Comment by faxmeyourcode
7 days ago
Every day preteen boys around the world are destroying their premature brains by watching stuff that should be 18+ by simply clicking a single button that says "I am over 18". They form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button. Many of these kids are never the same after their innocence is stripped.
You can blame the parents for allowing them unfettered access to the internet, but their classmates will show them something while they're hanging out after school or waiting for the bus. This doesn't even include the softer stuff that gets _recommended_ to them every day on tiktok and instagram reels - actively pushing them towards more explicit content.
I don't necessarily agree with the politicians here and I do believe there are ulterior motives at play such as information gathering for blackmail on adults, etc.
What is the solution here? I don't think there is one that satisfies everybody.
These sites implementing this could also implement a DNS TXT record or similar saying they are over 18s only (gambling sites would be included here too, and with a little thought you can categorise the sites).
They could publish their IP addresses so that the traffic can be blackholed at the router by the account holder.
The choice would then be down to the person paying the bill whether to block or not.
It won't apply to shady sites, but those sites won't do age verification anyway.
The problem is nobody wants the account holder to have the power.
> This doesn't even include the softer stuff that gets _recommended_ to them every day on tiktok and instagram reels
This is what needs regulated, not pushing “papers, please” Statsi nonsense on the adults.
I feel much the same way. This is a real headache of a problem for me because I'm pretty privacy-oriented, but this is a serious, serious problem that needs real intervention.
Way too many kids are rotting their brains away either becoming gooners or clout-chasers. I thank God every day I was born too early to have access to this stuff as a kid. I can't imagine what this "you must always be online and also sexy" culture is doing to our youngest generations.
Give me the IP addresses of every site and I'll blackhole them on my router if I want to. That solves the home problem. I'll also ask why gambling sites, which litter sports broadcasting, aren't included, and indeed why gambling is allowed to be advertised to under 18s at all.
Doesn't solve the away problem, which is mainly 5g. I should be able to do that as the account payer.
That's great, but unfortunately most parents don't know how to do that, and as I've read recently, tech literacy is going down in younger generations, not up.
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Interestingly, the youngs in the US seem to be much less into sex and drugs than previous generations. The stuff we got up to as GenX youth are legitimately shocking to our children.
I've seen nothing to state that sexual activity is down. Unplanned pregnancies maybe, but that's not the same thing. Do you have a source for this? I could be convinced pretty easily, it just sounds wrong to me.
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Pornography addiction doesn't exist. No major medical body in the world considers it an actual condition. Studies show that self-reported pornography addicts consume the same amount of pornography as non-addicts, but have much higher rates of religiosity and conservative sexual norms. Pornography "addiction" is a moral panic narrative, not a medical reality.
I agree that children should not have access to sexually explicit material and that it can warp their relationships to sex. I also agree that some people have unhealthy relationships to pornography; there are plenty of psychological and psychiatric factors that lead people to engage in disordered sexual behaviours.
But people NEED to stop bringing medical pseudoscience into these discussions. Statements like "[children] form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button" are neither true nor useful.
Can you link the studies?
Here's a systematic review of the research as of 2022: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11930-022-00329-8. It's paywalled, but you can probably find the full text on sci-hub.
> [T]he last 5 years of pornography research is marked by increased attention to the impact of context and individual differences when assessing pornography use effects. Particularly, researchers have provided compelling evidence that differences in religious and moral values regarding sexual behavior can impact estimates of pornography use and perceptions regarding the problematic or addictive nature of pornography. Considering recent findings, a systematic review of recent research (within the past 5 years) on how religion and morality shape pornography use effects was conducted, with a particular focus on findings regarding pornography problems due to moral incongruence.
> Fifty-one articles were included in the present review. Findings demonstrate religiousness, moral disapproval, and moral incongruence as robust, strong predictors of various problems regarding pornography (e.g., psychological distress, relational problems, perceived addiction).
Like they say above, it's hot-button issue and this sort of result is fairly easy to replicate, so a lot of papers have been published along these lines in recent years.
Before the internet, preteen boys just had stashes upon stashes of Playboy and other forms of porn ;)
Honestly seems more fun if you think about it since you could technically trade the goods around
I mean, ZKP of age seems to be a good enough compromise. Does it add friction? Yes. I used it a week ago to test, it isn't a smooth experience, but honestly, it's good enough.
The fact that people need to install vpn to access porn is also a solution. I doubt children younger than 13 could do it.
A 13-year-old is one year away from highschool. You're underestimating the user-friendliness of VPNs and the tech-savviness of, if not the average middle-schooler, than the 85th-percentile middle-schooler at least.
> They form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button. Many of these kids are never the same after their innocence is stripped.
[citation needed]
> What is the solution here?
The kids who grew up on violent games and unlimited free internet porn are adults now. We're fine. I don't understand what's all the ruckus about.
Unless the real issue is that people are noticing certain societal changes that are very difficult to combat so the politicians blame porn because otherwise they'd have to admit that they have no solutions to more pressing problems. Please note how suddenly the housing crisis, vote manipulation, inequality, fucked job market, mental health crisis, genocide in Gaza, war in Ukraine, loneliness epidemic, unchecked immigration, phone addiction all became irrelevant side topics because right now we're laser focused on making sure that boys going through puberty won't see a naked titty. Truly a clown world we live in.
I went through puberty in the golden age of internet porn. After widespread high-speed internet became a thing, but before we started algorithmically monetizing every second of people's attention. I'm so happy of that. I still have my collection of porn I downloaded as a horny teenager.
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