This is a relic mindset from the start of the Internet. The website itself even visually reflects that.
Is there a marginal grey area around adult content? Yes. But beyond that margin is a vast ocean of explicit, intentional adult content.
As someone who grew up in both the decentralized "new" era of the Internet, and now lives in the hyper localized algo driven version of it... It's all shit. And I'd never want my kids to be exposed to it.
Some Brazilian tribes had fertility festivals with dances meant to arouse the males, because simple nudity wasn't enough to get them interested in sex.
So maybe making nudity less common or accessible only makes it more valuable as a sexual thing.
anything that needs legal consent or age of majority to do, so all the sexy stuff, voteing, owning , buying and selling property, killing people(in the line of duty), running for political office, etc....someis deemed to be suitable for "viewing" and some not, but all fallunder the same legal umbrella of "age of consent/majority" where traditinional comunities had various ways of inducting, youth, and outsiders into the various "mysteries"
anybody alert may have noted a child saying "YOURE not supposed to talk about that stuff with us around!!!, huff, huff, eye rolls.....adults, sheeesh"
that stuff....
Hard question, and Instagram is getting abused by this. They allowed breastfeeding as a non-porn category, now you have hundreds of OnlyFans account faking breastfeeding. Effectively ruining the progress for everybody.
1) Get any porn site that is going to obey this to instead list themselves in some open way (TXT record in DNS, blockchain, some other form of list)
2) Get any provider in the UK to block access to those lists if the account owner wants it. That's ISPs and phone providers. I'd say it should be opt in, but opt out would be a reasonable compromise.
That way I can be happy that my 12 year old won't accidentality end up on some really shady porn site following a link from a classmate's whatsapp if they aren't at home.
Of course classmates can still share the content on whatsapp, and this isn't going to stop that.
If you want to really tackle the problem - and this would be really controversial -- have lists of "healthy porn", which people could opt in via their ISP to allow, or perhaps allow for a set period. I have no problem with a teenager looking at boobs, there's a big difference between the modern equivalent of FHM or playboy and many kinds of aggressive porn that's just as accessible.
Adult content is whatever is deemed to be objectionable and abhorrent to the dominant social group within a culture and that which needs to be censored and hidden from public view. Beyond a desire to "protect the children" from sex, violence, and drugs. It is a desire to hide and suppress dissent around major social issues. It is a desire to label representation of trans liberation and queer lives as adult, obscene. And it is a desire to label realistic representations of history such as Maus and others as unsuitable for children.
This effort is because once labeled adult it is broadly socially acceptable to do anything and everything necessary to hide a concept from public life.
A specific recent example is Itch.io's recent removal of all content labeled adult, stemming from coordinated pressure by Collective Shout. The block has led to the hiding of some content labeled as lgbt, despite not containing adult content or being labeled that way.
Why is this discussion always about nudity and sexuality? Would it not be much better if children see people having fun fucking each other than seeing people murder each other in countless ways? Why is it more acceptable to show Wile E. Coyote trying to murder Road Runner by dropping anvils onto him than showing Bugs Bunny and Lola Bunny fuck each other? Ignoring for the moment that children probably find the former much more funny than the later.
[Edit: I've been chronically online for a long time and seen this argument hashed out many times, and this blog post is one of the shallowest considerations of it. For context, the UK's online safety act has just gone into force and Reddit has switched all NSFW-tagged subreddits to require proof of ID for UK visitors. There's a lot of interesting argument to be had about government overreach, subs which are non-pornographic being included, the loss of pseudonymity when tying an account to a real world ID, the people who are "proving" their age with AI generated images, the mass sending of UK PassPort data to 3rd party American companies (not even to Reddit); "but who can say what is or isn't rude? Hah!" is ... basic. Anyone can say. Most people can easily say and be right often enough to be useful. Observing that people disagree on some edge cases is not an argument.].
> "It’s simply too subjective (teenagers will find almost any nudity sexual, no matter its context). How does anyone decide if any nudity is age-appropriate? Especially at scale."
OK (blog author) has made the case that one cannot decide, the government has gone with "ban by default". If you (blog author) object to that, can you make a case why that's bad? You wrote "apart from 'think of the children' being a classic call to censorship" so you've closed off that route for your objection which may have been a strong one.
If you work then you have given your employer proof of ID for things like showing your right to work in the UK, getting a paycheck, or a criminal record check; so the principle of an employee proving their age seems out of scope for you to object to - at least you haven't made a case that people need to be able to work anonymously. [Although the method of proving one's age is up for argument, it's not this argument].
It boils down to: if you can't decide, do you allow by default or block by default? Government has gone for default-block, blog author seems to be taking the position that default-allow is better but has not made a case why.
By comparison we tried that with digital security - for years computer systems were default-allow and it caused a lot of problems and we've had to reengineer them to have firewalls, ports closed, seperated user accounts, minimal user account permissions, minimal data-execute permissions, minimal employee access to company systems, minimal access from one app into another's data, then in each case grant-as-necessary with proof of identity and audit logging that it happened. Result? Reduced problems, reduced hacks, reduced crime, limited blast radius of mistakes.
It used to be that we made any product and sold it, and over thousands of years we got fed up of saying "okay you can't make bread padded with sawdust", "you can't sell arsenic wallpaper", "you can't sell deathly metabolism boosters as diet pills", "you can't sell public buildings that are a death trap", "you can't say your product was approved by The King if it wasn't" and flipped to say "you can only sell medicine and treatments which are generally recognised as safe, or you prove case-by-case that they are safe", "your advertising must tell the truth". And that's better.
We humans also used to be naked by default, and over time we've switched to being clothed-by-default. Occasionally it results in people having to cover their genitals when they'd rather not, but mostly it's resulted in body protection from sun, heat, cold, brick, concrete, metal, and reduced amount of poop covering communal seats and other surfaces, the ability to carry stuff in pockets and is generally a big win.
Frankly, "here is an edge case hah gotcha" is geek fun for arguing, but a shitty way to decide what to do. If a sorting algorithm sometimes doesn't sort things it's a dealbreake...
I’m sorry… all these comments about societies banning nudity and graphic violence are really skirting the point. In the context of modern age regulation, at a social level, nobody is arguing people at large should not have access to violent and sexual content. This isn’t about religion oppressing women’s sexual freedom. The argument is that children should not have unguided access to adult content. On top of that most parents I know allow children to experience violent and sexual content with supervision. The goal is not to censor society, it’s to draw some reasonable and realistic lines in the sand so parents can introduce sensitive content to children in a way that is empathetic with their child’s context and maturity level.
Now I’m sure even that is arguable, but the conversation should be around that and not superficially related tangents.
I just want less porn and violence exposure on the Internet. I dunno why this turns into a mouth frothing event. That's a pretty reasonable ask in any other context other than the Internet.
24 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 39.5 ms ] threadIs there a marginal grey area around adult content? Yes. But beyond that margin is a vast ocean of explicit, intentional adult content.
As someone who grew up in both the decentralized "new" era of the Internet, and now lives in the hyper localized algo driven version of it... It's all shit. And I'd never want my kids to be exposed to it.
They are going to be, they're just now going to be exposed to more shadier, less scrupulous stuff, or via vpns harvesting your children's data.
So maybe making nudity less common or accessible only makes it more valuable as a sexual thing.
Sending passport scans to random sleezy websites that are likely not even under British jurisdiction is beyond insane
How is this not sexual? The fact that it's a stock photo, or that the woman is pregnant, is irrelevant. It's very clearly a sexual picture.
1) Get any porn site that is going to obey this to instead list themselves in some open way (TXT record in DNS, blockchain, some other form of list)
2) Get any provider in the UK to block access to those lists if the account owner wants it. That's ISPs and phone providers. I'd say it should be opt in, but opt out would be a reasonable compromise.
That way I can be happy that my 12 year old won't accidentality end up on some really shady porn site following a link from a classmate's whatsapp if they aren't at home.
Of course classmates can still share the content on whatsapp, and this isn't going to stop that.
If you want to really tackle the problem - and this would be really controversial -- have lists of "healthy porn", which people could opt in via their ISP to allow, or perhaps allow for a set period. I have no problem with a teenager looking at boobs, there's a big difference between the modern equivalent of FHM or playboy and many kinds of aggressive porn that's just as accessible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nude_sculptures
This effort is because once labeled adult it is broadly socially acceptable to do anything and everything necessary to hide a concept from public life.
A specific recent example is Itch.io's recent removal of all content labeled adult, stemming from coordinated pressure by Collective Shout. The block has led to the hiding of some content labeled as lgbt, despite not containing adult content or being labeled that way.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/
> "It’s simply too subjective (teenagers will find almost any nudity sexual, no matter its context). How does anyone decide if any nudity is age-appropriate? Especially at scale."
OK (blog author) has made the case that one cannot decide, the government has gone with "ban by default". If you (blog author) object to that, can you make a case why that's bad? You wrote "apart from 'think of the children' being a classic call to censorship" so you've closed off that route for your objection which may have been a strong one.
If you work then you have given your employer proof of ID for things like showing your right to work in the UK, getting a paycheck, or a criminal record check; so the principle of an employee proving their age seems out of scope for you to object to - at least you haven't made a case that people need to be able to work anonymously. [Although the method of proving one's age is up for argument, it's not this argument].
It boils down to: if you can't decide, do you allow by default or block by default? Government has gone for default-block, blog author seems to be taking the position that default-allow is better but has not made a case why.
By comparison we tried that with digital security - for years computer systems were default-allow and it caused a lot of problems and we've had to reengineer them to have firewalls, ports closed, seperated user accounts, minimal user account permissions, minimal data-execute permissions, minimal employee access to company systems, minimal access from one app into another's data, then in each case grant-as-necessary with proof of identity and audit logging that it happened. Result? Reduced problems, reduced hacks, reduced crime, limited blast radius of mistakes.
It used to be that we made any product and sold it, and over thousands of years we got fed up of saying "okay you can't make bread padded with sawdust", "you can't sell arsenic wallpaper", "you can't sell deathly metabolism boosters as diet pills", "you can't sell public buildings that are a death trap", "you can't say your product was approved by The King if it wasn't" and flipped to say "you can only sell medicine and treatments which are generally recognised as safe, or you prove case-by-case that they are safe", "your advertising must tell the truth". And that's better.
We humans also used to be naked by default, and over time we've switched to being clothed-by-default. Occasionally it results in people having to cover their genitals when they'd rather not, but mostly it's resulted in body protection from sun, heat, cold, brick, concrete, metal, and reduced amount of poop covering communal seats and other surfaces, the ability to carry stuff in pockets and is generally a big win.
Frankly, "here is an edge case hah gotcha" is geek fun for arguing, but a shitty way to decide what to do. If a sorting algorithm sometimes doesn't sort things it's a dealbreake...
maiesiophilia (pregnancy fetishism), maschalagnia (armpit fetishism)…
Now I’m sure even that is arguable, but the conversation should be around that and not superficially related tangents.