What are your thoughts on restricting children’s access to pornography online?
What are your thoughts on restricting children’s access to pornography online?
There are a lot of GOP-controller legislatures in the USA pushing through so-called “child protection” laws, but there’s a toll in the form of impacting people’s rights and data privacy. Most of these bills involve requiring adults to upload a copy of their photo ID.
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As an analogy, should governments allow children access to strip clubs and have parents handle it or should that be illegal and have kids banned from those physical spaces?
It’s interesting because I think banning kids from strip clubs is pretty popular, but the digital laws are not as popular. I don’t know of a way to enforce a ban in a digital space that doesn’t infringe on individual liberties though
The reason is a technical one. At a strip club, none of your information is being transmitted; it’s just the bouncer making sure you’re of age by looking at your ID.
Per the EFF:
Age verification systems are surveillance systems. Mandatory age verification, and with it, mandatory identity verification, is the wrong approach to protecting young people online. It would force websites to require visitors to prove their age by submitting information such as government-issued identification. This scheme would lead us further towards an internet where our private data is collected and sold by default. The tens of millions of Americans who do not have government-issued identification may lose access to much of the internet. And anonymous access to the web could cease to exist.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/age-verification-mandates-would-undermine-anonymity-online
Being forced to reveal identification before you're allowed to view pornography is the equivalent of only being allowed to masturbate while your parents are in the room watching you.
I understand that completely, but if we’re saying kids shouldn’t see strippers, why should they be able to see far more graphic content?
I’m not saying I support these bills as written, basically for the reasons you’re saying. I do think watching extreme content online can damage children’s understanding of sex though. You have to go out of your way to find porn that looks like real sex.
One thing to note is that it is ALWAYS claimed that the issue is the Really Bad Stuff - the graphic content - but that it inevitably becomes anything that is socially offensive, and I’ll give you one queer guess as to what tends to get labeled “graphic content” right quick.
I actually don’t think it’s the more “extreme” content. For example, kink.com videos are pretty clear that consent has been obtained and actors are debriefed afterward.
I think the worst part of porn is the “regular” stuff that shows unrealistic expectations (grabbing a woman while she’s performing oral sex and forcing her to basically choke without consent is shockingly common, for example).
I don’t disagree that there’s a dark strain of the use and misuse of women in mainstream porn, but my point is that what is claimed as the basis for a porn ban and how far it will go and what it will target are two entirely different things.
It doesn’t really matter what the content is. Allowing the government to dictate what content can or cannot be accessed is not a good idea.
I agree with that statement for adults, but not for children. Even if you’re talking about something like drugs, protecting kids, who don’t make rational choices, is important.
This is the issue at hand: How do you prove it is an adult and not a child attempting to access the content?
Solutions exist for parents to block/allow access to content on routers, cell phone plans, and devices. The government does not need to impose here.
I see what you’re asking, and I agree if we’re going to prevent physical access to strip clubs by minors, it makes logical sense to take steps to prevent minors from accessing prurient content online as well.
The question becomes the exact methodology used to achieve that. It’s the same basic premise of making encryption illegal: Are we willing to sacrifice our privacy in the name of “protecting the children”?
Come up with another way to restrict access that doesn’t further encroach on privacy. I don’t have the answer for what that is, and it may not need to involve the government, but allowing them to put bills like this in place sets dangerous precedent. Once we relinquish power to the government, it’s damn near impossible to get it back.
If they really wanted to block access to adult only material, and not be a surveillance state in the process, the correct solution would be that every home router and every cell phone plan would have a secondary password that had to be entered in order to access that data.
Then by default only the parents and the people deemed responsible enough to have access to that password would be able to view adult only content.
That is very secure, it would sweep the floor with a huge percentage of successes with a minimum amount of intervention into people's daily life.
Sure, some kids will get the password one way or another and view adult only content, but at least they would know they had to go through the extra steps to do something they weren't allowed to do.
While that technically may not be a surveillance state, it would be an authoritarian state which could decide worker's rights or the history of slavery are "adult material" because what kid needs to know about them? Kids don't work or own slaves, so it's not suitable for them and they can't access it.
This idea sounds absolutely unhinged to me.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-Ben Franklin
I'm not of the opinion that we should just let kids see that stuff, though at the same time Im skeptical that it's as bad as some people claim, but I just don't see a way to actually stop them from seeing it that isn't way worse than the status quo via restricting everyone else. If the cure is worse than the disease, then one isn't advocating that the disease isn't harmful by rejecting the cure, just stating that the trade-off is not worth it.
As far as giving kids a dangerously wrong idea of what sex is goes, I do think that the best solution to this is better sex-ed than trying to hide things from them though. The thing about porn is that it isn't really possible to stop, without getting insanely draconian. You might be able to stop most kids from being able to access popular websites for it, sure, but given all the stories I've heard from before the internet was popular about people as kids finding relatives nsfw magazines and video tapes, that won't stop a curious kid, just make it slightly more difficult. Consider for a second that pretty much everyone carries a device with photo and video recording capacity everywhere that could be used to make and share porn, that someone with basic art skills can draw it if you remove the camera from the equation somehow, and that if you include smut in all this that even just being literate is enough to make some. Ultimately, porn is a form of information, and in the modern age restricting information is very difficult, let alone trying to restrict information that literally anyone can independently create, from being seen by children who are naturally curious because they have been forbidden from seeing something but dont understand what or why.
which I think we all agree on. There are ways that we could enforce age verification (the best one so far is that the browser itself checks your age, then a website tells the browser that it must do an age check before loading, which then your ID is never transmitted or logged for these sites). But politicians don't want to think about that, they love this because it plays into their surveillance state.
(the best one so far is that the browser itself checks your age
How? As a user I want to have total control over my browser and Internet is an open platform - any browser should be able to view any website even though google is trying to change that with their DRM.
I don't know exactly but the two big things I've seen, and again I'm not the engineer of it or anything, but
- Your browser would have to implement some sort of 3rd party ID checker that the results could then be stored in a non-adaptable way (specifically parental controls I think would need to be set up), then when a site is loaded it reports to the browser the minimum age limit and the browser decides if you can see it or
- You could register your ID on a third party ID checker site that does not log data, only verifies that you are of age. Then on load websites could then check against this third party service to verify the user is 18+.
Know that yes this is a limitation of a browser, and that's why it's viewed as a compromise, a word that a lot of people have forgotten. None of us really want to have to prove it, but if there is a need to prevent children from accessing content (and tbh there is a need), then I'd rather have it be done in a privacy focused way.
So it's not your browser that checks your age but a third party. This raises a few questions:
- What kind of IDs are accepted? Say I have one issued by Singapore...
- How often should it check that a person that uses my browser is still me?
the browser decides if you can see it or
Yea, no. I decide, not the browser.
Again, 2 huge points I pointed out, I am not the developer or the privacy focused engineers who are putting forward these ideas, and again, compromise. The option of "I don't want to do it" may not be on the table anymore. If it's going to happen, it would be better to compromise and instead push a privacy focused approach.
The option of “I don’t want to do it” may not be on the table anymore.
For this to be on the table you need to convince all the browser manufacturers to implement it and close the sources so it cannot be undone by the users or forked. And remove all the earlier copies and sources Next you need to ban tools like curl or wget because they can pretend to be browsers. If you want something that can't be removed in reasonable time realistically you have to demand full web drm a-la Google but this means a bunch of older computers needs to be thrown away just because they can't use newer browsers and/or newer OS.
Now that we figured out what needs to be done on the client site - let's talk about server side. You need to convince every porn site out there to perform this check. A few more interesting things to think about - how many porn sites are out there? What to do with those that won't follow your proposal?
In short - from technical point of view if you really want to achieve "enforced age verification" - internet must become a very different, much more closed system.
I mean they're already doing that, there's already a handful of states that require porn sites check a user's ID before granting access, that's why I keep reiterating compromise, because it's already happening. And the version they're pushing is we hand over our ID to ever site which then of course would be subpoenable. So, again, I don't know why you're thinking these solutions are the bad ones, the bad ones are already in place and being used, they're just trying to roll it out nationwide now.
And again, I really feel like I keep repeating the same point over and over and over and over and over again, if it's going to happen, which they're really trying to push through and looks like they are going to, a compromise would be to at least have a privacy focused approach.
Banning children from strip clubs in no way impacts the rights of other adults to enjoy strip clubs.
And, again, I am against the laws as written. But I’m asking more broadly about children accessing porn. I would never support a law that requires people to upload their ID, but there has to be some safe way to pull this off.
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Oh well that's even easier then. I don't care what other people's children do, in general.