Yeah but unfortunately it is very compatible with social conservatives and certain extreme christians who want to make it as hard as possible for adults to access porn as well, ideally banning it. Thats not possible to do, so they go and attack it with fake outrage (and it are all fake, children are not actually interested in sex nor do they spontainously combust if they see naked adults). Same with exedus cry, which…
I personally think that the libertarian argument is good: the government should focus on things other than this.
Which means devices could enact opt-in controls. Periodically scanning screenshots for nudity? That’s a feature… for an app. You’ve got all the right filtering apps? You’re a compliant semi-trustworthy teenager/Christian/Muslim/Exodus Cry member/citizen of the state religion. Parental controls keep the apps activated. A computer with 1995 Netscape continues to work with arbitrary Internet content. git and Docker don’t pause for AV when a comment contains the string “XXX”.
What you’re talking about are the movements behind the blockers. We can imagine an app which targets “sin” rather than nudity. Detecting corrosive text stories, especially homoeroticism. That this is merely very approximate detecting false positives is a feature, not a bug. One can’t be too careful with the intentions of outsiders. That the app itself collects more PII than the zero-knowledge proofs explained here is not interesting to its market; they already give superlative trust to those app makers. Perfectly acceptable to be carefree with the intentions of insiders.
Parents get a device that sanitizes as much as they want. Religious communities get to bless smartphones as finally advancing their fight against sin. The opt-in apps stay out of the way of well-adjusted busy people.
I’m ok with that scenario but I predict it requires a committed user base, patience with false detections, sustained funding, noticeable battery impact, and empowers some speciality app makers to be morality custodians. I’m less ok with one government getting all that right across a global communications network, even for the worst content.
But lawmakers who want control don’t like those apps. They want (1) the effects to be broadly distributed, (2) that the gatekeepers be hyperactive invite-only groups on social media, (3) that those volunteer ratings boards promote certain tastes over others. Song of Solomon must never be blocked. A reference to a torrent that contains a gay furry story? AV the entire domain, read the story into the Congressional Record, AV the Congressional Record.
Obviously hyperbole, but my point is that these are the contours of what a minority want with power. This comment section is full of people who want one government to make parenting choices for all, but as quoted in the article about the lawmaker from Utah, the censors are shockingly bad at predicting the future. We have to scrutinize their implementations when all proposed solutions depend on a powerful government intervening past the HTTP header level whenever someone finds inadequate supervision within any particular open forum.