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.
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.That doesn't make the rest automatically trustworthy. Just not genocidal. Though I tend to agree with Progressives and Socialist Dems or Socialists more often than not. Regular, middle of the road Dems, not as much.
Not genocidal eh? Ask a Democrat how many people they think Earth can support long term, then subtract that from Earth’s current population. Your answer is how many people they, at some level, believe need to be gone.
Perhaps, but it was a bipartisan effort that led to requiring ID to buy music.
Requiring ID to buy music?? What is this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_Advisory
Sure, and I'm not saying both parties don't want to surveil and control the population, but as you might be able to understand I'm a bit more focused on the Party that has all but made extermination of people like me the Party platform.
I’ve never heard anyone call for the extermination of queer communists (or whatever category you’re referring to).
I'm trans. If they simply take away my access to gender affirming care they're as good as murdering me, because I won't last long.
Furthermore, they believe being trans is a mental illness and that we're all groomers and rapists. It's not much of a logical leap for them to then declare that they're "hospitalizing us" because we present a threat to ourselves and to public safety. They already call gender affirming care "self mutilation" and they actually believe that it's contagious and making their children trans. You're blind if you can't see where that's going.
Me being a communist just gives them a reason to shoot me when we start WW3 with China lol
@queermunist @intensely_human
Будет "третья мировая война" - нам всем не жить.
В любом случае, фашизм только набирает скорость.
И он везде - национальный или гендерный, уже всё равно.
Удачи, брат или сестра.
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.
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.
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.
Ranked choice voting!! Let's see how long the two party system lasts when it's not "you have to vote for the lesser evil".
Only when it's convenient
Oh, it's fine. They make sure it's always convenient to rile up their base with lies, hatred, and culture-war nonsense...
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!
Most of these states banning pornography and asking for ID are Republican , conservatives States. It is very ironic that the government is now doing the job of the parents. Instead the government should give parents and students advice on the harm that excess that pornography causes and tools to protect kids from this content online , now the kids will learn to circumvent it because its "prohibited" just like the apple in the tree of Adam and Eve.
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:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/age-verification-mandates-would-undermine-anonymity-online
Being forced to reveal identification before you're allowed to view pornography is the equivalent of only being allowed to masturbate while your parents are in the room watching you.
I understand that completely, but if we’re saying kids shouldn’t see strippers, why should they be able to see far more graphic content?
I’m not saying I support these bills as written, basically for the reasons you’re saying. I do think watching extreme content online can damage children’s understanding of sex though. You have to go out of your way to find porn that looks like real sex.
One thing to note is that it is ALWAYS claimed that the issue is the Really Bad Stuff - the graphic content - but that it inevitably becomes anything that is socially offensive, and I’ll give you one queer guess as to what tends to get labeled “graphic content” right quick.
I actually don’t think it’s the more “extreme” content. For example, kink.com videos are pretty clear that consent has been obtained and actors are debriefed afterward.
I think the worst part of porn is the “regular” stuff that shows unrealistic expectations (grabbing a woman while she’s performing oral sex and forcing her to basically choke without consent is shockingly common, for example).
It doesn’t really matter what the content is. Allowing the government to dictate what content can or cannot be accessed is not a good idea.
I see what you’re asking, and I agree if we’re going to prevent physical access to strip clubs by minors, it makes logical sense to take steps to prevent minors from accessing prurient content online as well.
The question becomes the exact methodology used to achieve that. It’s the same basic premise of making encryption illegal: Are we willing to sacrifice our privacy in the name of “protecting the children”?
Come up with another way to restrict access that doesn’t further encroach on privacy. I don’t have the answer for what that is, and it may not need to involve the government, but allowing them to put bills like this in place sets dangerous precedent. Once we relinquish power to the government, it’s damn near impossible to get it back.
If they really wanted to block access to adult only material, and not be a surveillance state in the process, the correct solution would be that every home router and every cell phone plan would have a secondary password that had to be entered in order to access that data.
Then by default only the parents and the people deemed responsible enough to have access to that password would be able to view adult only content.
That is very secure, it would sweep the floor with a huge percentage of successes with a minimum amount of intervention into people's daily life.
Sure, some kids will get the password one way or another and view adult only content, but at least they would know they had to go through the extra steps to do something they weren't allowed to do.
While that technically may not be a surveillance state, it would be an authoritarian state which could decide worker's rights or the history of slavery are "adult material" because what kid needs to know about them? Kids don't work or own slaves, so it's not suitable for them and they can't access it.
This idea sounds absolutely unhinged to me.
which I think we all agree on. There are ways that we could enforce age verification (the best one so far is that the browser itself checks your age, then a website tells the browser that it must do an age check before loading, which then your ID is never transmitted or logged for these sites). But politicians don't want to think about that, they love this because it plays into their surveillance state.
How? As a user I want to have total control over my browser and Internet is an open platform - any browser should be able to view any website even though google is trying to change that with their DRM.
I don't know exactly but the two big things I've seen, and again I'm not the engineer of it or anything, but
Know that yes this is a limitation of a browser, and that's why it's viewed as a compromise, a word that a lot of people have forgotten. None of us really want to have to prove it, but if there is a need to prevent children from accessing content (and tbh there is a need), then I'd rather have it be done in a privacy focused way.
So it's not your browser that checks your age but a third party. This raises a few questions:
Yea, no. I decide, not the browser.
I'm not of the opinion that we should just let kids see that stuff, though at the same time Im skeptical that it's as bad as some people claim, but I just don't see a way to actually stop them from seeing it that isn't way worse than the status quo via restricting everyone else. If the cure is worse than the disease, then one isn't advocating that the disease isn't harmful by rejecting the cure, just stating that the trade-off is not worth it.
As far as giving kids a dangerously wrong idea of what sex is goes, I do think that the best solution to this is better sex-ed than trying to hide things from them though. The thing about porn is that it isn't really possible to stop, without getting insanely draconian. You might be able to stop most kids from being able to access popular websites for it, sure, but given all the stories I've heard from before the internet was popular about people as kids finding relatives nsfw magazines and video tapes, that won't stop a curious kid, just make it slightly more difficult. Consider for a second that pretty much everyone carries a device with photo and video recording capacity everywhere that could be used to make and share porn, that someone with basic art skills can draw it if you remove the camera from the equation somehow, and that if you include smut in all this that even just being literate is enough to make some. Ultimately, porn is a form of information, and in the modern age restricting information is very difficult, let alone trying to restrict information that literally anyone can independently create, from being seen by children who are naturally curious because they have been forbidden from seeing something but dont understand what or why.
Banning children from strip clubs in no way impacts the rights of other adults to enjoy strip clubs.
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.
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.
You didn’t turn out fine! You grew into a Freedomist, which puts you at odds with our beloved Safetyism.
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.
As a population, that isn’t a realistic course of action. It won’t work for even most parents that care to try.
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.
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.
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'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’s not one study, it’s a review of research done across the USA, UK, and AUS.
To clarify, the review states multiple studies found links to sexual aggression and negative views of women. Decrease in safe sex, and an increase in riskier sex acts.
This is a highly cherry picked set of conclusions from the study. Sex Ed would probably, as the authors note, negate these negative aspect of accessible porn.
Odd, I found your points to be cherry picked as well. Where does it say it would entirely negate the negative effects?
Yes, it is one study. One study that performed a literature review and drew conclusions based on its findings.
As it is a review article, its conclusions are not experimental, but observational. It notes similarities between outcomes of different studies. However of particular note is that the conclusions that you are most interested in are all correlational. That is to say, the negative aspects of pornography were not observed to be directly related to the viewing of the pornography, but rather associated with the groups of people who tended to view pornography more. That does not mean that X causes Y, as it could be that a third variable Z is the thing that causes both.
For the government to restrict something, there needs to be a very good reason. Removing the anonymity of watching porn (which to be honest, was removed a while ago with Google and co spreading their slimy tentacles everywhere) is a dangerous breach into the private lives of citizens.
It's like someone gets to go into your head and know exactly what turns you on. If you need an ID to watch pornography, this is exactly what is happening.
This is what you're actually advocating for. Just because something may be bad doesn't mean we need to get rid of it. It's like banning cigarettes because it causes lung cancer or alcohol because men beat their wives while drunk.
Didn't we figure out a while ago that banning shit arbitrarily is a bad idea that will have unforeseen consequences? I already envision a large exodus of young people to the dark net in an attempt to view porn, which is a natural desire for a teenager going through puberty, where they will be exposed to much worse than is on mainstream porn sites.
So we would have not accomplished our goal of preventing children from seeing porn but instead have made the situation worse AND we have removed the anonymity from adults leading to all sorts of potential issues. What if a porn site gets hacked and all the IDs are leaked? Many a closet gay could be in hot water. People deserve privacy where they can escape into their private world. This is basic 4th amendment stuff translated into the modern world
Do not miss the forest for the trees. A little bit of sexual aggression (allegedly) in our children is not a serious enough problem to justify this overreach. Not even close. The real solution is raising a society that treats men and women the same.
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.
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.
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
China heavily restricted video games for minors, and suddenly there was in increase of senior citizens playing videos games. What an odd coincidence... 🤔
::: spoiler spoiler "Nice ID you got there granny, would be a shame if it suddenly went missing" :::
That would've been hilarious to see on a graph
Governments should never stop into the role of a parent.
What if the parents can’t step in?
Or won't. There are a lot of very bad parents out there.
Then some teenagers learn what sex looks like a little earlier.
They they shouldn't be parents.
What should happen when what shouldn’t happen happens?
Then bad things happen. The government controlling the raising of children has a much worse consequences.
If the alternative to a child has a bad parent, is everyone gets the government as a parent. I would rather take the former and not the latter
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
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?
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.
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.
Which adults, if any, would moderate the children’s internet?
Watch the kids internet have a dark web "made by kids, for kids"
Where a kid can be a kid
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 🤔
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It’s impossible. That makes it perfect for building an unlimited enforcement apparatus, which is the real goal.
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.
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.
Didn't South Korea do this? IIRC some kids would steal their parents'/grandparents' government IDs to watch porn.
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:
Internet companies that are forced to take people's personal information could do it at their cost
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.
If the service is open source, I could actually see this working.
No. Open Source does not make violations of freedom somehow okay.
I thought it was obvious, but I guess I'm gonna go step-by-step. So, what's needed to verify if you're 18? Exactly one thing - a flag telling the other system yes/no! Very privacy friendly, porn site doesn't know anything else about you. And obviously the auth system shouldn't log that you verified for a porn site. That's why it should be open source, so you can trust it.
The auth system knows you verified for something. The only way to actually preserve privacy is total anonymity to everyone.
Nope, it doesn't. Did you read what I wrote or did you just have a knee-jerk reaction?
Please explain it to me like I'm five. How can the authentication service not know what your authenticating against? How can it provide you a token that you can't use over and over again, or past other people?
OAuth specifically wants to know what you're using your tokens for.
In principle if you insert a middleman into a transaction the middleman knows about the transaction. Thus it's violates privacy
What good is it for the system to know, if the system disregards that information right after auth? Effectively it's like no one ever knew.
You're confusing intents and capabilities. When we're talking about security and privacy we have to talk about capabilities. Not intents.
Somebody could have the best intentions, but you don't want to give them the capability to hurt you. If it's not necessary. So does a daycare need a volunteer militia to hang out all day cleaning their weapons? Probably not, the capability even if well intended is antithetical to the security and welfare of the children.
Even if the intention is good today, putting the framework and capability in just invites future corruption.
Hence why such a system would need to be open source and publicly audited.
It is a basic tautological fact that you cannot verify an identity while keeping that identity private from the verifier.
Then you don't know much about IT. Sure, the verifier must know your identity at the point of identification. Doesn't mean it has to store any information about what you did. Unless of course you're worried that the PC itself will magically come to life and do something with the information. In that case you need an entirely different kind of help. Source for my claims: Designing system architecture is literally my job.
If it's private and secure and isn't linked to your identity, we will share it and it will be useless because everyone who shares the same login is the same over-18 person.
If it is in any way linked to your identity, the data is online and a target for breach which will expose said identity.
There is no realistic way to implement this which both actually does anything at all, AND does not require adding attack surface for breaches.
Please reread what I wrote. And regarding attack surface, everything you use adds attack surface.
Please reread what I wrote. And regarding everything you use adding attack surface, that is the absolute best argument to not use an additional service such as the aforementioned 3rd party auth.
What are we doing here?
Your original post said the last can't be implemented in a privacy preserving manner. It can.
It absolutely cannot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That just moves the exact same question to a slightly different place. How do you verify someone accessing the real internet is an adult without destroying anonymity and therefore privacy?
Well now parents have a choice, only give their own children access to the KinterNet
Didn't answer the question.
Oh I'm sorry. I should be more clear. You don't. You don't verify people are adults. the capability to verify that is the same capability you need to oppress.
You enable parents to have the right tools to affect what they want for their children. But it's the parent's responsibility to let their kids use cell phones independently without a VPN without internet controls.
It's on the parents to parent their children. If they want to control what their children sees then the parents need to control what the children's devices can do. We can't turn the entire world into Disneyland because a parent doesn't want to deny their child the internet.
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
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?
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
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.
Unbelievably stupid.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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