Studies show that half of 11 to 13-year-olds have seen pornography at some point.
What's missing from that stat is where they saw porn. Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Imgur, etc are full of porn but aren't technically porn sites. If that's where kids are accessing porn then blocking porn sites will not fix the problem.
Unless you understand what the problem actually is there will be no way to fix it.
>Unless you understand what the problem actually is there will be no way to fix it.
Oh that's easy. The problem is with society. No one is in any way damaged or traumatized cause they saw some sex on a screen at approximately 13 years old. Its ridiculous we go through the intrusive charade of trying to stop them. The problem is there is no problem.
Usually when politicians ressurect "think of the children" initiatives they want to distract attention from something. What's the current UK scandal, besides the obvious ongoing BRExit consequences?
This is extremely dismissive of the issue, which does exist to some extent, even if its often over blown.
The problem isn't "13 year olds being traumatized because they see sex on a screen" but "13 year olds developing porn addiction alongside their burgeoning sexuality".
Porn addiction is a very real issue and todays youth is especially susceptible to it. Today a 13 y/o boy can see more breasts in an hour than every one of his prior-digital age male ancestors have seen combined. Its an absolute stimulus overload.
What's contested is if its the porn itself that causes the addiction or the feedback loop and easy access is what leads to compulsive consumption. No mainstream psychological organization is saying that there are no addictive or compulsive behaviors associated with excess porn consuption, just that it doesnt meet the critia as a medically diagnosed addiction and is closer to a compulsion.
For laymen however, referring to it as an addiction is what most accurately encompasses its impact on those who become compulsive consumers of it.
a) Build a community around a topic
b) Create an identifier for this community we are NoFap and We celebrate NoNutNovember
c) Sell SELF-HELP books, merchandise and services around the topic in order to guilt trip people into believing this voodoo science.
i.e. https://nofap.com/groups/
It’s not in bad faith. The example you gave is emblematic of where the cultural differences are.
Porn addiction may or may not be a problem but a puritan society only makes it worse. People freaking out about “what if a young’un sees the genitalia of the other gender” are, without fault, part of extreme puritan societies like the USA.
There is a similar problem around alcohol addiction and without fault, you’ll find that people have a much worse relationship with alcohol when their first introduction to it is a massive party for their 21st. Anecdotally, my first taste of alcohol was red wine at 12 (I’m French and it’s pretty common here). Today I rarely ever drink anything.
The problem in that equation is not the availability of porn, it’s the taboo around sex.
I could have easily replaced "breasts" with "intercourse" and the message conveyed would be the same. Children are being exposed to exponentially more sexually charged content in the first few years of their lives than most men historically have been in their entire lives.
This isn't a case of rampant puritanism, go to Pornhub (one of the milder purveyors) and tell me that most of their front-page content is a depiction of healthy sex between two loving adults.
> I could have easily replaced "breasts" with "intercourse" and the message conveyed would be the same.
The message becomes incredibly different. The very fact that you talk about "sexually charged content" while saying that the message would be the same with "breasts" vs "intercourse" is a demonstration of the cultural differences scrollaway mentioned. A lot of places "breasts" does not automatically imply anything sexually charged.
Given the context of the conversation you'd have to intententionally misinterpret the message to assume I was talking abut breasts in a non-sexual context. The core takeaway is very much still the same: A child in 2022 will likely be exposed to extreme amounts of sexual content online, far more than most humans in history have had the ability to see their entire lives.
It's not at all clear that you see the distinction, was the point that scrollaway was making, and I agree.
It matters, given that it is far less obvious to me whether or not your "updated" statement is true, depending on which specific age range we're talking about when you say "child" and how large a proportion of that age group needs to have seen any to justify generalising, and what "extreme amounts" are.
> and tell me that most of their front-page content is a depiction of healthy sex between two loving adults
Go to [0] and tell me how that is a depiction of a healthy whatever. Also please describe how the paywall on porn sites would help poor 13 y.o. chaps not to see this.
Thats certainly not as bad as most mainstream pornography, regardless your argument is a red herring. Sexual content existing on one platform isn't an argument against restricting access to platforms made for sexual content.
You identify both of it as a sexual content, yet one should be cash-blocked as it doesn't depict a healthy sexual relationship between two loving[0] adults and other shouldn't be blocked the same way because... it DOES depict a healthy sexual relationship between two loving[1] adults?
[0] should be sex depicted only between a loving adults? what about a non-loving adults who does that for fun and health?
I am not talking about alcoholism. I'm talking about how relationships with "forbidden fruits" function. My comment was not a statement on alcoholism. My comment was not an absolute statement. I am not a doctor. I am not a dietitian. I am not a lawyer. I am not your lawyer. Stock prices fluctuate and you may get less money back than you put in. Capital at risk.
> Today a 13 y/o boy can see more breasts in an hour than every one of his prior-digital age male ancestors have seen combined.
May be true on average, but there are not-so-exceptional exceptions to this. For example areas where topless sunbathing is common and cultures where breasts aren't hidden because of puritan ideas. (Also maybe Nordic countries? Not sure how old teens are before mixed naked saunas are a normal thing) If that was a significant problem you'd think we'd see some extreme behaviours there.
True but I would wager that it certainly wasn't in the same context as often found online. That aside I could (and should) have just used "intercourse" as an alternative example to convey the same point.
Breasts wouldn’t even be too bad. But porn nowadays is very extreme. Anal gaping and massive dildos may make young teens think that that’s normal and that their first girlfriend will be into that.
Today a 13 y/o boy can see more types of fruit in a supermarket in an hour than every one of his prior-digital age male ancestors have seen combined. Its an absolute stimulus overload. When will we bad fruit?
Or maybe things changing isn't necessarily a catastrophe 100% of the time?
At 8 and 10 I'd spent time on beaches in Denmark on holiday that were all clothing optional. I'd seen plenty of people of all ages fully nude. It was perhaps a novelty for a few minutes, and then it wore off.
If anything, I'm a bit worried at what growing up in puritan countries without even visiting places like that and getting nudity normalised does to people.
Yes. Because this is trivial. People have seen genitals for a long time. Humans have coped. If everyone was dying or going insane because the internet makes this different, we'd have noticed starting over 20 years ago. But that hasn't happened.
The minute someone has some actual evidence of a problem, I am all ears, whatever the ages involved (at least until people are consenting adults anyway).
But you comment is, respectfully, exactly what I object to: how I feel about a 4, 8, 12, or 16 year old is irrelevant. Maybe I don't like it. But that doesn't make it harmful. So we should either show some harm or calm down a bit. Or at least admit this is nothing to do with health or child safety, it's just our personally feelings about ickyness...
We've literally had the same moral panics about everything since the dawn of civilization. Just 200 years ago it was common knowledge that showing the legs on a piano would drive me wild with lust. 40 years ago reefer madness was a fact. 20 years ago masterbation made you blind. Now it's porn. Isn't it time we grew up? Aren't we more mentally prepared for change than the victorians?
> Now it's porn. Isn't it time we grew up? Aren't we more mentally prepared for change than the victorians?
It's been porn for many decades already. As a child combing my parents book cases for interesting stuff at some point in the mid 1980's, one of the things that initially got me excited because of a rather misleading title (and then disappointed, but still fascinated by lots of weird case studies) was a book from the 1970's about research into the psychological impacts on porn.
The internet has just re-ignited a many decades old argument by arguing now that it isn't porn per se, but the sheer amount of porn and ease of access, this time.
And this is such a problem we have kids running around becoming dehydrated from all the mouth watering?
Or perhaps breasts, vaginas and penises are not like fruit at all? Do most people get sexually aroused from fruit? No. Do most people get sexually aroused when they see the sexual parts of of the sex they’re interested in? Yes.
Fruit is not the same as sex, and I can’t believe this even has to be explained.
We have no idea what the level of exposure to lightbulbs is doing to people. That doesn't prove there is a problem. That's the issue here. Zero evidence is no evidence of a crisis.
Exactly. We have no idea what this is doing to people.
There is a shocking drop in the testosterone levels of young men from 1999 to 2016 per studies if you google it. 20-30% drop.
The correlation in data would obviously be there but who knows about causation.
I am 50 and didn't see hardcore porn until I was almost 18. Some kid got into his fathers porn collection and was playing it at a party. I still remember it was the most horny I had ever been at that point in my life. It is illogical to believe that level of stimulation from the onset of puberty has no effect on development.
I don't see what the solution to this is though. It is a really tough subject to study on any real level.
Back before the modern age it probably wasn’t uncommon for children/teens to see actual people having sex in front of them.
Also, sperm levels have been dropping for far longer than internet porn has been a thing. It stands to reason they might share a cause.
There isn’t a solution. You can’t block teens from viewing porn. The best thing you can do is educate them that (most) porn isn’t a reflection of what most sex is like, and to watch out for porn addiction.
When I was a child, I once read a novel that featured a rape scene. While I had no idea what rape was, it was described in enough detail to be horrifying to read, so much so that I still remember it now. If it'd been a video, it'd probably have been much worse.
Now I don't think that book should've been locked away in a section of the library inaccessible to children, but that doesn't mean it's absolutely safe for children to consume content intended for adults.
No one is in any way damaged or traumatized cause they saw some sex on a screen at approximately 13 years old.
I don't think that's necessarily true. People are influenced by what they see (advertising wouldn't work if they weren't...). It's certainly possible that watching porn makes people want to emulate what they've watched. As consenting adults that's fine, but I don't think we really know what impact that has on younger people, and it would be irresponsible to just say it doesn't have any impact without studying it (just as it is to say the opposite.)
I don't think there's anything really wrong with wanting to protect children and limit what they see and do until they're capable of understanding themselves well enough to deal with what they've seen. But I definitely think it has to be done in a way that actually works. This policy almost certainly won't, so it's a giant waste of time.
There are a variety of documented undesirable side effects of heavy pornographic use [0],[1], including issues with mental health, sexual disfunction, and the ability to maintain normal romantic relationships.
It may be hard to stop, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem.
Skimming these, neither of those papers appears to document any demonstrable links. They're relying on self reporting in surveys and case studies that seems to produce what is at best correlation, potentially heavily biased by the self-reporting from people who at least judging by the case studies I skim appears to have to some degree self-diagnosed issues they may or may not have been right about.
I made a previous comment that I deleted because it was a bit sarcastic which doesn’t help the conversation. More seriously:
If you’re raising children, do you attempt to place safeguards in your family to prevent the potential outcomes discussed in the papers, or do you dismiss them because the correlations aren’t strong enough?
Never before in human history has the volume and type of pornography been so universally available. We’re in brand new territory here, and I think it’s worth paying attention to even self-reported anecdotes as the science is still being settled.
I dismiss them because there's literally decades worth of research into the effects of porn which to my knowledge has failed to come up with anything more than very minor effects, and when the best that's coming up now is some poorly constructed survey papers trying to infer things from self-reporting it's a strong indication there's nothing worth paying attention to, given the amount of effort and money that has been poured into it from groups with a strong interest in finding something.
If I trusted self-reported anecdotes I'd also seek to protect my family against ghosts, extra-terrestrial probing sessions and vengeful gods, among a long range of other risks I don't take seriously. If you can't provide evidence that gives a stronger indication of a damaging effect than that, I'll treat it the same way I threat those risks. If anything, if those studies are the best you can find it reassures me that the risks are near non-existent.
Side note:
Recently a teacher posted a thread on Reddit, that while discussing social media he mentioned Reddit and his class snickered. They teased him „Mr teacher are you a Reddit user?“ which he confusingly acknowledged to more snickering. He finally found out that teenagers regarded Reddit as a porn site like pornhub!
Interesting perspective and maybe generational divide: if you are not a geek with special interest hobbies and reason to visit subreddits, you only know it from nsfw stuff?
> What's missing from that stat is where they saw porn. Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Imgur, etc are full of porn but aren't technically porn sites. If that's where kids are accessing porn then blocking porn sites will not fix the problem.
The proposed legislation is insane, but it also requires all of those sites to implement age verification.
This is true. India has blocked a lot of major porn sites. This has however led to creation of porn sharing whatsapp/telegram groups since one person downloads the porn via VPN and then shares it to all. This inturn has led to sharing of even more shadier porn and hasn't prevented teens from accessing porn. Sadly this has lead to a couple of horrific cases of minors raping minors:
I think the half statistic is way too low. When I was in elementary school in the early 90s, everyone had seen a friends dads magazines. I’m sure it’s close to 100% these days.
Teens already master it. Many preteens master it just fine. My son had VPNs set up to bypass region locks on anime and bypass bans on game servers by the time he was 10.
It's adults that'll need to learn. I foresee a lot of awkward conversations with parents trying to ask theirs kids how to set up VPNs while pretending it's for a different purpose.
Before the internet you had a janky friend who was able to raid their parents porn stash or older brother/cousin who could get it. Porn magazines were prominently displayed along other magazines in news stands and candy stores. The usual approach was a really janky friend would casually enter, grab one and run out. There was always porn kicking around for kids to find/steal.
A bunch of stubborn purists have discovered that kids know more than they are "supposed" to know. I remember, I knew pretty much everything at the age of 6, and that was in a very strict and stubborn family.
This had already been proposed years ago and postponed.
The obvious result isn't that people will do the identification thing: instead people will use a VPN. It seems pretty clear to me.
I think based on the number of times they have tried to legislate for this, most recently in 2019, I would put the odds of it happening (even in a hamstrung way) at less than 10%.
Let's assume porn websites implement this as required (fat chance). You'd be daft to enter your CC that associates you by name, home address, phone number and purchases to the porn videos that you'd look at. Who comes up with this stuff?
Zeroknowledge proof based age verification service when?
I don’t know the shady data economy at all, but are there datasets out there which let you de-anonymize just via residential/mobile IP address or hostname?
I just assumed there were, available to any very motivated party.
And how effective and wide spread is browser fingerprinting to de-anon someone?
Consumer451 seems to be insuating that age verification by CC for porn might be okay? Since your privacy online is lost anyhow? While stating "he doesn't know ... at all".
> Consumer451 seems to be insuating that age verification by CC for porn might be okay? Since your privacy online is lost anyhow? While stating "he doesn't know ... at all".
How did kuschkufan manage to put those words into my mouth?
Really, how did you get that from what I said?
I was just pointing out that it might not take a credit card to ID you. And I really don’t know what datasets are out there, but I assume the worst.
> I don’t know the shady data economy at all, but are there datasets out there which let you de-anonymize just via residential/mobile IP address or hostname?
Sure, and they're built using data collected from shady sites which ask for personal information such as CC details under dubious pretenses (like age verification) and associate it with the visitor's IP address.
These de-anonymizing datasets exist because of poorly considered policies exactly like the one being discussed here.
Thanks. Yeah, uploading PII to a something like a porn site seems crazy to me, but the industry seems to make a lot of money via card charges so maybe I am in the minority.
I also want to make clear I was not endorsing the policy outlined in OP. Just curious.
The article is also light on what this actually means for sites not even hosted in the UK. I assume that eventually sites like PornHub will be blocked entirely, for everyone, unless they comply with adding these checks.
Very, very few porn sites anyone actually uses are hosted in the UK and therefore very few must obey UK law on what they host and to whom they show it. But they can be pressured into it, I imagine.
My guess would be that a whole lot of porn companies would love if this was required, because it'd mean conditioning people to enter card details far more places, and would potentially allow for far easier upsells if people have already accepted they have no other way in than giving a card.
We've already been down this route in the past with "Adult Verification Services" after the Communications Decency Act 1996, when it quickly was turned into a monetisation mechanism for porn sites. E.g. see:
(One might think the UK government would have someone sufficiently aware of history to realise how spectacularly that failed to stop access to porn for minors, but it seems not)
EDIT: Also, last time this specific UK attempt came out, MindGeek, the company which owns Pornhub, was one of the company vying to handle the then-proposed identity checking mechanism.
When I was a kid, I had a joint bank account with one of my parents. When I was around 16 I was able to get a "Check card", which behaved like a debit card in that I couldn't spend more money within was in the account, but it looked like a Visa card to anyone who was processing it. I recall being pleasantly surprised when I learned that I could use that card to "prove" I was over 18.
> When I was around 16 I was able to get a "Check card", which behaved like a debit card in that I couldn't spend more money within was in the account
Not relevant to the conversation at hand, and perhaps this is US only, but using a debit card you can absolutely spend more than you have. Sometimes banks won’t remove the funds until the actual transaction posts. Most shops won’t post the transactions until evening. So in some cases you can double, triple, quadruple spend. Doing so of course is fraud.
Are you sure that's fraud? When I accidentally spent more than I had, the bank never cancelled my account / told me I'd committed fraud / sicced the cops on me.
My balance went negative, and I was charged an overdraft fee. Reading the fine print on my account, it said that charges would go through on an overdrawn account until a certain dollar amount, at which point the debit card transactions would fail.
Now reading what I just wrote... It does seem like it would be very much specific to each bank.
Oh, good point. Now that I think about it, I did overspend by a small amount once, and I remember the bank paid it but charged me a $25 fee so that my account was left at -$26 or whatever. I think my paycheck cleared the next day, and then they refunded the fee when I called and complained.
(I think it's only fraud if you do it intentionally, though.)
On the one hand, this sounds like a good idea. On the other hand, every kid will find a way around it easily.
I would rather porn sites have to have a "responsible use" link on their sites that gives addicted users a way to find help, and a way to add themselves to a self-exclusion list. The self-exclusion list would essentially be an industry-wide temporary block, so you could say "I don't want to use porn for a month" or "I can only use for 1 session a week"
>Studies show that half of 11 to 13-year-olds have seen pornography at some point.
This is not porn site's fault, parents should be aware of what their children see online.
>Experts who work with children say it gives them unhealthy views of sex and consent, putting them at risk from predators and possibly stopping them reporting abuse.
LOL. Instead of educating children about sex and consent, they instead prefer to put the burden on the porn sites.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadWhat's missing from that stat is where they saw porn. Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Imgur, etc are full of porn but aren't technically porn sites. If that's where kids are accessing porn then blocking porn sites will not fix the problem.
Unless you understand what the problem actually is there will be no way to fix it.
Oh that's easy. The problem is with society. No one is in any way damaged or traumatized cause they saw some sex on a screen at approximately 13 years old. Its ridiculous we go through the intrusive charade of trying to stop them. The problem is there is no problem.
Unfortunately the maximum POST size Chrome allows limits my response to 4GB so I won't be able to cover it all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partygate
The problem isn't "13 year olds being traumatized because they see sex on a screen" but "13 year olds developing porn addiction alongside their burgeoning sexuality".
Porn addiction is a very real issue and todays youth is especially susceptible to it. Today a 13 y/o boy can see more breasts in an hour than every one of his prior-digital age male ancestors have seen combined. Its an absolute stimulus overload.
It's literally highly contested if it even exists. The evidence base is extremely poor.
For laymen however, referring to it as an addiction is what most accurately encompasses its impact on those who become compulsive consumers of it.
This assertion seems odd to me.
More importantly: you should not assume that just because you do not suffer from porn addiction that others do not suffer from it.
It's the oldest trick in the book.
Poor little guy!
Certainly can’t let young kids see breasts lest they become raging maniacs. Societal mental health, brought to you by bottled milk.
Porn addiction may or may not be a problem but a puritan society only makes it worse. People freaking out about “what if a young’un sees the genitalia of the other gender” are, without fault, part of extreme puritan societies like the USA.
There is a similar problem around alcohol addiction and without fault, you’ll find that people have a much worse relationship with alcohol when their first introduction to it is a massive party for their 21st. Anecdotally, my first taste of alcohol was red wine at 12 (I’m French and it’s pretty common here). Today I rarely ever drink anything.
The problem in that equation is not the availability of porn, it’s the taboo around sex.
This isn't a case of rampant puritanism, go to Pornhub (one of the milder purveyors) and tell me that most of their front-page content is a depiction of healthy sex between two loving adults.
The message becomes incredibly different. The very fact that you talk about "sexually charged content" while saying that the message would be the same with "breasts" vs "intercourse" is a demonstration of the cultural differences scrollaway mentioned. A lot of places "breasts" does not automatically imply anything sexually charged.
It matters, given that it is far less obvious to me whether or not your "updated" statement is true, depending on which specific age range we're talking about when you say "child" and how large a proportion of that age group needs to have seen any to justify generalising, and what "extreme amounts" are.
Go to [0] and tell me how that is a depiction of a healthy whatever. Also please describe how the paywall on porn sites would help poor 13 y.o. chaps not to see this.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsm4poTWjMs
LOL.
So you DO think this is a sexual content.
And the difference between 'other platforms' sexual content is the lack of an exposed genitals.
[0] should be sex depicted only between a loving adults? what about a non-loving adults who does that for fun and health?
[1] really?
May be true on average, but there are not-so-exceptional exceptions to this. For example areas where topless sunbathing is common and cultures where breasts aren't hidden because of puritan ideas. (Also maybe Nordic countries? Not sure how old teens are before mixed naked saunas are a normal thing) If that was a significant problem you'd think we'd see some extreme behaviours there.
Or maybe things changing isn't necessarily a catastrophe 100% of the time?
Eating too much fruit actually could turn you blind...
And there are a whole bunch of foods that affect your sexual hormone levels too.
What if it was 8 year old children? Would you feel differently then?
If anything, I'm a bit worried at what growing up in puritan countries without even visiting places like that and getting nudity normalised does to people.
> Fruit and nudity are not the same. Fruit doesn’t trigger hormonal responses, nudity does.
Nothing about hardcore sex. That your intent with the comment further above that was about sex is irrelevant to what I replied to.
The minute someone has some actual evidence of a problem, I am all ears, whatever the ages involved (at least until people are consenting adults anyway).
But you comment is, respectfully, exactly what I object to: how I feel about a 4, 8, 12, or 16 year old is irrelevant. Maybe I don't like it. But that doesn't make it harmful. So we should either show some harm or calm down a bit. Or at least admit this is nothing to do with health or child safety, it's just our personally feelings about ickyness...
We've literally had the same moral panics about everything since the dawn of civilization. Just 200 years ago it was common knowledge that showing the legs on a piano would drive me wild with lust. 40 years ago reefer madness was a fact. 20 years ago masterbation made you blind. Now it's porn. Isn't it time we grew up? Aren't we more mentally prepared for change than the victorians?
It's been porn for many decades already. As a child combing my parents book cases for interesting stuff at some point in the mid 1980's, one of the things that initially got me excited because of a rather misleading title (and then disappointed, but still fascinated by lots of weird case studies) was a book from the 1970's about research into the psychological impacts on porn.
The internet has just re-ignited a many decades old argument by arguing now that it isn't porn per se, but the sheer amount of porn and ease of access, this time.
Nudity accompanied with a sense of guilt, forbiddeness or assumed hornyness is what triggers different responses.
You can blame 'porn addiction' on nudity as much as you like, completely ignoring the elephant in the room [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsm4poTWjMs
Or perhaps breasts, vaginas and penises are not like fruit at all? Do most people get sexually aroused from fruit? No. Do most people get sexually aroused when they see the sexual parts of of the sex they’re interested in? Yes.
Fruit is not the same as sex, and I can’t believe this even has to be explained.
We have no idea what this level of stimulation is doing to boys at development.
I think you are confusing the moral aspects with the unknowns here.
There is a shocking drop in the testosterone levels of young men from 1999 to 2016 per studies if you google it. 20-30% drop.
The correlation in data would obviously be there but who knows about causation.
I am 50 and didn't see hardcore porn until I was almost 18. Some kid got into his fathers porn collection and was playing it at a party. I still remember it was the most horny I had ever been at that point in my life. It is illogical to believe that level of stimulation from the onset of puberty has no effect on development.
I don't see what the solution to this is though. It is a really tough subject to study on any real level.
Also, sperm levels have been dropping for far longer than internet porn has been a thing. It stands to reason they might share a cause.
There isn’t a solution. You can’t block teens from viewing porn. The best thing you can do is educate them that (most) porn isn’t a reflection of what most sex is like, and to watch out for porn addiction.
Now I don't think that book should've been locked away in a section of the library inaccessible to children, but that doesn't mean it's absolutely safe for children to consume content intended for adults.
I don't think that's necessarily true. People are influenced by what they see (advertising wouldn't work if they weren't...). It's certainly possible that watching porn makes people want to emulate what they've watched. As consenting adults that's fine, but I don't think we really know what impact that has on younger people, and it would be irresponsible to just say it doesn't have any impact without studying it (just as it is to say the opposite.)
I don't think there's anything really wrong with wanting to protect children and limit what they see and do until they're capable of understanding themselves well enough to deal with what they've seen. But I definitely think it has to be done in a way that actually works. This policy almost certainly won't, so it's a giant waste of time.
It may be hard to stop, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7835260/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5039517/
If you’re raising children, do you attempt to place safeguards in your family to prevent the potential outcomes discussed in the papers, or do you dismiss them because the correlations aren’t strong enough?
Never before in human history has the volume and type of pornography been so universally available. We’re in brand new territory here, and I think it’s worth paying attention to even self-reported anecdotes as the science is still being settled.
If I trusted self-reported anecdotes I'd also seek to protect my family against ghosts, extra-terrestrial probing sessions and vengeful gods, among a long range of other risks I don't take seriously. If you can't provide evidence that gives a stronger indication of a damaging effect than that, I'll treat it the same way I threat those risks. If anything, if those studies are the best you can find it reassures me that the risks are near non-existent.
Interesting perspective and maybe generational divide: if you are not a geek with special interest hobbies and reason to visit subreddits, you only know it from nsfw stuff?
The proposed legislation is insane, but it also requires all of those sites to implement age verification.
https://timesofindia.com/city/raipur/chhattisgarh-8-year-old...
I guess sex education and teaching about consent at an early age is the only thing that can be done.
If there has been adequate adult supervision, the eight year old girl would not have been repeatedly raped for two months.
It's adults that'll need to learn. I foresee a lot of awkward conversations with parents trying to ask theirs kids how to set up VPNs while pretending it's for a different purpose.
All the major ISPs here are already logging tonnes of metadata at the TCP and DNS level
Zeroknowledge proof based age verification service when?
I just assumed there were, available to any very motivated party.
And how effective and wide spread is browser fingerprinting to de-anon someone?
How did kuschkufan manage to put those words into my mouth?
Really, how did you get that from what I said?
I was just pointing out that it might not take a credit card to ID you. And I really don’t know what datasets are out there, but I assume the worst.
Sure, and they're built using data collected from shady sites which ask for personal information such as CC details under dubious pretenses (like age verification) and associate it with the visitor's IP address.
These de-anonymizing datasets exist because of poorly considered policies exactly like the one being discussed here.
I also want to make clear I was not endorsing the policy outlined in OP. Just curious.
Very, very few porn sites anyone actually uses are hosted in the UK and therefore very few must obey UK law on what they host and to whom they show it. But they can be pressured into it, I imagine.
We've already been down this route in the past with "Adult Verification Services" after the Communications Decency Act 1996, when it quickly was turned into a monetisation mechanism for porn sites. E.g. see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_Check
(One might think the UK government would have someone sufficiently aware of history to realise how spectacularly that failed to stop access to porn for minors, but it seems not)
EDIT: Also, last time this specific UK attempt came out, MindGeek, the company which owns Pornhub, was one of the company vying to handle the then-proposed identity checking mechanism.
It's available from age 6.
Not relevant to the conversation at hand, and perhaps this is US only, but using a debit card you can absolutely spend more than you have. Sometimes banks won’t remove the funds until the actual transaction posts. Most shops won’t post the transactions until evening. So in some cases you can double, triple, quadruple spend. Doing so of course is fraud.
My balance went negative, and I was charged an overdraft fee. Reading the fine print on my account, it said that charges would go through on an overdrawn account until a certain dollar amount, at which point the debit card transactions would fail.
Now reading what I just wrote... It does seem like it would be very much specific to each bank.
(I think it's only fraud if you do it intentionally, though.)
"apart" means "to deviate from the rest of a group".
The rest of Europe has a much more relaxed cultural stance towards nudity that can be seen by minors.
Reading about the Online Safety Bill makes me quite glad to not live in the UK.
I would rather porn sites have to have a "responsible use" link on their sites that gives addicted users a way to find help, and a way to add themselves to a self-exclusion list. The self-exclusion list would essentially be an industry-wide temporary block, so you could say "I don't want to use porn for a month" or "I can only use for 1 session a week"
This is something that gambling sites already have to do, for example here's Betfair's site: https://responsiblegambling.betfair.com/
This is not porn site's fault, parents should be aware of what their children see online.
>Experts who work with children say it gives them unhealthy views of sex and consent, putting them at risk from predators and possibly stopping them reporting abuse.
LOL. Instead of educating children about sex and consent, they instead prefer to put the burden on the porn sites.
I, for one, welcome our new QR overlords.