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Porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age using credit card

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Re: Porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age using credit card

#71
post #2

Studies show that half of 11 to 13-year-olds have seen pornography at some point. What's missing from that stat is where they saw porn. Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Imgur, etc are full of porn but aren't technically porn sites. If that's where kids are accessing porn then blocking porn sites will not fix the problem. Unless you understand what the problem actually is there will be no way to fix it.

Soon, we'll see "Studies show that the legal requirement to verify users has led teens to master using VPNs."

Teens already master it. Many preteens master it just fine. My son had VPNs set up to bypass region locks on anime and bypass bans on game servers by the time he was 10.

It's adults that'll need to learn. I foresee a lot of awkward conversations with parents trying to ask theirs kids how to set up VPNs while pretending it's for a different purpose.

Re: Porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age using credit card

#72
post #2

Studies show that half of 11 to 13-year-olds have seen pornography at some point. What's missing from that stat is where they saw porn. Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Imgur, etc are full of porn but aren't technically porn sites. If that's where kids are accessing porn then blocking porn sites will not fix the problem. Unless you understand what the problem actually is there will be no way to fix it.

So just ban porn on reddit&co. for users without age-check, too. Shouldn't that already be the case anyway?

Re: Porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age using credit card

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you still exert this much effort to minimize or trivialize if we were talking about 10 year old children instead of 13 year old children? What if it was 8 year old children? Would you feel differently then?

Yes. Because this is trivial. People have seen genitals for a long time. Humans have coped. If everyone was dying or going insane because the internet makes this different, we'd have noticed starting over 20 years ago. But that hasn't happened. The minute someone has some actual evidence of a problem, I am all ears, whatever the ages involved (at least until people are consenting adults anyway). But you comment is, r…

> Now it's porn. Isn't it time we grew up? Aren't we more mentally prepared for change than the victorians?

It's been porn for many decades already. As a child combing my parents book cases for interesting stuff at some point in the mid 1980's, one of the things that initially got me excited because of a rather misleading title (and then disappointed, but still fascinated by lots of weird case studies) was a book from the 1970's about research into the psychological impacts on porn.

The internet has just re-ignited a many decades old argument by arguing now that it isn't porn per se, but the sheer amount of porn and ease of access, this time.

Re: Porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age using credit card

#74

Let's assume porn websites implement this as required (fat chance). You'd be daft to enter your CC that associates you by name, home address, phone number and purchases to the porn videos that you'd look at. Who comes up with this stuff? Zeroknowledge proof based age verification service when?

My guess would be that a whole lot of porn companies would love if this was required, because it'd mean conditioning people to enter card details far more places, and would potentially allow for far easier upsells if people have already accepted they have no other way in than giving a card.

We've already been down this route in the past with "Adult Verification Services" after the Communications Decency Act 1996, when it quickly was turned into a monetisation mechanism for porn sites. E.g. see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_Check

(One might think the UK government would have someone sufficiently aware of history to realise how spectacularly that failed to stop access to porn for minors, but it seems not)

EDIT: Also, last time this specific UK attempt came out, MindGeek, the company which owns Pornhub, was one of the company vying to handle the then-proposed identity checking mechanism.

Re: Porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age using credit card

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could have easily replaced "breasts" with "intercourse" and the message conveyed would be the same. Children are being exposed to exponentially more sexually charged content in the first few years of their lives than most men historically have been in their entire lives. This isn't a case of rampant puritanism, go to Pornhub (one of the milder purveyors) and tell me that most of their front-page content is a depict…

> and tell me that most of their front-page content is a depiction of healthy sex between two loving adults Go to [0] and tell me how that is a depiction of a healthy whatever. Also please describe how the paywall on porn sites would help poor 13 y.o. chaps not to see this. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsm4poTWjMs

Thats certainly not as bad as most mainstream pornography, regardless your argument is a red herring. Sexual content existing on one platform isn't an argument against restricting access to platforms made for sexual content.

Re: Porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age using credit card

#76
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could have easily replaced "breasts" with "intercourse" and the message conveyed would be the same. Children are being exposed to exponentially more sexually charged content in the first few years of their lives than most men historically have been in their entire lives. This isn't a case of rampant puritanism, go to Pornhub (one of the milder purveyors) and tell me that most of their front-page content is a depict…

> I could have easily replaced "breasts" with "intercourse" and the message conveyed would be the same. The message becomes incredibly different. The very fact that you talk about "sexually charged content" while saying that the message would be the same with "breasts" vs "intercourse" is a demonstration of the cultural differences scrollaway mentioned. A lot of places "breasts" does not automatically imply anything…

Given the context of the conversation you'd have to intententionally misinterpret the message to assume I was talking abut breasts in a non-sexual context. The core takeaway is very much still the same: A child in 2022 will likely be exposed to extreme amounts of sexual content online, far more than most humans in history have had the ability to see their entire lives.

Re: Porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age using credit card

#77
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you still exert this much effort to minimize or trivialize if we were talking about 10 year old children instead of 13 year old children? What if it was 8 year old children? Would you feel differently then?

At 8 and 10 I'd spent time on beaches in Denmark on holiday that were all clothing optional. I'd seen plenty of people of all ages fully nude. It was perhaps a novelty for a few minutes, and then it wore off. If anything, I'm a bit worried at what growing up in puritan countries without even visiting places like that and getting nudity normalised does to people.

Did you see them also having hardcore sex constantly? Because that's the true equivalent here.

Re: Porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age using credit card

#78
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could have easily replaced "breasts" with "intercourse" and the message conveyed would be the same. The message becomes incredibly different. The very fact that you talk about "sexually charged content" while saying that the message would be the same with "breasts" vs "intercourse" is a demonstration of the cultural differences scrollaway mentioned. A lot of places "breasts" does not automatically imply anything…

Given the context of the conversation you'd have to intententionally misinterpret the message to assume I was talking abut breasts in a non-sexual context. The core takeaway is very much still the same: A child in 2022 will likely be exposed to extreme amounts of sexual content online, far more than most humans in history have had the ability to see their entire lives.

It's not at all clear that you see the distinction, was the point that scrollaway was making, and I agree.

It matters, given that it is far less obvious to me whether or not your "updated" statement is true, depending on which specific age range we're talking about when you say "child" and how large a proportion of that age group needs to have seen any to justify generalising, and what "extreme amounts" are.

Re: Porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age using credit card

#79
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 8 and 10 I'd spent time on beaches in Denmark on holiday that were all clothing optional. I'd seen plenty of people of all ages fully nude. It was perhaps a novelty for a few minutes, and then it wore off. If anything, I'm a bit worried at what growing up in puritan countries without even visiting places like that and getting nudity normalised does to people.

Did you see them also having hardcore sex constantly? Because that's the true equivalent here.

The claim I replied to came in response to a chain where this is what I initially reacted to:

> Fruit and nudity are not the same. Fruit doesn’t trigger hormonal responses, nudity does.

Nothing about hardcore sex. That your intent with the comment further above that was about sex is irrelevant to what I replied to.

Re: Porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age using credit card

#80
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today a 13 y/o boy can see more types of fruit in a supermarket in an hour than every one of his prior-digital age male ancestors have seen combined. Its an absolute stimulus overload. When will we bad fruit? Or maybe things changing isn't necessarily a catastrophe 100% of the time?

Fruit and nudity are not the same. Fruit doesn’t trigger hormonal responses, nudity does.

Fruit absolutely triggers hormonal responses, what are you talking about?
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