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That person obviously knows what they're talking about and are much smarter than me but I still think this here is a weasel thing to say. > I think the best wa

That person obviously knows what they're talking about and are much smarter than me but I still think this here is a weasel thing to say. > I think the best way to deal with the issue includes education, digital skills, and parental oversight of Internet use including the use of personal filters or blocking tools if desired. That made me actually laugh. Internet access is ubiquitous, parental digital literacy is often low, none of those are actually helpful suggestions that would help address the symptom. Imagine if we suggested that for other problems. "I think the best way to deal with gun violence includes education, gun skills, and parental oversight of gun use including the use of safety mechanisms and gun safes if desired." I appreciate people spending their time fighting for our rights. But these arguments here weren't very practical in my opinion.

genocidicbunny 3y ago
> That made me actually laugh. Internet access is ubiquitous, parental digital literacy is often low, none of those are actually helpful suggestions that would help address the symptom. I think that works both for and against your point though. For the very same reason, it's not likely there will ever be a way to reliably solve this technologically. So while we may need some technological measures, we also need to educate parents and kids about this at the same time. Anyone trying to sell a technological 'this will solve the porn problem' solution should be viewed with a very critical eye.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  > For the very same reason, it's not likely there will ever be a way to reliably solve this technologically. How did you arrive at this? Because I'm optimistic and think that if the government sets the ground rules, porn distributors will find a way to implement it reliably (using technology) and continue delivering porn to their consumers. We get age checked here in Canada all the time when we buy booze for instance. Why not enforce it here with something like an age verification?
  - genocidicbunny 3y ago
    Because the internet does not end at the Canadian border, and porn companies operating from other countries have no reason to implement such systems. And you can't block access to them -- VPNs are trivial to access these days. > We get age checked here in Canada all the time when we buy booze for instance. Why not enforce it here with something like an age verification? Because to buy alcohol you have to physically show up at a store with a physical ID that needs to pass as real, and you need to present yourself passably as an adult. Even then, it's not terribly difficult to get around even that -- plenty of high-schoolers are able to reliably get alcohol with cheap fake ID's because they look old enough and the ID is good enough. Online delivery services are also not terribly hard to spoof for a dedicated enough teenager.
    - cherioo 3y ago
      Then the next step is to ban VPN. It also doesn’t matter that the ban is not 100% effective, as long as it deters majority of the uses. Arguing whether or not it CAN be blocked feels pointless. The question needs to start from whether it SHOULD be blocked or not.
      - mulmen 3y ago
        You said the quiet part out loud. The next step is banning VPNs. For the children of course.
      - rangestransform 3y ago
        The closet authoritarians have really come out of the woodwork during the pandemic and haven’t been kicked back into submission
  - happyopossum 3y ago
    >Why not enforce it here with something like an age verification? While I'd love this technical utopia, the Internet is a global construct. All it takes is someone in another country to decide they'd like to prey on kids by selling them porn, and your age verification goes out the window. To use your analogy, if the government can't even stop licensed stores in fixed physical locations from selling alcohol to kids (because it does happen), then how is one country going to enforce this in a globally distributed, virtual space?
wharvle 3y ago
> That made me actually laugh. Internet access is ubiquitous, parental digital literacy is often low, none of those are actually helpful suggestions that would help address the symptom. And tools for enforcing any kind of rules on your own are hot garbage. Especially any that a normal person could possibly hope to figure out. You either have to cut off the 'net entirely (which is less practical with each passing year) or commit to a second job of managing this crap. I'm not a fan of bills like this, but also something's gonna have to change, or we'll get... bills like this. My guess is nothing will change, and this sort of thing is what'll happen instead.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  > And tools for enforcing any kind of rules on your own are hot garbage. Especially any that a normal person could possibly hope to figure out. Online ID check?
iimblack 3y ago
I don’t think equating kids watching porn with gun violence makes sense. One has a much greater and more permanent effect so the reaction should be stronger. The other isn’t, in my opinion, a big deal and the way the government is trying to deal with it has much farther reaching effects than the issue warrants.
kelnos 3y ago
I think in the end we should just stop caring so much about this stuff. Yes, educate children, with a frank discussion, about porn and why it can be a problem. But if a teenager really wants to find porn, they're going to find porn, and... so what? I downloaded low-quality porn JPEGs from BBSes as a teen in the early/mid-90s, and then found so much more porn on the internet in the mid/late-90s, and I turned out ok. Sure, some people end up addicted and/or with unhealthy views on sex and intimacy because of porn, but Draconian blocking schemes (that ultimately don't work) aren't the answer. Maybe parents should actually parent their children. Install parental controls where possible (which I know are far from perfect), but otherwise, maybe give your kids some measure of trust. This particular thing isn't like worrying about a child predator luring your kid out to meet in person after finding them online; there's very little harm in a kid seeing some porn and then a parent finding out about it and disciplining the kid, if that's what they want to do. When I broke the rules as a kid, I got TV or Nintendo privileges taken away for a time; parents can take away a teen's internet-connected devices as punishment.
adamomada 3y ago
The argument doesn’t work for gun violence because that’s other people using the equipment. It works if every kid has a gun (smartphone) and keeps shooting themselves with it though

genocidicbunny 3y ago

> That made me actually laugh. Internet access is ubiquitous, parental digital literacy is often low, none of those are actually helpful suggestions that would help address the symptom. I think that works both for and against your point though. For the very same reason, it's not likely there will ever be a way to reliably solve this technologically. So while we may need some technological measures, we also need to educate parents and kids about this at the same time. Anyone trying to sell a technological 'this will solve the porn problem' solution should be viewed with a very critical eye.

barbazoo 3y ago
> For the very same reason, it's not likely there will ever be a way to reliably solve this technologically. How did you arrive at this? Because I'm optimistic and think that if the government sets the ground rules, porn distributors will find a way to implement it reliably (using technology) and continue delivering porn to their consumers. We get age checked here in Canada all the time when we buy booze for instance. Why not enforce it here with something like an age verification?
- genocidicbunny 3y ago
  Because the internet does not end at the Canadian border, and porn companies operating from other countries have no reason to implement such systems. And you can't block access to them -- VPNs are trivial to access these days. > We get age checked here in Canada all the time when we buy booze for instance. Why not enforce it here with something like an age verification? Because to buy alcohol you have to physically show up at a store with a physical ID that needs to pass as real, and you need to present yourself passably as an adult. Even then, it's not terribly difficult to get around even that -- plenty of high-schoolers are able to reliably get alcohol with cheap fake ID's because they look old enough and the ID is good enough. Online delivery services are also not terribly hard to spoof for a dedicated enough teenager.
  - cherioo 3y ago
    Then the next step is to ban VPN. It also doesn’t matter that the ban is not 100% effective, as long as it deters majority of the uses. Arguing whether or not it CAN be blocked feels pointless. The question needs to start from whether it SHOULD be blocked or not.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      You said the quiet part out loud. The next step is banning VPNs. For the children of course.
    - rangestransform 3y ago
      The closet authoritarians have really come out of the woodwork during the pandemic and haven’t been kicked back into submission
- happyopossum 3y ago
  >Why not enforce it here with something like an age verification? While I'd love this technical utopia, the Internet is a global construct. All it takes is someone in another country to decide they'd like to prey on kids by selling them porn, and your age verification goes out the window. To use your analogy, if the government can't even stop licensed stores in fixed physical locations from selling alcohol to kids (because it does happen), then how is one country going to enforce this in a globally distributed, virtual space?

wharvle 3y ago

> That made me actually laugh. Internet access is ubiquitous, parental digital literacy is often low, none of those are actually helpful suggestions that would help address the symptom. And tools for enforcing any kind of rules on your own are hot garbage. Especially any that a normal person could possibly hope to figure out. You either have to cut off the 'net entirely (which is less practical with each passing year) or commit to a second job of managing this crap. I'm not a fan of bills like this, but also something's gonna have to change, or we'll get... bills like this. My guess is nothing will change, and this sort of thing is what'll happen instead.

barbazoo 3y ago
> And tools for enforcing any kind of rules on your own are hot garbage. Especially any that a normal person could possibly hope to figure out. Online ID check?

iimblack 3y ago

I don’t think equating kids watching porn with gun violence makes sense. One has a much greater and more permanent effect so the reaction should be stronger. The other isn’t, in my opinion, a big deal and the way the government is trying to deal with it has much farther reaching effects than the issue warrants.

kelnos 3y ago

I think in the end we should just stop caring so much about this stuff. Yes, educate children, with a frank discussion, about porn and why it can be a problem. But if a teenager really wants to find porn, they're going to find porn, and... so what? I downloaded low-quality porn JPEGs from BBSes as a teen in the early/mid-90s, and then found so much more porn on the internet in the mid/late-90s, and I turned out ok. Sure, some people end up addicted and/or with unhealthy views on sex and intimacy because of porn, but Draconian blocking schemes (that ultimately don't work) aren't the answer. Maybe parents should actually parent their children. Install parental controls where possible (which I know are far from perfect), but otherwise, maybe give your kids some measure of trust. This particular thing isn't like worrying about a child predator luring your kid out to meet in person after finding them online; there's very little harm in a kid seeing some porn and then a parent finding out about it and disciplining the kid, if that's what they want to do. When I broke the rules as a kid, I got TV or Nintendo privileges taken away for a time; parents can take away a teen's internet-connected devices as punishment.

adamomada 3y ago

The argument doesn’t work for gun violence because that’s other people using the equipment. It works if every kid has a gun (smartphone) and keeps shooting themselves with it though