Comment by lemoncookiechip
7 days ago
I've posted this before: We shouldn't need Age Verification checks for adults in the first place.
Create a better, standardized, open-source parental control tool that is installed by default on all types of device that can connect to the web.
The internet aspect of the parental control should be a "Per Whitelist" system rather than Blacklisting. The parents should be the ones to decide which domains are Whitelisted for their kids, and government bodies could contribute with curated lists to help establish a base.
Yes, there would be some gray area sites like search engine image search, or social media sites like Twitter that can allow you to stumble into pornography, and that is why these devices that have the software turned ON, should send a token through the browser saying "Parental Control". It would be easier for websites to implement a blanket block of certain aspects of their site than expect them to implement whole ID checks systems and security to make sure that no leaks occur (look at the TEA app) like the UK is expecting everyone to do.
Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography. I was once a teenager, every adult was, and we know that it's a natural thing to masturbate which includes the consumption of pornography for most in some way. Repressing their desires, their sexuality, and making this private aspect of their life difficult isn't the way. Yes, yes, there is nuance to it, (very hardcore/addiction/etc) but it should be up to the parents to decide with given tools if they trust their kid to consume such a thing.
As for the tool itself. Of course we have parental tools, but they can be pretty garbage, their all different, they're out of the way, and I understand that many people simply don't know how to operate them. That's why I believe that creating a standardized open-source project that multiple governments can directly contribute to and advertise for parents is the way, because at the end of the day, it should be up to the parents to decide these things, and for the government to facility that choice.
Obviously, besides the internet aspect, the tool should have all the bells and whistles that you'd expect from one, but that's not the topic.
And yes, some children would find a way, just like they're doing now for the currently implemented ID checks. It's not lost of me that VPNs with free plans suddenly exploded in 4 digits % worth of downloads. A lot of those are tiny people who are smart enough. Or using an app like a game to trick Facial Recognition software.
Also, I'd be remiss to not point out a very obvious fact. This, and I'm not just referring to the UK, isn't about children, it's not about terrorism, it's not about public safety. It's about control, it's about tracking, it's about documenting, it's about power over the masses. I know some people will hand wave this away, but we have been seeing a very obvious, very fast, rise of authoritarianism since COVID and later the war in Ukraine. It's not a new trend, but it is one that got accelerated at those stages and has been progressively getting worse world wide.
> Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography.
I'm against: pornography, as found in search results, is generally quite bad. Sexism, racial stereotyping, misrepresentations of queer issues: and that's just the titles. Page 3 has nothing on porn sites.
Maybe I'm judging a book by its SEO spammers here, but I've not read anything that'd disabuse me of this notion: indeed, people raise concerns about unreasonable body image expectations, normalising extreme sex acts like choking without normalising enthusiastic consent practices, the sites allowing CSAM and "revenge porn" that they've already taken down to be re-uploaded…
That said, I routinely come across nudes / sexualised imagery on the Fediverse, and that's… not an issue? Sometimes I find it a bit squicky (which teaches me not to play lift-the-flap with clearly-marked content warnings – I don't know what I expected), but the only times I've seen something viscerally offensive has been people re-posting from porn aggregation sites. (I've blocked three or four accounts for that, and I don't see it any more.)
If porn sites had the kind of stuff that queer / disabled techies post on main on niche social media sites, then I'd be absolutely fine with teenagers accessing porn. As you say, a safe environment for adolescents to explore their sexuality is unequivocably a good thing. I just don't think commercial porn sites provide that.
This is what concerns me the most about the Online Safety Act. It's shutting down the aforementioned queer / disabled techies on their social media sites, and surely plenty of other pro-social sex communities I don't even know about, but it's not going to do a thing about the large aggregators that are the real problem. It in fact makes the whole problem worse.
There is certainly good and bad porn - in terms of quality, messaging, and ethics of production. The most successful and widespread porn falls on the bad side of all of these - partly because the industry is just historically broken, partly because good porn is more expensive to produce, but subject to all the same restrictions and costs as bad porn.
Your post reads like a parody of itself. If you're being genuine, I encourage you to step out of your attachment to your own views and meditate on what you said here, and what it looks like to an outside observer who does not share your views.
Perhaps you should try doing the same, instead of treating it as a parody why not step out of your attachment to your own voews and try to engage with it as a genuine statement?
There's never really a time I'm not attempting that, but sure.
I don't think children should have access to porn, because they should have access to decent sex education, and (most?) porn is extremely misrepresentative of reality. According to https://xkcd.com/598/, exposure to porn can affect people's sexual fetishes. I think it is bad for people to develop an interest in violent, dangerous, or asymmetrically-pleasurable sexual activities before they have have had a chance to… uh, however it is people would otherwise figure out what they're into.
It is better for people to learn about BDSM from actual practitioners (including the background context, such as… uh, safe words? and whatever a "scene" is) than from fictional characters. If the average person (or, heck, the average 16-year-old) attempts to act out a rape fantasy, without proper access to information about SSC / RACK / etc, how's that going to go?
This isn't really the sort of thing you can teach in schools. For one, children mature at different rates: some 15-year-olds are too young to even be thinking about that sort of thing, while others are having sex in secret while their parents pretend to be oblivious. (And some of us never start being interested in that sort of thing.) Teaching anything more than the basics (how reproductive biology works, contraceptives, STIs, respecting consent, enforcing consent, the risk profiles of various popular sex acts, "if you skip foreplay, you might need additional lubricant to avoid injury", "don't use condom solvent as a lubricant", "seriously, don't rape people") in compulsory education fails to respect children's autonomy and is wrong. (Schools don't teach those basics properly, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)
I also do not trust schools to provide decent sex education, because there are even "good schools" that cover up peer-on-peer rape, and place the onus of "getting along" afterwards on the victim. How's an institution that does that supposed to teach a holistic notion of consent? (No environment with such a high child-to-adult ratio where the children aren't allowed to leave is ever going to be safe, but the reputational incentives lead to particularly bad outcomes when these things happen; we don't have strong enough cultural norms requiring that adults act responsibly when what "shouldn't happen" happens.)
For similar reasons, I think any policy based on the assumption that children are innocent little angels we must avoid corrupting, is dead on arrival and bound to fail. Children are young people, with all the autonomy that entails.
There's no particular difference, apart from power dynamics, between exposing a 17-year-old to sexual material they don't want to see, and exposing a 30-year-old to sexual material they don't want to see. Of course, we cannot generally ignore power dynamics, which is why age-based rules are useful; but age is a proxy for things like autonomy, capacity for choice, informedness of choice, and tendency for choice to be respected by others. A 17-year-old at risk of exploitation does not magically become less vulnerable on their 18th birthday. If the rules to protect teenagers from harm don't protect all teenagers, there's probably something fundamentally wrong with them. (Yes, yes, you can move the threshold to 20. Very clever. Way to miss the point.) Furthermore, if the rules don't protect all teenagers, they probably don't even protect all teenagers below the age of 18, because they're not addressing the problem close enough to its source / to the harm.
As should be apparent from my earlier post, I have very little personal experience with pornography. But I have spent a while thinking about this topic, and I'm not sure how this position is parodic. Perhaps you could enlighten me?
Maybe the social ills caused by porn will disappear with proper sex education; in that case, I might be inclined to support the prospect of children who choose to seek it out having the authority to access pornography. But my current understanding of the world suggests that a restriction is more beneficial than access. (It's only, what, four years to wait? During which time children can learn to deal with randiness in ways other than "fire up ye olde web browser" or "shag a friend".)
Computer-mediated ID verification, and the Online Safety Act in general, is obviously bad, and should be opposed. But, being obvious, that goes without saying. (Was that your objection: that I didn't clearly pick a side?)
“Queer/Disabled techies post porn that I think is good for kids, which is great because otherwise children would have to just use PornHub” is a GREAT ideology to viscerally radicalize the majority of people against you AND the people you’re speaking about.
There's a difference between "good" and "not harmful". I would not encourage children to watch porn (if it came up in conversation, I'd dissuade them or change the subject); however, it's a fact that they do – to the point my peers did not believe me when I told them I didn't. There is such a thing as harm reduction, and there's a point past which "teaching children that their feelings are not harmful nor wrong" is more important than the veneer of propriety.
But, noted. That's excellent feedback.
To steal your wording from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44728577: if some children are going to seek out porn no matter what we do, better for the first thing they find not to be "content that demeans women and distorts their worldview on sex and relationships". If the Online Safety Act effectively prevented children from being exposed to that, then I would be ambivalent about it – but the law clearly won't achieve any of its stated goals. (I suspect bad porn is clearly-defined enough to prohibit directly, with cigarette-style prohibitions on making attractive to children sufficient for the respectful stuff, but I expect many people to call any ban "draconian".)
I've changed my mind: this isn't very good feedback, because you had to misrepresent what I wrote in order to criticise it.
I said "if porn sites had the kind of stuff": your paraphrase adds an implication I vehemently disagree with. The impersonal nature of a website (or magazine, or whatever) is important. Children shouldn't be looking at porn on social media sites, because they should have neither social nor parasocial relationships with sex workers qua sex workers (lumping amateurs in with professionals, here): this is a (non-central) special case of "adults should not have sexual relationships with children". We can't ignore the power dynamics.
That's one of the things I think the OSA got right: if you read between the lines, each measure does seem to be motivated by an actual problem, some of which aren't obvious to non-experts like me. I'd love to get access to the NSPCC's recommendations for the OSA, before it got translated to this awful implementation: that'd make it much easier to try to design alternative, more effectual implementations.
Note also, the queer/disabled techies I mentioned? They take pains to ensure that minors do not interact with them in a sexual context: some of them explain why, and others make blanket prohibitions without explanation. It is generally understood that consent and boundaries are respected. And, from what I can tell looking at public social graphs, this works: nobody I know to be a child is interacting with nudes, risqué posts, erotica, or accounts dedicated to that purpose, even if they're otherwise quite close in the social graph. (Maybe I should do a study? But analysing people's social graphs without their consent doesn't feel ethical. Perhaps interviews would be a better approach.)
There is the occasional post from a child (youngest I've observed was 16) complaining about these policies, because they think they don't need protection. That they're complaining, rather than just bypassing the technical barriers (as everybody in my school knew how to do), is perhaps another indication that this approach works.
(I'm a degree separated from the communities that post sexy stuff online, so my observations may not be representative of what actually happens. I'm also seeing the situation after moderation, a few minutes delayed due to federation latency: I know that "remove the consequences of a child's foolishness from the public sphere as quickly as possible" is a priority in online moderation, so this selection bias might be quite heavy. Further research is needed.)
Anyone who supports literal children of any age viewing pornography needs their hard drives checked immediately.
“Literal children”, by which definition?
By the definition of every major nation in the world, which is that anyone under 18 is a minor, which is a child who should not be intentionally exposed to pornography. Kids shouldn’t grow up viewing content that demeans women and distorts their worldview on sex and relationships, much less having the trusted adults in their lives advocate for them to watch it!!
Very bold choice to argue the nuance of “But how do we define ‘child’?” in a discussion about showing pornography to kids, though!
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Then you deserve all the censorship that comes your way. Treat others like you wish to be treated.
I don’t think censorship of nearly any kind has any place on the internet, but neither do kids.
It’s a parent’s responsibility to keep their children away from that type of content, not to hand them access to it so they can develop maligned, destructive ideas about sex, intimacy, and women.