Comment by unethical_ban
15 days ago
Taking away porn access would be great except you can't do it at scale without with eliminating porn from the Internet altogether and prosecuting anyone who shares any, or by eliminating privacy and anonymity from the Internet altogether.
I agree with your take on the damage of porn to the youth but don't yet agree that asking the government to watch every conversation is worth it. (That's what you're enabling long term)
In order to make sure businesses aren't giving porn to teens, you can require they do meaningful age verification at the time they want to provide the porn. You can impose criminal penalties on a domestic business which doesn't do this, and other penalties on foreign businesses (such as locking them out of the payments network). You don't need to get 100%, even partial success will act as a deterrent. This is how the world worked before the Internet, you needed to show ID to buy porn, and public opinion is in favor of the world working this way again. Crucially, penalties on businesses (not consumers, and starting with the biggest ones) are the way you need to go because this is the only way this can feasibly be enforced.
The libertarian concerns around privacy, freedom of expression and surveillance are all valid, but they're downstream. We have hard evidence that porn damages sexual health and relationships, and it has basically zero value to society; it's like digital cigarettes in this sense. We can't allow ourselves to be paralyzed on this issues because of a theoretical slippery slope. Whether Discord is going about this the right way is open for debate, and whether legislation solves the porn problem without introducing surveillance risks is also a good discussion to have. But the porn as well as the fraud and exploitation which always seem to accompany that industry need to go. Libertarians would be wise not to conflate the endorsement of privacy with an endorsement of porn -- most people support the former to some degree, but when people come forward with enthusiastic support for the latter, more often than not their motivation is addiction or profit, not a crowd the defenders of privacy want to be lumped in with.
I don't care what degenerate stuff you look at as you are free to do so.
Privacy is a fundamental right, at that my opinion one of the more important ones, as when the right to privacy is removed the other ones are impossible to keep.
To give up the right to privacy because you don't want kids looking at degenerate stuff on the internet is stupid, additionally the kids will work around your barriers.
How about we teach kids (and adults) the dangers, putting the responsibility on the consumer instead of micromanaging/censoring everyone's information intake.
If a minor drives in a car without a license we also don't require the car brand to install license & age verification in each car. We punish the kid that did it.