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I think pornography should only be seen by adults
Right, and Pornhub, like all mainstream porn websites, carries an RTA flag that trips all standards compliant content blockers. The black-market sites which the government is pushing traffic to do not, so it’s up to the blocker developers to make best guesses.
Not that parents bother with the blockers anyway.
Most parents apparently don't agree with you, or are too lazy to do anything:
From: https://www.girlonthenet.com/blog/age-verification-whats-the-harm/
I was aware of this and used it exactly as intended, set an age appropriate filter setting, with a watershed to switch to “18” in the evening. When the kids got old enough to stay up past this watershed, I decided to run the age limiters settings 24hrs and instead allow vpn as the only route for me as an adult to access the ‘adult internet’ Paired with parental controls on their devices, worked fine. Included in this was conversations with the children about their devices, what usage time looked like, internet safety and as an aside we had no TVs in bedrooms.
Guess what? It took a little effort and had to be consistent. I guess most parents are lazy.
It's honestly maddening that we're being subjected to this mass surveillance in the name of preventing children seeing porn when we've had much more effective tools for decades now. An OS or ISP level DNS filter takes more work to get around than just finding a more shady website. Microsoft, to its credit, have pretty good parental controls built into their OSs (Windows + Xbox).
But it's like I've said before, this isn't about preventing kids seeing porn; it's about preventing adults seeing porn because the political class finds it icky.
This is bollocks and lazy thinking.
It is about preventing kids from seeing porn, but the people who support this lack the knowledge and intelligence to understand that it does more harm than good.
The government absolutely has access to people with the knowledge to tell them that this approach wouldn't work, Aylo (the company who owns Pornhub) has been advocating for device based age verification for years (Yes, Aylo are a shitty company, but they're right about this and have been vocal about it). But sure, a piece of Tory legislation, the same Tories who banned porn with bondage and even women ejaculating in 2014, didn't choose this approach because it'd discourage adults accessing porn.
What makes you think that, because someone will have told the government something, that means they believe them? That's always the missing link in this argument.
It's what makes me think it's a failure to mentalise other people. "It's so obvious" I imagine you thinking, "anyone can see that it won't work!"
But no, not anyone can. Some people are dumb. Some people are smart but have a blind spot.
This is just getting into pure speculation now, neither of us knows for sure. It just lines up too perfectly with the Tories history of anti-porn stances for me to believe that it wasn't a motivating factor in choosing this approach to others that were pitched to the government (the lobbying from the age verification industry probably helped as well).
I don't think it's too much speculation, because opinion polling found that the public was broadly in favour of age verification. It's a mistake to think that politicians must automatically know (and agree with) things that the public don't know.
Sure, puritanism means that politicians aren't going to leap the defence of porn sites and their business models. But that angle is rather different - and I think contradictory - to the one you started with. You said that the government was told that it won't work; if that really was the solid argument you presented it as, wouldn't that imply they couldn't possibly be in favour of OSA for anti-porn reasons? After all, they ought to believe it won't actually work to reduce access to porn, right?
Obviously it's not the case that everything popular with the public is popular with politicians for the same reason, but if something is popular with the public you need quite a good reason to believe that politicians are in favour of it for some other motivation, and with all of that, we just don't have that good reason.
Sorry I misspoke, when I said it wouldn't work I was thinking of the negative knock-on effects that make this approach unworkable, not that it was entirely ineffective. What I'm trying to get at is that there were more effective options that the government for achieving it's stated goals, only allowing legal adults to access pornography, that didn't require you to send a picture of your ID or face to every website that happens to have nudes on it. But other, more privacy-friendly approaches wouldn't make adults hesitant to access porn websites and I think this quality of the current approach was a desirable effect.
I think politicians hating the concept of porn and liking the idea of having your real identity linked to your social media accounts are actually pretty good explanations for the government knowingly going with an inferior approach to all this.
Again, I think we're at an impasse, you're giving the former government a level charitably I can't. That's not to say prospective is unreasonable, I think it's perfectly reasonable, I just don't believe it.
Fair enough, thanks for the chat
The windows/xbox parental controls never worked for me, luckily it would have only been for screen time, so we managed that the old fashioned way. (After countless MS support calls on an OEM prebuilt machine too!) The apple mac parental controls were faultless both MacOS and iOS.
I don't think anyone disagrees with that, but the current "upload a video of your face, a copy of your passport and your full name and address to a criminal company based in Cypress" combined with "if you don't implement it you must block the UK" is one of the most stupid, dangerous and incompetent things I've seen for weeks.
It's not just porn being blocked. It's Discord servers, Twitter, image hosters, other hosting websites, media websites, images on websites, international companies' websites, tech support, equipment manufacturers, fucking paint suppliers.
It's a sack of badly thought-out shit by bell-ends. An opt-in from a mobile phone provider or ISP, plus some parental controls was all we needed. Now we can't order some fucking specialist paint for work, and the pictures in the online safety manual all say "not available in your region".
At least we'll soon be able to buy a pack of 1000 stolen uploaded British passports and photos for £50.
Sounds like your paint company has misunderstood the law. Or sells porn on the side
Glad we agree that Pornhub should be age verified though. Because selling porn to kids is abhorrent
Moving forward companies that don't sell porn can stop over reacting. As can you all
I think pornography WILL be seen by anyone who looks for it. If you want kids not to be fucked up by it you're going to have to get over yourself and have that conversation you're scared of having with them.
When I was 14 a shopkeeper sold us single cigs for 50p shg. If you want to break the law there's a way and usually someone willing to make some money. Doesn't make smoking at 14 right.
Happy to have the convo with my kids and for part of that to be “don’t break the law”. Also expect them to break the law. Happy for that to be part of learning what is healthy from unhealthy.