, all bets are off.
As an under 12y old, my first encounter with porn was as porn paper magazines rolled and stored between the wall and the radiators of my school class. No amount of server side age verification will prevent kids and teenagers from sharing stuff.
As a parent I'd rather pay for access to an ethical porn website that promote pleasure for all parties and safe sex and give access to it to my teenagers than trying at all cost to prevent them from seeing all porn.
blitzar · 1h ago
The biggest impact I have experienced so far has been that popups for cam sites, porn sites and other such affiliate marketting referal attempts lead to an age verification page rather than directly to all the "hot singles in my area looking for sex".
I don't like it, but for the most part the internet is now a better place for me to browse.
johtso · 1h ago
Do you not use an adblocker? I can't remember the last time I saw that kind of ad..
blitzar · 1h ago
DNS level and in browser ad blocking. Still not enough to overcome some of the more agressive parts of the internet.
29athrowaway · 1h ago
Age verification will make porn websites go out of business. And this is likely what the legislators truly wanted.
Porn is partially protected by the constitution and it is politically impopular to tell people what they can't do.
decimalenough · 2h ago
Australia is about to introduce the dumpster fire of age verification for all social media, not just porn. Or at least the law says so, nobody appears to have the faintest idea of how this will be implemented or what "social media" even means.
pcthrowaway · 36m ago
While I agree that there's something dystopian about government-mandated age verification on the web, it's amusing to say the least to see porn companies entering discourse on ethics, since the commodification of sexual services under capitalism is already a tough sell to people who are particularly interested in social justice.
high_byte · 2h ago
welcome to the Age of Scam Verification
the internet is no longer anonymous
staticelf · 2h ago
Modern politicians only goal seems to be how to make peoples lives worse. I don't understand how this did happen. I think the people simply got too lazy and let them run loose instead of resisting like we used to.
Now the EU is slowly turning into a oligarchy where very few control the majority. For every stupid law they make, the more I wish for it's destruction.
arcane23 · 1h ago
Lately there has been a larger power difference between governing and governed, and it shows itself in these kinds of moves.
My favourite and most out-of-touch part of the article was the one in which they argue it is "a fallacy" to think pornography can be harmful to teenagers because "research into pornography’s impact on children is limited and inconclusive — prompting calls for further study". I actually laughed out loud at this part
As for the bad article, it was clearly AI-generated.
The kids in my family were well protected and supervised, they got into contact with hardcore porn at the age of 6 when other kids had access to smartphones and exposed them to it.
I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.
In my 20s I was promiscious and lived what I saw in pornography, only later in life I learned about normal sex.
In germany we had a state sponsored porn flick once produced by ZDF Neo, maybe that is the approach to expose the kids to material that shows sex as a respectable flow rather than an extreme fantasy.
For all these things, we rely on people's world experience and common sense to figure it out. I think it's pretty obvious that sex is not like porn, and I don't understand why so many people are convinced that people can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality in this domain specifically.
Mainstream porn sites show a lot of weird practices (what's up with that strangulation fetish??) and I do think it has a bad influence.
I don't think age verification is a good solution, because we don't become immune to influence at age 18. Adults are just as vulnerable to copying poor behavior as minors.
I think we should do the opposite: Remove stigma associated with sexuality. Why can't more movies just include everyday sex scenes? Why do we need to make this distinction where you need to go to a different site if you want to see something more explicit than a nipple? Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.
Adults can be vulnerable, but I don't think just as vulnerable. Youngsters with no initial idea of how a given thing works have nothing with which to compare and contrast and potentially reject the first idea presented to them. Generally, the younger, the more impressionable.
> Remove stigma associated with sexuality. [...] Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.
I do agree with loosening the stigma. If there are parents that are giving their children unrestricted access to the internet, and those children may expose things to others that have better parental controls, then the straightforward solution is to have some form of earlier sex-ed. Doesn't need to cover everything, but enough to prepare them against the bad influences they'll apparently encounter. "Something steamy on Netflix" may be a positive counterexample to help them reject nonsense fantasies on porn sites.
Lol what, what makes you think it was caused by James Bond, not countless other anti smoking initiatives?
When there was a push to regulate smoking in advertising, it cut the original feedback loop which made film/tv characters not use smoking as a sign of being cool. This led to advertising (if it were allowed) to be less effective at portrayal of coolness via smoking.
It's not a simple one-to-one cause and effect.
The correlation between an exposure and initiating smoking is proved: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27043456/
Kids and even adults pick up cues from games, movies, books. War is like CoD and heroic war movies (why do many 18 year olds go to the army expecting glory and come back with trauma and broken dreams?), sex is like in porn, and gangs are like in GTA. Until they gain practical experience and slowly realize some things are vastly different. Maybe a couple will love “porn sex”. Most others will break a leg having shower sex and reconsider the “teachings”.
The other part is the huge insecurities people have in this domain. You will meet a lot of people who aren't afraid to tell you that they dance like crap, or have no musical ear, or are in bad shape, etc.; but even if you meet people who talk about sex, no one is going to tell you that they last one minute in bed.
Also, we (usually) talk about these things - video games are not the only source of discourse of violence or conflict, but sex is such a taboo topic that it’s highly likely most or all of someone’s knowledge will come from what they’ve learned on the internet
Only if they have no other exposure to this pretty damn normal thing. If all the adults in their life refuse to talk about because of some misplaced idea it is shameful, where are they going to get that info?
Not saying that’s the case for you, just that it’s the impression I get from many people.
There’s a bunch of studies on this and at the individual level it seems to do a bunch of stuff, but at the population level it has at most an effect so small it can’t be measured. Which IMO suggests causation goes in the other direction. IE if you’re entering puberty early you may seek both porn and sex at a younger age.
That said, I’m not an expert and have only briefly looked through the literature.
Such as mandatory site filtering options. So the same place you pay your bill, you can also set which sites you want to be blocked by an "admin" password.
Or are they afraid that people will add tracking.facebook.com to the block list?
The chances of the kids stealing the admin password are about as likely as the kids stealing your age verification password that you needed to set up to access Reddit.
It's extremely difficult to get solid evidence of this stuff, as it all happens so slowly it's inseparable from many other gradual forces in society.
Are people getting married and having children less, because porn has undermined their ability to form healthy adult relationships?
Or is it because of a successful campaign against teen pregnancy? A rise in women's education levels making them want to wait to start a family? Contraception and pre-marital sex removing a major incentive to settle down? Society's infantilisation of men, who should put away childish things at a much younger age? A housing crisis and hollowing out of the lower middle class meaning people can't hope to afford a family home until middle age? A preference the man out-earns the woman being incompatible with a world where women out-perform men in education? Fears about the future, like the climate crisis? A decline in religion and traditional family values? The rise of online/app-based dating?
Our main tools for disentangling these influences are, as far as I can tell, vibes and anecdotes.
Honestly I'm really surprised that the generation that grew up on free access to internet porn and turned out fine is suddenly acting so prudish. As a kid I really believed that when my generation grows up, we'll be "the cool parents".
Of course porn distorted my view of sex, but let's be real - this damage is absolutely nothing compared to American family movies where a family of four with one adopted token black kid has a minor issue and then resolves it and everyone lives happily everafter. Those sold me the fantasy that as an adult I'd have lots of friends and a loving family and a satisfying job, and when none of that happened, I spent years feeling deep disappointment, which I still haven't processed.
Meanwhile hardcore porn I watched... look, that's the absolute least of issues I had as a kid. Growing up gay in a conservative country never gave me a chance to learn about proper relationships, I was immediately pushed into the underground world of hookups with shady people. Not to mention the plethora of other, unrelated issues, like constant bullying at school which nobody gave a fuck about, abusive parents, or ghetto community promoting criminal lifestyle. Or thinking even larger: what about whole generation that enters job market into recession, what about whole generation that will never build capital because they're trapped in a cycle of poverty, what about the constant fear that WW3 might be happening, what about social connections dissolving and people becoming more and more aggressive towards each other.
But those are difficult problems to tackle, so let's focus on kids seeing a naked titty instead. For sure that's a great use of our limited time.
For us internet access was a bit of a ritual—find a computer and got some privacy. Or you could risk getting caught at the computer lab.
Now, the internet is ubiquitous and many kids have access to connected devices all the time (computers, tablets, smartphones) and it's harder to overview their use.
Also, the amount of content and extreme content available has exploded.
Now, the internet is ubiquitous and many kids have access to connected devices at their homes (computers, landline phones) and it's harder to overview their use.
Also, the amount of content and extreme content available has exploded.
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I leave as an exercise for the reader to one-up this argument regarding the introduction of porn magazines themselves, porn drawings once paper became a commodity, as so on, dating all the way back to the first human sculpture (fat woman with giant boobs).
Super annoying!
Given Australia doesn't even require Age Verification on porn sites (only on social media sites), the incentives hint this was strongly supported by legacy media (90% of Aussie media is owned by two companies, Newscorp and Nine Entertainment).
The internet licence will make it difficult for both authors and readers on alternative media platforms. And it will outright prohibit young people from getting information from non-permitted sources (of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources). (I've long said, to try to think clearly after watching 'the news' is akin to trying to operate heavy machinery after consuming alcohol).
Am I only one who sees loophole in creating a social media site, which will be a porn site first? FaceHub or Pornbook.
Loads of VPNs are simply, someone other than the local ISP gets your data. Mullvad seems trustworthy, as an exception to this, and who else? And even then, Mullvad faces issues from websites and censorious countries trying to block it and bother its users all the time.
Not really? Like the article says, they’ll just go to sites that don’t require age verification.
A good example of where social media can really matter is for say, gay kids in a religious households, where they might not be able to talk to someone in person. Social media makes it easy to create a dummy account and visit forums for advice or reassurance.
What a silly idea. The modern world was built while traditional media existed. The decay and backsliding conicides with modern day social media. How does that point to traditional media being the culprit?
But the inverse is also true: the best content on social media is orders of magnitude better than the best content on mainstream media.
An individual should be able to choose what works for them, not have the government disallow swaths of sources.
Today every eight year old can browse Motherless for free with the same tablet he uses to watch whatever slop it is parents let their kids watch instead of educating them. That’s not a difference between “legacy” and “modern” porn but between zero access and full access.
Verification is the stick, AI is the carrot.
More than one answer is a bug - Eric Schmidt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4
It's hurting their own case by giving the EU commission the easiest retort imaginable. If you really don't want age verification, that's bad, because they usually get the last word in.
Better to respond in good faith to the commission's strongest possible argument, rather than do this, which is going to get brushed aside while handing them a win.
But of course that's not what it's about.
Online age verification and content moderation was never about protecting anyone. It's about controlling the masses and tricking them into believing that it's for their own good.
1) Not everybody would know how to do it 2) This creates a weakest link problem, where in a class of say 15 kids, just having one with a non-blocked device would allow for all to see.
I don't know what would be good solution, maybe something intermediate... for example, filtering at the ISP level and making it mandatory for them to inform and request the settings for all their customers? Just a form, so they can block it. But then, maybe I want to block porn for my underage kids but not for me or my partner.
Who's "us"? This blog doesn't seem to have an About Us.
That's why you do quality control on AI-generated content :^)
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> Device-level parental controls have existed for years, and can actually block a million sites. But politicians can’t take credit for them.
Seems like porn VPN would be popular.
As the article says, all this means is that law-abiding porn sites (that, for example, respond to requests to delete CSAM and revenge porn) will go bankrupt and everybody will be driven to sketchypron.xxx instead.
How would that work? Can PornHub not exist without the "lucrative" market of children watching porn?
This was exactly what the German public transport service Mopla did when I registered an account there. It needed to know my name to be able to sell me the personal Deutschlandticket. To verify my identity their web application forwarded me to list of countries, where I selected the Netherlands, and then my bank from the list there. That forwarded me to my bank's digital environment, with the request to share my name with Mopla (and just that one attribute). I then used my bank's auth system to approve sharing that claim.
Simple, transparent, and at no point did Mopla have to do anything with ID cards or AI or whatever.
I would expect systems like this to become more broadly available in the near future. In the EU for sure.
It wouldn’t deter kids if you want to let them have unsupervised root access to a computer (like I enjoyed when I was 12), but I think it would be fairly effective for a walled garden like an iPhone
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/age-assurance...
Hopefully false positives won't be set high and this abused as an excuse to obtain sensitive personal information on their users.
Introducing laws that are going to be relatively trivially circumvented, which do not provide the protection they purport to provide, and which burden citizens with rather useless but onerous duties, should be called out as a failure at lawmaking. I think the best defense against such laws is to show thoroughly why and how bad and useless such laws are, so that large enough political constituencies (that is, us, citizens) would become interested in fixing or repealing them, and would vote accordingly.
> But that comparison is dishonest: on a gambling or merchant site, users already expect to submit personal data — credit card info, name, phone number, address. They are paying for something. On a free site, users do not expect to hand over private data. They simply refuse — and move on to other sites. Why wouldn’t they?
the success of OnlyFans destroys this argument. It is not that people do not pay for porn - the authors try to uphold their free, ad-based model. But looking at OnlyFans, people absolutely seem to be OK submitting their personal data incl. payment details.
They'll just get it somewhere else, private chatrooms, torrents, etc and from probably even less regulated and more nefarious sources that also serve stuff super hardcore or completely illegal.
As an under 12y old, my first encounter with porn was as porn paper magazines rolled and stored between the wall and the radiators of my school class. No amount of server side age verification will prevent kids and teenagers from sharing stuff.
As a parent I'd rather pay for access to an ethical porn website that promote pleasure for all parties and safe sex and give access to it to my teenagers than trying at all cost to prevent them from seeing all porn.
I don't like it, but for the most part the internet is now a better place for me to browse.
Porn is partially protected by the constitution and it is politically impopular to tell people what they can't do.
the internet is no longer anonymous
Now the EU is slowly turning into a oligarchy where very few control the majority. For every stupid law they make, the more I wish for it's destruction.