[RpFLCL]

I heard from a friend last night that they were unable to see posts on X about current protests in their country because those were considered "adult" content which can now only be viewed after submitting to an ID check. Not porn, video of a protest.

You're 100% right that it's happening today.

[btown]

It’s really important to remember in this context that “the purpose of a system is what it does.”

Do not think for a moment that ID verification primarily protects children and only incidentally enables authoritarian restrictions on speech. Do not think for a second that verification initiatives are designed without anticipating this outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

[praestigiare]

The phrase does not mean that you can pick any single effect of a system and claim that is its purpose, as your linked article does in its examples. (Ironically, a form of reducto as absurdum.) It is a heuristic, a pattern of thought to attempt to overcome the bias towards judging systems based on the intentions behind them instead of the outcomes they produce. The point is that when you choose a course of action, you are implicitly choosing its negative effects as well, and the choice should be judged on all its effects. You are making a cost / benefit analysis, and if that is not explicit, it can easily be wrong.

[socalgal2]

That's a typical "reductio absurdum"

The purpose of a system is not what it does.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

[simmerup]

So the purpose of a hospital is to kill people?

[throwaway290]

> "the purpose of a system is what it does"

So then the purpose of the internet was to share cat pics? This quote is so wrong in every way.

> Do not think for a moment

I will decide what I think thank you. It's very ironic when arguments against "censorship" go this way.

[stinkbeetle]

Sadly the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries - if their team decided that the content is "problematic", then they are entirely justified in censoring and punishing the speakers for daring to speak it, and entirely justified in protecting everybody else from having to suffer the horror of reading/seeing/hearing it, and it matters not whether the mechanisms are legal or ethical because the ends justify the means.

[fsckboy]

>the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries

which is an unnecessary ideological divide if your concern is free speech and privacy; too bad the old guard of activists chose sides and alienated additional support for their cause.

[GuB-42]

> Not porn, video of a protest

Not commenting on ID checks but depending on the protest, some images can be violent and definitely "adult".

I never understood why we go out of our way to "protect" children against seeing naked people, but real people in a pool of blood, nah, no problem. I think that people bloodily fighting each other for causes that I have a hard time understanding even as an adult may not be what we want children to be exposed to without control. Images of violence create a visceral reaction and I don't think it is how we should approach political problems, in the same way that porn may not be the best approach to sex, the same argument for why we don't let children access porn applies to political violence too.

The point I wanted to make is that whatever your opinion is on ID checks to access to adult content, "adult" doesn't and shouldn't just mean "porn".

[RpFLCL]

Well that's kind of exactly my point, really.

Ostensibly these laws are to protect kids from porn, but that isn't really the case. They instantly expand to everything else "adult", and it's very easy to argue that talking about politics, or discussing evidence of war crimes or genocide, or apparently showing a real and current protest, are "adult" conversations.

And with laws like this, people, adults, everyone, lose the ability to participate in those conversations without doxxing themselves. Some of these things are difficult to discuss when you fear retribution.

It's not about the porn. It was never actually about the porn. The porn is just the difficult-to-defend-without-looking-like-a-pervert smokescreen. It's designed to curtail the free flow of information and expression in far more areas. The people behind these laws are liars.