What could possibly go wrong... I don't expect Facebook or TikTok to oppose this very much, having credit cards on file is conveniently closer to making more money.
The number of active credit card holders in the UK is somewhere in the 35 million range. The number of adults is somewhere over 56 million. There is quite a mismatch there. Unlike the US, owning a credit card is not standard for most people in the world.
People tend to get them for online shopping abroad, and for travels out of their currency zone as a back up.
I don’t know if a debit card counts, because they are 16+. Many of us took a while to move onto credit cards but still had access to cashless, online and overseas payment.
It's credit card OR id though. People like Experian are already offering age verification systems that check passports, driving licences etc. The government also have their own GOV.UK Verify programme which has multiple providers which prove identity and thus age.
If you can login to your government tax account, or apply for a DBS, you'll be able to prove your identity.
You're right. I've been in the weeds analyzing the finances of tech companies where the users of the apps are actual customers, and the term 'user' weren't as nice
I'm not so sure. I think Facebook might oppose it on the grounds that there are large numbers of people on the cusp who may just abandon Facebook if they have to give their credit card details. Facebook is already haemorrhaging users, I don't think they will want any friction that may lose them more.
There must be plenty of not-so-young people who don't have a credit card or passport.
Edit: the article says "Adults would be forced to enter personal information like passport or credit card details", so I guess other forms of ID with a date of birth would be accepted.
The government already have a GOV.UK Verify programme for identity assurance that they want to be funded by the private sector. They'll presumably just encourage people to use one of those private operators (currently Digidentity and Post Office) and maybe it'll encourage more operators to spring up.
They screwed up that for me. I registered, worked with it for a few months (via Expedia, iirc), then they just said "sorry, we're disabling this for you" - probably because of Brexit, but who knows. Can I recover my account somehow? Who knows, I couldn't be arsed and just let my accountant do things for me.
I get your dislike of Brexit (and such sentiments get votes on HN) but this isn’t ‘friction because of Brexit’ - a post Brexit government could choose to not do this at all, or choose to implement something better.
It’s just an implementation of a crappy idea by a crappy government.
Setting aside Brexit itself, the government currently in power were elected partly on promises to cut such friction, not increase it.
But yeah, it's a crappy, incompetent government who are currently announcing all kinds of badly thought out populist ideas to distract attention from the trouble their leader is in.
For Facebook or TikTok it's a sensible move because they are social networks trying to connect natural persons. Not just child protection as mentioned in the article but ecommerce scams, misinformation, catfishing or botting would be cut down if you could verify that the online identity represents who it claims it does.
It would be good though if there is some identity standard across platforms rather than the existing patchwork solutions that exclude people without say, credit cards. Digital ID systems like in South Korea or Taiwan seem good because they're uniform across the country and comparable to national ids.
What you are suggesting wouldn't help improve those situations, and in fact will likely make them worse. Governments and companies have been historically bad at protecting information. Companies will see it as an opportunity, governments will abuse it and the user will end up just having more information online for people to use against them. So called misinformation will change in definition to only support government-approved talking points. Before you know it, disagreeing with your government and pointing out lies will just cause them to say they have a reason now to use the information you provided to go after you and try to ruin your life. Employees and government agents will now have a plethora of more data to do lookups on their exes, enemies, etc. It is bad all around.
There is no “talking about doing it for Reddit” here. Targeting a measure like this at specific companies is all sorts of gross, it has to be a case of what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
There’s no reasonable definition of who should and shouldn’t be affected by this where Facebook has to comply but Reddit doesn’t.
The reasonable basis is that Facebook have consistently shown themselves to be a bad actor. I'm not arguing that age checks are a good thing, just that I don't see a reason why the law can't explicitly target companies that are detrimental to society. You might then argue Reddit should also be included for similar reasons.
I would suggest this is generally better than an attempt to codify in law some kind of definition of what companies should be covered.
Indeed. You can tell a historically bad technical measure by the following phrase being repeated forever: ”we will never ask you for…”. I await this for credit cards.
This feels like it could be resolved by technology.
I am happy to identify myself to government entity A to prove my age, but I don't want A to know what sites I visit.
I want to visit site B, but I don't want to identify myself.
Is there no API that will allow B to verify my age via A, without A finding out what site B is, and without B finding out anything more than my age bracket?
I believe they're talking about doing that, but contracting out to approved 3rd parties instead of the government for age verification. I still don't trust them to do it securely, and I worry deeply about the chilling effect it will have on the internet as a whole.
Pretty sure that’s already on its way. One way we avoid giving card details to untrustworthy sites is to use a third party verification service. Suspect that this is well enough known that the headline should be construed as clickbait.
But I doubt anything so well thought out would be implemented for this. Current government suggestions are credit card checks, checking identity against government passport records, or your mobile phone service provider.
I don't even understand the mobile phone one. My son has a mobile phone, but I'm the account holder according to the phone company. He's too young to enter into contracts for a start!
I suppose this would be a very neat usage of Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
If I can prove User is over 18 to App, without giving away who User is to App - that seems quite valuable. An "Ali Baba cave" for identity. (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~mkowalcz/628.pdf)
OAuth 2.0 resolves this. The government can be in control of maintaining citizens' identities and citizens can likewise request claims from the government's auth server regarding their age or any other matter.
That claim as a signed message can be provided to third-party services which need only validate the signed message using the public key associated with the secret key that signed the claim message.
I don't think oauth 2 would give the required privacy protection.
How would the flow go? Click on an age verification link on a site. It redirects to the gov site, where you authenticate and it returns a signed claim.
Now the government knows what sites you are visiting. Not something I suspect most people will want when accessing porn sites...
I refreshed my understanding of OAuth 2.0 and sure, its typical flows which are meant for convenience do not offer the level of privacy protection as you mention. But if we replace that convenience with some effort from the user, we can get the privacy protection as well.
The flow can be as follows:
The user authenticates itself via government's site and is presented with a page which lets them create government-signed messages using claims provided by the government.
The concerned site can generate a random string during their registration/verification process which they expect to be part of the signed message that the user is to provide them.
The user enters that random string on government's site and checks/selects the age claim for it to be included in the signed message. The government adds timestamp to it and a key id based on the private key which it used to sign the message.
The user posts the signed message on the concerned site during the registration/verification process. The site uses the government's well-known address to fetch the public key associated with the key id (mentioned in the signed message). It then uses the public key to verify the signed message alongside checking the timestamp for recency and presence of the exact random string in the signed message. Ultimately checking the age claim.
So now, instead of providing credit card details, the signed message was provided by the user which the concerned site can validate on its own without the government knowing.
A FOSS browser extension developed and maintained by a non-profit organization, vetted/audited by other trusted third party entities can facilitate convenience in this flow, bringing the overall experience closer to a desirable state.
The websites which are to be restricted by government-imposed legalities can expose the claims they need during their registration/verification process and the browser extension can automatically retrieve those claims alongside other details as mentioned previously, and can auto-fill on the website for the user.
Since this extension acts as the intermediary client, it knows the parties involved but it preserves user's privacy accordingly due to its vetted nature and as a FOSS application.
Of course, there will be concerns regarding pushing people to use such things but if legality can force people to give out their credit card details on certain websites, then it can also push for such user-focused convenience ways to enforce the legal matters. Whether it will really happen is not in our power but technically it is a resolvable matter as put forth by the original comment.
There was a thread about this yesterday [0], this is almost certainly not going to happen. 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%.
Big company’s (Facebook, etc) will lobby against it, they will argue about what the threshold of requirement is. Then there is the logistics, privacy, security and cost factors. Not going to happen.
I believe this is all about making it look like politicians are doing “something” without actually doing anything.
The fact they keep trying despite repeatedly being humiliated by market realities, though, indicates the lobbying pressure by pro-censorship groups is quite high. This is bound to produce something eventually.
Are they being humiliated though? Feels like they get lots of press when announcing this kind of stuff which sits well with some target part of the electorate, then when the whole thing gets abandoned it happens with almost no attention. The current government seems to be well aware that most of the time announcing a policy has a much higher ROI than actually implementing one (cf all the times pre-existing spending commitments get recycled in new announcements)
But you can only perform this act so much before it wears out and backfires. See for example the recent defections of "red wall" Tory MPs after the announcements you mention - they know the situation is becoming indefensible in the eyes of their electorate, since they keep promising money which then fails to materialize.
Have they reached this point with the "online moral-indignation brigade" yet? Maybe not, but it's been 5 years since the Snoopers' Charter, I don't know how many since the porn-blocking promises and about 13 since the first pledges in this area by a Conservative party, with no significant progress to show for it. That's a lot of time even in political terms.
> announcing this kind of stuff which sits well with some target part of the electorate
I really dont see anyone in the electorate clamouring for any of this stuff. Announcing the same policy being told it is a shit idea and announcing it again 6 months later is much harder to sell than the recycled spending (which they tend to just lie and say it is in addition to the last lot they announced anyway). That said, the electorate dont actually care much (unless it is a penny off the price of a pint or something) so it is hardly a humiliation when these ideas go nowhere and it makes the government look busy.
I can only assume that the driver is the security services, or just recycling past homework to look busy. As noted in many other comments they try all sorts of seemingly stupid ideas in this space - banning all encryption has failed countless times, adult verification is already a thing on mobile networks, and logging every online activity has slipped through and passed.
If you say you're going to do this often enough, and keep getting thwarted for whatever reason, eventually you won't have much credibility with anyone.
Even if you include debit cards, you're still wrong.
You don't need anything. At all. According to Google, in case they suspect you might be lying about your age, they _might_ require age verification. This can be done with a credit card or an ID card.
So no, you don't need a credit card to watch age-restricted videos. You don't need a debit card either. You probably don't even need an ID card or anything at all.
This is basically the same as the UK proposal which the Register article is talking about - that's also credit card or valid ID, they just chose to focus on the credit card part in the article.
Sorry, which videos? I mean it really, I'm from EU and have never found one. To watch some videos I have to login but have never ever asked me for a credit card that I recall. I'd like to know.
I suppose if you have verified your age in the past (for example if you bought something from the play store?) then you can watch the video freely. Try and watch it while logged off.
Thank you. I have not found one of these before. Only some that asked me to log in but no one with these restrictions , even if I used Google pay in the past, many years ago, is asking me for a credit card after logging in.
Blaming the EU is a common escape strategy, but I don't believe it in the slightest. Mind, I wouldn't believe anything coming out of the modern Google except "we want to make tracking you easier so we can sell more expensive ads".
Edit: if the evil EU "forced" them to require a credit card or my ID to watch Samuel L Jackson saying "motherfucker", why hasn't the same evil EU forced them to make it easy to opt out of all tracking?
Wow.Thank you. I have not found one of these before. Only some that asked me to log in but no one with these restrictions , even if I used Google pay in the past, many years ago, is asking me for a credit card after logging in.
People don’t realize how invasive the UK govt is when it comes to internet monitoring.
Today if you try to access adult content on a UK mobile device you get blocked by age verification. You have to call your mobile provider and prove your age (it’s a once-per-contract thing). One of the ways you can prove your age is with a credit card. But I imagine it’s a large deterrent because not many people want to call Vodafone and ask permission to look at pornography. They’d probably just rather get a VPN.
I've been using them for a while, very happy with it so far. Stable connection and high speeds - good enough that I often forget I have it on - and a nice selection of locations.
They even accept cash! Each account is just an ID so you can mail your account number and some money to them and payment will be processed.
Mozilla VPN also uses Mullvad's servers behind the scenes.
At this point one must assume that all traffic is monitored and stored, maybe it is or maybe it is not, but assume so. At least all metadata is stored for some time.
Using a VPN moves the point where this occurs and may obfuscate some things, but also realize that many VPNs are probably in some form associated with nation-states and therefore makes their job easier.
For example, my VPN is based in Thailand. For various legal reasons, it's very unlikely anything obtained by a nation-state actor in Thailand will be used for trivial stuff like, say, enforcing copyright legislation against individual consumers. Defense lawyers / barristers would have a field day. If you are planning terrorist acts, on the other hand...
Depending on your reasons, a seedbox that comes with built in vpn capabilities out of the box could be an option.
I pay €5/month to ultracc for a server I can torrent with. It just happens to come with a vpn installed as a bonus.
Mullvad is the same cost for just a vpn. I'm sure it's better in many ways that people will list below but for the purposes of getting around government internet blocks where you're not then expecting g men to kick in your door for getting around them, openvpn installed on whatever random server works fine.
But I imagine it’s a large deterrent because not many people want to call Vodafone and ask permission to look at pornography.
True, and particularly galling when the content you want to look at is not porn but (say) the internet archive or opinion sites that weenies in the provider have deemed offensive.
I've had this happen when wanting to view US News Sites in the UK. Yes, they may well show photos of violence and wars. Sadly, this is still valid news.
But the verification process wanted my Driving License number, which I gave repeatedly, but which it never accepted.
I scrapped that mobile contract ("Three") as useless.
I accidentally saw some pornography when I wasn't sexually active. I had no clue what was I looking at. I found it to be disgusting, like those extreme cancer photos, and didn't watch it again until many years later.
Porn and gambling (and possibly more - we filter and block 18+ sites, as classified by the BBFC British Board of Film Classification) is blocked on mobile data connections - as far as I can recall this has been the situation since the turn of the century.
In effect, this proposal already exists for mobile data connections. Add this to what is enabled by the snoopers charter, and the use of this information accross governement and it is a pretty grim state.
This triggered for me when trying to download a podcast from Hardcore Gaming 101. The detection is clearly very accurate and good. I had no shame disabling it.
To those in this thread saying it's just a toggle, have you actually tried the toggle? On giffgaff, for example, if you press the toggle it then asks you for your Driving License or Passport.
> I was at the pool this summer and overheard this 15 year old boy ask (and then nag) a 16 year old girl what her onlyfans was bc she admitted to havi g one underage.
> What we've done to ourselves as a society in this regard is pathetic.
I fail to see how that's substantively different/worse than the cat-calling, profanities and other verbal abuse that women and girls have unfortunately suffered throughout history; often out of sight, and hence less amenable to third-party anecdotes.
Your argument would have more merit if it were based on actual data, showing some sort of historical trend. As far as I'm aware, historical trends show the exact opposite of your argument; i.e. that winding-back the clock would increase the abuse and violence that women and girls suffer.
> Meanwhile our art and entertainment these days are void of any real complex romantic plots or subplots.
> The US should actually enforce the age restrictions.
The goal is to create infrastructure and laws to censor arbitrary content, and deanonymise users. "Think of the children" is, as always, just a distraction.
> I fail to see how that's substantively different/worse than the cat-calling, profanities and other verbal abuse that women and girls have unfortunately suffered throughout history; often out of sight, and hence less amenable to third-party anecdotes.
Just because you perceive a problem as being less worse than another problem, doesn't mean its not a problem.
I think it should be normalized to not give children personal devices capable of accessing the web until they are 16.
No, it was a criticism of whataboutism of the first part of your comment, which didn't address the problem, but rather compared its magnitude to a different problem.
I think it was your comment, actually, which was the straw man of the person you were responding to. The original commenter was talking specifically about pornography, and your comment straw-manned this as somehow a wish to "wind back the clock"; involving returning to social norms where casual sexism was the norm.
In fact, we can still go forward, whilst still addressing the problem the original commenter was highlighting.
Nagging someone for their onlyfans details is a form of "cat-calling, profanities and other verbal abuse". It's not "a different problem", just because it involves an Internet word.
> The original commenter was talking specifically about pornography
Yes.
> your comment straw-manned this as somehow a wish to "wind back the clock"
No, that was a specific reference to the original commenter's claim that "art and entertainment these days are void of any real complex romantic plots or subplots. It's all quarantined off into the world of hardcore porn.".
That claim is so laughably ignorant that no straw-man is needed:
- It ignores Sturgeon's law (that most of everything is crap; regardless of when it was made)
- It's ignoring survivorship bias (that great works will be long treasured and easily recalled; whilst the crap will get forgotten)
- It's ignoring availability bias (that examples from "these days" will be drawn from what's close-to-hand; not necessarily the best of what's out there right now)
- It's ignoring that porn has permeated media since pre-history; that some of the earliest photos and film are pornographic; etc.
- It's claiming that this is somehow a new problem, despite kids having access to pornography long before smartphones were invented.
> I think it should be normalized to not give children personal devices capable of accessing the web until they are 16
But do you think the government should step in and enforce such a limitation?
As a counter example, I grew up in a repressive, abusive environment. My access to the Internet at that age was a lifeline. It helped me understand the real world, form deep and lasting friendships with people from diverse backgrounds with opinions I had never been exposed to, and eventually helped me escape my environment.
While I acknowledge that the Internet has evolved since then, and more care is needed at that age, I see a lot of opinions that all seem based on the premise of a perfect childhood. Good parents who are actually involved and are not harming their children. Parents who themselves have a healthy outlook on all of this.
Don’t get me wrong, I know such parents exist. But where they exist, this is a self solving problem. Because good parents will manage their children’s access and help them navigate the Internet safely.
When bad parents do not, a government entity doing it for them can only further exacerbate the situations of those who rely on that phone to have some hope of a normal life.
> But do you think the government should step in and enforce such a limitation?
No, it should be a social norm.
I'm not suggesting teenagers shouldn't use the internet at all, but it should be in a family environment. e.g. what used to be the desktop in the family lounge.
I think things like unrestricted access to Reddit, tiktok, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram have proved toxic for young teenagers.
Don't let your hate of porn, however justified you think it is, blind you to the harms of censorship and de-anonymization. As others have noted, they have already been caught censoring all sorts of non-porn content under this guise.
That you can remove the block doesn't fix all the issues - anyone under 18 is still confined to a government-approved subset of the internet, and many over-18's won't lift the filter, further marginalizing dissident websites that, entirely by accident, find themselves blocked.
That porn culture and identity politics culture sucking them up in a vacuum isn't a positive thing.
This isn't something we want to encourage to grow.
Incel culture is largely men growing up on porn mad at their inadequacy in obtaining women.
Trans culture, at least in part and mostly why it's slanted so far MtF is because autism affects men more than women and they internalized the porn differently in that they'd just tther be the women seen in the porn.
Trans and Incel culture are two sides of the same coin Imho.
Why do you think trans people call people bigots for not wanting to sleep with them.?
> Trans culture, at least in part and mostly why it's slanted so far MtF is because autism affects men more than women and they internalized the porn differently
Where is this coming from? This is such a reductionist take on an extremely complex issue. If you have studies to share, I’d be interested to read them.
If you’re basing your conclusions on extreme subreddits or similar places, I would remind you that Reddit is not a direct reflection of society as a whole. Nor are some of the personalities there a direct reflection of their counterparts in other parts of the real world.
> Increasing acceptance hasn't done anything positive for their depression rates, drug use rates, suicide rates, either.
Bold assertion. What are you basing it on, the PIDOOMA institute report?
> Trans culture, at least in part and mostly why it's slanted so far MtF is because autism affects men more than women and they internalized the porn differently in that they'd just tther be the women seen in the porn.
> Trans and Incel culture are two sides of the same coin Imho.
No, you just have no bloody idea what you are talking about, and are blindly parroting talking points that you decided sounded right: you started out with a falsehood, followed by a bunch of not even wrong assertions, throwing in a couple of articles - very loosely related to at most one of your assertions - to give them the appearance of respectability.
> Why do you think trans people call people bigots for not wanting to sleep with them.?
If you simply cannot control your need to engage in culture war bullshit - targeting an already extremely victimized minority to do so - could you kindly do so in a less boring manner?
I'm on the fence on whether luring people like this out with "tell me more(about your incredibly naive and bigoted takes)" is worth it. On one hand they are clearly bursting at the seams with garbage and cannot hold back at the opportunity to implicate themselves. Never stop an opponent from making an error. On the other hand, it has the potential for readers to mistake their drivel for substantive discourse.
I don't owe you (nor anyone) genuine Socratic methodology. This is the internet after all. :) I will happily guide people into earnestly saying terrible things and then point it out. No one is being forced to say anything they don't believe.
The only person who can display "genuine curiosity" over the nth dimwit making the same set of already thoroughly debunked claims for the hundredth time - claims that get repeated, only infinitesimally changed, over timeframes measured in years to decades - is someone who suffers from heavy memory problems.
Engaging with them is frankly pointless: even if they are willing and able to learn - which is a big if - there's always another person around the corner ready to take their place, and argue the inarguable. Oh, sure, there are probably a lot of people, at any point of time, who are willing to engage with them in good faith, but bullshit is fundamentally asymmetric: they do get tired of it.
At that point, the only real solution is to either stop engaging - and let them appear unopposed, while other people burn themselves out in an effort to bring them the light - try to shut them down, or - in loosely moderated places - deploy mockery and use them as a teaching tool: people who think themselves rational do not, as a rule, want to be associated - even in their own minds - with people who are absolutely foaming at the mouth to spew easily-debunked bullshit, and who get ridiculed as a result. Most of these bad actors do not possess a lot of self-control, and are easily riled up, or otherwise convinced to go mask off in a way that makes them unpalatable to the general population - say, by simply asking them to discuss their beliefs further - which makes this method very effective in limiting the spread of their memes.
You're relying on the (inaccurate) fact that this tactic is designed specifically in mind to shut down trans-haters/trans-disinformation (I lack the right word here, but you know what I mean, people who are seen as spreading damaging and likely untrue information about LGBTQ).
Ignoring the debate about whether our methodologies should be applied uniformly, even to trans disparagers or even people like Nazis, this turns out to be a false assumption. Kelseyfrog repeatedly engages in this ("luring" Socratic methodology) behavior on a variety of topics, including ideas that don't involve disparaging trans population such as on property and the state.
Usually they are not so straight forward about their intentions, but as you have proven in a crystal clear fashion, this topic has provided perfect cover for 'frog to reveal their true intentions. After all -- anyone questioning them can be accused of interfering with some sort of process meant to limit "spread of memes" about trans persons. A convenient way to offload blame from the self and onto an unsavory other.
Just wanted this to die down because this is like meta-meta discourse at this point.
I love this tactic because it gets people to earnestly say what they believe. More people in debates should say what they believe.
The problem is when people don't want to reveal what they believe. These people know their assumptions and conclusions are socially unacceptable. Socially unacceptable beliefs make people feel socially isolated. This isolation creates a pressure in them so great that when someone asks them to continue speaking, they cannot stop. They are so used to being told to stop that they don't know how to handle someone asking them to speak.
By now it's clear that the trap has been set. When they reveal their true beliefs, they temporarily forget that they are in front of an audience. They have unwittingly been made part of a performance they didn't want to be in, but at this point it is too late. The audience here is the true judge, and the audience is a harsh critic. The audience enjoys the theatrics of the villain performing their grand reveal and they enjoy the justice in seeing them make this critical error.
So many subversives couch their true beliefs in meta-irony. finger on nose "Am I joking about these reprehensible beliefs or do I really believe them? We'll never know but we're making it ok to say them. uwu." The end results are the same. Either they will learn not to say them - eventually eradicating the belief, or they will say them and the audience will learn from them not to believe them. As you are well aware, I'm ok with both.
I understand your justification boils down to 'did it for the greater social good to out people I disagree with.'
It doesn't make me look any more favorably on you. You engage in 'luring', drawing people into performances they 'didn't want to be in' and set 'traps.' Some of these people you engage may be genuinely bad and disingenuous people, others may be honest and well meaning people with bad ideas. And some, may simply have ideas you disagree with and don't have bad ideas at all. You on the other hand, are cool and calculated while laying in wait with what you characterize as 'traps' for others.
Frankly I think you're no better than the individuals you intend to impugn. You use your remarkable intelligence for deceit, and even brag about it. Dishonest behavior is not the way to fix unsavory influences. But the greatest tyrannies and misdeeds happen under guise of acting on the greater good, and this same rationale tends to make people act in the boldest fashion when they otherwise would not.
> On the other hand, it has the potential for readers to mistake their drivel for substantive discourse.
The thing is, not engaging with them - in non-moderated communities - also has the potential for readers to mistake their drivel for substantive discourse, both by way of familiarizing them with it - mere exposure effect - and by making it appear like their assertions are not being challenged because they cannot be challenged.
That's why the engagement really needs to happen on two fronts: both on their own level - assertions met with demands for proof, unrelated or misunderstood papers pointed out as such, counter-assertions backed with proof - and on a meta level. If you only do the former you will run afoul of Brandolini's bullshit asymmetry principle, while letting them choose the field of engagement: there is a literally infinite number of bullshit claims they are able to make - be that "trans people are just incels, really" or "transsexualism [sic] is a sexual addiction, which is why epileptics never transition" - and attempting to disprove them will perforce require much more effort than it takes them to shit them out.
Helping them can be very satisfying, also. I still fondly remember that time when I decided to engage with a Nazi who was denying the existence of the gas chambers, asking them for proof, only to receive a link to a report, hosted on Nikzor, which went about debunking their own claim.
> And we're past the point of telling parents to parent.
This, to me, is the root of the issue with this stance. Say what you will about modern parenting, handing the reins to the government is guaranteed to be worse.
The effect of porn is still not fully understood, and is the subject of much study (and conjecture). Findings from those studies are far from conclusive, and certainly not to a degree that would warrant this level of government intervention.
Make no mistake, these new proposed rules are a “moral” stance to please a certain demographic, not a stance based on good science or understanding of the topic.
You might find it interesting to read about the history of sexual violence in the world. Violence that still exists, yes, but some would argue that porn has provided an outlet where one can explore fantasies safely.
You claim without evidence that right wing incels exist because of porn - a dubious claim at best.
You claim without evidence (or understanding of the underlying psychology) that trans people only exist because of porn - this is where the argument becomes preposterous.
> Your right to watch a husband wearing a chastity cage while his wife pulls a creampie gangbang of race-exploited BBCs will be preserved man. You just gotta show ID.
You misunderstand. I'm saying that such material is by far not the only thing that will be, or is, censored. See for example anti-drug-war sites getting swept under the "porn filter", while pro-drug-war sites are exempt [1]. Torrentfreak and linuxtracker were also censored [2].
Of course every attempt will be made to pretend, as you have done, that only porn will be censored, and to paint everyone that argues against this as a pro-child-access-to-porn activist.
I have a gut feeling this is a lead balloon, meant to be shot down so that other stuff can pass untouched. This type of bill is typically full of horrible little clauses that would never clear Parliament on their own, but if you bag enough of them together, pushing them all at the same time, eventually some will make it through.
This needs to be seen in the context of the political situation in the UK. Boris Johnson, the current PM, is currently on this 9th and last political live. During the strictest period of lockdown, when UK citizens where not able to say goodbye to loved ones dying in hospitals, several parties were organised at his residence . It is alleged he attended two of them himself and was photographed drinking beer. In attempt to rescue his political career, he has announced several "red meat" measures and this appears to be one of them.
Over the years several attempts have been made to introduce this. Just like past attempts it will face a heavy lobby from the adult content industry and social media companies. More importantly this government will likely not be around long enough to actually introduce it (the consensus is that Boris will be gone after the May local elections). It will almost certainly drop off the radar of a subsequent government as there are much bigger and more important issues to tackle after Covid.
In the unlikely event it will get introduced, it will be delayed for years. For past measures Ofcom, the media regulator, was asked to classify all adult websites to determine if they fall in a category that requires age verification, and as you can imagine, this can take a while. In addition age verification is only required for websites that allow users to upload content, not commercially sourced content. There are endless loopholes here, however, likely adult websites will just block user content from UK visitors. It is not like there is a shortage of commercial content. Of course VPN providers will do well out of this too.
It's good not to underestimate the situation though - few things are as dangerous as a desperate government. If they can start wars to divert attention, they can certainly force bad laws. This goes double in the UK, where the executive is effectively all-powerful in practice since the Blair reforms.
> few things are as dangerous as a desperate government. If they can start wars to divert attention, they can certainly force bad laws
To support this, see Turkey and Russia for current examples.
The usual dying government cycles between "we are now super nationalistic and everyone who doesn't join us are terrorists" and "but think about the children!!11" like clockwork.
The damage these cause lives much longer than the creators. It totally makes sense to tread with care.
Every bill is screened before it is debated. If it contains anything that may effect the royal family, personally, then they must consent before it is debated.
I'm pretty sure that it was the leader of the opposition who was photographed drinking beers with his colleagues during lockdown, and everyone seems to have bought the claim that was work related and therefore legal. Boris and his colleagues were drinking wine. The big reason that he's on his 9th and last political life is increasingly cynical attacks on him over the handling of Covid - for context, one of the most recent ones is accusing him of "wasting" billions of pounds on PPE because the government ended up buying more PPE than it actually ended up using and the price dropped since then. The consequences of undereestimating this or overestimating future availability are of course that doctors and nurses don't have the protection they need, and there were a bunch of earlier attacks on the government for not having a massive PPE stockpike (which would waste billions on PPE that'd just be thrown away). Even the nominally trusted and non-political BBC, which everyone thinks of as a government mouthpiece, ran with this and all the other attack lines, including stuff like lying about what South Korea had achieved with contact tracing to make the UK scheme sound like an expensive failure and Boris's bragging about it like lies. It's impossible to disentangle the anger over the parties from the misinformation people have been fed about the UK's Covid response; they seem closely intertwined in most people's thinking.
To give some further idea of how cynical all this is, the people who actually organised the supposed parties which are supposed to end Boris' career - the vast majority of which he doesn't even seem to have been involved in - are just scapegoats according to the media reporting, including the BBC. And at least one of the claimed parties Boris was involved was actually reported by a major newspaper the day after, back when lockdown was still on and people's relatives were still dying alone in hospital, and no-one seemed to conclude it was obviously an illegal party or even really care back then - and that was the one for Boris's birthday.
As to your first point, the police have completed an investigation into the beer in question and found no offence committed, so it's not the same as the 12 (IIRC) parties that happened at 10 downing street, currently under investigation by the met.
Johnson will go down as one of the worst PM's in UK's history.
Under his leadership UK suffered immense damage and he dragged down political standards to an almost Trumpian level.
The PPE that was sourced was unusable and the deals were handed out to some Tory mates. Where was the due-diligence?
The police looked into Steir Karmer's beer case and concluded he didn't break the laws.
Compare that to the Tory's multiple parties.
The PM is under criminal investigation for crying out loud.
Why didn't he stop those parties he was at. As the leader he could have easily said this is not on and needs to be stopped now. He sets the tone.
He's a disgrace to the UK and can't lead. He's a lying narcissist who only cares about what's good for him. It's all about 'winning' and not actually thinking about how to improve the lives of people living in the UK.
The Johnson administration is a joke and needs to be replaced asap.
> for context, one of the most recent ones is accusing him of "wasting" billions of pounds on PPE because the government ended up buying more PPE than it actually ended up using and the price dropped since then.
Ah, gotta love alternative takes on realities. Nah mate, the expensive PPE contracts went to friends and family of people in government. Ooh sure, these are just "cynical attacks" and in reality Boris and co are competent and non-corrupt people working so hard to serve the UK public.
No, it's in the fine print of some (though not all) of the media reporting - most of the "wasted" billions that made the news headlines in the UK was from the decrease in the market price of the stockpile: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60176283 The next highest was items "unusable in the NHS", which is to say they're functional PPE but don't meet normal NHS standards - most countries ended up intentionally buying a lot of this because medical PPE was in massive short supply and there were similar non-medical items that were a lot better than nothing.
Really, the UK PPE acquistion was unremarkable aside from its speed - the government ended up buying PPE from basically everyone who could sell it to them, just like every other government that was taking Covid seriously. Some of those contracts inevitably went to friends of people in government (they're the party of big business after all) but there's no evidence that played any role in them being awarded the contracts, those people weren't the ones deciding who to award the contracts to, and those contracts don't seem to have fared any worse than any of the other PPE contracts. The speed was also impossible to disentangle from the perception of corruption, a lot of which came from not putting the contracts out to bid as usual.
(There was a really weird - and as it turns out probably illegal - VIP fast lane where people who got referred via an MPs got priority for being evaluated for PPE contracts. The weird thing is that the effective criteria to get onto the fast lane just seem to have been phoning or emailing your MP and pestering them, and that the politicians doing the referrals don't seem to have known about the fast lane. The one friend and donor of a senior member of government who got on the fast lane was also somehow referred by someone else entirely...)
"if it was another..." is political fiction. The fact is that the leader of the opposition wasn't caught partying like a teenager on Ibiza on those days. We'll never know what would happen so lets not assume a different outcome by default.
In any case, this partygate looks to me like an excuse to push the dead weight out of the car when is not useful anymore.
If he were acting as a serious PM at the same time and taking smart actions, the event could be sold easily as 'diplomatic work', hanging up with the people that counts in the public interest and so, and nobody would bat an eye. Nobody. Is just that the videos are too damaging and that damage control train has passed yet.
> I'm pretty sure that it was the leader of the opposition who was photographed drinking beers with his colleagues during lockdown, and everyone seems to have bought the claim that was work related and therefore legal.
The photo of Johnson is not AFAIK in public circulation; the police have it as part of the evidence they are currently investigating, in particular that this was part of his unlawful birthday celebration with his coworkers.
Starmer was having some drinks after a long day with his coworkers in the office - all was completely above board and vetted by the met police. This was a story thrown out by conservative outlets in a desperate attempt to distract from the real scandals of Boris going to full on Christmas parties that were prohibited under the laws his own government passed.
>More importantly this government will likely not be around long enough to actually introduce it
Don't worry. The next one is going to introduce it. Doesn't matter which party gets into power - one thing stays the same: The government/state always expands in scope.
The most worrying thing about the political situation in the UK is that it is years ahead of other countries. I can see similar madness happen in the future in some EU countries, the script already exists. I think a country like NL can be a target. I think it's really worth the effort to analyse what happen in the UK over recent years and how we can learn from it
The UK and Australia take it in turns. One will introduce a bill, get it slapped down, then the other country uses those learnings to tweak the bill until its within the Overton window... and then it's law.
My perception is that that's a position that most people would find weird.
The politicians in the UK have just slapped the harshest restrictions on people's liberties since (I assume) the world wars, and then they completely ignored them themselves.
People weren't able to attend loved ones funerals, but the politicians where having parties in their offices.
I'm intrigued to find out why you don't think this is a bad thing?
I don't think it's a bad thing, because it is what I expected. (Edit: what I meant is that it confirmed my belief in how things work, and did not assert a need to reexamine my mental model of politicians) And if this revelation goes some way to shaking people out of the naivety and blind conformity that were needed to support lockdowns, then that is ultimately a good thing.
For democracy to survive, people must sharpen their political antennae.
"Evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters not by bureaucrats, but by joiners. That evil originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements" Helen Arendt after watching the Nazi trials.
I don't think anybody actually cares the politicians have a party. The average person cares that politicians didn't follow the rules they passed while enforcing / attempting to enforce the rules on the average Joe.
Right answer! This is about signalling more than it's about the actual health details and people (rightfully?) are unhappy because leaders who make rules should follow them (right....?)
Frankly I think our politicians deserve a break and should be able to have a party to blow off steam once in a while, and I tolerate fairly modest violations of the lockdown policy.
I think a lot of people in other professions were also working hard, deserved a break and wanted to blow off steam, are you advocating for them to be allowed to ignore the law set down during pandemic too?
How much harder is it going to be to convince the public to follow rules/guidelines if we announce that certain groups can ignore parts of them?
Do you live in the UK? We had harsh, cruel, extended lockdowns. Like - no talking to friends on the street lockdowns. For like months at a time. Johnson, who subjected us to this, was having house parties the whole time. Most Brits would push the creep in front of a bus at this point.
Seems pretty clear to me. Boris did something that offended a certain segment, so he makes amends by creating the perception he is going to do something that segment approves of. At least that seems to be what is implied.
The noted point here is it likely won't happen, but the underlying goal of creating such perception may be achieved.
Well I'm not the one who made that assertion, I was just explaining what OP had wrote since the person above me didn't understand. I didn't mean to imply it was my opinion nor that it was likely.
Facebook still needs government's help to implement it, so there must be something in it for representatives if it's going to make it through. Seems doubtful Facebook can possibly pass a law on its own. And if Facebook wants to, they can easily require credit card without any law being passed; it's not illegal to require credit card to become a member of a website.
I thought it was implied that this was a distraction.
Gets people on both sides engaged and takes over the headlines and the hope is that it wipes partygate off the headlines and short term memory loss sets in and everyone forgets about partygate by election time.
Trump would just say something completely insane every other day to keep the headlines thrashing on nonsense to distract away from whatever else was going on.
Also think this is similar to the way that Klopp whines about the length of the grass after losses to keep media attention on what nonsense he's saying in pressers and off the performance of his players on the pitch.
Is there really a lot of porn on those platforms? I would have expected porn to be forbidden by the content policies of any big service with user generated content, it's probably the easiest kind of abuse to automatically detect, and it's something the services are very motivated to keep out since they can't sell ads on that content. I have never heard of either of those platforms as having a reputation for hosting porn.
Wireless radio (it will mean mothers no longer sing to their children), various genres of music over the years (will harm development of children), newspapers (in the 30s there was an obsession with young men reading newspapers rather than talking to their colleagues or family, like a mobile phone concern but in the 30s - if you Google this story you can find some impressive pictures of lines of men waiting at a bus stop and every single one is reading a newspaper).
It wouldn’t surprise me if kids are better adjusted to social media than adults. The kids don’t need to go through a readjustment period of trying to convert their expectations to the new reality.
Kids will still bully each other with or without social media. There will Still exist dangers which can’t be controlled without active parenting and an attentive society.
I see the attraction of banning social media below a certain age but i can’t help think that open discussion with kids would be far more effective.
Young victims of schoolyard bullying could in the past retreat to safe spaces - a friend’s house, a favorite art or music teacher’s classroom, the computer club. Today, the bullies are posting cruel messages and media about you in huge group chats and creating fake social media accounts under your name to embarrass you. The abuse follows them into their bedrooms. There’s literally nowhere for them to go to hide. This is why tween suicide rates are skyrocketing, especially for girls.
>> Young victims of schoolyard bullying could in the past retreat to safe spaces
I don't think you meant it this way but what you're saying there is that victims of bullying who have been physically harmed in school yards could have just retreated to a safe space and avoided it. Clearly that's not true. I don't think you meant that but the words you've used are clearly wrong.
The one advantage of social media is that it does have an off button, in a way that the bully screaming in your face in the lunch hall queue does not.
>> This is why tween suicide rates are skyrocketing
I'm sure it's a contributing factor but this is just a statement we can't back up other than with faith that we think we understand what's happening. The truth is we don't fully understand.
>> to embarrass you
It is definitely a viable medium for bullys to harm victims. What i'm getting at is the problem is the bullying rather than the medium. If you play whackamole with all the ways a person can persecute another, you'll never solve it.
Easy solution … give up Facebook and TikTok and all the other social media addictions like a sane and healthy person. Social media is essentially the tobacco of today; a toxic, destructive, addictive force.
Keeping credit card details will expose private companies to the requirements of PCI to store them. It's against those rules for private companies to keep the cardholder information connected to the card details like the PAN. The PANs aren't even allowed to be stored unencrypted and access to them is subject to PCI as well.
Plus it means that people that don't have those forms of identification will be restricted from using the internet. Libraries won't be able to offer a lot of services, the "unintended side effects" are enormous.
But never put it past this particular British government from establishing the very best in footguns.
184 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadIt will be a drastic change to pivot the company from one where the customer is the product to the customer.
Credit card input also introduces friction and bounce rate of user signup. This would hurt Facebook's user growth and MAU KPIs
People tend to get them for online shopping abroad, and for travels out of their currency zone as a back up.
11+ with parental permission. I had one around that age.
If you can login to your government tax account, or apply for a DBS, you'll be able to prove your identity.
Edit: the article says "Adults would be forced to enter personal information like passport or credit card details", so I guess other forms of ID with a date of birth would be accepted.
See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introducing-govuk...
Who would have thought there would be more friction for just about every part of British life? /s
[1] https://preprod.metro.co.uk/2021/08/27/no-more-cookie-pop-up...
It’s just an implementation of a crappy idea by a crappy government.
But yeah, it's a crappy, incompetent government who are currently announcing all kinds of badly thought out populist ideas to distract attention from the trouble their leader is in.
It would be good though if there is some identity standard across platforms rather than the existing patchwork solutions that exclude people without say, credit cards. Digital ID systems like in South Korea or Taiwan seem good because they're uniform across the country and comparable to national ids.
There’s no reasonable definition of who should and shouldn’t be affected by this where Facebook has to comply but Reddit doesn’t.
I would suggest this is generally better than an attempt to codify in law some kind of definition of what companies should be covered.
Yesterday’s obvious attempt at fraud is tomorrow’s legal obligation, and the fraudsters are going to love it.
People will start buying shitty VPNs advertised on prime time TV instead and entirely side step the issue but create two more at the same time.
Think we need a new national anthem now along the lines of https://youtu.be/P1CyPjQQTAM
Use code shittyVPN for 95% off our Best VPN in the World service for life.
So... the internet?
I am happy to identify myself to government entity A to prove my age, but I don't want A to know what sites I visit.
I want to visit site B, but I don't want to identify myself.
Is there no API that will allow B to verify my age via A, without A finding out what site B is, and without B finding out anything more than my age bracket?
See the work of Jan Camenisch for example: https://jan.camenisch.org
But I doubt anything so well thought out would be implemented for this. Current government suggestions are credit card checks, checking identity against government passport records, or your mobile phone service provider.
I don't even understand the mobile phone one. My son has a mobile phone, but I'm the account holder according to the phone company. He's too young to enter into contracts for a start!
https://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/release-1.3/ide...
DAA solves a different problem.
If I can prove User is over 18 to App, without giving away who User is to App - that seems quite valuable. An "Ali Baba cave" for identity. (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~mkowalcz/628.pdf)
That claim as a signed message can be provided to third-party services which need only validate the signed message using the public key associated with the secret key that signed the claim message.
How would the flow go? Click on an age verification link on a site. It redirects to the gov site, where you authenticate and it returns a signed claim.
Now the government knows what sites you are visiting. Not something I suspect most people will want when accessing porn sites...
The flow can be as follows:
The user authenticates itself via government's site and is presented with a page which lets them create government-signed messages using claims provided by the government.
The concerned site can generate a random string during their registration/verification process which they expect to be part of the signed message that the user is to provide them.
The user enters that random string on government's site and checks/selects the age claim for it to be included in the signed message. The government adds timestamp to it and a key id based on the private key which it used to sign the message.
The user posts the signed message on the concerned site during the registration/verification process. The site uses the government's well-known address to fetch the public key associated with the key id (mentioned in the signed message). It then uses the public key to verify the signed message alongside checking the timestamp for recency and presence of the exact random string in the signed message. Ultimately checking the age claim.
So now, instead of providing credit card details, the signed message was provided by the user which the concerned site can validate on its own without the government knowing.
It's not really oauth 2 either, even though it re-uses bits of it. There is no "flow"!
The websites which are to be restricted by government-imposed legalities can expose the claims they need during their registration/verification process and the browser extension can automatically retrieve those claims alongside other details as mentioned previously, and can auto-fill on the website for the user.
Since this extension acts as the intermediary client, it knows the parties involved but it preserves user's privacy accordingly due to its vetted nature and as a FOSS application.
Of course, there will be concerns regarding pushing people to use such things but if legality can force people to give out their credit card details on certain websites, then it can also push for such user-focused convenience ways to enforce the legal matters. Whether it will really happen is not in our power but technically it is a resolvable matter as put forth by the original comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona
Big company’s (Facebook, etc) will lobby against it, they will argue about what the threshold of requirement is. Then there is the logistics, privacy, security and cost factors. Not going to happen.
I believe this is all about making it look like politicians are doing “something” without actually doing anything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30256984
Have they reached this point with the "online moral-indignation brigade" yet? Maybe not, but it's been 5 years since the Snoopers' Charter, I don't know how many since the porn-blocking promises and about 13 since the first pledges in this area by a Conservative party, with no significant progress to show for it. That's a lot of time even in political terms.
I really dont see anyone in the electorate clamouring for any of this stuff. Announcing the same policy being told it is a shit idea and announcing it again 6 months later is much harder to sell than the recycled spending (which they tend to just lie and say it is in addition to the last lot they announced anyway). That said, the electorate dont actually care much (unless it is a penny off the price of a pint or something) so it is hardly a humiliation when these ideas go nowhere and it makes the government look busy.
I can only assume that the driver is the security services, or just recycling past homework to look busy. As noted in many other comments they try all sorts of seemingly stupid ideas in this space - banning all encryption has failed countless times, adult verification is already a thing on mobile networks, and logging every online activity has slipped through and passed.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10070779?hl=en-GB#...
Credit cards in the EU are not very prominent as a payment method, mostly for paying USA companies.
You don't need anything. At all. According to Google, in case they suspect you might be lying about your age, they _might_ require age verification. This can be done with a credit card or an ID card.
So no, you don't need a credit card to watch age-restricted videos. You don't need a debit card either. You probably don't even need an ID card or anything at all.
I suppose if you have verified your age in the past (for example if you bought something from the play store?) then you can watch the video freely. Try and watch it while logged off.
Blaming the EU is a common escape strategy, but I don't believe it in the slightest. Mind, I wouldn't believe anything coming out of the modern Google except "we want to make tracking you easier so we can sell more expensive ads".
Edit: if the evil EU "forced" them to require a credit card or my ID to watch Samuel L Jackson saying "motherfucker", why hasn't the same evil EU forced them to make it easy to opt out of all tracking?
Today if you try to access adult content on a UK mobile device you get blocked by age verification. You have to call your mobile provider and prove your age (it’s a once-per-contract thing). One of the ways you can prove your age is with a credit card. But I imagine it’s a large deterrent because not many people want to call Vodafone and ask permission to look at pornography. They’d probably just rather get a VPN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28551960
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29903695
I've been using them for a while, very happy with it so far. Stable connection and high speeds - good enough that I often forget I have it on - and a nice selection of locations.
They even accept cash! Each account is just an ID so you can mail your account number and some money to them and payment will be processed.
Mozilla VPN also uses Mullvad's servers behind the scenes.
Using a VPN moves the point where this occurs and may obfuscate some things, but also realize that many VPNs are probably in some form associated with nation-states and therefore makes their job easier.
For example, my VPN is based in Thailand. For various legal reasons, it's very unlikely anything obtained by a nation-state actor in Thailand will be used for trivial stuff like, say, enforcing copyright legislation against individual consumers. Defense lawyers / barristers would have a field day. If you are planning terrorist acts, on the other hand...
I pay €5/month to ultracc for a server I can torrent with. It just happens to come with a vpn installed as a bonus.
Mullvad is the same cost for just a vpn. I'm sure it's better in many ways that people will list below but for the purposes of getting around government internet blocks where you're not then expecting g men to kick in your door for getting around them, openvpn installed on whatever random server works fine.
Vultr ( Cheapest $2.5/Month): https://www.vultr.com/marketplace/apps/openvpn Linode: https://www.linode.com/marketplace/apps/linode/openvpn/ Hetzern, or any other cheap VPS provider as your are not storing any data on it anyways so even it dies or corrupts it shouldn't be a problem.
Open VPN has a clients for every major platform: https://openvpn.net/vpn-client/
Make sure do your research about Open VPN and VPS before using any of it.
No need to call, it's a switch in their app or website. It's the same for pretty much any provider.
The annoying part is that the switch tends to reset fairly often.
True, and particularly galling when the content you want to look at is not porn but (say) the internet archive or opinion sites that weenies in the provider have deemed offensive.
But the verification process wanted my Driving License number, which I gave repeatedly, but which it never accepted.
I scrapped that mobile contract ("Three") as useless.
I accidentally saw some pornography when I wasn't sexually active. I had no clue what was I looking at. I found it to be disgusting, like those extreme cancer photos, and didn't watch it again until many years later.
In effect, this proposal already exists for mobile data connections. Add this to what is enabled by the snoopers charter, and the use of this information accross governement and it is a pretty grim state.
> What we've done to ourselves as a society in this regard is pathetic.
I fail to see how that's substantively different/worse than the cat-calling, profanities and other verbal abuse that women and girls have unfortunately suffered throughout history; often out of sight, and hence less amenable to third-party anecdotes.
Your argument would have more merit if it were based on actual data, showing some sort of historical trend. As far as I'm aware, historical trends show the exact opposite of your argument; i.e. that winding-back the clock would increase the abuse and violence that women and girls suffer.
> Meanwhile our art and entertainment these days are void of any real complex romantic plots or subplots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
> The US should actually enforce the age restrictions.
The goal is to create infrastructure and laws to censor arbitrary content, and deanonymise users. "Think of the children" is, as always, just a distraction.
Just because you perceive a problem as being less worse than another problem, doesn't mean its not a problem.
I think it should be normalized to not give children personal devices capable of accessing the web until they are 16.
What a silly strawman; I never said it wasn't a problem, and in fact I said the opposite.
No, it was a criticism of whataboutism of the first part of your comment, which didn't address the problem, but rather compared its magnitude to a different problem.
I think it was your comment, actually, which was the straw man of the person you were responding to. The original commenter was talking specifically about pornography, and your comment straw-manned this as somehow a wish to "wind back the clock"; involving returning to social norms where casual sexism was the norm.
In fact, we can still go forward, whilst still addressing the problem the original commenter was highlighting.
Nagging someone for their onlyfans details is a form of "cat-calling, profanities and other verbal abuse". It's not "a different problem", just because it involves an Internet word.
> The original commenter was talking specifically about pornography
Yes.
> your comment straw-manned this as somehow a wish to "wind back the clock"
No, that was a specific reference to the original commenter's claim that "art and entertainment these days are void of any real complex romantic plots or subplots. It's all quarantined off into the world of hardcore porn.".
That claim is so laughably ignorant that no straw-man is needed:
- It ignores Sturgeon's law (that most of everything is crap; regardless of when it was made)
- It's ignoring survivorship bias (that great works will be long treasured and easily recalled; whilst the crap will get forgotten)
- It's ignoring availability bias (that examples from "these days" will be drawn from what's close-to-hand; not necessarily the best of what's out there right now)
- It's ignoring that porn has permeated media since pre-history; that some of the earliest photos and film are pornographic; etc.
- It's claiming that this is somehow a new problem, despite kids having access to pornography long before smartphones were invented.
and so on.
I like how what you got out of this was that someone was harassing someone... Which, true
Rather than a underage teenager had an onlyfans. you seem to be OK with this and more worried she was being asked for it.
Wtf is a teenager doing with a f* OF page ?
Again with the silly strawmen...
But do you think the government should step in and enforce such a limitation?
As a counter example, I grew up in a repressive, abusive environment. My access to the Internet at that age was a lifeline. It helped me understand the real world, form deep and lasting friendships with people from diverse backgrounds with opinions I had never been exposed to, and eventually helped me escape my environment.
While I acknowledge that the Internet has evolved since then, and more care is needed at that age, I see a lot of opinions that all seem based on the premise of a perfect childhood. Good parents who are actually involved and are not harming their children. Parents who themselves have a healthy outlook on all of this.
Don’t get me wrong, I know such parents exist. But where they exist, this is a self solving problem. Because good parents will manage their children’s access and help them navigate the Internet safely.
When bad parents do not, a government entity doing it for them can only further exacerbate the situations of those who rely on that phone to have some hope of a normal life.
That’s not a silver bullet either.
No, it should be a social norm.
I'm not suggesting teenagers shouldn't use the internet at all, but it should be in a family environment. e.g. what used to be the desktop in the family lounge.
I think things like unrestricted access to Reddit, tiktok, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram have proved toxic for young teenagers.
That you can remove the block doesn't fix all the issues - anyone under 18 is still confined to a government-approved subset of the internet, and many over-18's won't lift the filter, further marginalizing dissident websites that, entirely by accident, find themselves blocked.
That they have existed for a long time or that you approve of the particular one doesn't change that.
Technically, yes.
But my kid's Kindle not being able to access Xhamster is not what most people have in mind when we talk about censorship.
Increasing acceptance hasn't done anything positive for their depression rates, drug use rates, suicide rates, either.
So yeah. I don't see this population growing as a good thing for anyone.
Im not advocating eradication of them or anything negative.
But I do think when we have kids who trend towards narcissistic personality disorder, that the web exacerbates ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4301205/)
And a population that trends autistic (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/11/the-link-...)
That porn culture and identity politics culture sucking them up in a vacuum isn't a positive thing.
This isn't something we want to encourage to grow.
Incel culture is largely men growing up on porn mad at their inadequacy in obtaining women.
Trans culture, at least in part and mostly why it's slanted so far MtF is because autism affects men more than women and they internalized the porn differently in that they'd just tther be the women seen in the porn.
Trans and Incel culture are two sides of the same coin Imho.
Why do you think trans people call people bigots for not wanting to sleep with them.?
Who's thst sound like? Oh yeah.. Incels. Who thinks they're owed sex.
Its a political divide of the same base problems.
Where is this coming from? This is such a reductionist take on an extremely complex issue. If you have studies to share, I’d be interested to read them.
If you’re basing your conclusions on extreme subreddits or similar places, I would remind you that Reddit is not a direct reflection of society as a whole. Nor are some of the personalities there a direct reflection of their counterparts in other parts of the real world.
Bold assertion. What are you basing it on, the PIDOOMA institute report?
> Trans culture, at least in part and mostly why it's slanted so far MtF is because autism affects men more than women and they internalized the porn differently in that they'd just tther be the women seen in the porn.
> Trans and Incel culture are two sides of the same coin Imho.
No, you just have no bloody idea what you are talking about, and are blindly parroting talking points that you decided sounded right: you started out with a falsehood, followed by a bunch of not even wrong assertions, throwing in a couple of articles - very loosely related to at most one of your assertions - to give them the appearance of respectability.
> Why do you think trans people call people bigots for not wanting to sleep with them.?
If you simply cannot control your need to engage in culture war bullshit - targeting an already extremely victimized minority to do so - could you kindly do so in a less boring manner?
The only person who can display "genuine curiosity" over the nth dimwit making the same set of already thoroughly debunked claims for the hundredth time - claims that get repeated, only infinitesimally changed, over timeframes measured in years to decades - is someone who suffers from heavy memory problems.
Engaging with them is frankly pointless: even if they are willing and able to learn - which is a big if - there's always another person around the corner ready to take their place, and argue the inarguable. Oh, sure, there are probably a lot of people, at any point of time, who are willing to engage with them in good faith, but bullshit is fundamentally asymmetric: they do get tired of it.
At that point, the only real solution is to either stop engaging - and let them appear unopposed, while other people burn themselves out in an effort to bring them the light - try to shut them down, or - in loosely moderated places - deploy mockery and use them as a teaching tool: people who think themselves rational do not, as a rule, want to be associated - even in their own minds - with people who are absolutely foaming at the mouth to spew easily-debunked bullshit, and who get ridiculed as a result. Most of these bad actors do not possess a lot of self-control, and are easily riled up, or otherwise convinced to go mask off in a way that makes them unpalatable to the general population - say, by simply asking them to discuss their beliefs further - which makes this method very effective in limiting the spread of their memes.
TL;DR: "revealed"? I'm sorry?
Ignoring the debate about whether our methodologies should be applied uniformly, even to trans disparagers or even people like Nazis, this turns out to be a false assumption. Kelseyfrog repeatedly engages in this ("luring" Socratic methodology) behavior on a variety of topics, including ideas that don't involve disparaging trans population such as on property and the state.
Usually they are not so straight forward about their intentions, but as you have proven in a crystal clear fashion, this topic has provided perfect cover for 'frog to reveal their true intentions. After all -- anyone questioning them can be accused of interfering with some sort of process meant to limit "spread of memes" about trans persons. A convenient way to offload blame from the self and onto an unsavory other.
I love this tactic because it gets people to earnestly say what they believe. More people in debates should say what they believe.
The problem is when people don't want to reveal what they believe. These people know their assumptions and conclusions are socially unacceptable. Socially unacceptable beliefs make people feel socially isolated. This isolation creates a pressure in them so great that when someone asks them to continue speaking, they cannot stop. They are so used to being told to stop that they don't know how to handle someone asking them to speak.
By now it's clear that the trap has been set. When they reveal their true beliefs, they temporarily forget that they are in front of an audience. They have unwittingly been made part of a performance they didn't want to be in, but at this point it is too late. The audience here is the true judge, and the audience is a harsh critic. The audience enjoys the theatrics of the villain performing their grand reveal and they enjoy the justice in seeing them make this critical error.
So many subversives couch their true beliefs in meta-irony. finger on nose "Am I joking about these reprehensible beliefs or do I really believe them? We'll never know but we're making it ok to say them. uwu." The end results are the same. Either they will learn not to say them - eventually eradicating the belief, or they will say them and the audience will learn from them not to believe them. As you are well aware, I'm ok with both.
It doesn't make me look any more favorably on you. You engage in 'luring', drawing people into performances they 'didn't want to be in' and set 'traps.' Some of these people you engage may be genuinely bad and disingenuous people, others may be honest and well meaning people with bad ideas. And some, may simply have ideas you disagree with and don't have bad ideas at all. You on the other hand, are cool and calculated while laying in wait with what you characterize as 'traps' for others.
Frankly I think you're no better than the individuals you intend to impugn. You use your remarkable intelligence for deceit, and even brag about it. Dishonest behavior is not the way to fix unsavory influences. But the greatest tyrannies and misdeeds happen under guise of acting on the greater good, and this same rationale tends to make people act in the boldest fashion when they otherwise would not.
The thing is, not engaging with them - in non-moderated communities - also has the potential for readers to mistake their drivel for substantive discourse, both by way of familiarizing them with it - mere exposure effect - and by making it appear like their assertions are not being challenged because they cannot be challenged.
That's why the engagement really needs to happen on two fronts: both on their own level - assertions met with demands for proof, unrelated or misunderstood papers pointed out as such, counter-assertions backed with proof - and on a meta level. If you only do the former you will run afoul of Brandolini's bullshit asymmetry principle, while letting them choose the field of engagement: there is a literally infinite number of bullshit claims they are able to make - be that "trans people are just incels, really" or "transsexualism [sic] is a sexual addiction, which is why epileptics never transition" - and attempting to disprove them will perforce require much more effort than it takes them to shit them out.
Helping them can be very satisfying, also. I still fondly remember that time when I decided to engage with a Nazi who was denying the existence of the gas chambers, asking them for proof, only to receive a link to a report, hosted on Nikzor, which went about debunking their own claim.
This, to me, is the root of the issue with this stance. Say what you will about modern parenting, handing the reins to the government is guaranteed to be worse.
The effect of porn is still not fully understood, and is the subject of much study (and conjecture). Findings from those studies are far from conclusive, and certainly not to a degree that would warrant this level of government intervention.
Make no mistake, these new proposed rules are a “moral” stance to please a certain demographic, not a stance based on good science or understanding of the topic.
You might find it interesting to read about the history of sexual violence in the world. Violence that still exists, yes, but some would argue that porn has provided an outlet where one can explore fantasies safely.
You claim without evidence that right wing incels exist because of porn - a dubious claim at best.
You claim without evidence (or understanding of the underlying psychology) that trans people only exist because of porn - this is where the argument becomes preposterous.
You misunderstand. I'm saying that such material is by far not the only thing that will be, or is, censored. See for example anti-drug-war sites getting swept under the "porn filter", while pro-drug-war sites are exempt [1]. Torrentfreak and linuxtracker were also censored [2].
Of course every attempt will be made to pretend, as you have done, that only porn will be censored, and to paint everyone that argues against this as a pro-child-access-to-porn activist.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/uk-porn-filters-are-censo_b_5...
[2] https://torrentfreak.com/uk-porn-filter-triggers-widespread-...
I'd require any US site, including search engines, to provide their own age verification system.
It's a common idiom in political discourse. Or was this a bad joke?
It was a historical joke :)
Over the years several attempts have been made to introduce this. Just like past attempts it will face a heavy lobby from the adult content industry and social media companies. More importantly this government will likely not be around long enough to actually introduce it (the consensus is that Boris will be gone after the May local elections). It will almost certainly drop off the radar of a subsequent government as there are much bigger and more important issues to tackle after Covid.
In the unlikely event it will get introduced, it will be delayed for years. For past measures Ofcom, the media regulator, was asked to classify all adult websites to determine if they fall in a category that requires age verification, and as you can imagine, this can take a while. In addition age verification is only required for websites that allow users to upload content, not commercially sourced content. There are endless loopholes here, however, likely adult websites will just block user content from UK visitors. It is not like there is a shortage of commercial content. Of course VPN providers will do well out of this too.
To support this, see Turkey and Russia for current examples.
The usual dying government cycles between "we are now super nationalistic and everyone who doesn't join us are terrorists" and "but think about the children!!11" like clockwork.
The damage these cause lives much longer than the creators. It totally makes sense to tread with care.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...
To give some further idea of how cynical all this is, the people who actually organised the supposed parties which are supposed to end Boris' career - the vast majority of which he doesn't even seem to have been involved in - are just scapegoats according to the media reporting, including the BBC. And at least one of the claimed parties Boris was involved was actually reported by a major newspaper the day after, back when lockdown was still on and people's relatives were still dying alone in hospital, and no-one seemed to conclude it was obviously an illegal party or even really care back then - and that was the one for Boris's birthday.
Under his leadership UK suffered immense damage and he dragged down political standards to an almost Trumpian level.
The PPE that was sourced was unusable and the deals were handed out to some Tory mates. Where was the due-diligence?
The police looked into Steir Karmer's beer case and concluded he didn't break the laws.
Compare that to the Tory's multiple parties.
The PM is under criminal investigation for crying out loud.
Why didn't he stop those parties he was at. As the leader he could have easily said this is not on and needs to be stopped now. He sets the tone.
He's a disgrace to the UK and can't lead. He's a lying narcissist who only cares about what's good for him. It's all about 'winning' and not actually thinking about how to improve the lives of people living in the UK.
The Johnson administration is a joke and needs to be replaced asap.
Ah, gotta love alternative takes on realities. Nah mate, the expensive PPE contracts went to friends and family of people in government. Ooh sure, these are just "cynical attacks" and in reality Boris and co are competent and non-corrupt people working so hard to serve the UK public.
Really, the UK PPE acquistion was unremarkable aside from its speed - the government ended up buying PPE from basically everyone who could sell it to them, just like every other government that was taking Covid seriously. Some of those contracts inevitably went to friends of people in government (they're the party of big business after all) but there's no evidence that played any role in them being awarded the contracts, those people weren't the ones deciding who to award the contracts to, and those contracts don't seem to have fared any worse than any of the other PPE contracts. The speed was also impossible to disentangle from the perception of corruption, a lot of which came from not putting the contracts out to bid as usual.
(There was a really weird - and as it turns out probably illegal - VIP fast lane where people who got referred via an MPs got priority for being evaluated for PPE contracts. The weird thing is that the effective criteria to get onto the fast lane just seem to have been phoning or emailing your MP and pestering them, and that the politicians doing the referrals don't seem to have known about the fast lane. The one friend and donor of a senior member of government who got on the fast lane was also somehow referred by someone else entirely...)
In any case, this partygate looks to me like an excuse to push the dead weight out of the car when is not useful anymore.
If he were acting as a serious PM at the same time and taking smart actions, the event could be sold easily as 'diplomatic work', hanging up with the people that counts in the public interest and so, and nobody would bat an eye. Nobody. Is just that the videos are too damaging and that damage control train has passed yet.
Both were photographed with beer.
This is the photo of Keir Starmer: https://metro.co.uk/2022/02/07/keir-starmer-cleared-of-lockd...
The photo of Johnson is not AFAIK in public circulation; the police have it as part of the evidence they are currently investigating, in particular that this was part of his unlawful birthday celebration with his coworkers.
The picture in this article is not, I think, of this incident: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/feb/04/police-have...
Jonathan Pie: 'Boris Johnson Is a Liar' | NYT Opinion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS7kUqKeg_0
Don't worry. The next one is going to introduce it. Doesn't matter which party gets into power - one thing stays the same: The government/state always expands in scope.
The politicians in the UK have just slapped the harshest restrictions on people's liberties since (I assume) the world wars, and then they completely ignored them themselves.
People weren't able to attend loved ones funerals, but the politicians where having parties in their offices.
I'm intrigued to find out why you don't think this is a bad thing?
For democracy to survive, people must sharpen their political antennae.
Frankly I think our politicians deserve a break and should be able to have a party to blow off steam once in a while, and I tolerate fairly modest violations of the lockdown policy.
How much harder is it going to be to convince the public to follow rules/guidelines if we announce that certain groups can ignore parts of them?
The noted point here is it likely won't happen, but the underlying goal of creating such perception may be achieved.
Facebook still needs government's help to implement it, so there must be something in it for representatives if it's going to make it through. Seems doubtful Facebook can possibly pass a law on its own. And if Facebook wants to, they can easily require credit card without any law being passed; it's not illegal to require credit card to become a member of a website.
Gets people on both sides engaged and takes over the headlines and the hope is that it wipes partygate off the headlines and short term memory loss sets in and everyone forgets about partygate by election time.
Trump would just say something completely insane every other day to keep the headlines thrashing on nonsense to distract away from whatever else was going on.
Also think this is similar to the way that Klopp whines about the length of the grass after losses to keep media attention on what nonsense he's saying in pressers and off the performance of his players on the pitch.
Wireless radio (it will mean mothers no longer sing to their children), various genres of music over the years (will harm development of children), newspapers (in the 30s there was an obsession with young men reading newspapers rather than talking to their colleagues or family, like a mobile phone concern but in the 30s - if you Google this story you can find some impressive pictures of lines of men waiting at a bus stop and every single one is reading a newspaper).
It wouldn’t surprise me if kids are better adjusted to social media than adults. The kids don’t need to go through a readjustment period of trying to convert their expectations to the new reality.
Kids will still bully each other with or without social media. There will Still exist dangers which can’t be controlled without active parenting and an attentive society.
I see the attraction of banning social media below a certain age but i can’t help think that open discussion with kids would be far more effective.
It’s also extremely harmful for adults, but adults can make their own decisions.
I don't think you meant it this way but what you're saying there is that victims of bullying who have been physically harmed in school yards could have just retreated to a safe space and avoided it. Clearly that's not true. I don't think you meant that but the words you've used are clearly wrong.
The one advantage of social media is that it does have an off button, in a way that the bully screaming in your face in the lunch hall queue does not.
>> This is why tween suicide rates are skyrocketing
I'm sure it's a contributing factor but this is just a statement we can't back up other than with faith that we think we understand what's happening. The truth is we don't fully understand.
>> to embarrass you
It is definitely a viable medium for bullys to harm victims. What i'm getting at is the problem is the bullying rather than the medium. If you play whackamole with all the ways a person can persecute another, you'll never solve it.
We can do without it if it was just switched off, but everyone else who is using it, is itself a reason to be part of it.
Plus it means that people that don't have those forms of identification will be restricted from using the internet. Libraries won't be able to offer a lot of services, the "unintended side effects" are enormous.
But never put it past this particular British government from establishing the very best in footguns.