The UK's Online Safety Act doesn't just age-gate porn; it blocks material deemed "harmful" to minors. Days after the law went into effect, reports of non-explicit content on social media getting blocked in the region started to crop up. Subreddits from r/IsraelCrimes to r/stopsmoking are now walled in the UK. Video games, Spotify, and dating apps have instituted or will institute age checks.
Given the SCOTUS age verification decision [June '25], Stabile fears that people [in the US] will go "mask off" in the fall and spring, when state legislatures start getting back together. "People are going to attempt to restrict the internet even more aggressively," Stabile said. "I think people are going to work to restrict all sorts of content, particularly LGBTQ content, but also content that is broadly defined as any sort of threat or propaganda to minors." Other experts Mashable spoke to agree with him.
"I'm going to jump to the end step," [Eric Goldman, law professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law] said. "The end step is that most online users are going to be required to age authenticate most of the time they visit websites. That's going to become the norm." In a paper he wrote, Goldman called these statutes "segregate-and-suppress" laws.
The stated reason behind these laws is to "protect children." But as journalist Taylor Lorenz pointed out, in the UK, age verification is already preventing children from accessing vital information, such as about menstruation and sexual assault.
"When we see crackdowns on spaces on the internet, we're essentially stripping away that potential for self-actualization," Goldman said. We've reached the dystopian stage of the internet, he added.
It gets the main public porn sites back to being private sites for adults. There was always other ways to get porn but that doesnt make the change negligible.
Sure, assuming the age verification actually works. But it also adds risk to people accessing those sites since now they need to do some form of identity verification.
The net result here is going to be less traffic to those sites, and more damaging leaks when those sites inevitably get breached, and kids are still going to access porn, and probably worse porn than what's on the main sites.
I'd have to hear a good example of more damaging leaks, unless you just mean linking people to their porn history?
Kids won't access worse porn because they won't even be aware of it to begin with. Pornhub and the like have some awful categories that I'm sure you are aware of. All this stuff front and center on such well known and easy to access websites is not okay when its obvious children will end up there.
Porn advocates should feel lucky they had a "golden age" where kids were discovering porn completely on their own by the age of 10. Personally I dont think thats a societal benefit and its not helping men especially.
Pretty much that. Think of an Equifax style breach, but with porn, and all the blackmail that could create.
Are you sure about that? I grew up with dialup and a publicly placed family court computer and I was definitely aware of porn, despite even simple images loading at a crawl.
Children will find porn, that's a given, our choice is where they'll likely go. Do we want them going to a place parents are aware of and can look out for, or do we want them going to the sketchy corners of the web to find what they want?
Locking down the main sites just endangers adults and pushes kids to worse sites.
There aren't worse sites. The current way porn is presented is with no restrictions. Addind restrictions won't push kids to "worse sites". Kids dont need porn to begin with, acting like they will find it and abuse it no matter what is an awfully bleak take. Do you assume that all kids are going to try hard drugs too? How about armed robbery? Maybe we should keep drugs and guns in as public a place as possible so parents can "monitor" kids using it easier.
That's a ridiculous comparison. Kids know the harm of drugs, they can see people strung out on the side of the road downtown and have heard horror stories from friends about bad trips. So most kids stick with weed, alcohol, and nicotine (all bad) because they're not complete idiots. They want to break rules and have fun, not destroy their lives.
What's the equivalent for porn? They'll have trouble forming relationships and may objectify their partners some months or years down the road? They'll learn things incorrectly (things they should've learned from sex ed in school or from their parents)?
They're not in the same category at all. Here's what will likely happen from a kid seeing porn:
That's it. They're not going to start raping people or anything, they just want to release the sexual tension they're feeling.
Now, if the safe places are blocked (i.e. places that care about regulators), they'll go to forums and whatnot and probably be exposed to actual abuse, like CSAM, actual rape, etc. That's much more problematic than role play between consenting adults or whatever.