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UK internet age checks have boosted rogue adult sites, says Pornhub
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- somenameforme 2mo agohttps://archive.is/xQiFO https://archive.is/xQiFO
- micromacrofoot 2mo agowhen you make something more difficult to access a black market profiting from easier access will always appear
- PaulKeeble 2mo agoAlong with it organised crime, which gets richer faster and then tends to branch out into other areas. Prohibition in all its forms has caused an enormous cost to people outside of those wanting the now banned things.
- realusername 2mo agoThat was 100% obvious that would happen, the law will only be followed by good actors and bad actors now have an additional advantage
- forinti 2mo agoWhich site would you qualify as a "good" actor? It's an honest question. Is there such a thing as ethical porn or are there only sites that pay taxes and those that don't?
- iso1631 2mo agoThere are sites which follow laws and those that don't.
- pessimizer 2mo agoIt's not an honest question. A good actor is one that is not trying to show porn to children and follows the law.
- forinti 2mo agoThat's one (very serious issue) but there are many others. Pornhub is a company, has an address, pays taxes, and has a history of problems.
- pessimizer 2mo agoWhat's a good commenter? I'm sure you eat meat and use fossil fuels. The discussion is about actors under a regime of universal age checks, not your personal problems. If it helps, change it to be about sites that write about birth control when information about birth control has been ordered to be restricted to married males over 30, and "good actors" complying with this ends up resulting in both unmarried females and married Catholic males over 30 who don't want to identify themselves visiting sites that also contain information about full communism and Zoroastrianism, which have been decreed illegal for anyone to discuss.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo ago> A good actor is one that is not trying to show porn to children and follows the law. It's been happening since the 1800s non stop.... I know it's wrong to show kids porn etc but what's the actual damage it does?
- realusername 2mo agoI'd call the ones which have a process for verifying actors and following local laws to be good actors
- shakow 2mo ago“Good” actor does not refer to ethical, but to lawful. > ethical porn Define “ethical porn”? Problem with ethics is that it varies from person to person; at least lawful has the taste of varying only from country to country.
- dgellow 2mo agoOnlyFan is as ethical as porn can get
- jakkos 2mo agoThere are definitely more ethical porn sites, e.g. ones that will take down revenge porn vs ones that won't.
- teroshan 2mo agoGood news, the end goal that is being pushed by corporate lobbyists is still in sight. Give it a few years (months if you're an optimist?) and you will have to use your Google/Apple hardware device to formally tie your real identity with your digital identity for every site that has even the slim possibility of being a small danger to hypothetical children. I'm sure Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will gladly join this effort to reduce harm to children as well, I'm sure that's high on their priority list. They may even already have the infrastructure in place to handle that digital ID, what an amazing coincidence. Everything will be fine!
- alansaber 2mo agoSnooper's charter ring a bell? This is the work of the UK govt, not corporate lobbyists.
- ivanbakel 2mo ago> This is the work of the UK govt, not corporate lobbyists. This is not an exclusive or. Corporate lobbyists from social media have a real incentive for pushing age verification and attestation. They benefit from public outcry and popular movements for age restrictions online, while also presenting age verification as the only solutions to the problems causing that outcry (which is to say, largely moderation problems on their own websites).
- somenameforme 2mo agoAge verification will be a significant loss for social media companies. It's going to push plenty of people away, and it provides no information that they don't already know to a reasonably high degree of certainty. And I think the problems with social media for children have little to do with moderation. It's more about the typical ails that even 'good' social media would entail: FOMO, image crafting, amplification/streamlining all typical stuff that happens at all schools - bullying, rumor milling, and so on. To say nothing of the general effect of people becoming zombies to their phones rather than actually interacting in person as much.
- everdrive 2mo agoThis outcome was always obvious. The internet is too big. You can degrade the sites that are legitimate enough to follow the law, but that's just a drop in the bucket in the sea of porn.
- alansaber 2mo agoHence why the UK govt wants to ban VPNs and have our own lil internet firewall
- lahgjam 2mo agoThey gave up on banning VPNs. They did a consultation and found that the overwhelming majority of children aren't using VPNs to bypass age checks, they're just going to websites that don't implement them.
- Citizen_Lame 2mo agoNot true, we had change or PM.
- GuzzlingIceTea 2mo agoWhat they said is true. The outcome of the consultation [1] states, "We will not ban or age-gate VPNs." It also states, "... children typically circumvent age assurance with less sophisticated methods rather than with VPNs, using VPNs more for security and privacy." [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-the-online-world-a-national-consultation/outcome/growing-up-in-the-online-world-government-response-july-2026 https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...
- echelon 2mo agoThey're going to build an internet where every device must be attested and logged in with your personal state identification. They're not just stopping filthy, sinful porn. They're making sure wrongthink will be traced to the source and jailed. You can't be allowed to have a job or be banked if you're saying harmful things. You exist to work and die and be a good little ward of the state. No stepping out of line. You do not get to live as the elites live.
- iso1631 2mo agoAnother The UK tried to ban choking porn. Quite reasonable given the realities of monkey-see monkey-do. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/06/choking-strangulation-in-porn-new-uk-law-banning-vital https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/06/chokin... Trouble is, "nobody in the UK" consumes porn. Had they not passed the "ban porn site" bill then the majority of people would be viewing porn on sites which will enforce (or at least attempt to enforce), and consumption of it would reduce. Instead UK people consume port from places which is quite happy to have choking, bestiality, and child porn. Good job Mary Whitehouse Brigade.
- a_c 2mo agoTax and regulations always punish the good actors
- MSFT_Edging 2mo agoLike the good actors who ship contaminated food?
- noja 2mo agoThe regulation could have been "adult content must be labelled", and then the logic is pushed to the client device.
- Ouman 2mo ago[dead]
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- Razengan 2mo agoWho the fuck was actually dumb enough to believe that all these laws are actually honestly intended to ""protect children""? ..the answer is almost everyone, apparently
- WarmWash 2mo agoI think the most damning thing about porn hysteria is that society as a whole ran the experiment of an open internet for 30 years, long enough for a full generation of people to be fully raised on it and -none- of the things the anti-porn crowd cried about came true. In fact things actually moved in the opposite direction. The whole think is unsurprisingly just as bunk as the hysteria over violent video games and "demonic" music. It seems plain old social media is the actual damaging thing to come from the internet.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo ago> It seems plain old social media is the actual damaging thing to come from the internet. Ah come on man used by billions it should have killed hundreds of thousands by now if what they say is true about it
- harvey9 2mo agoNot all damage is fatal
- pickleglitch 2mo agoOne could make the argument that it has, via political changes. DOGE, for instance, who's cuts have been linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths, would have been very unlikely without social media.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo agoWhat, because of the doge meme?
- jfengel 2mo agoBecause of the misinformation that led to DOGE cutting funding on programs that saved a lot of lives, but cost almost nothing. People elected the present government based on the lie that the budget could be balanced by cutting things like foreign aid and the arts, but in fact those things are a rounding error in the overall budget.
- jalapenoj 2mo ago>Aylo said last year that traffic to its Pornhub had fallen 77 per cent since the introduction of the Online Safety Act. So just MindGeek kvetching about a good thing.
- someguynamedq 2mo agoWhat do you think is more likely: they stopped looking at porn or they changed websites?
- tom1337 2mo agoAnd something similar will happen with chat control I'm afraid. Make every public messenger scan all messages to "protect the children" and those people that would be affected by these scanners will simply find another way to communicate (or build their own E2EE chat app like EncroChat in the past) and the only ones that suffer are the normal people who are now being surveilled and with no real reason.
- andy99 2mo agoThese things are all pretences to track and control “normal” people anyway though. It’s not really about protecting children or about reducing porn access or whatever, it’s about control. It’s less important that the people that really want to do this stuff slip through, the key is to tighten the screws on the population generally. This is why there are apparent inconsistencies, which disappear once you realize what’s actually happening.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo agoSecurity services would certainly have an easier time in such a world
- drbscl 2mo agoI don't recall her name, but a past government hired a consultant before implementing the age verification laws, who warned that this would obviously happen, and they promptly fired her.
- AlexDragusin 2mo agoIf only there was a period in the 1920s that could have predicted this outcome...
- ocodo 2mo agoIt's a crying shame that a mountain of prior knowledge never existed, a real pity.
- mattrighetti 2mo agoProbably boosted Mullvad’s ARR as well