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This is a hard situation. I don’t think minors should be exposed to porn. Hell, I think even social media has a drug-like effect best kept from minors. Age ver
by tyleo 1y ago
This is a hard situation. I don’t think minors should be exposed to porn. Hell, I think even social media has a drug-like effect best kept from minors.
Age verification is the most obvious solution but comes with the downside of potentially leaking private adult activity or information.
I suppose my POV is that the benefit here outweighs the good even if imperfect. Porn just isn’t a necessity even if some folks really enjoy it.
I don’t hold that POV strongly, I pretty much formed it while writing this comment. I’m be interested in hearing other perspectives.
- CalRobert 1y agoI generally agree, except that I don’t like how this removes anonymity. (I also think fifteen year olds seeing genitalia isn’t a big deal but it does seem some porn can have negative impacts) The government shouldn’t need to know if I read hustler magazine but online I don’t know how to separate proof of age from identity.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- resource_waste 1y agoWhile I don't think there is much harm, 'If you stare into the abyss, the abyss will stare back at you.' You cannot be unaffected by events. (I know the quote is paraphrased, and specifically talking about philosophy)
- CalRobert 1y agoYeah, big difference between seeing consenting adults have sex and some more violent stuff
- orwin 1y agoAll the code produced by this government agency it required to be open source, so unless you see a token tracker on GitHub, anonymity should be fine.
- jeroenhd 1y ago> I don’t think minors should be exposed to porn. The problem with that is that minors will be looking at porn. You're not going to stop a horny 16 year old. These laws will certainly take care of age gating the decent, well-willing websites. The shady, probably unmonitored, or even niche websites outside of the mainstream, won't. Aside from the obvious VPN workaround, this will only push curious teenagers towards worse websites. As for privacy risks, privacy-friendly methods do exist. Yivi (previously dubbed IRMA) is a proof-of-concept that has been running for a while for privacy-friendly verification and data exchange using signed attributes (https://irma.app/docs/what-is-irma/ https://irma.app/docs/what-is-irma/). A signed "user-is-over-18" attribute is all a website would need to verify a user's age, without any other details. Privacy-friendly age verification won't stop the other risks and problems these law may impose, though.
- ty6853 1y ago>These laws will certainly take care of age gating the decent, well-willing websites Lol they won't. dark IDs or just AI altering their IDs, the second france enforces such law there will be some entrepreneur that makes an AI bot that accepts your ID and then changes the DOB and then spits out the video/images for KYC.
- diggan 1y agoUse the national ID that surely has a digital DB, and make the check against those, which unless some corrupt officials has edit rights to, won't allow those simple bypasses.
- diggan 1y ago> I don’t think minors should be exposed to porn I guess the devil is in the details. I think you're talking about this from the context of USA, where I think a minor is up to 18, while a minor is up to 15. Then what constitutes of "porn" is also very different, I'm sure pictures of topless women could be considered porn in some places, while not in others. So by some folks definition, a lot of content on current social media would be considered porn, and by others, a lot of content on porn sites wouldn't be considered porn. What's lacking in these discussions are almost always: Not being specific enough about used terms and also providing enough context to understand the specifics and where those come from.
- Retric 1y agoI think porn has ~net neural effects on kids. One of the upsides is it’s a time sink replacing activities that can result in direct physical harm, just as video games do etc. Without hormones driving people to it it’s uninteresting. After hormones kick in there’s upsides and downsides to porn, but those hormones are pushing a drug like effect and thus addiction either way.
- closewith 1y ago> One of the upsides is it’s a time sink replacing activities that can result in direct physical harm, just as video games do etc. This is a delusional worldview.
- thunderfork 1y agoThis is not a very constructive comment. Explain how?
- episteme 1y agoI think they might have meant that video games are also a time sink, not that video games cause harm?
- badmintonbaseba 1y agoI wonder how effectively the regulation achieves its desired outcome of fewer minors being exposed to porn.
- mediumrhino 1y agoCounter argument: While I agree with your general sentiment, this will only take effect on larger sites and will lead to minors shifting to smaller, less moderated, and potentially more extreme content.
- robertlagrant 1y ago> Age verification is the most obvious solution but comes with the downside of potentially leaking private adult activity or information. The system they have seems reasonable, though? Verifier doesn't know site; site doesn't know user. Not going to be perfect, but is quite good.
- UnreachableCode 1y ago>Instead, users must verify their age using a credit card or a government-issued ID. This check must be carried out by an external service, not the porn site itself. >This system, referred to as “double anonymity”, means the porn site receives only a yes-or-no confirmation that the user is of legal age. The age-check provider knows who the user is, but not which sites they visit. So is there an issue here if the external service disposes of the card details immediately following confirmation? I'm not exactly sure how this would/could work though.
- TheChaplain 1y agoIMHO it's not porn that is the problem, it's parents. What minors are exposed to, and educated about, is the parents primary responsibility to deal with. Minors will somehow get access to porn and nudies, age verification will not stop them.
- ty6853 1y agoI don't disagree but let me go one step further and say perhaps it is no one's responsibility. A parent cannot possibly monitor what teens are getting into at all times. When teens do 'bad' things it doesn't mean the parent or society is somehow at fault.
- imchillyb 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 1y ago> This is alarmingly incorrect. Extra curricular activities, clubs, sports, and music work exceptionally well at keeping kids too busy to indulge in pornography or other unacceptable habits like drugs. Ha ha, if only. You're forgetting the liminal space - the transition periods. Unless you're going to personally hand your kid off to a teacher and then pick them up afterwards, exactly on the minute the activities start and end, leaving exactly zero time for them to interact with other kids with little supervision, kids will find a way. And if you actually manage to do that, you'll be severely damaging their social development, hindering their ability to function in society as independent adult, possibly for life. This is arguably much, much worse than them smoking a few cigarettes and watching some porn.
- loudmax 1y agoThe amount of exposure matters here. It's one thing for a teenager to manage to occasionally access clandestine pornography (as was kind of the norm growing up in the 1980's). It's a much worse thing to spend many hours per week looking at porn. The former is probably not a terrible thing, the latter is not healthy for emotional or social development. Plus, there are other positive aspects to keeping kids busy and involved with healthy social activities.
- MangoToupe 1y ago> Age verification is the most obvious solution but comes with the downside of potentially leaking private adult activity or information. Honestly the older I get, the less I can strongly care about this. For better or worse, porn is a relatively mainstream topic. If we can't have discussions about why porn taste is so potentially devastating to leak, we don't deserve privacy. Besides, it's not like "leaking" of this information would lead to a public index of who is watching what. And maybe it should, I'm no longer sure.
- wkat4242 1y agoI love the way you use the term POV so much. I see what you're doing there ;)
- SecretDreams 1y ago> Hell, I think even social media has a drug-like effect best kept from minors. I'd venture to guess the exposure to social media is far more harmful than porn, but I could be out to lunch as to how much kids are looking at porn??
- williamdclt 1y agoFleeting, largely-unconsidered thought: given teenagers _will_ look for porn, that I can’t reliably be prevented and that some porn is worse than other, could/should we have a category of porn that can be accessed _for teenagers_ (>15yo for example)? A category where there has to be no violence, no degradation, decent representation of sexualities/races/body types, no incest etc etc… Basically give enough to teenagers that they’re satisfied enough with it without having to look elsewhere and be exposed to the worse stuff. Doesn’t sound entirely like a bad idea
- oersted 1y agoThis is a reasonable take, and there is strong precedent that it can work. In Germany, the drinking age for beer and similar lower alcohol drinks is 16 instead of 18, and it has a big impact in preventing teenagers from binge drinking vodka and such. In the Netherlands, beer and wine are readily available in every supermarket, but you really need to get out of your way to get harder alcohol at designated dispensaries or liquor stores manned by a clerk. Similarly, the laws on drugs make a significant distinction between softer drugs like weed (not legalised despite stereotypes, but tolerated) and harder drugs like heroin. There was a massive heroin addiction epidemic in the 70s, and such methods were remarkably effective in combating that.
- oersted 1y agoI don't disagree, but let's not forget that there is a significant difference with main things that are age-gated right now: alcohol, tobacco, driving... It's not just about addiction or mental health, it's a whole different ballgame. These things carry big real-world physical risks, potentially deadly. Minors literally have different brain chemistries as they develop, and drugs can cause long-lasting effects unlike in adults. Even gambling is not age-gated as strictly, with massive potential negative impacts to your livelyhood. For the rest of things that might cause some psychological harm (maybe, hard to verify), like movies or videogames, we just have recommendations and some light barriers. Elevating porn to the top category is therefore quite a significant move, it is not the same.
- throwaway366363 1y ago[dead]
- numpad0 1y ago> Porn just isn’t a necessity even if some folks really enjoy it. So isn't speech! Not everyone need privileges to talk about human rights or democracy. China's doing fine with neither(officially). By the way, unofficially and anecdotally, coastal Chinese prostitution as well as porn seem to be getting bigger and more wicked faster. I wonder which comes first: puritanism, or erosion of industrial base. This whole slow movement could be just a symptom than culprit.
- const_cast 1y agoMinors already aren't allowed to look at porn, and in fact they're not even allowed to access the internet. I mean, when you go to an ISP to purchase an internet plan, they're going to ask you for ID and they're going to verify your age. It is then the parents responsibility to monitor that. If parents choose to turn around and grant their kids free access, then fair's fair. Just think about alcohol and tobacco. The clerk is going to ask for your ID in the store, sure. But they're not gonna follow you home and make sure you don't slip your kid a cig or a bottle. That's not their responsibility, their transaction is done. And, actually, in a lot of places this is explicitly allowed. I think in most US states minors can drink under adult supervision. So, if we want to solve this, we need to aim at the parents and convincing them (as well as giving them more tools) to do this reasonably. These identity solutions are a tool, but IMO, a rather blunt and unnecessary tool.
- theshrike79 1y agoThe problem is that the legit sites will implement this. These sites have actual takedown processes and they verify uploaders (to a degree) etc. The ones that don't ... will have the nasty stuff.