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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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 ? :)
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.
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."
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.
nomilk|5 months ago
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).
verisimi|5 months ago
Verification is the stick, AI is the carrot.
More than one answer is a bug - Eric Schmidt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4
Bender|5 months ago
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.
general1465|5 months ago
Am I only one who sees loophole in creating a social media site, which will be a porn site first? FaceHub or Pornbook.
lordhumphrey|5 months ago
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.
classified|5 months ago
As always, the rich get to buy their way out of pretty much everything while the poor get the crap treatment.
delusional|5 months ago
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?
Aeolun|5 months ago
Not really? Like the article says, they’ll just go to sites that don’t require age verification.
aaron695|5 months ago
[deleted]
ckbkr10|5 months ago
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.
jakobnissen|5 months ago
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.
Aeolun|5 months ago
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.
Retric|5 months ago
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.
_mu|5 months ago
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.
Hizonner|5 months ago
News flash. That is normal in your 20s and always has been.
happymellon|5 months ago
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.
anal_reactor|5 months ago
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.
michaelt|5 months ago
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.
lukan|5 months ago
edu|5 months ago
freestingo|5 months ago
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
Hizonner|5 months ago
IshKebab|5 months ago
Same deal as violent video games. What's your view on those?
classified|5 months ago
As for the bad article, it's AI-generated slop.
BriggyDwiggs42|5 months ago
txrx0000|5 months ago
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.
edu|5 months ago
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.
crowbahr|5 months ago
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.)
chmod775|5 months ago
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.
rpdillon|5 months ago
g-b-r|5 months ago
LelouBil|5 months ago
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
nine_k|5 months ago
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.
UrMomsRobotLovr|5 months ago
Seems like porn VPN would be popular.
decimalenough|5 months ago
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.
cpa|5 months ago
That's why you do quality control on AI-generated content :^)
unknown|5 months ago
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freddie_mercury|5 months ago
BriggyDwiggs42|5 months ago
ipaddr|5 months ago
g-b-r|5 months ago
Hizonner|5 months ago
precommunicator|5 months ago
> Device-level parental controls have existed for years, and can actually block a million sites. But politicians can’t take credit for them.
ngruhn|5 months ago
kcrwfrd_|5 months ago
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
octo888|5 months ago
Freak_NL|5 months ago
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.
danaris|5 months ago
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.
modernerd|5 months ago
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/age-assurance...
jolmg|5 months ago
Who's "us"? This blog doesn't seem to have an About Us.
jeanloolz|5 months ago
classified|5 months ago
prmoustache|5 months ago
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.
edu|5 months ago
lambdaone|5 months ago
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.
natas|5 months ago
littlecranky67|5 months ago
atoav|5 months ago
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.
29athrowaway|5 months ago
Porn is partially protected by the constitution and it is politically impopular to tell people what they can't do.
rpdillon|5 months ago
> "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...
lofaszvanitt|5 months ago
scarface_74|5 months ago
JackSlateur|5 months ago
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 ? :)
decimalenough|5 months ago
amradio1989|5 months ago
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.
rpdillon|5 months ago
> "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."
jheriko|5 months ago
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metalman|5 months ago
blitzar|5 months ago
I don't like it, but for the most part the internet is now a better place for me to browse.
johtso|5 months ago
littlecranky67|5 months ago
> 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.
g-b-r|5 months ago
prmoustache|5 months ago
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.
staticelf|5 months ago
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.
arcane23|5 months ago
lofaszvanitt|5 months ago
high_byte|5 months ago
the internet is no longer anonymous
pcthrowaway|5 months ago
BriggyDwiggs42|5 months ago
jheriko|5 months ago
[deleted]
cande|5 months ago
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