The choice citizens have now is between an 'internet licence' (submit ID's to myriad sites), or an 'internet tax' (VPN).
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).
> 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).
an 'internet licence' (submit ID's to myriad sites), or an 'internet tax' (VPN).
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.
For many it would be. I started with FTP and then SFTP so it's muscle memory for me and it's a lot faster than using a browser when used optimally with LFTP+SFTP+mirror, much like rsync but works with chroot SFTP-only. Groups can fully automate sharing their own collections with one another, entirely hands off no pun intended.
FetLife? It exists, and is subject to the same laws and regulations. Any legal site will have to comply to a load of regulations, supplemented by the inscrutable rules laid down by Visa and Mastercard.
X is one of the prohibited sites for under 16's in Australia (falls under 'social media'), but someone should seriously tell Elon about this, because it may work and would be hilarious.
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.
Proton includes a VPN in their office365 competitor Proton Business Suite. While big sites like Netflix don't want you to use VPN, I am sure porn sites are very happy to let you through once your VPN address is not longer in a jurisdiction that requires AV.
As the other replies allude to, it worked at one stage.
This subjective and lovely history of the Great Firewall of the PRC was posted recently, about the to and fros in the methods of this kind of thing, and is really very good, if you're interested:
> of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources
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?
In the extremes, both ideas are right. In terms of timeliness, relevance, quality, rigour, variety, discussion and debate the worst content on social media is orders of magnitude worse than the worst content on mainstream media.
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.
I don’t understand what “traditional media” means in this context. Before the internet, kids didn’t have access to porn. It just wasn’t there when I was growing up. I’m sure someone out there had 8mm or 16mm porn films, but I as a child had no clue where to find those, and the physical stores selling them were not accessible: I didn’t have transportation to them, and they checked ID at the door. I heard of Playboy through friends at school, but I had zero access to it myself. I don’t think that was unusual.
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.
The parent comment was talking about the other meaning of "media", the "news media". "Traditional media" then means newspapers, radio, and TV. As opposed to "new media" which is idiots yelling at each other on twitter or whatever.
Hard to argue that isn't an inconvenience. In other words, the outcome is the same, but thanks to government intervention, everyone's worse off.
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.
I wish there was a honest discussion, I am with them about parents not giving a shit and pushing away responsibility. The idea of supervision in education institutions is good as well.
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.
But kids (and adults) are exposed to all kinds of fantasies. War is not like Call of Duty. The Mafia is not like GTA. Monarchy is not like in the fairy tales. Romance is not like Twilight. BDSM is not like 50 Shades of Grey.
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.
People can't tell the difference in any domain. People copy what they see. It's why James Bond stopped smoking in movies, and people smoke far less now.
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.
> Adults are just as vulnerable to copying poor behavior as minors.
Adults can be vulnerable, but I don't think just as vulnerable. Youngsters with no initial idea of how a given thing works have nothing with which to compare and contrast and potentially reject the first idea presented to them. Generally, the younger, the more impressionable.
> Remove stigma associated with sexuality. [...] Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.
I do agree with loosening the stigma. If there are parents that are giving their children unrestricted access to the internet, and those children may expose things to others that have better parental controls, then the straightforward solution is to have some form of earlier sex-ed. Doesn't need to cover everything, but enough to prepare them against the bad influences they'll apparently encounter. "Something steamy on Netflix" may be a positive counterexample to help them reject nonsense fantasies on porn sites.
It's a feedback loop - smoking was advertised as being cool way back when, which led to movie characters smoking to appear cool, which then reinforces the advertising.
When there was a push to regulate smoking in advertising, it cut the original feedback loop which made film/tv characters not use smoking as a sign of being cool. This led to advertising (if it were allowed) to be less effective at portrayal of coolness via smoking.
Vaping took off as a cool thing without a bunch of cool people vaping in movies.
People stopped smoking in movies at the same time a lot of other smoking related things changed. Similarly smokers likely notice people smoking in movies more than non smokers.
I remember a viral twitter photo of Sophie Turner smoking a Juul while filming the last episodes of Game of Thrones
Juul changed the cultural standing of vaping and (for a very brief moment of time) made it "cool" by means of social media celebrity promotion. They were hit with pretty aggressive punishment for this by the US FDA if I'm not mistaken.
Juul was founded in May 22, 2015 well after Vaping was in a fairly flat growth trajectory, and afterwards there wasn’t any kind of noticeable bump in adoption from such efforts.
It was cool to smoke when all the cool guys in the movies were smoking. One of the reasons it’s not cool anymore is that the cool guys in the movies don’t smoke nowadays (although they do it more often now than they did ten years ago; which is worrying).
Fads long predate social media. Instead social media and vaping came into their own on similar timelines but adoption of vaping just never saw the kind of hockey stick curve you see from a major fad.
Instead it was relatively slow taking ~10 years to hit 25 million users and ~20 years to hit 85 million users keeping it niche vs the ~1,100 million smokers.
It’s not that people stopped but that they didn’t start. Smoking was no longer sold as cool so kids didn’t learn of it as a cool thing.
Kids and even adults pick up cues from games, movies, books. War is like CoD and heroic war movies (why do many 18 year olds go to the army expecting glory and come back with trauma and broken dreams?), sex is like in porn, and gangs are like in GTA. Until they gain practical experience and slowly realize some things are vastly different. Maybe a couple will love “porn sex”. Most others will break a leg having shower sex and reconsider the “teachings”.
It's different. One big part of the reason has already been said in sibling comments: taboo. Kids know that the huge jumps in martial arts movies are impossible because they jump when they play, they have seen their friends and classmates jump, they probably have tried flying kicks when playing so they get an idea of where the limits are. Nothing of this happens with sex, plus often they aren't exposed to anyone talking about it, except of course in porn.
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.
Taboo exactly; I will freely talk with colleagues and friends about e.g. GTA or action movies; watching movies and playing games is a communal and public thing.
But nobody talks about what they do in the bedroom; nobody goes to a movie theater to watch porn, people are awkward when there's sex scenes in films (and mainstream films have stopped having them altogether it seems), teenagers run away if their parents ever broach the subject, etcetera.
We shouldn’t be giving 6 year olds access to call of duty or GTA either. PEGI ratings (although overzealous) are a god starting point. I wouldn’t withhold an average 10 year old from a 12 rated game, but I wouldn’t give them access to an 18+.
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
> 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.
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.
What is really missing is good sex education in schools, especially public schools - and in particular in the United States. The state of sex education in America actually deserves the work deplorable, it's so bad.
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.
> 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.
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.
Only for the last few decades, this has almost always been a taboo across all of humanity, this high level promiscuity you speak of. Hardly a normative experience across space and time.
It only really became taboo due to religion and the associated oppression of women.
Humans, for the vast majority of the time they existed, were largely free range. Lots and lots of sex. I assure you, hunter gatherers were not monogamous suburbanites who attended their white Christian church.
It's only been the norm since we've had effective birth control, decent pregnancy and early-life health care, cures for most serious STDs, the notion that neither women nor children are property, what would nowadays seem like a reasonable amount of individual physical and social mobility and independence, certain knowledge of paternity, a less inheritance-based economic system where certainty of paternity isn't as overwhelmingly important anyway, and whatever else I'm forgetting.
But those are the new normal. Or at least one may hope they'll stay normal. And they've definitely been more or less normal throughout the lifetimes of anybody who's in this forum.
Why don't they do things that are within their control.
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 think it's more the case that many parents are not tech savvy enough to even know that's possible or how to do it. Also, this create a safety net which seems too fragile, as you just need one family that doesn't do it to potentially expose all their friends.
It's no different to the phones for toddlers at school - they can, they know how, they are just even more affected by FOMO, peer pressure and judgement than children.
The other excuses are all just cope - little Timmy will just find a way around the blocks is true. Little Timmy can also get Heroin if he really wants or just one family might offer all the kids a hit on a crack pipe but it isn't an excuse to keep a needle, pipe and some fresh gear in the living room.
And as another commenter points out, this also requires parents to unionize and enforce blocks together. (”Block en bloc” if you will.) Otherwise Timmy just uses Johnny’s phone to watch XXX videos.
I’m not arguing for either side, just pointing out a reality of the situation.
Who are these six year olds with cell phone plans?
They’re going to use their parents’ devices, which are all age verified anyway.
More to the point: Age block technologies have been around since the mid 90’s and, for thirty years, parents have voted with their wallets and not installed them. In areas where they’re free, parents still don’t want them.
I too have wondered why there has not been huge pressure from parents to demand that cell phone hardware and the cell companies (and cable companies) - offer a portal they can log into and choose a 'bouncer / blocking system'
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.
> 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.
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.
But I think a big difference is that while the current parent generation grow up with free access to internet, our access was limited usually to the family computer.
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.
But I think a big difference is that while the current parent generation grow up with family computers, our access was limited usually to porn magazines.
For us magazines were a bit of a ritual—find one and got some privacy. Or you could risk getting caught at the library.
Now, the internet is ubiquitous and many kids have access to connected devices at their homes (computers, landline phones) and it's harder to overview their use.
Also, the amount of content and extreme content available has exploded.
---
I leave as an exercise for the reader to one-up this argument regarding the introduction of porn magazines themselves, porn drawings once paper became a commodity, as so on, dating all the way back to the first human sculpture (fat woman with giant boobs).
> 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.
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.
Hm .. there is porn and there is porn. Of course the professional casts are fake, but there is usually for example a amateur porn category, a bit closer to reality. So if you blame porn for you being promiscious ... I would say you had the choice what kind of porn you watch. And likely rather, what kind of friends you hang around with.
But from your own case, how do you protect your kids from other kids accessing hardcore porn at the age of 6? That would be a great argument in favour of blocking access unless age verification is provided so you reduce the chance of the "weakest link", otherwise as much as I can content block any device used by my kids the surface of having some other kid whose parent don't care/know how to block it would be enormous.
A completely absurd and clearly biased article trying to defend the impossible. Age verification is somehow supposed to be bad for online porn content providers (even though it is already mandatory for real-world porn content providers, for obvious reasons) because... it would hurt their profits and is not 100% effective. Child labour laws also severely hurt company profits and are not 100% effective; so much so that companies choose to delocalize production plants in the opposite part of the world, just to be able to continue exploiting workers. I guess child labour laws are bad too, and must be stopped.
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
If it were a serious problem, even very limited research wouldn't be "inconclusive". Actually important problems have big, obvious, indisputable effects. That's why they're important.
Why did you laugh out loud? It's clear that it doesn't have large impacts on children - otherwise no research would be needed to know this, in the same way we don't really need research to know that over-use of alcohol fuels violence. If there's a small effect then we do need research to show it and that's extremely difficult to do and as far as I know nobody has.
Same deal as violent video games. What's your view on those?
Could you please point us to credible sources about how online porn is supposed to be harmful to teenagers, beyond “If they knew I'm watching this, they'd laugh at me”?
I definitely don’t wanna take it with more than a grain of salt, but they raise good points I think. For example, the idea it’s only enforced on big players so people will just go to shadier sites sounds like an issue IF it’s true. So it sounds more like it would be like 10% effective at keeping kids off porn.
It's much easier to implement user-configurable client-side filters at the application and OS level than censor the entire Internet.
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.
I agree that client-side filters would be a great solution, but I see two issues there:
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.
1) It's up to the parents to decide whether they want to put in the effort to look up how to use the parental control settings for their own child.
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.
ID will be a new form of auth. ISO-18013-7 establishes the equivalent of OAuth for electronic ID presentation on the Internet. It's already accepted. Apple and Google announcing the ability to use your ID at TSA is ISO-18013-5 and it's a short hop to 18013-7 from there.
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.)
While I'll immediately believe their complaints about political shenanigans and publicity stunts going on in the EU commission, this post very obviously intentionally ignores good-faith efforts at building out privacy-preserving age verification using ZKP. They're laying into a strawman - with gusto - when they attack age verification methods that are objectively worse than the commission's best proposal.
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.
The laws are all being passed and ZKP is nothing more than a proof of concept. The laws are not being passed in good faith, and so I think it's a mistake to think that ZKP will ever be used. The only two systems I've heard of that have actually been deployed to comply with these laws are either face scanning or ID scanning. Neither one is acceptable, but the legislation is passing anyway.
They might be "good faith" in terms of the relationship between corpos and government, but they most certainly are not good faith in the relationship between corpos and individual software freedom. One can't simply sprinkle ZKP faerie dust and obtain any desired security properties. These systems simply cannot provide the claimed security properties without relying on treacherous computing that prevents individuals from running the software of their choosing on their own devices.
How about the scam of lawmaking disconnected from reality :(
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.
This age verification stuff is really poorly designed by law makers. That said, the article points out the number of free VPN services with ad blockers are a problem. Couldn’t they run their own free VPN services that enables access and keeps the ads?
No, because law-abiding companies can't offer tools to circumvent the law.
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.
Do you seriously believe that 90% of current porn consumers would rather watch their pornography on websites where it's intermingled with child pornography and revenge porn, than verify their age?
Are you seriously arguing that 90% of porn viewers are against digital age verification, even though about 60% of the population (in my home country) approve of the use for purchasing physical goods?
In your reading of the world, there can only ever exist a deregulated market, and democracy may as well pack its bags and make room for anarchy. I don't think that's a reasonable worldview.
> Do you seriously believe that 90% of current porn consumers would rather watch their pornography on websites where it's intermingled with child pornography and revenge porn, than verify their age?
Of course! We can go back and forth about the 90%, but the immediate data available 24 hours after the UK law passed was very clear.
> Daily visits to Pornhub, the UK’s most used porn site, fell from 3.6m on 24 July, the day before age-gating was introduced, to 1.9m on 8 August, a drop of 47%.
> At the next most popular sites, XVideos and xHamster, visits fell 47% and 39% over the same period, according to the data from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company.
> A spokesperson for Pornhub said: “As we’ve seen in many jurisdictions around the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliant sites and an increase in traffic for non-compliant sites.”
Yes. Sending your government issued id to random porn sites is asking for your identity to be stolen. Sites filter out any child porn because those are different serious laws. I can live with revenge porn because it's really amateur porn labelled another way. Like supporting eco friendly porn where you walk to the hotel instead of drive.
Regulating markets where someone unvested group of people decide the rules on what can sell /how it can be sold /who can buy or sell is always worse than not regulating it in the first place.
That's disrespectful to anyone who has been raped. Someone posting a private video of a consensual action is not rape in any way shape or form. That's a warped viewpoint that needs to be changed. I recommend you speak with a rape survivor.
> Yes. Sending your government issued id to random porn sites is asking for your identity to be stolen.
Ah, so you don't understand what's being proposed. Let me clear that up.
The implementation proposed by the EU does not involve your government issued id, but rather an openid style handoff to a trusted government entity, where you verify your identity with your government, followed by a handback along with a proof of your age bracket. The website asking for verification only ever gets to know if you're 16+ or 18+ (or whatever other classification we can make up).
> I can live with revenge porn because it's really amateur porn labelled another way
Fuck you. Get out of here with that shit. Disgusting.
A lot of disgusting legal porn exists. Revenge porn is just boring amateur porn that doesn't have consent attached. Both parties may or may not have knowledge of it and someone decides to share after the relationship ends. It's part of their relationship, its a real event that shows a moment of closeness and its an expression of real love. It doesn't interest me but to find you think its so disgusting sounds fake. People have real lives and real relationships that are raw and doesn't always show you in the light you want to present but if its honest and real its life. It's art in a different form.
> It doesn't interest me but to find you think its so disgusting sounds fake.
Hello! I think it's incredibly disgusting. Uploading intimate videos of your partner (past or present) is an absolute breach of that individual's privacy and trust. Additionally, it absolutely is NOT legal. I think it's quite alarming if someone doesn't find it disgusting.
I got the French version and was really confused, since it randomly mentioned autonomous vehicles on the page. Turns out, Age Verification = AV = Autonomous Vehicle.
That's why you do quality control on AI-generated content :^)
So the argument is that, even though age verification is required for this line of business in the real world, online it shouldn't be required because their ad-supported model won't be profitable?
Bars and Casinos argued the exact same thing when we mandated they check the IDs of a patron before serving them a drink. The world didn't stop spinning.
It's not really a good point. Yes it's more difficult, but that doesn't exempt them from complying. And they've made basically zero effort to comply.
You could argue quite convincingly that the explosion of adult content sites is due largely to evading regulation and reaching a wider (ie: illegal) audience.
What are you talking about though? I don’t care one way or another whether the porn company makes money, fuck em. The problem is if your law doesn’t prevent kids from watching porn but instead pushes them to shadier sites.
Google can probably infer what I had for breakfast from
the way I move the cursor. Can't we have ID-less age verification somehow? Sure, it won't be 100% accurate but keeping out 90% of the kids is a win.
They should just do something like have parental controls that can configure the user agent with the user’s age, and require adult websites to not serve underage users.
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
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.
Already possible! Banks know who you are, so what if there was a safe way to let a site know that you are over 18 — and nothing more than that — through some common API?
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.
> Age verification: If we incorrectly estimate a user to be under 18, the user has the option to correct their age, including by uploading a photo of their government ID or a selfie.
Hopefully false positives won't be set high and this abused as an excuse to obtain sensitive personal information on their users.
The thing about age verification ia that it is at its core identity verification. You need to make sure the person on the other side of the screen is indeed who they are.
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.
Age verification at the content end has always been a silly idea. Eyeball networks can, and do, implement such filtering already - for example, UK mobile networks block porn by default, but allow any adult account holder to connect to unfiltered service.
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.
It is not like kids/teenager who currently visit the big porn sites like pornhub will say: "Oh I can't, let's read a book instead"
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.
But it will be harder for them, the same way it's harder to get alcohol if you don't have a proper ID, and just that will prevent a good number of them of accessing it or at least accessing it in a regular way.
Well in the case of alcohol and tobacco it is a bit different, it is a physical good that can't be cloned infinitely and distributed through many medias. If you don't want your kids to have access to the internet at home and fap all afternoon it is quite easy. If you don't want them to look at smartphone from other kids, all bets are off.
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.
> it is a physical good that can't be cloned infinitely and distributed through many medias
And age verification can't stop that no matter what. It's solely for restricting access to websites and apps.
> No amount of server side age verification will prevent kids and teenagers from sharing stuff.
Great, now convince the politicians and the voting public of that. See how things are going. It would be better to have some system in place that protects adults' privacy and restricts some underage access. Instead of having to upload your passport to every website 5 years from now.
Why aren't there proposals for online age verification to be exactly like alcohol and tobacco?
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.
> Why aren't there proposals for online age verification to be exactly like alcohol and tobacco?
> 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
I don’t know if you’ve ever bought alcohol or tobacco, either in person or online, but the process in either case, in my experience, does not involve showing government ID at a private business separate from the one you are going to purchase the product from in advance to purchase a single-account, single-year token which you then use to prove age when you purchase the good in question.
I don't crack open the beer in front of the cashier either. That's even illegal in many jurisdictions. I go home and drink it in private, or sometimes with friends. They have literally no way to know if I give it to a minor. But that's considered good enough age verification for a substance that can be lethal if consumed to excess or before driving (which teenagers are allowed to do).
I haven't heard a good explanation for why my proposal is bad other than it's not perfect. Well teenagers sometimes get their hands on beer too and we haven't called for age verification lock technology on beer can tabs yet.
> I haven't heard a good explanation for why my proposal is bad other than it's not perfect.
It has the same flaw as the common age verification laws: it is unnecessarily intrusive; but I wasn’t, in the grandparent post, commenting on the merits, I was commenting on your description of the proposal as being both very different from what is currently being proposed and “just like buying alcohol or tobacco”, since it is nothing like buying alcohol and tobacco and shares the basic features which are different and more intrusive than buying alcohol and tobacco with the common online age verification legislative proposals.
The intent of the "I don't crack open a beer.." post was to draw a comparison between "show ID at physical store then later open and drink the beer at home" and "show ID at physical store then later submit the token and watch the porn at home".
>and shares the basic features which are different and more intrusive
How so?
Are you maybe assuming that some entity (the ID issuer? the physical store?) would track an association between the ID shown and the token purchased?
I suppose anything's possible, but that's not how the alcohol system works: when I show ID to purchase alcohol, the cashier looks at it and hands it back to me without recording anything. The same could work in this case, except the product changing hands is a scratch card carrying a number I type into a form on a website later.
(fwiw I don't particularly support age verification; I'm just thinking about how strong your criticisms of this proposal are.)
(OP described a single-site token with a 1 year lifetime, but I'm not sure what I think of the single-siteness. Seems like it means either every site prints its own cards, distinguishable from other site's cards, meaning the cashier can judge one's taste in adult entertainment (just like they can judge one's taste in alcohol I suppose) and when a site folds, its cards are landfill. Alternatively, there's a central authority printing the cards and tracking which have been consumed and for which site and when they expire. And that doesn't seem great either.)
> I suppose anything's possible, but that's not how the alcohol system works: when I show ID to purchase alcohol, the cashier looks at it and hands it back to me without recording anything
On the other hand, I bought Pseudoephedrine from a Publix at home when I was living in GA, left it by mistake, flew to Puerto Rico and was denied in a CVS because there is a nationwide database.
There's no reason for each site to roll their own card provider or for there to be a central authority. There could easily be 5 or 7 companies providing this product and sites could choose to accept any or all of them.
If you pay in cash, wear a mask, and buy your token scratch card a couple counties or states over it's as close to anonymous age verification as possible.
Admittedly it's still more intrusive than the status quo (what if the cashier has a photographic memory? what if the store's surveillance cams zoom in on your ID as you hand it over?). But several orders of magnitude less intrusive and scary than uploading your driver's license to random websites to read some forum posts.
Everyone seems to be going toward the latter age verification methods right now. Assuming there's no stopping this age verification train, we can try to limit the damage.
Love how the articles tiptoes around "Porn users don't want to be identified", yet later in the article they disclose that their current tracking method is able to uniquely identify users and their behaviour.
> "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."
Of course it won't. Maybe it will some of the current players. But I think they already have a lot of sites that use the same infra, just with different skins...
The state I live in already has age verification. Any site that is not based in the US - including the most popular one - just ignores it. The other sites can be accessed via a VPN.
Can anyone be kind enough to explain how this "age verification" works ?
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 ? :)
An adult content provider is legally bound to not distribute to minors. Its not even debatable.
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.
The purpose of these laws is not to protect children.
> "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."
Australia is about to introduce the dumpster fire of age verification for all social media, not just porn. Or at least the law says so, nobody appears to have the faintest idea of how this will be implemented or what "social media" even means.
Age verification is only one, of a growing list of fuckeries that does/can not work, at scale, without huge unknown fundamental changes to societal norms and practices. Thinking through to the end games of implimenting any of these new types of oversight leads to grim scenarios and outcomes for indivuals. Governments beurocracies are panting in antisipation of new powers and the many ways to exploit the nessesary (now) new contracts to be issued to new companies that will be "needed" to perform these (new) tasks that are outside of the governments expertise.
Not just tax, not just fuckery, but privitisation of taxation and fuckery in.a way that gives a private entity all kinds of rights, and burdens people with new responsibilties.
This pattern of seperating rights and responsibilities is the hallmark of the whole public private partnerships that results from the weaponisation of "saftey"
The other thing that is standard is to ensure that there are no performance targets or reviews ever allowed to be included in any of these "saftey" initiatives, along with a complete elimination of marking the baseline conditions, so that future reviews, are impossible.
The other two parallel things happening are moves to refuse cash/debit payments and push services including government, totaly online, for which there can be no legaly implimentable end game, that does not include providing free internet, devices, and training(in home), with all of the
updating and maintenance, as there is no end run around the things that are legaly public accessable in a democracy, like documents.
The biggest impact I have experienced so far has been that popups for cam sites, porn sites and other such affiliate marketting referal attempts lead to an age verification page rather than directly to all the "hot singles in my area looking for sex".
I don't like it, but for the most part the internet is now a better place for me to browse.
The article is a bit one-sided (yes, they have an agenda):
> 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.
Porn will never disappear the same way prostitution will never disappear. It exists even in countries were people can be faced with death sentences.
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.
Modern politicians only goal seems to be how to make peoples lives worse. I don't understand how this did happen. I think the people simply got too lazy and let them run loose instead of resisting like we used to.
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.
While I agree that there's something dystopian about government-mandated age verification on the web, it's amusing to say the least to see porn companies entering discourse on ethics, since the commodification of sexual services under capitalism is already a tough sell to people who are particularly interested in social justice.
The choice citizens have now is between an 'internet licence' (submit ID's to myriad sites), or an 'internet tax' (VPN).
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).
> 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).
Verification is the stick, AI is the carrot.
More than one answer is a bug - Eric Schmidt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4
an 'internet licence' (submit ID's to myriad sites), or an 'internet tax' (VPN).
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.
That is a tax
That is a tax
For many it would be. I started with FTP and then SFTP so it's muscle memory for me and it's a lot faster than using a browser when used optimally with LFTP+SFTP+mirror, much like rsync but works with chroot SFTP-only. Groups can fully automate sharing their own collections with one another, entirely hands off no pun intended.
> Given Australia doesn't even require Age Verification on porn sites (only on social media sites)
Am I only one who sees loophole in creating a social media site, which will be a porn site first? FaceHub or Pornbook.
FetLife? It exists, and is subject to the same laws and regulations. Any legal site will have to comply to a load of regulations, supplemented by the inscrutable rules laid down by Visa and Mastercard.
Not a loop hole. The Minister may declare anything to be a social media site. The law does not restrict what may be considered.
It's called X.
X is one of the prohibited sites for under 16's in Australia (falls under 'social media'), but someone should seriously tell Elon about this, because it may work and would be hilarious.
How am I going to find cisgender porn on there though
The 'internet tax' will not last, either, I fear.
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.
Proton includes a VPN in their office365 competitor Proton Business Suite. While big sites like Netflix don't want you to use VPN, I am sure porn sites are very happy to let you through once your VPN address is not longer in a jurisdiction that requires AV.
... but I don't care if my ISP or the VPN knows I'm watching porn. I just want to actually be able to watch it.
What about a VPS and ssh -D ?
As the other replies allude to, it worked at one stage.
This subjective and lovely history of the Great Firewall of the PRC was posted recently, about the to and fros in the methods of this kind of thing, and is really very good, if you're interested:
https://danglingpointer.fun/posts/GFWHistory
Easily blockable. The early days of getting around Netflix was just using a commercial VPN. Then they blocked all those.
Then we transitioned to a VPS and hosting our own VPN.. then they blocked all VPS IP ranges.
What came next was VPNs that were using other people's home connections (either willingly or otherwise)
Where is your VPN hosted? A lot of sites will block vps hosts.
> or an 'internet tax'
As always, the rich get to buy their way out of pretty much everything while the poor get the crap treatment.
> of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources
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?
In the extremes, both ideas are right. In terms of timeliness, relevance, quality, rigour, variety, discussion and debate the worst content on social media is orders of magnitude worse than the worst content on mainstream media.
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.
I don’t understand what “traditional media” means in this context. Before the internet, kids didn’t have access to porn. It just wasn’t there when I was growing up. I’m sure someone out there had 8mm or 16mm porn films, but I as a child had no clue where to find those, and the physical stores selling them were not accessible: I didn’t have transportation to them, and they checked ID at the door. I heard of Playboy through friends at school, but I had zero access to it myself. I don’t think that was unusual.
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.
The parent comment was talking about the other meaning of "media", the "news media". "Traditional media" then means newspapers, radio, and TV. As opposed to "new media" which is idiots yelling at each other on twitter or whatever.
> The internet licence will make it difficult for both authors and readers on alternative media platforms
Not really? Like the article says, they’ll just go to sites that don’t require age verification.
Hard to argue that isn't an inconvenience. In other words, the outcome is the same, but thanks to government intervention, everyone's worse off.
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.
Once again showing that the best way to make money in that market is to just break the law.
[dead]
I wish there was a honest discussion, I am with them about parents not giving a shit and pushing away responsibility. The idea of supervision in education institutions is good as well.
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.
But kids (and adults) are exposed to all kinds of fantasies. War is not like Call of Duty. The Mafia is not like GTA. Monarchy is not like in the fairy tales. Romance is not like Twilight. BDSM is not like 50 Shades of Grey.
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.
People can't tell the difference in any domain. People copy what they see. It's why James Bond stopped smoking in movies, and people smoke far less now.
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.
> Adults are just as vulnerable to copying poor behavior as minors.
Adults can be vulnerable, but I don't think just as vulnerable. Youngsters with no initial idea of how a given thing works have nothing with which to compare and contrast and potentially reject the first idea presented to them. Generally, the younger, the more impressionable.
> Remove stigma associated with sexuality. [...] Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.
I do agree with loosening the stigma. If there are parents that are giving their children unrestricted access to the internet, and those children may expose things to others that have better parental controls, then the straightforward solution is to have some form of earlier sex-ed. Doesn't need to cover everything, but enough to prepare them against the bad influences they'll apparently encounter. "Something steamy on Netflix" may be a positive counterexample to help them reject nonsense fantasies on porn sites.
>. It's why James Bond stopped smoking in movies, and people smoke far less now.
Lol what, what makes you think it was caused by James Bond, not countless other anti smoking initiatives?
It's a feedback loop - smoking was advertised as being cool way back when, which led to movie characters smoking to appear cool, which then reinforces the advertising.
When there was a push to regulate smoking in advertising, it cut the original feedback loop which made film/tv characters not use smoking as a sign of being cool. This led to advertising (if it were allowed) to be less effective at portrayal of coolness via smoking.
It's not a simple one-to-one cause and effect.
Vaping took off as a cool thing without a bunch of cool people vaping in movies.
People stopped smoking in movies at the same time a lot of other smoking related things changed. Similarly smokers likely notice people smoking in movies more than non smokers.
I remember a viral twitter photo of Sophie Turner smoking a Juul while filming the last episodes of Game of Thrones
Juul changed the cultural standing of vaping and (for a very brief moment of time) made it "cool" by means of social media celebrity promotion. They were hit with pretty aggressive punishment for this by the US FDA if I'm not mistaken.
Juul was founded in May 22, 2015 well after Vaping was in a fairly flat growth trajectory, and afterwards there wasn’t any kind of noticeable bump in adoption from such efforts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cigarette#/media/Fi...
All the exponential curve stuff happened early on the path from 0 to ~10 of million.
It was cool to smoke when all the cool guys in the movies were smoking. One of the reasons it’s not cool anymore is that the cool guys in the movies don’t smoke nowadays (although they do it more often now than they did ten years ago; which is worrying).
The correlation between an exposure and initiating smoking is proved: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27043456/
Correlation is not causation, vaping didn’t need movies.
Vaping needed social media
Fads long predate social media. Instead social media and vaping came into their own on similar timelines but adoption of vaping just never saw the kind of hockey stick curve you see from a major fad.
Instead it was relatively slow taking ~10 years to hit 25 million users and ~20 years to hit 85 million users keeping it niche vs the ~1,100 million smokers.
It’s not that people stopped but that they didn’t start. Smoking was no longer sold as cool so kids didn’t learn of it as a cool thing.
Kids and even adults pick up cues from games, movies, books. War is like CoD and heroic war movies (why do many 18 year olds go to the army expecting glory and come back with trauma and broken dreams?), sex is like in porn, and gangs are like in GTA. Until they gain practical experience and slowly realize some things are vastly different. Maybe a couple will love “porn sex”. Most others will break a leg having shower sex and reconsider the “teachings”.
Characters in movies stopped (or reduced a lot) smoking pretty much across the board.
It's different. One big part of the reason has already been said in sibling comments: taboo. Kids know that the huge jumps in martial arts movies are impossible because they jump when they play, they have seen their friends and classmates jump, they probably have tried flying kicks when playing so they get an idea of where the limits are. Nothing of this happens with sex, plus often they aren't exposed to anyone talking about it, except of course in porn.
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.
Taboo exactly; I will freely talk with colleagues and friends about e.g. GTA or action movies; watching movies and playing games is a communal and public thing.
But nobody talks about what they do in the bedroom; nobody goes to a movie theater to watch porn, people are awkward when there's sex scenes in films (and mainstream films have stopped having them altogether it seems), teenagers run away if their parents ever broach the subject, etcetera.
We shouldn’t be giving 6 year olds access to call of duty or GTA either. PEGI ratings (although overzealous) are a god starting point. I wouldn’t withhold an average 10 year old from a 12 rated game, but I wouldn’t give them access to an 18+.
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
> PEGI ratings (although overzealous) are a god starting point.
PEGI says FIFA Ultimate Team: Parental Wallet Draining is PEGI 3. Maybe PEGI should clean its house before we defer 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.
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.
What is really missing is good sex education in schools, especially public schools - and in particular in the United States. The state of sex education in America actually deserves the work deplorable, it's so bad.
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.
> 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.
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.
> In my 20s I was promiscious and lived what I saw in pornography, only later in life I learned about normal sex.
News flash. That is normal in your 20s and always has been.
Only for the last few decades, this has almost always been a taboo across all of humanity, this high level promiscuity you speak of. Hardly a normative experience across space and time.
It only really became taboo due to religion and the associated oppression of women.
Humans, for the vast majority of the time they existed, were largely free range. Lots and lots of sex. I assure you, hunter gatherers were not monogamous suburbanites who attended their white Christian church.
Well, OK, that's true. I was wrong with "always".
It's only been the norm since we've had effective birth control, decent pregnancy and early-life health care, cures for most serious STDs, the notion that neither women nor children are property, what would nowadays seem like a reasonable amount of individual physical and social mobility and independence, certain knowledge of paternity, a less inheritance-based economic system where certainty of paternity isn't as overwhelmingly important anyway, and whatever else I'm forgetting.
But those are the new normal. Or at least one may hope they'll stay normal. And they've definitely been more or less normal throughout the lifetimes of anybody who's in this forum.
Why don't they do things that are within their control.
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.
Parents dont want to be the "bad guy" or parents in any real sense.
I think it's more the case that many parents are not tech savvy enough to even know that's possible or how to do it. Also, this create a safety net which seems too fragile, as you just need one family that doesn't do it to potentially expose all their friends.
It's no different to the phones for toddlers at school - they can, they know how, they are just even more affected by FOMO, peer pressure and judgement than children.
The other excuses are all just cope - little Timmy will just find a way around the blocks is true. Little Timmy can also get Heroin if he really wants or just one family might offer all the kids a hit on a crack pipe but it isn't an excuse to keep a needle, pipe and some fresh gear in the living room.
The rules can be whatever they want them to be.
Block adult sites by default (much like a lot of phone companies already do) and the account owner can go in a make changes.
You only need one kid with a fake id that works, or for them to discover AI that can fake faces on a webcam to potentially expose all their friends...
Lazyness is a terrible excuse
And as another commenter points out, this also requires parents to unionize and enforce blocks together. (”Block en bloc” if you will.) Otherwise Timmy just uses Johnny’s phone to watch XXX videos.
I’m not arguing for either side, just pointing out a reality of the situation.
Who are these six year olds with cell phone plans?
They’re going to use their parents’ devices, which are all age verified anyway.
More to the point: Age block technologies have been around since the mid 90’s and, for thirty years, parents have voted with their wallets and not installed them. In areas where they’re free, parents still don’t want them.
I too have wondered why there has not been huge pressure from parents to demand that cell phone hardware and the cell companies (and cable companies) - offer a portal they can log into and choose a 'bouncer / blocking system'
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.
> 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.
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.
But I think a big difference is that while the current parent generation grow up with free access to internet, our access was limited usually to the family computer.
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.
But I think a big difference is that while the current parent generation grow up with family computers, our access was limited usually to porn magazines. For us magazines were a bit of a ritual—find one and got some privacy. Or you could risk getting caught at the library.
Now, the internet is ubiquitous and many kids have access to connected devices at their homes (computers, landline phones) and it's harder to overview their use.
Also, the amount of content and extreme content available has exploded.
---
I leave as an exercise for the reader to one-up this argument regarding the introduction of porn magazines themselves, porn drawings once paper became a commodity, as so on, dating all the way back to the first human sculpture (fat woman with giant boobs).
I totally agree on the easiness of accessing content
> 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.
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.
Hm .. there is porn and there is porn. Of course the professional casts are fake, but there is usually for example a amateur porn category, a bit closer to reality. So if you blame porn for you being promiscious ... I would say you had the choice what kind of porn you watch. And likely rather, what kind of friends you hang around with.
But from your own case, how do you protect your kids from other kids accessing hardcore porn at the age of 6? That would be a great argument in favour of blocking access unless age verification is provided so you reduce the chance of the "weakest link", otherwise as much as I can content block any device used by my kids the surface of having some other kid whose parent don't care/know how to block it would be enormous.
A completely absurd and clearly biased article trying to defend the impossible. Age verification is somehow supposed to be bad for online porn content providers (even though it is already mandatory for real-world porn content providers, for obvious reasons) because... it would hurt their profits and is not 100% effective. Child labour laws also severely hurt company profits and are not 100% effective; so much so that companies choose to delocalize production plants in the opposite part of the world, just to be able to continue exploiting workers. I guess child labour laws are bad too, and must be stopped.
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
If it were a serious problem, even very limited research wouldn't be "inconclusive". Actually important problems have big, obvious, indisputable effects. That's why they're important.
Why did you laugh out loud? It's clear that it doesn't have large impacts on children - otherwise no research would be needed to know this, in the same way we don't really need research to know that over-use of alcohol fuels violence. If there's a small effect then we do need research to show it and that's extremely difficult to do and as far as I know nobody has.
Same deal as violent video games. What's your view on those?
Could you please point us to credible sources about how online porn is supposed to be harmful to teenagers, beyond “If they knew I'm watching this, they'd laugh at me”?
As for the bad article, it's AI-generated slop.
You're misreading freestingo. They didn't claim it was harmful; the article did.
I definitely don’t wanna take it with more than a grain of salt, but they raise good points I think. For example, the idea it’s only enforced on big players so people will just go to shadier sites sounds like an issue IF it’s true. So it sounds more like it would be like 10% effective at keeping kids off porn.
It's much easier to implement user-configurable client-side filters at the application and OS level than censor the entire Internet.
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.
I agree that client-side filters would be a great solution, but I see two issues there:
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.
1) It's up to the parents to decide whether they want to put in the effort to look up how to use the parental control settings for their own child.
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.
ID will be a new form of auth. ISO-18013-7 establishes the equivalent of OAuth for electronic ID presentation on the Internet. It's already accepted. Apple and Google announcing the ability to use your ID at TSA is ISO-18013-5 and it's a short hop to 18013-7 from there.
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.)
While I'll immediately believe their complaints about political shenanigans and publicity stunts going on in the EU commission, this post very obviously intentionally ignores good-faith efforts at building out privacy-preserving age verification using ZKP. They're laying into a strawman - with gusto - when they attack age verification methods that are objectively worse than the commission's best proposal.
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.
The laws are all being passed and ZKP is nothing more than a proof of concept. The laws are not being passed in good faith, and so I think it's a mistake to think that ZKP will ever be used. The only two systems I've heard of that have actually been deployed to comply with these laws are either face scanning or ID scanning. Neither one is acceptable, but the legislation is passing anyway.
Privacy-preserving good-faith efforts requiring a Google/Apple account and a phone passing Play Integrity (or an iPhone)
They might be "good faith" in terms of the relationship between corpos and government, but they most certainly are not good faith in the relationship between corpos and individual software freedom. One can't simply sprinkle ZKP faerie dust and obtain any desired security properties. These systems simply cannot provide the claimed security properties without relying on treacherous computing that prevents individuals from running the software of their choosing on their own devices.
Can you provide more context on this?
I found out about this for zero knowledge profs that are able to be separated from the issued document.
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
How about the scam of lawmaking disconnected from reality :(
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.
This age verification stuff is really poorly designed by law makers. That said, the article points out the number of free VPN services with ad blockers are a problem. Couldn’t they run their own free VPN services that enables access and keeps the ads?
Seems like porn VPN would be popular.
No, because law-abiding companies can't offer tools to circumvent the law.
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.
> law-abiding porn sites will go bankrupt
How would that work? Can PornHub not exist without the "lucrative" market of children watching porn?
More like, they can't exist without the lucrative market of the 90% of current customers who will refuse age verification and go elsewhere.
Do you seriously believe that 90% of current porn consumers would rather watch their pornography on websites where it's intermingled with child pornography and revenge porn, than verify their age?
Are you seriously arguing that 90% of porn viewers are against digital age verification, even though about 60% of the population (in my home country) approve of the use for purchasing physical goods?
In your reading of the world, there can only ever exist a deregulated market, and democracy may as well pack its bags and make room for anarchy. I don't think that's a reasonable worldview.
> Do you seriously believe that 90% of current porn consumers would rather watch their pornography on websites where it's intermingled with child pornography and revenge porn, than verify their age?
Of course! We can go back and forth about the 90%, but the immediate data available 24 hours after the UK law passed was very clear.
> Daily visits to Pornhub, the UK’s most used porn site, fell from 3.6m on 24 July, the day before age-gating was introduced, to 1.9m on 8 August, a drop of 47%.
> At the next most popular sites, XVideos and xHamster, visits fell 47% and 39% over the same period, according to the data from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company.
> A spokesperson for Pornhub said: “As we’ve seen in many jurisdictions around the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliant sites and an increase in traffic for non-compliant sites.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/aug/13/porn-site-tr...
Yes. Sending your government issued id to random porn sites is asking for your identity to be stolen. Sites filter out any child porn because those are different serious laws. I can live with revenge porn because it's really amateur porn labelled another way. Like supporting eco friendly porn where you walk to the hotel instead of drive.
Regulating markets where someone unvested group of people decide the rules on what can sell /how it can be sold /who can buy or sell is always worse than not regulating it in the first place.
> I can live with revenge porn because it's really amateur porn labelled another way.
"revenge porn", by definition is non-consensual. You might as well have said "I can live with rape because it's just love labeled another way".
That's disrespectful to anyone who has been raped. Someone posting a private video of a consensual action is not rape in any way shape or form. That's a warped viewpoint that needs to be changed. I recommend you speak with a rape survivor.
You are a disgusting person and no amount of pseudo intellectualism is going to change that.
You are fake.
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> Yes. Sending your government issued id to random porn sites is asking for your identity to be stolen.
Ah, so you don't understand what's being proposed. Let me clear that up.
The implementation proposed by the EU does not involve your government issued id, but rather an openid style handoff to a trusted government entity, where you verify your identity with your government, followed by a handback along with a proof of your age bracket. The website asking for verification only ever gets to know if you're 16+ or 18+ (or whatever other classification we can make up).
> I can live with revenge porn because it's really amateur porn labelled another way
Fuck you. Get out of here with that shit. Disgusting.
And then the government knows what sites I visit. There is no such thing as a trusted government entity.
A lot of disgusting legal porn exists. Revenge porn is just boring amateur porn that doesn't have consent attached. Both parties may or may not have knowledge of it and someone decides to share after the relationship ends. It's part of their relationship, its a real event that shows a moment of closeness and its an expression of real love. It doesn't interest me but to find you think its so disgusting sounds fake. People have real lives and real relationships that are raw and doesn't always show you in the light you want to present but if its honest and real its life. It's art in a different form.
> It doesn't interest me but to find you think its so disgusting sounds fake.
Hello! I think it's incredibly disgusting. Uploading intimate videos of your partner (past or present) is an absolute breach of that individual's privacy and trust. Additionally, it absolutely is NOT legal. I think it's quite alarming if someone doesn't find it disgusting.
I guess you are not a fan of Taylor Swift. All of her albums have been revenue porn.
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So radar detectors for cars don't exist?
They're not sold by car companies, and they're illegal in many countries.
I got the French version and was really confused, since it randomly mentioned autonomous vehicles on the page. Turns out, Age Verification = AV = Autonomous Vehicle.
That's why you do quality control on AI-generated content :^)
So the argument is that, even though age verification is required for this line of business in the real world, online it shouldn't be required because their ad-supported model won't be profitable?
They argue it won’t work and will hurt people more than it helps.
Bars and Casinos argued the exact same thing when we mandated they check the IDs of a patron before serving them a drink. The world didn't stop spinning.
But the law applied to almost all bars because it’s more enforceable. I don’t mean to white knight for the porn company but I think it’s a good point.
It's not really a good point. Yes it's more difficult, but that doesn't exempt them from complying. And they've made basically zero effort to comply.
You could argue quite convincingly that the explosion of adult content sites is due largely to evading regulation and reaching a wider (ie: illegal) audience.
They were never intended to comply. They were intended to pull their offering.
What are you talking about though? I don’t care one way or another whether the porn company makes money, fuck em. The problem is if your law doesn’t prevent kids from watching porn but instead pushes them to shadier sites.
You don't need a license to write santa why should you on facebook?
Or because of privacy?
"This line of business" no longer exists in the "real world".
Most important part:
> Device-level parental controls have existed for years, and can actually block a million sites. But politicians can’t take credit for them.
Google can probably infer what I had for breakfast from the way I move the cursor. Can't we have ID-less age verification somehow? Sure, it won't be 100% accurate but keeping out 90% of the kids is a win.
They should just do something like have parental controls that can configure the user agent with the user’s age, and require adult websites to not serve underage users.
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
We do.
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.
Already possible! Banks know who you are, so what if there was a safe way to let a site know that you are over 18 — and nothing more than that — through some common API?
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.
No, let's not encourage Google and the rest of the ad industry
Google launched ID-less age approximation in July in the US:
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/age-assurance...
> Age verification: If we incorrectly estimate a user to be under 18, the user has the option to correct their age, including by uploading a photo of their government ID or a selfie.
Hopefully false positives won't be set high and this abused as an excuse to obtain sensitive personal information on their users.
And kids rapidly realized that watching a few videos on taxes would bump them into the adult category.
Amazing, that's exactly what I had in mind.
> usually, us and Pornhub
Who's "us"? This blog doesn't seem to have an About Us.
Did not know neither and reseatched. Us = xvideos.com the 2nd largest porn site.
An AI slop generator isn't strictly part of any "Us".
The thing about age verification ia that it is at its core identity verification. You need to make sure the person on the other side of the screen is indeed who they are.
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.
Shouldn't parents decide what's good for their kids instead of having their government do that?
Age verification at the content end has always been a silly idea. Eyeball networks can, and do, implement such filtering already - for example, UK mobile networks block porn by default, but allow any adult account holder to connect to unfiltered service.
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.
It is not like kids/teenager who currently visit the big porn sites like pornhub will say: "Oh I can't, let's read a book instead"
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.
But it will be harder for them, the same way it's harder to get alcohol if you don't have a proper ID, and just that will prevent a good number of them of accessing it or at least accessing it in a regular way.
Well in the case of alcohol and tobacco it is a bit different, it is a physical good that can't be cloned infinitely and distributed through many medias. If you don't want your kids to have access to the internet at home and fap all afternoon it is quite easy. If you don't want them to look at smartphone from other kids, all bets are off.
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.
> it is a physical good that can't be cloned infinitely and distributed through many medias
And age verification can't stop that no matter what. It's solely for restricting access to websites and apps.
> No amount of server side age verification will prevent kids and teenagers from sharing stuff.
Great, now convince the politicians and the voting public of that. See how things are going. It would be better to have some system in place that protects adults' privacy and restricts some underage access. Instead of having to upload your passport to every website 5 years from now.
Why aren't there proposals for online age verification to be exactly like alcohol and tobacco?
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.
> Why aren't there proposals for online age verification to be exactly like alcohol and tobacco?
> 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
I don’t know if you’ve ever bought alcohol or tobacco, either in person or online, but the process in either case, in my experience, does not involve showing government ID at a private business separate from the one you are going to purchase the product from in advance to purchase a single-account, single-year token which you then use to prove age when you purchase the good in question.
I don't crack open the beer in front of the cashier either. That's even illegal in many jurisdictions. I go home and drink it in private, or sometimes with friends. They have literally no way to know if I give it to a minor. But that's considered good enough age verification for a substance that can be lethal if consumed to excess or before driving (which teenagers are allowed to do).
I haven't heard a good explanation for why my proposal is bad other than it's not perfect. Well teenagers sometimes get their hands on beer too and we haven't called for age verification lock technology on beer can tabs yet.
> I haven't heard a good explanation for why my proposal is bad other than it's not perfect.
It has the same flaw as the common age verification laws: it is unnecessarily intrusive; but I wasn’t, in the grandparent post, commenting on the merits, I was commenting on your description of the proposal as being both very different from what is currently being proposed and “just like buying alcohol or tobacco”, since it is nothing like buying alcohol and tobacco and shares the basic features which are different and more intrusive than buying alcohol and tobacco with the common online age verification legislative proposals.
>it is nothing like buying alcohol and tobacco
The intent of the "I don't crack open a beer.." post was to draw a comparison between "show ID at physical store then later open and drink the beer at home" and "show ID at physical store then later submit the token and watch the porn at home".
>and shares the basic features which are different and more intrusive
How so?
Are you maybe assuming that some entity (the ID issuer? the physical store?) would track an association between the ID shown and the token purchased?
I suppose anything's possible, but that's not how the alcohol system works: when I show ID to purchase alcohol, the cashier looks at it and hands it back to me without recording anything. The same could work in this case, except the product changing hands is a scratch card carrying a number I type into a form on a website later.
(fwiw I don't particularly support age verification; I'm just thinking about how strong your criticisms of this proposal are.)
(OP described a single-site token with a 1 year lifetime, but I'm not sure what I think of the single-siteness. Seems like it means either every site prints its own cards, distinguishable from other site's cards, meaning the cashier can judge one's taste in adult entertainment (just like they can judge one's taste in alcohol I suppose) and when a site folds, its cards are landfill. Alternatively, there's a central authority printing the cards and tracking which have been consumed and for which site and when they expire. And that doesn't seem great either.)
> I suppose anything's possible, but that's not how the alcohol system works: when I show ID to purchase alcohol, the cashier looks at it and hands it back to me without recording anything
On the other hand, I bought Pseudoephedrine from a Publix at home when I was living in GA, left it by mistake, flew to Puerto Rico and was denied in a CVS because there is a nationwide database.
There's no reason for each site to roll their own card provider or for there to be a central authority. There could easily be 5 or 7 companies providing this product and sites could choose to accept any or all of them.
If you pay in cash, wear a mask, and buy your token scratch card a couple counties or states over it's as close to anonymous age verification as possible.
Admittedly it's still more intrusive than the status quo (what if the cashier has a photographic memory? what if the store's surveillance cams zoom in on your ID as you hand it over?). But several orders of magnitude less intrusive and scary than uploading your driver's license to random websites to read some forum posts.
Everyone seems to be going toward the latter age verification methods right now. Assuming there's no stopping this age verification train, we can try to limit the damage.
It will be harder for them the same way that when mcdonald’s is closed, you go 40ft to a taco bell. Barely an inconvenience.
Love how the articles tiptoes around "Porn users don't want to be identified", yet later in the article they disclose that their current tracking method is able to uniquely identify users and their behaviour.
Age verification will make porn websites go out of business. And this is likely what the legislators truly wanted.
Porn is partially protected by the constitution and it is politically impopular to tell people what they can't do.
Vought confirmed as much.
> "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...
Of course it won't. Maybe it will some of the current players. But I think they already have a lot of sites that use the same infra, just with different skins...
The state I live in already has age verification. Any site that is not based in the US - including the most popular one - just ignores it. The other sites can be accessed via a VPN.
Can anyone be kind enough to explain how this "age verification" works ?
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 ? :)
An adult content provider is legally bound to not distribute to minors. Its not even debatable.
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.
The purpose of these laws is not to protect children.
> "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."
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Australia is about to introduce the dumpster fire of age verification for all social media, not just porn. Or at least the law says so, nobody appears to have the faintest idea of how this will be implemented or what "social media" even means.
Age verification is only one, of a growing list of fuckeries that does/can not work, at scale, without huge unknown fundamental changes to societal norms and practices. Thinking through to the end games of implimenting any of these new types of oversight leads to grim scenarios and outcomes for indivuals. Governments beurocracies are panting in antisipation of new powers and the many ways to exploit the nessesary (now) new contracts to be issued to new companies that will be "needed" to perform these (new) tasks that are outside of the governments expertise. Not just tax, not just fuckery, but privitisation of taxation and fuckery in.a way that gives a private entity all kinds of rights, and burdens people with new responsibilties. This pattern of seperating rights and responsibilities is the hallmark of the whole public private partnerships that results from the weaponisation of "saftey" The other thing that is standard is to ensure that there are no performance targets or reviews ever allowed to be included in any of these "saftey" initiatives, along with a complete elimination of marking the baseline conditions, so that future reviews, are impossible. The other two parallel things happening are moves to refuse cash/debit payments and push services including government, totaly online, for which there can be no legaly implimentable end game, that does not include providing free internet, devices, and training(in home), with all of the updating and maintenance, as there is no end run around the things that are legaly public accessable in a democracy, like documents.
The biggest impact I have experienced so far has been that popups for cam sites, porn sites and other such affiliate marketting referal attempts lead to an age verification page rather than directly to all the "hot singles in my area looking for sex".
I don't like it, but for the most part the internet is now a better place for me to browse.
Do you not use an adblocker? I can't remember the last time I saw that kind of ad..
DNS level and in browser ad blocking. Still not enough to overcome some of the more agressive parts of the internet.
The article is a bit one-sided (yes, they have an agenda):
> 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.
Some people
Porn will never disappear the same way prostitution will never disappear. It exists even in countries were people can be faced with death sentences.
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.
Modern politicians only goal seems to be how to make peoples lives worse. I don't understand how this did happen. I think the people simply got too lazy and let them run loose instead of resisting like we used to.
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.
Lately there has been a larger power difference between governing and governed, and it shows itself in these kinds of moves.
Just one more step to tell people: you watch porn, you should go and have coitus with someone in real life. You want someone assigned to you?
welcome to the Age of Scam Verification
the internet is no longer anonymous
While I agree that there's something dystopian about government-mandated age verification on the web, it's amusing to say the least to see porn companies entering discourse on ethics, since the commodification of sexual services under capitalism is already a tough sell to people who are particularly interested in social justice.
Yeah they’re shit too.
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