This is good news. I fear that the two sides of the debate have been talking past each other -- it would obviously be a good idea to stop children from viewing porn, but there are three problems with that requirement: it won't stop all access, it won't magically just block for children and it won't only block pornography, even by the conservative standards of what I'd prefer not to see.
I have primary-school-age children, and to my mind the best way to protect them is sensible supervision and a good ad-blocker.
No it isn't. S/He said "primary school age children" and some kind of parental supervision is definitely necessary here. You can't give young children a choice in many areas - including food for example - as they don't have the skills, experiences and capacity to make an informed choice.
Regarding the automatic blocking of porn, I agree that this shouldn't happen, but when it comes to children I believe that good parenting is one of the parents being selective until the child is grown up enough to make their own decisions
I don't think most children really care about porn before puberty. So, I don't think it's really an issue.
I'm going to guess that you don't remember much of your pre-puberty childhood. I remember quite a bit from mine (1976-1985), including what the other kids talked about. Porn, and sex in general, were definitely topics we had strong interest in. But without internet access, our options were pretty limited.
PS: Most of the reasons to block porn also apply to adults. Why not block it from everyone?
It's not that anti-porn people think porn isn't harmful to adults. Most of them do. They just think protecting adults from porn is out of reach, while protecting kids from porn isn't.
"it would obviously be a good idea to stop children from viewing porn"
Nonsense. I'm bloody glad I had access to porn as a closeted gay teenager. Without access to Internet porn, my teenage years would have been far more miserable and lonely.
It was only a decade ago when Section 28 was still the law of the land. Internet porn was giving plenty of gay teenagers the sex education that society and the education system was too prudish and/or fearful to give them.
I wish I could upvote this multiple times.
Teenage years are a period usually with low self steam, confusion and doubts. At least porn helps teens to calm their hormones in healthier way than the alternatives: striptease, hookers, "bad girls" or drugs. And with internet they can do it from the safety and privacy of their own home without the risk of doing anything stupid to watch people having sex. And of course, like you mention being gay doesn't help with all of those puberty issues.
Maybe I'm just thinking slowly this saturday, but couldn't it be argued that those all have the virtue of giving social interaction that porn does not give, and giving a realistic view of what sex involves?
Hookers and "bad girls" make the risk of STDs higher. Also they all cost money. Also you may end up in places that increase the risk of being robbed, damaged, consuming harmful addicting distances such as alcohol, etc.
The lack of sexual education before sexual encounters is a real issue, not really with porn.
To be a little nit-picker here, but he specifically said children, wereas you said teenagers.
I too believe it is a good idea to make sure 6 years old don't stumple on a inter-racial shemale anal-gangbang site before they are old enough to understand what sex is.
The law may not discriminate between teenagers and children, but I would question the parentalabilities on a parent who still treat their 14 year old as if she was 6 or 9.
Sensible supervision is definitely the best way. When friends have asked for the best way to stop their kids looking at nefarious things on the Internet, my answer is usually to put computers in a communal room and not to give the kids smartphones until they're grown up enough.
I'm not sure how many kids pre-puberty are looking for porn - I know until a certain age I had absolutely no interest whatsoever. And for kids that are old enough to be curious about porn - you could probably argue that social networks and SMS and whatever else are just as dangerous.
I think the issue is that you can sometimes stumble on quite hardcore porn without actually looking for it. I've used plenty of non porn sites that have had porn as advertising.
The issue is at what point have the "grown up enough". The law says that porn is only for those > 18 but good look persuading a 16 year old that they aren't allowed a smartphone.
Damn, govt, get off the internets.
Porn is the very foudation of Internet's Maslow pyramid.
If you remove all porn from the 'net (which is near-impossible and not worth an effort), there will be the only one website left. It will read "Put the porn back".
And what the funk with all this opt-out bullshit? Why should I all of a sudden use the service I do not need and not even know about? If I want to filter my or my kid's (or sister, or whoever the funk is on my home network) browsing experience, I'd do that on my own gateway. I know better what I should and should not browse.
Which leads me to expect, that the true target of filtering is not really porn.
Perhaps a sensible middle road would be to ask customers whether they want to enable "child protection filters" when they sign up to an ISP. This way parents have the best possible chance of protecting their children without the danger of over-reaching censorship.
If you as a parent have internet in your house, its your responsibility to control your childrens access to it, not the governments. Same goes with porn or non-porn mags and DVD's.
I certainly agree in principle and am glad we don't have these measures.
OTOH I can understand why this might be a harder thing for parents than perhaps is acknowledged.
There are so many internet capable devices in households nowadays, including phones and games consoles etc. Sure you can try and implement some filtering but no system is bulletproof, especially when you consider P2P networks, anonymous proxies etc etc.
So I can understand the worries of parents who perhaps themselves barely understand the internet (likely their kids are much more savvy) themselves but want their children to have access to the internet as an education resource.
You might try and not allow any internet enabled device in bedrooms etc but then these days everything is an internet device and they will likely want to play games with always-on DRM etc.
This is the part I don't understand, what are those worries? What do you think it happens when a kid watchs porn? What negative consequences have been demonstrated to happen? And is not like porn randomly plays itself in the browser, you have to use explicit sexual words for Google to respond with links to porn sites.
Well showing porn to young children could certainly give them some unrealistic ideas about sex, because it is harder to frame stuff in context as a child than as an adult.
I've certainly visited sites where I've been exposed randomly to porn without googling for it. Especially disguised links on forums etc.
I don't think unrealistic expectations are the issue, Forrest Gump gives unrealistic expectations about life and success but nobody is trying to ban it; not to mention there is tons of amateur porn with fairly normal sex.
The issue is social perception, dumbness by the masses pretending there is something evil and inmoral about watching other people have sex.
Even forest gump has an (IIRC) 15 certificate here in the UK.
The issue is that you don't necessarily control which porn your kids would see first. And there is certainly a disproportional amount of "extreme" content available prominently.
I'm not sure it's necessarily just hysteria, I know people who would happily consume porn themselves but would be very mindful of what they expose their kids too.
> This is the part I don't understand, what are those worries?
Not a parent, but I think the problem with kids watching pornography is that you're basically letting a random person teach them what sex is. If a kid who's just beginning to get curious about sex stumbles on hard-core BDSM/rape fantasy sites, it's probably going to have some sort of impact. (I picked an obvious bad-case scenario, I'm not saying it's always like this, or that it'll certainly traumatize them, etc., etc. I just wouldn't want my kid's first experience with sex to be a video of a gagged woman being whipped.)
> And is not like porn randomly plays itself in the browser, you have to use explicit sexual words for Google to respond with links to porn sites.
I was going to come up with an example where little Billy is searching for his uncle Dick, but most of the results are about Dick Cheney, which is arguably more frightening than pornography.
I'd wager that the people who don't want 17 year olds having access to porn are probably the same ones who don't really want sex education, either, aside from the "On your wedding night, God will let you know what to do" speech.
If your line of through were true there would be sites famous among parents for their unexaggerated normal porn videos, so when you have the talk about how normal sex is you would also mention that the desire for watching other people doing it is also normal and you would mention those porn sites. Well, that is never the case; they just teach you about sex and then they keep pretending that you don't want to access stimulating content.
I remember the BBC (or Ch4) made a set of documentaries a few years back that showed people having actual sex for educational purposes. I can't remember the name.
Most porn is certainly made for commercial rather than educational purposes though and idealized stuff with giant penises and huge cumshots seems to be more commercially successful.
Effectively it's more about fantasy and than reality.
I think that used to be called "Playboy", except it was on paper for some reason, and traditionally the father would give one to his son.
Then there are also the more extreme cases of family members renting prostitutes for young men, but I think that was much less common (though it still happens.)
I didnt literally mean "in your house", if you as a parent allow your child to have a smart phone, again thats your responsibility to determine what you want your child to have access to.
Here's what the filtering would mean: sexual health sites would also be blocked. Whenever I visit a university or corporation that has filtered Internet access, I always test out a few sexual health and LGBT support sites. Inevitably, a few of them are blocked. (Hey, my alma mater used to filter access to the Wikipedia article "Same-sex marriage" because it has the word "sex" in the URL.)
For years, websites that offer a space for young people to talk about sex, sexual orientation, relationships and so on have been blocked because too many of the people making the censorware presume that sex == porn or that LGBT == porn.
That's the cost of our anti-porn prudery: that people can't access sites that have advice on having healthy sex and relationships. Mandating a policy with that kind of side effect by law is a really dumb idea.
I've yet to see a compelling case that teenagers are being harmed by porn. But not having access to advice on how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases... that's really harmful. Whether it's providing sexual health advice or providing an anonymous shoulder to cry on for sexually confused teenagers, the Internet has saved plenty of young people's lives and health. It's helped people discover who they are, how to come out, how to have positive, healthy relationships. Ensuring that the next generation can have access to the enormous amount of good stuff that the Internet provides is precisely why we need to ensure we do not have government-instituted web censorship.
Yeah, but the policy wasn't to have one "national filter". It was to have the government tell ISPs "you must have a filter". How the ISPs implement it would be up to them. Which means they'd go buy the same crap that universities, libraries and corporations are currently using and implement that.
Deciding what counts as "porn" is very difficult. Deciding what is illegal child porn is, with the odd exception, pretty easy. But for legal non-child porn, well, what about a 15-year-old girl writing erotic Harry Potter shags Dracoy Malfoy fan fiction and sharing it in the fanfic community on LiveJournal or whatever. Does that count as "porn" in the same way as commercially produced videos does?
And it is trivially defeatable: one kind finds a stash of porn, puts it on USB sticks and sneakernets it to all the other teenage boys in the neighbourhood. Hell, sexting exists.
> it's easy to think it would have been better than the lousy filters already existing.
Why on earth would you assume that? It's a government imposed solution with no competition or incentive to be user friendly. If anything every politician and bureaucrat involved in the project would rather make it more restrictive to be safe than risk their own ass.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 91.6 ms ] threadI have primary-school-age children, and to my mind the best way to protect them is sensible supervision and a good ad-blocker.
Regarding the automatic blocking of porn, I agree that this shouldn't happen, but when it comes to children I believe that good parenting is one of the parents being selective until the child is grown up enough to make their own decisions
I don't think most children really care about porn before puberty. So, I don't think it's really an issue.
PS: Most of the reasons to block porn also apply to adults. Why not block it from everyone?
I'm going to guess that you don't remember much of your pre-puberty childhood. I remember quite a bit from mine (1976-1985), including what the other kids talked about. Porn, and sex in general, were definitely topics we had strong interest in. But without internet access, our options were pretty limited.
PS: Most of the reasons to block porn also apply to adults. Why not block it from everyone?
It's not that anti-porn people think porn isn't harmful to adults. Most of them do. They just think protecting adults from porn is out of reach, while protecting kids from porn isn't.
Nonsense. I'm bloody glad I had access to porn as a closeted gay teenager. Without access to Internet porn, my teenage years would have been far more miserable and lonely.
It was only a decade ago when Section 28 was still the law of the land. Internet porn was giving plenty of gay teenagers the sex education that society and the education system was too prudish and/or fearful to give them.
> striptease, hookers, "bad girls"
Maybe I'm just thinking slowly this saturday, but couldn't it be argued that those all have the virtue of giving social interaction that porn does not give, and giving a realistic view of what sex involves?
The lack of sexual education before sexual encounters is a real issue, not really with porn.
I too believe it is a good idea to make sure 6 years old don't stumple on a inter-racial shemale anal-gangbang site before they are old enough to understand what sex is.
Teenagers are an entirely different catagory.
That said, I think the under 10s probably need parental supervision anyway.
As, I imagine, would the child authorities.
I'm not sure how many kids pre-puberty are looking for porn - I know until a certain age I had absolutely no interest whatsoever. And for kids that are old enough to be curious about porn - you could probably argue that social networks and SMS and whatever else are just as dangerous.
The issue is at what point have the "grown up enough". The law says that porn is only for those > 18 but good look persuading a 16 year old that they aren't allowed a smartphone.
OTOH I can understand why this might be a harder thing for parents than perhaps is acknowledged.
There are so many internet capable devices in households nowadays, including phones and games consoles etc. Sure you can try and implement some filtering but no system is bulletproof, especially when you consider P2P networks, anonymous proxies etc etc.
So I can understand the worries of parents who perhaps themselves barely understand the internet (likely their kids are much more savvy) themselves but want their children to have access to the internet as an education resource.
You might try and not allow any internet enabled device in bedrooms etc but then these days everything is an internet device and they will likely want to play games with always-on DRM etc.
This is the part I don't understand, what are those worries? What do you think it happens when a kid watchs porn? What negative consequences have been demonstrated to happen? And is not like porn randomly plays itself in the browser, you have to use explicit sexual words for Google to respond with links to porn sites.
I've certainly visited sites where I've been exposed randomly to porn without googling for it. Especially disguised links on forums etc.
The issue is social perception, dumbness by the masses pretending there is something evil and inmoral about watching other people have sex.
The issue is that you don't necessarily control which porn your kids would see first. And there is certainly a disproportional amount of "extreme" content available prominently.
I'm not sure it's necessarily just hysteria, I know people who would happily consume porn themselves but would be very mindful of what they expose their kids too.
Not a parent, but I think the problem with kids watching pornography is that you're basically letting a random person teach them what sex is. If a kid who's just beginning to get curious about sex stumbles on hard-core BDSM/rape fantasy sites, it's probably going to have some sort of impact. (I picked an obvious bad-case scenario, I'm not saying it's always like this, or that it'll certainly traumatize them, etc., etc. I just wouldn't want my kid's first experience with sex to be a video of a gagged woman being whipped.)
> And is not like porn randomly plays itself in the browser, you have to use explicit sexual words for Google to respond with links to porn sites.
I was going to come up with an example where little Billy is searching for his uncle Dick, but most of the results are about Dick Cheney, which is arguably more frightening than pornography.
That is certainly not the opinion of the masses because they don't want kids to see porn even years after they have been educated about sex.
If you need to hide something is gore, sites like Reddit are full of it and contrary as porn it can be a little bit traumatic.
Most porn is certainly made for commercial rather than educational purposes though and idealized stuff with giant penises and huge cumshots seems to be more commercially successful.
Effectively it's more about fantasy and than reality.
Then there are also the more extreme cases of family members renting prostitutes for young men, but I think that was much less common (though it still happens.)
That's hilariously old fashioned. Kids have smart phones.
For years, websites that offer a space for young people to talk about sex, sexual orientation, relationships and so on have been blocked because too many of the people making the censorware presume that sex == porn or that LGBT == porn.
That's the cost of our anti-porn prudery: that people can't access sites that have advice on having healthy sex and relationships. Mandating a policy with that kind of side effect by law is a really dumb idea.
I've yet to see a compelling case that teenagers are being harmed by porn. But not having access to advice on how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases... that's really harmful. Whether it's providing sexual health advice or providing an anonymous shoulder to cry on for sexually confused teenagers, the Internet has saved plenty of young people's lives and health. It's helped people discover who they are, how to come out, how to have positive, healthy relationships. Ensuring that the next generation can have access to the enormous amount of good stuff that the Internet provides is precisely why we need to ensure we do not have government-instituted web censorship.
You list the result of bad filtering, and suggest that a national filter would have the same problems.
While I disagree with a national filter it's easy to think it would have been better than the lousy filters already existing.
Does the existing child porn filter prevent access to innocent sites?
Deciding what counts as "porn" is very difficult. Deciding what is illegal child porn is, with the odd exception, pretty easy. But for legal non-child porn, well, what about a 15-year-old girl writing erotic Harry Potter shags Dracoy Malfoy fan fiction and sharing it in the fanfic community on LiveJournal or whatever. Does that count as "porn" in the same way as commercially produced videos does?
And it is trivially defeatable: one kind finds a stash of porn, puts it on USB sticks and sneakernets it to all the other teenage boys in the neighbourhood. Hell, sexting exists.
Why on earth would you assume that? It's a government imposed solution with no competition or incentive to be user friendly. If anything every politician and bureaucrat involved in the project would rather make it more restrictive to be safe than risk their own ass.
I highly doubt that an institution which blocks pornography wants its students having any sex at all.