Super annoying!
Given Australia doesn't even require Age Verification on porn sites (only on social media sites), the incentives hint this was strongly supported by legacy media (90% of Aussie media is owned by two companies, Newscorp and Nine Entertainment).
The internet licence will make it difficult for both authors and readers on alternative media platforms. And it will outright prohibit young people from getting information from non-permitted sources (of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources). (I've long said, to try to think clearly after watching 'the news' is akin to trying to operate heavy machinery after consuming alcohol).
Verification is the stick, AI is the carrot.
More than one answer is a bug - Eric Schmidt
Or learning one of the many non-http ways that people share porn and other things or people sharing among friends on small private or semi-private forums, chat servers or sharing porn in video games as many teens do. Beyond that is paying the slowness tax of tor hidden .onion sites which can be sped up by disabling 3 hops.
Am I only one who sees loophole in creating a social media site, which will be a porn site first? FaceHub or Pornbook.
Loads of VPNs are simply, someone other than the local ISP gets your data. Mullvad seems trustworthy, as an exception to this, and who else? And even then, Mullvad faces issues from websites and censorious countries trying to block it and bother its users all the time.
As always, the rich get to buy their way out of pretty much everything while the poor get the crap treatment.
What a silly idea. The modern world was built while traditional media existed. The decay and backsliding conicides with modern day social media. How does that point to traditional media being the culprit?
But the inverse is also true: the best content on social media is orders of magnitude better than the best content on mainstream media.
An individual should be able to choose what works for them, not have the government disallow swaths of sources.
Today every eight year old can browse Motherless for free with the same tablet he uses to watch whatever slop it is parents let their kids watch instead of educating them. That’s not a difference between “legacy” and “modern” porn but between zero access and full access.
Not really? Like the article says, they’ll just go to sites that don’t require age verification.
A good example of where social media can really matter is for say, gay kids in a religious households, where they might not be able to talk to someone in person. Social media makes it easy to create a dummy account and visit forums for advice or reassurance.
The kids in my family were well protected and supervised, they got into contact with hardcore porn at the age of 6 when other kids had access to smartphones and exposed them to it.
I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.
In my 20s I was promiscious and lived what I saw in pornography, only later in life I learned about normal sex.
In germany we had a state sponsored porn flick once produced by ZDF Neo, maybe that is the approach to expose the kids to material that shows sex as a respectable flow rather than an extreme fantasy.
For all these things, we rely on people's world experience and common sense to figure it out. I think it's pretty obvious that sex is not like porn, and I don't understand why so many people are convinced that people can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality in this domain specifically.
Mainstream porn sites show a lot of weird practices (what's up with that strangulation fetish??) and I do think it has a bad influence.
I don't think age verification is a good solution, because we don't become immune to influence at age 18. Adults are just as vulnerable to copying poor behavior as minors.
I think we should do the opposite: Remove stigma associated with sexuality. Why can't more movies just include everyday sex scenes? Why do we need to make this distinction where you need to go to a different site if you want to see something more explicit than a nipple? Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.
The other part is the huge insecurities people have in this domain. You will meet a lot of people who aren't afraid to tell you that they dance like crap, or have no musical ear, or are in bad shape, etc.; but even if you meet people who talk about sex, no one is going to tell you that they last one minute in bed.
Also, we (usually) talk about these things - video games are not the only source of discourse of violence or conflict, but sex is such a taboo topic that it’s highly likely most or all of someone’s knowledge will come from what they’ve learned on the internet
Only if they have no other exposure to this pretty damn normal thing. If all the adults in their life refuse to talk about because of some misplaced idea it is shameful, where are they going to get that info?
Not saying that’s the case for you, just that it’s the impression I get from many people.
There’s a bunch of studies on this and at the individual level it seems to do a bunch of stuff, but at the population level it has at most an effect so small it can’t be measured. Which IMO suggests causation goes in the other direction. IE if you’re entering puberty early you may seek both porn and sex at a younger age.
That said, I’m not an expert and have only briefly looked through the literature.
Looking at this comment thread, I get the sense that people are coming from vastly different backgrounds and upbringings. There's no baseline established for what people are trying to discuss.
There are a lot of topics that should simply be explained to children up front from a very early age. When a topic is not shrouded in mystery, it becomes boring. So kids should learn from an early age what is sex, puberty, menstruation, homosexuality, etc. and it should be presented in a manner-of-fact way that takes the emotional charge out of the picture. When people are educated, they have more latitude to make good decisions.
News flash. That is normal in your 20s and always has been.
Such as mandatory site filtering options. So the same place you pay your bill, you can also set which sites you want to be blocked by an "admin" password.
Or are they afraid that people will add tracking.facebook.com to the block list?
The chances of the kids stealing the admin password are about as likely as the kids stealing your age verification password that you needed to set up to access Reddit.
I have suggested publicly in the past that there should be a set of community blocker bots that are transparent about what they do and do not block and they are easy to fork and change for this sort of thing. And parents can choose which level of blocking their networks adhere to.
Of course they could just block all things sex for the moment -
But parents have not demanded this.
I imagine that way back in the day when if the porn via cable boxes was enabled by default, many parents would not have chosen to just give their kids one in the living room and one in their bedroom, many houses put one in every room of the house.
And yet they know that these phone devices can bring up porn and many worse things - and they just hand them over with an unlimited data plan like its nothing.
Many years ago, some parents could argue they did not know there was naughty things on the telephone like connected to the computers, but today's parents grew up with the porn on the internet and most partents just give them unlimited anytime access to all the things.
If the zealots riling up the churches and mom groups and such truly believe that porn is proven scientifically destruction to the children, why are the parents not in trouble for giving these devices to the kids? Like giving a car and alcohol and unlimited ammo to what 90% of kids?
I do believe part of the problem has been non-great options for blocking. (I have heard there are more options today than there were when I researched this a bit 10 years ago - back then disney circle (too expensive) and an open source dns poisoning thing I couldn't figure out how to setup)
But I think we also need to be honest that all parents know the porn is there (and worse, they know they have cameras on these devices and things like snap have been around so long everyone knows there are worse things that can be done with these devices) - and yet people have not demanded non-camera, all adult blocked devices, in fact they have been buying them up and paying premium prices to provide unlimited 24/7 access.
So the few people who are getting their ego stroked by the choir for saving the children, it would seem being in their bubbling is preventing them from seeing the reality of the people's choices, and providing better alternatives and education.
It seems every year each group needs a boogie man to raise money and get the likes and shares before campaign season. It's a shame they are willing to slay the rights of people just to get some temporary popularity - and likely knowing it's not going to fix the thing, but it is going to cost time and money for many - but they don't care about the masses.
Honestly I'm really surprised that the generation that grew up on free access to internet porn and turned out fine is suddenly acting so prudish. As a kid I really believed that when my generation grows up, we'll be "the cool parents".
Of course porn distorted my view of sex, but let's be real - this damage is absolutely nothing compared to American family movies where a family of four with one adopted token black kid has a minor issue and then resolves it and everyone lives happily everafter. Those sold me the fantasy that as an adult I'd have lots of friends and a loving family and a satisfying job, and when none of that happened, I spent years feeling deep disappointment, which I still haven't processed.
Meanwhile hardcore porn I watched... look, that's the absolute least of issues I had as a kid. Growing up gay in a conservative country never gave me a chance to learn about proper relationships, I was immediately pushed into the underground world of hookups with shady people. Not to mention the plethora of other, unrelated issues, like constant bullying at school which nobody gave a fuck about, abusive parents, or ghetto community promoting criminal lifestyle. Or thinking even larger: what about whole generation that enters job market into recession, what about whole generation that will never build capital because they're trapped in a cycle of poverty, what about the constant fear that WW3 might be happening, what about social connections dissolving and people becoming more and more aggressive towards each other.
But those are difficult problems to tackle, so let's focus on kids seeing a naked titty instead. For sure that's a great use of our limited time.
For us internet access was a bit of a ritual—find a computer and got some privacy. Or you could risk getting caught at the computer lab.
Now, the internet is ubiquitous and many kids have access to connected devices all the time (computers, tablets, smartphones) and it's harder to overview their use.
Also, the amount of content and extreme content available has exploded.
It's extremely difficult to get solid evidence of this stuff, as it all happens so slowly it's inseparable from many other gradual forces in society.
Are people getting married and having children less, because porn has undermined their ability to form healthy adult relationships?
Or is it because of a successful campaign against teen pregnancy? A rise in women's education levels making them want to wait to start a family? Contraception and pre-marital sex removing a major incentive to settle down? Society's infantilisation of men, who should put away childish things at a much younger age? A housing crisis and hollowing out of the lower middle class meaning people can't hope to afford a family home until middle age? A preference the man out-earns the woman being incompatible with a world where women out-perform men in education? Fears about the future, like the climate crisis? A decline in religion and traditional family values? The rise of online/app-based dating?
Our main tools for disentangling these influences are, as far as I can tell, vibes and anecdotes.
My favourite and most out-of-touch part of the article was the one in which they argue it is "a fallacy" to think pornography can be harmful to teenagers because "research into pornography’s impact on children is limited and inconclusive — prompting calls for further study". I actually laughed out loud at this part
Same deal as violent video games. What's your view on those?
As for the bad article, it's AI-generated slop.
But of course that's not what it's about.
Online age verification and content moderation was never about protecting anyone. It's about controlling the masses and tricking them into believing that it's for their own good.
1) Not everybody would know how to do it 2) This creates a weakest link problem, where in a class of say 15 kids, just having one with a non-blocked device would allow for all to see.
I don't know what would be good solution, maybe something intermediate... for example, filtering at the ISP level and making it mandatory for them to inform and request the settings for all their customers? Just a form, so they can block it. But then, maybe I want to block porn for my underage kids but not for me or my partner.
2) It's up to the child to decide who they want to associate with in school and in society, and up to the parents to advise their child in their decision-making.
Presumably, the parents are the ones buying the child's device, so this can be done at the OS level. The parent creates a user account for the child and a password-protected admin account for themselves on the new device, and only allow the firewall settings to be changed by the admin account. We can even implement offline on-device neural network-based detection and filtering, and you decide what to filter.
If the child is old enough to work and buy their own device, then it's debatable whether they should be moderated at all.
The problem with filtering at beyond the device level is widespread censorship, surveillance, and the erosion of the freedoms of the common man. The systems being built for supposedly the safety of the children are much too powerful that I can't help but question their true purpose.
We will be barred from accessing sites without valid ID. The question is can we get a few IdPs to provide the ID in a privacy sensitive way (the relying party really only needs to know your age after all).
Ideally an international governing body, under the auspices of the UN, holds the IDs and transmits the specific claims when requested and keeps no logs on requests.
Realistically it will be Apple and Google and you'll just have to trust them to totally not use the data of what sites request your ID to track you (lmao. lol, even.)
It's hurting their own case by giving the EU commission the easiest retort imaginable. If you really don't want age verification, that's bad, because they usually get the last word in.
Better to respond in good faith to the commission's strongest possible argument, rather than do this, which is going to get brushed aside while handing them a win.
https://github.com/microsoft/crescent-credentials
The demo I saw looked really interesting but I don't have the knowledge to say if the approach is viable or not
Introducing laws that are going to be relatively trivially circumvented, which do not provide the protection they purport to provide, and which burden citizens with rather useless but onerous duties, should be called out as a failure at lawmaking. I think the best defense against such laws is to show thoroughly why and how bad and useless such laws are, so that large enough political constituencies (that is, us, citizens) would become interested in fixing or repealing them, and would vote accordingly.
Seems like porn VPN would be popular.
As the article says, all this means is that law-abiding porn sites (that, for example, respond to requests to delete CSAM and revenge porn) will go bankrupt and everybody will be driven to sketchypron.xxx instead.
How would that work? Can PornHub not exist without the "lucrative" market of children watching porn?
That's why you do quality control on AI-generated content :^)
> Device-level parental controls have existed for years, and can actually block a million sites. But politicians can’t take credit for them.
It wouldn’t deter kids if you want to let them have unsupervised root access to a computer (like I enjoyed when I was 12), but I think it would be fairly effective for a walled garden like an iPhone
This was exactly what the German public transport service Mopla did when I registered an account there. It needed to know my name to be able to sell me the personal Deutschlandticket. To verify my identity their web application forwarded me to list of countries, where I selected the Netherlands, and then my bank from the list there. That forwarded me to my bank's digital environment, with the request to share my name with Mopla (and just that one attribute). I then used my bank's auth system to approve sharing that claim.
Simple, transparent, and at no point did Mopla have to do anything with ID cards or AI or whatever.
I would expect systems like this to become more broadly available in the near future. In the EU for sure.
It has a terrible false positive and false negative rate.
So it's not just a matter of it "keeping out 90% of the kids"; it's a matter of it decreeing that due to unknowable factors, and with no ability to appeal to a human, you are 13, and are no longer allowed to access large chunks of the internet.
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/age-assurance...
Hopefully false positives won't be set high and this abused as an excuse to obtain sensitive personal information on their users.
Who's "us"? This blog doesn't seem to have an About Us.
They'll just get it somewhere else, private chatrooms, torrents, etc and from probably even less regulated and more nefarious sources that also serve stuff super hardcore or completely illegal.
As an under 12y old, my first encounter with porn was as porn paper magazines rolled and stored between the wall and the radiators of my school class. No amount of server side age verification will prevent kids and teenagers from sharing stuff.
As a parent I'd rather pay for access to an ethical porn website that promote pleasure for all parties and safe sex and give access to it to my teenagers than trying at all cost to prevent them from seeing all porn.
You can show ID at a real world store and buy an age verification token. The token is good for exactly one user account on one website for one year. The website is responsible for ensuring no account sharing.
No need to store IDs online and it's still pretty hard for kids to access anything we don't want them to. Just like alcohol and tobacco there will be straw purchasers who re-sell to minors, and we accept that imperfection. We also punish people who re-sell or give alcohol to minors.
Providing a BGP feed of such provider network subnets to content providers would then allow them to happily serve content to those subnets without any further checks, safe in the knowledge that they will only be providing service to endpoints controlled by adults.
Details of how this can be done for other services including home broadband omitted - suffice it to say your router would have both adult and child-friendly SSIDs.
This seems both simple and obvious, and protects children without encumbering adults, risking privacy, or forcing a mass censorship regime on everyone.
This means it isn't enough to verify the age of an account once. If all you need are verified accounts you just created a black market for verfied accounts.
That means you need to verify the identity of the actual person sitting in front of the screen with regularity. And that is problematic in various ways.
Porn is partially protected by the constitution and it is politically impopular to tell people what they can't do.
> "We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use, as opposed to the person who visits the website [having to] certify that 'I am 18," Vought told the undercover Centre for Climate Reporting staffers. "We've got a number of states that are passing this and then you know what happens is the porn company says 'We're not going to do business in your state'—which, of course, is entirely what we were after."
https://reason.com/2024/08/19/age-check-laws-are-a-back-door...
Surely, if this is about "show me an ID", one can grab his parent's
If this is about "show me your face", again this seems stupid at best (how one can detect that this is an adult face, especially between 17 yo vs 19 yo)
So .. how does it work ? And also, does it work ? :)
Your local adult video store can't sell to minors. They have to check id. If they don't, and a minor buys some goods, the store is liable.
Your local strip club can't let minors into their doors. They have to check id. If they don't, and a minor gains entry, the club is liable.
The same applies to all age-restricted products everywhere, online or offline. I can't buy liquor on doordash without showing ID for crying out loud.
But for some (probably nefarious) reason, online adult content providers want to pretend the rule doesn't apply to them. Device-level controls? Hilarious. What... are we going to add device-controls to a teenager's car to prevent them from driving to liquor stores too?
Don't get me wrong, there's some shady stuff behind AV. But I strongly disagree with the notion that an adult content provider isn't responsible for restricting their content in a way that works.
> "We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use, as opposed to the person who visits the website [having to] certify that 'I am 18," Vought told the undercover Centre for Climate Reporting staffers. "We've got a number of states that are passing this and then you know what happens is the porn company says 'We're not going to do business in your state'—which, of course, is entirely what we were after."
I don't like it, but for the most part the internet is now a better place for me to browse.
> But that comparison is dishonest: on a gambling or merchant site, users already expect to submit personal data — credit card info, name, phone number, address. They are paying for something. On a free site, users do not expect to hand over private data. They simply refuse — and move on to other sites. Why wouldn’t they?
the success of OnlyFans destroys this argument. It is not that people do not pay for porn - the authors try to uphold their free, ad-based model. But looking at OnlyFans, people absolutely seem to be OK submitting their personal data incl. payment details.
Instead of age verification, I'd rather see a discussion on how to make a form of ethical porn more visible and popular than the one which involves sex trafficking, sexism and violent or degrading practices. I'd rather see good porn more accessible to teenager than letting them use workarounds and visit terrible stuff.
Now the EU is slowly turning into a oligarchy where very few control the majority. For every stupid law they make, the more I wish for it's destruction.
the internet is no longer anonymous
