What are your thoughts on restricting children’s access to pornography online?
There are a lot of GOP-controller legislatures in the USA pushing through so-called “child protection” laws, but there’s a toll in the form of impacting people’s rights and data privacy. Most of these bills involve requiring adults to upload a copy of their photo ID.
As an analogy, should governments allow children access to strip clubs and have parents handle it or should that be illegal and have kids banned from those physical spaces?
It’s interesting because I think banning kids from strip clubs is pretty popular, but the digital laws are not as popular. I don’t know of a way to enforce a ban in a digital space that doesn’t infringe on individual liberties though
The reason is a technical one. At a strip club, none of your information is being transmitted; it’s just the bouncer making sure you’re of age by looking at your ID.
Per the EFF:
Age verification systems are surveillance systems. Mandatory age verification, and with it, mandatory identity verification, is the wrong approach to protecting young people online. It would force websites to require visitors to prove their age by submitting information such as government-issued identification. This scheme would lead us further towards an internet where our private data is collected and sold by default. The tens of millions of Americans who do not have government-issued identification may lose access to much of the internet. And anonymous access to the web could cease to exist.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/age-verification-mandates-would-undermine-anonymity-online
Banning children from strip clubs in no way impacts the rights of other adults to enjoy strip clubs.
The government has way too much influence over children already. Governments could do so much for children that would actually benefit them (better education, free lunch at school, better public libraries, ensure no kids are starving because of poor parents, no wars in foreign countries, whatever) but instead they use children to increase their control over people.
I think it has nothing to do with children. It is about requiring ID registration for online services so that identities can be tracked. Every time authoritarians want to push another mechanism of control it's always "about the children".
Ultimately, I agree with you and that’s why I’m against these laws, but I really do wish there was a good way to do it anonymously. Porn is not good for kids and it’s pretty much impossible to keep them away from it without drastic measures that are more harmful than porn.
Not sure if it’s actually possible given how far outside out evolutionary context internet porn is, but the correct solution here would be to train your kids to deal with the temptation of dopaminergic reinforcement buttons.
What if the block is more harmful than just letting curious kids sneak a peek at porn sites? If all the legitimate places to get porn block anyone without ID then a lot of those prove will seek out unregulated places - they're going to see far worse things and be in communication with potentially very dangerous people.
And of course the next step would be to totally limit any access to the internet to stamp out any unregulated communication and file sharing thus giving the corporations a total monopoly on the internet... It's not about protecting kids it's about controlling all of us.
Its not the governments job to make up for absent parenting.
If you dont want your kids seeing things or doing shit online, its your job to monitor them and talk to them about it.
Stop throwing your kids a tablet and expecting that to be the fuckin parent.
If I didn't want my kids looking at porn online, I already have plenty of things to prevent them from doing so.
Not giving them access to a device without supervision. Using firewall filters. Child-mode browser/OS settings.
We don't need more regulation for this. Parents just need to get off their ass and do their own parenting. But these bills aren't actually designed to protect children. They're designed to gain access to adults' personal info and will be used more for oppression than safety.
And from the party of "Small Government", too!
I’m a conservative but I’d never be caught dead calling myself a Republican.
Republicans are corrupt, despicable, and stupid. Democrats are corrupt, naive, and arrogant.
I really wish we had runoff voting, so that the American ecosystem could move away from two party balanced dominance.
Only when it's convenient
Most effective way to prevent kids from looking at porn is to encase them in spray foam insulation with feeding tubes and catheters.
This also prevents that pesky physical growth which turns them into military-able adults.
You can cut down on porn and terrorism in one go!
Some principles and things to note:
Given these principles and observations, I conclude that the expected effect of such regulations would be to increase sexual abuse of children, while also strongly harming the ability of a free society to discuss and educate about sexuality.
Very excellent points. While I agree kids shouldn't be looking at porn, forcibly trying to keep all knowledge of sex and porn from them until they hit a magic age where now they can do anything they want isn't the answer.
Children need to be educated so they can make wise decisions when the time comes. No matter how much people try to stop it, the time will often come before they reach the magic age set by laws, and unfortunately it's sometimes through sexual assault or their naivety being taking advantage of.
This nails it right here, #1 and #2 especially.
Sex is fun, sex is awkward, sex is weird and messy and life-changing. Sex is mundane, sex is cathartic, sex is funny and sex is cardio. Also, sex makes people, oh and it feels good. All that is pretty fucking magical if you ask me.
What is done in private between consenting adults is none of your goddamn business, including porn. Don’t use kids as an excuse to control adults’ behavior.
I would combat that by saying I think most pornography is nowhere close to what sex is like. Anecdotally, I hear more stories about men who try to fuck someone like they’re in a porn film, which can result in physical pain to their partner.
I think teaching kids about sex and giving them access to porn that often displays non-consensual acts as normal are two totally different things.
But yes, I think 4 is a very strong point, which is why most of the bills that are being proposed are not being executed well.
Oh sure. Generally speaking, most porn is a terrible sex educator.
However, it's also a wrong target for concerns about child sexual abuse.
And crackdowns on "porn" tend to end up being crackdowns on sexuality-related speech and sweep in a lot of other speech too.
I like the idea of having a cleaner internet for under 12s but I hate the idea of giving the government more control of the internet. Ultimately I side with freedom. I grew up on the wildwest internet and turned out fine. These kids will also be fine.
Yup. If the government was concerned, they could educate and empower parents to do this kind of stuff.
You didn’t turn out fine! You grew into a Freedomist, which puts you at odds with our beloved Safetyism.
Usually when politicians says "to protect children", it's not about children.
When politicians talk about protecting children they’re really talking about dismantling the nuclear family.
There's no way for a government to do it that wouldn't interfere with adults' privacy.
There technically is, but it's going to be a while until the government is ok with it. It's called zero knowledge cryptography, where a user could prove they have an identification that is government issued, and that they are of age, without revealing any other information.
There’s a vanishingly small chance that the government wouldn’t fuck that up. Here is what would happen:
If the government really wanted to, it could provide citizens with a portal that would do oauth (or something similar) to authorize the porn access.
They could do some crypto crap to avoid storing anything about the citizen, so, unless the system is subborned, it doesn't store anything about users.
EDIT: the point is that this kind of system can be implemented in a privacy-preserving manner. I'm ambivalent about the idea, but it has been enacted by a democratically elected government, so they should go about it in the most responsible manner possible.
No. Absofuckinglutely not.
I disagree. I could literally put some porn in this very comment. So the fediverse needs a porn barrier, and every file hoster, we can't allow TOR, there is porn, and illegal porn as well. So please show us your id before entering TOR, pls.
It is an authoritarian move. It is undermining privacy. It is censoring the web.
It is parents and maybe schools responsabilty to teach kids how to interact with media, that porn exists and is not an actual representation of sex, and to restrict their access to pornography or media in general.
Furthermore, on planet earth, there are no perfect democracies, and the democratic system of the USA is flawed to a degree where it is at least questionable if your leaders are elected democratically.
None of these politcians who push for all those "protect the children" laws actually gives a shit about child safety. The only thing that such laws mange to do is restrict freedom of speech and expression for everyone including children.
If you are a careless parent, then no law is going prevent your kids from watching porn.
I'm against heavy handed regulation because it pushes people into more dangerous spaces, if you're a teenager or unID'd adult who can't access real porn sites do you decide not to look at boobs or do you seek out unregulated communities on places like discord?
Would you like your kid seeing generic regulated porn or seeing the kinds of things people can't post on regulated porn sites? Plus not only is there the fact that the content on underground sites is by their nature the stuff not allowed on regulated sites but also do you want your kid taking to the creeps that hang out in porn sharing groups on discord?
It's the parents job to do that, not the government's. I have kids, when they were at the age I didn't want them seeing porn I made sure it was blocked, and I educated them on safe internet browsing. I don't need the government's help with that.
The GOP is also the party of the chronically ill and the criminally insane. They just don't want to admit that they want China's great firewall style world wide web after wasting millions of dollars going after TikTok.
It's almost like porn has been available, to varying degrees, to youth, for decades if not centuries. Even discounting all the good arguments like "small government" and "think of the kids is a dumb excuse to curtail privacy"... You have to ask, what's the goal?
Keeping kids away from porn? Why is that an important goal for the government? Is it one the government is even capable of doing? At what age is porn OK? 16? 18? 21? Never? Did you ever look at porn when you were in high school? Do you regret it?
Is there any real research that porn is corrosive to a 16 year old? I mean we can't even pass simple, popular gun legislation because the NRA swears up and down we don't know "for sure" if it will save more than a couple lives. We can't even have an EPA that enforces laws, while millions of people suffer from asthma and other stuff that kills them.
Yes l, actually. We do have research into the effects. Here’s a summary I found:
https://aifs.gov.au/research/research-reports/effects-pornography-children-and-young-people
Things the study finds hard to do:
Also worth noting this is one study. In Australia.
Not saying the study should be discounted. But it's not really a clear support for government intervention.
It is still very shocking to us in Europe that the United States wants to control pornography before guns. I don't know many people who have killed themselves by masturbating.
Doesn't parts of Europe have stricter laws against porn or is that just UK?
I believe that pornography is illegal in Bulgaria, while in other places, there are no strict laws. There's a warning banner that you must check if you are over 18 years old. That's it. On the other hand, we have many gun control laws. Priorities.
Even the UK isn't this level of strict - the things that are outlawed are those involving lack of consent and those that are very likely to injure people.
I'm out of the loop on this one, but it sounds like yet another attempt at SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). Back in 2011, people had to fight hard because the US congress was attempting to gain control over the internet. The congress' reasoning was that they wanted to hinder piracy, but the implications of the bill was so much more.
I don't recall the full history of this, but I believe that as soon as SOPA was turned down, a new bill regarding preventing child pornography was proposed. And that bill had basically the same implications, but if you were against it this time, the congress had implied that you were supporting child pornography.
It seems like the state's attempt at gaining control of the internet is never ending, since they can propose new bills as soon as the previous bill is voted out. Basically the "throw enough shit at a wall and some of it will stick"-tactic.
We shouldn't let the government parent our kids. I know it's human nature to be lazy, but the government isn't the answer.
That’s basically what the Republicans claim to believe
Exclusively used for fascism and propaganda. If it's "for the children" it's usually not and just propaganda to push more fascism. If kids want to lie and click the "I am 18" button despite not being 18, literally who cares lol. Before the internet, kids would steal nude magazines. Also that's how they discover things about themselves instead of being completely left in the dark until 18. Should definitely still keep the requirement of clicking that button, but more so for plausible deniability on the website's side. It's only religious extremists that consider this stuff bad.
This isn't a government issue. This is a bad parent issue. How about instead forcing routers to have easy ways to block adult content?
Technically pretty much every router does have built in porn blocking, the problem is is that it's across the board.
With these routers it's almost always All or nothing.
It's also slightly complicated to set up in the first place, and the grand majority of people will not spend more than 10 seconds setting up any technology unless they absolutely have to.
Most people will not go through the process of finding out what the IP address of their router is, attempting to log into it with the default passwords available on the internet, navigating through the HTML 1.0 1993 interface to find the section that allows them to enable parental controls and then enabling them.
As a person who doesn't have and chooses to not ever have children, it does my head in everytime a government tries to pass laws to stop children getting access to things, instead of making the parents, the people whose job it is to raise the children, take responsibility. I agree tho that router manufacturers should be forced to give easy access to parents to block unwanted sites.
They're trying to ban vapes in Australia, not because of "health" reasons, but because kids are getting access to them, so instead of making adults accountable, they're just trying to blanket ban, I'm sick of being punished because shitty parents can't do their fucking job.
Raise your God damn kids yourself, stop relying on the government to do it for you.
That would've been hilarious to see on a graph
as a zoomer who had access to porn at a young age, that shit was not good for me at all. i think it's pretty fair to suggest that people below the age of 13 should not be looking at porn - but i wouldn't even know how one could even go about actually regulating it
I've started looking at porn on the internet at 8 or 9 years old, and nothing bad happened to me.
I understand why the law says that porn is for 18+ only, but that's it. The access shouldn't be restricted. It's the parents' role to stop kids from going on those websites, if any.
Nothing bad happened to you doesn't mean the same for others. There are all kinds of horror stories regarding pre-adult children on the topic
I've never heard one. Can you point me to an example?
I thought we already had a flawless system for this where you put in your birthday.
Where are all my Jan 1 1970 friends at?
It was an emotional moment for me when I reverted all my fake DOBs to my real one since I turned 18
Ah yes, the birth of time itself
Anyone that thinks kids won't find a way around any and all blocks is an outright idiot
Even before we had ubiquitous internet everywhere there was forest porn.
At some point between the ages of 11 and 14 every male child would be inexplicably drawn to a local wooded area where they would find hustlers and playboys and penthouse magazines wrapped in trash bags.
Maybe it was different in the city but if you lived in the suburbs that happened.
I oppose on principle any attempt to further restrict, marginalize, exclude, or otherwise other young people.
I also oppose on principle any attempt to worsen surveillance state overreach.
And I oppose out of sheer fucking common sense anything a Republican says.
For all these reasons and more, I oppose this entire concept and its execution.
Agreed. Parents can install tools on devices (or use the ones that are built-in). Kids will find ways around that and that's fine. Kids have to put in some effort and learn how to outsmart vendors and their parents. This will add to their problem-solving skills. When they finally get to the sex, they'll be fine.
It's really about teaching kids to have a healthy attitude about sex and sexuality. Republican kids will be taught that it's bad and they're bad for thinking about it. They'll be fucked up in various ways. Proper parenting will teach kids that not everything they see on the internet is healthy to pursue and help them approach the topic in a mature fashion. Those kids will turn out like the rest of us who grew up with porn online. Fine.
Whoa
Ahh I see the strategy. Put out this trafficking movie, hype dems as pedos (and commies) and stir up a whole terd of doo doo. Classic.
I'm not uploading my ID to shit.
On a moral level, I do agree with keeping children from accessing certain content online, especially porn. I think I'd be happier if I porn was less accessible to me until I had the mental faculties to understand it.
On a practical / policy level, I disagree since there is no way to stop children from accessing this content without drastically hampering the freedoms of all people. I see no good solutions. I really feel bad for parents who have to raise kids in the internet age.
That’s basically my thinking too. So is the solution just increasing transparency in sex ed? I think someone has to say to kids “pornography is nothing like real sex and a lot of it is degrading to women”
Yes. It should be a multifaceted approach, and increasing sexual education is absolutely a part of that. Good luck getting more funding for education ESPECIALLY if it could be used for sexual education in these red states though.
They preach abstinence and then feign surprise when that’s not what happens.
Basically that. I don't want to say 'bad parenting', because my own parents basically never spoke to me about this stuff at all and I don't think it negatively affected me at all. I think they just observed that I didn't really need them to have that talk, and so didn't bother. In my case, it worked out. But for many kids it might not.
Children get their own internet. If they get in adult internet, then they get juvenile detention and a criminal file, their parents are arrested for child endangerment and child services take over.
And anyone complaining about what is on the internet gets an helicopter ride to the deep sea from 10'000 feet.
Children get their own internet
Which adults, if any, would moderate the children’s internet?
Watch the kids internet have a dark web "made by kids, for kids"
Some extremely restrictive AI and all children provided inputs would not be visible without heavy filtering and anonymization. In fact children's general ability to express themselves in this children internet would be massively curtailed.
This could work 🤔
Unpopular opinion, but I’d rather not allow kids on the regular internet.
I’m surprised these issues haven’t been fixed and that the only method I hear about fixing them are ones that break the internet as we know it. Why not think of like some type of sub internet designed for kids that separates them from the chaos of the regular internet…. If I’ve learned on thing living in America it’s that money is wore more than kids or kids futures so it’s hopeless anyway.
Like traffic from a device could be locked down until the users proper age is reached.
Or just try to build better communities where parents take care of their kids.
This was always the obvious solution to me. It feels like every other year YouTube is jumping through hoops to correct some situation involving children on the platform. Simply make YouTube 18 plus, require an ID upon sign up. Instantly fix everything, except they'd make less money.
I don't need the government's help. Plus it's probably a front for keeping kids uninformed. I'm more concerned about Florida teaching that there was some benefit to slavery.
None of those blocks actually work, it’s theater. I think it’s better to prepare your child for the world and how to handle it than to try and lock them in a bunker.
It's a well-intentioned goal that's impossible to implement without egregiously privacy violating measures.
It's not well intentioned. Those egregious privacy violating measures are the intention, "protecting kids" is a smokescreen.
In the UK, The Online Safety Bill is almost about to become law. Without going into the full details, the government basically wants to monitor everyone's messages to stop child pornography and protect people (and other stuff too).
The problem is, they want companies to scan messages and photos as they are uploaded and to give themselves backdoor access to E2E encryption services.
It's very likely the UK will lose access to iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp etc as they would rather withdraw their services from the UK than break their promise to their users.
It’s impossible. That makes it perfect for building an unlimited enforcement apparatus, which is the real goal.
I had an interesting experience as a teen looking at porn online and blocking is not the way. Education is the best, basically teaching teens is better than letting them make mistakes when they turn 18 and get their ass fucked
Even if the system works as designed, it relies on parents to teach their kids about porn. That means when they turn 18 (or 30 or whatever) they get unfettered porn access and we're no further ahead.
It should be the sole responsibility of parents or guardians to control any restrictions like this. I'm not a parent myself, but if I were, I wouldn't just let my child have a device with unrestricted access to everything on the internet. To me, it makes more sense to just have content restrictions on children's devices than force all adults to go through extra verification steps to access porn.
I'm entirely of this opinion. Why put the pornographers in charge of who can see porn? Parents, do you job. Am I supposed to upload my driver's license for them to store somewhere? that's what some of these states are proposing. That sounds like a privacy and security disaster. And I agree also that this is not about protecting kids, but more about a grab for authoritarian power.
This makes absolute sense until they get to secondary school (ages 11-16). All the kids at school have mobiles. You might have put the best parental controls on your sprogs phone but someone else hasn't and his son - he's the one showing pictures and videos at playtime. The problem is that kids don't live in a bubble.
I'm in the UK, don't have a clue about what laws are coming in but am against this type of state intervention into private life of adults. Adults uploading id online is not something I am for.
But I am pretty much in favour of banning smartphones in schools with kids that age these days - I'm a very liberal guy but I've heard so many horror stories from friends that are teachers.
I actually think the main problem is the nature of the pornography itself. The stuff that comes up with choking and hair pulling and all that... There's porn which is just people getting it on but it seems to be this violent stuff that gets to kids first and that's the bit I don't understand. I'm old. When I was their age it was magazines of naked people. A more innocent time.
Didn't South Korea do this? IIRC some kids would steal their parents'/grandparents' government IDs to watch porn.
My upbringing in the US shamed all forms of sexuality; I was entirely forbidden from watching porn until I moved out on my own for college. I feel like that upbringing was very very harmful to me as an adult though because I spent my entire 20s breaking away from that shame and guilt. I had a good sex-Ed teacher in 6th-7th grades but they just simply didn’t spend enough time on the topic to educate me at all about anything but very basic anatomy though. The amount of shame I got at home just didn’t let my sex-Ed class information get absorbed in a way that was conducive to a normal sex life; we were never told that sex was normal and healthy either.
Me personally, my interest in animal science/anatomy led me to reading books about sexuality and the missing sex info I needed. I really don’t think it was healthy to have to learn that information alone; I’m lucky and I was reading official textbook material; I couldn’t imagine kids today learning accurate information from uncertified sources.
Like, sex-Ed at the senior HS level should be basically a how-to pleasure yourself and others in a healthy way and pitfalls to avoid. They should go into the anatomy and physiology ad nauseum so every student feels comfortable in their body as an adult.
it's my belief that if you try to shield your children from the evils of the world, you will invariable fail and they'll be unprepared for the world itself once they leave the nest. not saying that you shouldnt try to enact parental controls on their devices, just that you'll fail.
also, not sure how the government is going to control access to the porn. it's one thing to gate pornhub/xhamster behind a ID required page, it's another thing entirely to ban all porn everywhere. like, good luck mr government but you're going to fail.
Unbelievably stupid.
These bills are intended to make it harder for anyone to look at porn online. There are plenty of tools parents can employ to make it harder for their own kids to see porn -- that's where the responsibility belongs.
Parents should have the tools to be able to give their children specific information. And part of that toolbox is keeping them off the internet. Or only supervise internet use for an hour or two a day. Giving any child complete and total access to a tool is kind of dangerous. You have to educate them about the dangers of the tool and how to properly respect it. So if your child is 3 years old they may not be ready for the raw internet.
If an organization such as the government wants to spend money to create a child friendly network space, KinterNet, Great more power to them. Then concerned parents could VPN to the Kinternet on devices for their children. It would be opt-in.
De facto if you give your child a device with unfettered internet access, you're saying they're ready and responsible enough to handle the kind of information there. That you've trained them in the proper use of the tools.
Most kids used to be farm kids, they knew about sex, because on the farm sex happens. Happens a lot. They see the entire life cycle of a various animals. But now we have many children who don't have exposure to the whole life cycle, and if you cut the internet off for them then they're going to grow up very stunted as well. Everything's a balance, and that's up to the parents.
But I think all of these words are wasted. The reason surveillance bills are pushed on us "for the children" is because it's a convenient excuse, it sets precedent, it's about control, it's not about the children. It's an excuse only... And if everyone really is trying to protect the children, where does it end? Can't talk about Santa Claus online? We must reaffirm the tooth fairy industrial complex?
Personally, I don't like the idea. Government policies aren't good substitutes for parenting. even if they implemented these changes, kids and adults alike would likely move to other websites that don't have the government ID scanning feature in, or kids would use things such as a fake ID or their parent's IDs.
If someone wants porn online, they will find it. It's up to the parents to ensure that their children don't become porn addicts in the first place.
My first problem is that the GOP wants to have people's private vital information freely given to them and that people would be required to comply. Tying that information to activities of consenting adults will be misused. Blue noses can't keep their noses in their own business, and the possibility for graft and blackmail is immense.
When did the GOP start to care about children, anyway?
The GOP has always cared about sex
You cannot stop kids from looking at porn. Doesn't matter how hard you try, they will find a way around it. This is about collecting a database of porn preferences to probably use as blackmail.
I don’t think there’s a good way to accomplish this on a governmental level. But personally, I would’ve liked to not be exposed to it when I was.
I'm against it. Parents should be helping their children go online go submit homework or whatever they need to do. You cannot babyproof the internet the same way you cannot babyproof society. Parents in the 90s understood this well. Parents in the 20s do not understand this.
Build safer websites for kids. Don't degrade adult spaces, because the 4chans and fox newses will always exist, but will take down the good sites as collateral.
The internet will always be an open forum of advertisements, ideas, arguing, and little niches of helpful information and nerds.
Define porn.
I don’t know if I can create an algorithm that detects it, but I bet I could make a neural network to.
— Clarence Thomas — Intensely Human
Certainly not your mom undressing
it should be their parent's paroblem ! give them the tools to do it properly without making other people's lives hell. instead of govs trying to strip encryption and what not
My state actually blocked all porn sites. In theory this is a good thing... however it's pretty easy to bypass with a VPN. If someone wants to get access to porn there are about a million different ways of doing so.
I thought all research has shown blocking porn increases rapes and sexual assaults. If that is true a vote to block porn is a vote to increase sexual assaults and rapes without introducing some alternative into the picture
Do you think politicians care about rape? Chances are. If the numbers are higher, their crimes go unnoticed more.
I'm definitely in favor of some rules for porn, and that basic rule is being of age. Administrators of pornographic servers should also sort harmful content and select videos. He also had some problems in the past https://www.pornhub.com/ and had to delete some videos, so you have to choose sites with a gentler obasaho for adults https://www.pornann.com/nl. However, I am strongly against the state banning tasteful pornography. Recently, there are only commands, prohibitions and dictating to people how they should live and what they should do. No way!!
I'm against these bills and proposals but all for blocking pornographic content altogether
ITT: Why conservatives think the left is full of pedos.
I feel like it’s a far cry between “kids are gonna find porn anyway” to “you’re a pedophile for not making me upload my ID on pornhub”
They don't. It's another bad-faith psyop, just like all conservative campaigns. Conservatives are far more likely to be pedos than the left
Considering these are Republican states, they're just going to define Wikipedia articles about gender dysphoria as pornographic lol
Think carefully and double check before you ever agree with a Republican about anything.
This is literally the goal. They are using porn as a trojan horse because they know nobody is going to stand up and fight them on letting children see porn
FTFY
I guess, but like, there's only one party that wants me in a
concentrationconversion therapy camp for being trans.All politiicans should be listened to with scepticism, but the Republicans have gone to full on lies, alternative truths, fraud, grifting and fascism. It's not a both sides issue.
This attempt of bothsidesing has failed.