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Comment by extraisland

2 days ago

It isn't about something not agreeing with my vibes. I don't appreciate when people put words in my mouth. I never said all. I obviously meant some.

Firstly in my original post I stated why I don't believe YouGov to be accurate. It isn't just me that has an issue with thier polling.

Secondly, It is well known that many people are swayed by peer pressure and/or what is perceived to be popular. Therefore if you can manipulate polling to show something is popular, then it can sway people that are more influenced by peer pressure/on the fence.

Often in advertising they will site a stat about customer satisfaction. In the small print it will state the sample size or the methodology and it is often hilariously unrepresentative. Obviously they are relying on people not reading the fine print and being statistically illiterate.

Politicians, governments and corporations have been using various tactics throughout the 20th and 21st century to sway public opinion, both home and abroad to their favour.

This issue has divisive for years and has historically had a huge amount of push back. You can see this in the surge of VPN downloads (which is a form of protest against these laws), the popularity of content covering this issue.

Are you against any kind of content restriction whatsoever or just porn?

  • I am generally against content restrictions. I am actually OK with restrictions on pornography.

    The UK government has engaged political censorship throughout my lifetime.

    e.g.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988%E2%80%931994_British_broa...

    I still remember the stupid Irish dubbing on the news. I thought it was hilarious when I was 10.

    Some of it the public are often unaware of e.g super injunctions.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-injunctions_in_English_l...

    The internet has made it much more difficult to censor. It is quite obvious to me that they wish to end online anonymity, which makes it easier for them to target people and thus easier to censor.

    I believe that this is the precursor before massive political censorship.

    As stated in my first reply on this subject. Even if you don't buy into that there are obvious problems with handing you ID over to third parties. There is no guarantee they can keep your data safe (and often haven't).

  • They may not be against content restriction, instead they may be against removal of user privacy or anonymity. If the proof of age thing was some kind of zero knowledge proof such that the age verifying group has no knowledge of what you're accessing, and the site you're accessing has no knowledge of you as an individual (beyond tells like IP address etc.) then perhaps they'd be more open to it?

    • There isn't any technology that can prevent sharing of age verification with third parties without tying your uses to your identity. To unmask someone in order to uncover sharing, you would require the ability to do it in general, which is incompatible with privacy/anonymity.

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