This is a pretty wild story but also an illustration of just how dystopian the world has gotten. The UK has gone completely bonkers with this "real id to use the internet" law. In the US Google is using a crazy AI algorithm to prohibit people under 18 from viewing some content on YouTube. Obviously, the stated purpose of the policy is good IMO. However, I can't help but take a cynical view that Google is using this as an excuse to fully profile everyone EVEN MORE extensively with a behavioral AI algorithm coupled with all the user data which they use in conjunction with all the tracking data they have accumulated. They will say it is to protect the children, but in reality they have cranked their tracking and surveillance up to 11. I am open to being corrected, but this seems dystopian: both the UK verification laws and the AI trac king policy roll outs.
that's not true, consumerism is only growing, people are not giving up anything in that regard.
The planet is getting trashed and 'the children' are doomed.
Individually We try and help, driving less, recycling and so on, but it kinda gets diluted by a billion Chinese moving into the middle-class and burning coal like there's no tomorrow.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals." - CS Lewis
The dystopia even extends to HN. This was near the top of the front page just half an hour ago, but now it's buried several pages away. Not for discussion, apparently.
I realize it was likely flagged, but burying anything controversial means that only vanilla topics will ever be discussed in any depth.
Yet the engineers who frequent HN and work at big tech companies are the ones who need to know about cases like this the most.
> burying anything controversial means that only vanilla topics will ever be discussed in any depth.
You place too much weight on reading the "front page" .. that's community and mod curated toward the core ethos of the site.
HN has a wealth of ongoing in depth discussion of all manner of things that often don't make "front page", you can see these if you (say) browse or follow new comments or active threads
What honestly blew my mind was the whole Cookies debate.
- EU introduces law, making thirdparty tracking cookies illegal
- Every advertisement tracker switches to CNAME based first/secondparty cookies
- EU judges decide they are illegal by default, too, without explicit consent
- Google pushes out Federal Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) prototype, and essentially saying they track so much of the internet, they don't even need cookies to get beyond 98% accuracy.
Not to mention the fact that someone would want to cover their entire body and face with tatoos... It points to an underlying social issue; people aren't happy with the body they were born in and/or not getting the attention/validation they need as individuals. Extreme body modification is a symptom of that. I think this struggle to accept one's self has systemic roots. People shouldn't have to go to such lengths to feel special. I suspect related to inequality dynamics and hyper-centralization of attention.
You shouldn't have to be an extreme world-class outlier in any area in order to feel valued. It's ridiculous how everything has become an all-or-nothing deal. This is not healthy.
There's this Deep Space 9 episode called Past Tense.
The crew goes back to 21st century earth to find that being unemployed is illegal and they quickly get put in a ghetto with other indigents.
At one point they're trying to get on the internet (the show was aired in 1995 so they predicted the 21st century internet) but they can't login because you have have a real identity and be a citizen in good standing (so nobody in the ghetto).
It's really the most prescient episode of Star Trek ever made.
Also probably the most unrealistic. Why would not people in ghetto create their own version of internet? They would have all the resources in a nearest scrapyard you just need gear what works. Then use few stolen IDs to copy the controlled internet and they could have it public just for themselves. Next step would be to connect other ghettos and what is the real internet at this point? The controlled one or this ghetto one where people can create freely without being hindered by the government?
I'm still confused about the purpose behind these laws. Are there still adults stupid enough to think that watching porn will mess a kid up? Because there's now two whole generations of kids who have grown up watching porn (my generation, and the one after). So far younger people don't seem any more fucked up than people were before, only the older people seem to be getting worse.
There's quite a few accounts on here that will argue in good faith and bad faith that people enjoying oral, anal, gay, bi, or any kink has already ruined society, whether it's solely via porn or real life.
The argument usually starts with an assumption that nobody did those things before and it's obvious that life was better before for everyone when those things were viewed as shameful.
Personally I think it's been known for centuries that sex is a pleasurable activity and controlling pleasure is a good way to control people.
> Are there still adults stupid enough to think that watching porn will mess a kid up?
This absolutely is a real problem, especially for younger kids. Have you talked to a teacher? Think things like "a kindergartner runs around grabbing teachers' tits and saying "I want to ..." lines you'd expect from a rape work like 50 Shades of Gray. It is neither in the child's interest nor in the interest of society at large to let that happen. And for every case that's as obviously bad as that one, who knows how many come off as creeps or even manage to appear normal from the outside, while suffering the trauma internally?
Remember, the status quo on the Internet is no control at all. Real-world sex businesses aren't allowed to get away with that, why should the Internet be exempt from laws? Just because the government is slow and incompetent to get started doesn't mean we can stick with "self-regulate, aka no regulation at all".
We can argue about exactly what the law should be, and we can argue how it should be implemented, but there absolutely must be something.
What you're talking about is internalized normalization of abuse. The kid was probably molested. Very unfortunate, but these things happen without porn. I'd talk to experts about this rather than assume "porn did it". And in any case, if a kid is behaving like that, you can then educate them on how to behave properly; the same would be true if the kid was punching other kids in the face. (and by the way, the "porn make kids bad" argument was the one used against violent video games years ago; turns out kids don't mimic everything they see in a screen)
If you absolutely must have a barrier to entry, let it be a credit card or other form of payment (everyone likes free porn, but sex work is real work and deserves to be paid). It's something not a lot of kids have access to (a bank account) and you don't have to track people's identities anymore. (Kids can steal their parents' cards but that's on the parents.)
Knives are useful. What's the the benefit of porn? Before I discovered porn, I just used my imagination and got the same level of "entertainment" as you now must get from porn.
Porn does harm some people, as it's easy to get addicted to it, and there's a lot of bad things happening on the supply side of it. I'm sure porn has also changed how people behave and what people expect in relationships, but it's hard to study such things. The amount of sex we have has decreased recently. I don't know if it's due to porn, but it'd be worth studying. If sexual satisfaction is easily available, there's less reason to seek the real thing.
It's beyond parents to fix these things, at best they can delay the discovery of porn for a few years, but that doesn't fix anything.
What is a benefit of a video game? People can get addicted on gaming, let's ban it. What is a benefit a of a good steak? It is not healthy, let's ban it.
You don't like stuff other people enjoy and then you will go out of your way with ludicrous excuses to destroy it for others. Like a religious bigot.
Well sure, there's entertainment value. But there's plenty of harmful things that people enjoy that we ban because the entertainment value is not worth the downsides. I enjoy driving very fast, but I'm not allowed to do it (except in very limited areas) because the negative effects outweigh the positive ones.
Very well said, and true. However, the post the parent was replying to said, "Are there still adults stupid enough to think that watching porn will mess a kid up?", which represents an unreasonable absolute.
> Are there still adults stupid enough to think that watching porn will mess a kid up?
Not only this but there seems to be no one on mainstream platforms putting forward the argument that what will mess kids up is a lack of access to sex education, which the bill also restricts.
The fact that you believe there simply is no argument on the other side regarding porn (not censorship) - implied by the assertion that one must be "stupid" to believe that watching porn can be detrimental for children - is exhausting.
It's that people are so stupid as to ostensibly outsource parental responsibility to a dystopian, dysfunctional government to encroach on the rights of everyone because "think of the children".
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin
I started watching in my early teens. It did, in fact, mess me up. I overconsumed, would explore increasingly more intense material for the dopamine hits, and couldn't stop. It fucked years of my life.
That said, these laws are bad and counterproductive. They create more (worse) problems than they solve. What I went through could have been averted if I understood the health impacts and risks. Back then, no one knew, and no one talked about it. I also don't know how representative my particular case was. I endured many years of chronic insomnia, anxiety, self-loathing and depression.
Not sure if youd find me me smart or stupid, but in my immediate experience a youth in my circle was influenced negatively by porn. It won't be every kid, and yes his parents should have watched him, better, but they have little influence over him from the grave.
>So far younger people don't seem any more fucked up than people were before, only the older people seem to be getting worse.
If you look at levels of depression, sexual disfunction the steep drop in relationships and dating among younger people and other metrics you could argue the exact opposite, although obviously there are other factors (social media, ect) in how "messed up" generations are besides the widespread watching of porn by children.
"Other factors" is doing a heavy lifting here. I don't have a skin in this game, but politicians are scared to touch the elephant in the room (smartphones + social media), because they know they'll get a flack instantly. I don't think porn consumption among teenage girls are high, yet their depression rates are high as well.
If you go one level up in "abstraction" for what these platforms include, then e.g. Instagram immediately springs to mind. But since they've long since washed their hands, having banned nipples.
No skin in the game here either. I'd agree that smartphones and social media are also very damaging.
>I don't think porn consumption among teenage girls are high, yet their depression rates are high as well.
That isn't what the data says.
>Seventy-three percent of the respondents (75 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls) said they had watched online pornography. The average age they started was 12. Many began younger.
>Seven in 10 who admitted they had watched porn intentionally said they had done so in the past week.
>Four in 10 said they had watched pornography, including nudity and sexual acts, during the school day. Almost half said they had done so on school-owned devices.
>Of those who watched the past week, 80 percent said they had seen “what appears to be rape, choking, or someone in pain.”
>Fewer than half (43 percent) said they had discussed pornography with a trusted adult. (Robb and Mann, 2023).
I'm certainly no puritan, but it seems absurd to me to suggest that this early and mostly ubiquitous exposure to (often violent) pornography doesn't have a significant negative effect on the developing minds of children.
Edit: Just to be clear, my contention that children watching pornography is harmful to their development is in no way an endorsement of the crusade to force users to link their IDs to their online accounts under the fig leaf of "protecting children" (the universal trope used to deprive people of their rights).
This is very broad, we both know what "being too much into porn" means. I doubt that an average girl watches as much porn as an average man. And let me put it this way, most of my friends (guys and girls) are far from being puritan. Consumption type between these two groups is significantly different.
But I might be making stuff up. I just think social media is more damaging, because kids start comparing themselves to everyone else. In this case, everyone else became "global everyone else" rather than "local everyone else" (which was the case back in my middle school days). I feel like that's the biggest problem, because you people see what they're missing out on, which is basically unavailable to 99% of population. That simple thought process would bring down any kid.
>I doubt that an average girl watches as much porn as an average man.
If you are talking about men and women, perhaps that is true. I'm not of the opinion that watching pornography as an adult matters much one way or the other once your psyche is fully developed. The original OP regarded children and their development, and the study I cited was taken among children aged 13-17. These aren't my numbers, this is a peer-reviewed study.
>Seven in 10 who admitted they had watched porn
intentionally said they had done so in the past week.
>Seventy-three percent of the respondents (75 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls) said they had watched online pornography. The average age they started was 12. Many began younger.
I also think social media is more damaging to children, but it isn't a zero sum game. With or without social media, I don't see how anyone can credibly argue that child exposure to (often extremely violent) hardcore pornography isn't a contributing negative factor.
I don't think that being a free society is a core "civilizational virtue" for the British in the same sense that it is for Americans, or even, say, the French.
The havoc this idiotic law will bring is about to snowball.
The UK has always been obsessed with controlling what they deem "indecent behavior". The rich have always been able to ignore this and the poor have always been forced to pick up the tab.
You think members of the government are entering their ID before going to pornhub? Not a chance. They are all circumventing this system themselves while endorsing it in public.
It's kinda pathetic that this news outlet literally self-censors the word 'porn'. I've noticed that some of the loudest online moral entrepreneurs crowing about freedom of speech are also the quickest to self-censor and demand others do the same.
As for the story itself, it's depressing but sadly unsurprising that the whole population of the UK seems to accept being infantilized in this fashion in a country notorious for letting politically well-connected people evade any consequences for actual sex abuse.
I mean...if the system accommodated that appearance it would have been one of the best designed systems in the world. There are a lot of edge cases here.
Moreover, I've known a few people with extensive facial scarring due to burns. I suspect that they're treated the same as this guy, but the story isn't nearly as "fun."
Yes, this is a very weird development for a millennial like me. I think this is a GenZ/Gen Alpha thing born out of steep surveillance enforced by the policies of streaming services chatrooms and TikTok. It really seems like the younger generation has really kowtoked to advertisers and self censor words I would consider benign. It honestly disgusts me.
Not necessarily, it's desirable for articles to be accessible from work and corporate firewalls, and lists of banned words exist. This was already the case before streaming services or TikTok existed.
Those are, as I undersand, mostly TikTok-isms (designed around actual and perceived TikTok censorship) more than generational patterns that have escaped (but somewhat attenuated) to other contexts ("unalive" is particularly common in other social media, the rest not so much.)
Its substituting a job you can't talk about without risking repercussions on some platforms with one you can. I don't think its a lot deeper than that, and that the substitution is essentially arbitrary (though I do think it was chosen because it has an extreme opposite social valence, with accountant being among the jobs with the most laced-up, boring, vanilla perception available.)
This really kind of highlights that not only is the “age check system” not at all about children, it is also about conditioning the adults into total control.
If it were about children then it would be the children that would need to be restricted from accessing the open internet, not adults of legal age who are supposed to have the rights needing to gain access to their inalienable rights … at least in America.
I also want to protect children from pornography, especially since I know people who have been deeply harmed by it, but it should be that any device that is for or used by children, people with curtailed and subordinate rights, are restricted by white-lists, not the other way around.
This is a pretty wild story but also an illustration of just how dystopian the world has gotten. The UK has gone completely bonkers with this "real id to use the internet" law. In the US Google is using a crazy AI algorithm to prohibit people under 18 from viewing some content on YouTube. Obviously, the stated purpose of the policy is good IMO. However, I can't help but take a cynical view that Google is using this as an excuse to fully profile everyone EVEN MORE extensively with a behavioral AI algorithm coupled with all the user data which they use in conjunction with all the tracking data they have accumulated. They will say it is to protect the children, but in reality they have cranked their tracking and surveillance up to 11. I am open to being corrected, but this seems dystopian: both the UK verification laws and the AI trac king policy roll outs.
Everyone can see what is coming, but it appears we will give up everything to “protect the children.” One “reasonable” new rule at a time.
> Everyone can see what is coming, but it appears we will give up everything to “protect the children.” One “reasonable” new rule at a time.
Yeah:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
that's not true, consumerism is only growing, people are not giving up anything in that regard.
The planet is getting trashed and 'the children' are doomed.
Individually We try and help, driving less, recycling and so on, but it kinda gets diluted by a billion Chinese moving into the middle-class and burning coal like there's no tomorrow.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals." - CS Lewis
See also: Religion
That quote came from one of his essays on theology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_the_Dock
The dystopia even extends to HN. This was near the top of the front page just half an hour ago, but now it's buried several pages away. Not for discussion, apparently.
I realize it was likely flagged, but burying anything controversial means that only vanilla topics will ever be discussed in any depth.
Yet the engineers who frequent HN and work at big tech companies are the ones who need to know about cases like this the most.
> burying anything controversial means that only vanilla topics will ever be discussed in any depth.
You place too much weight on reading the "front page" .. that's community and mod curated toward the core ethos of the site.
HN has a wealth of ongoing in depth discussion of all manner of things that often don't make "front page", you can see these if you (say) browse or follow new comments or active threads
* https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments
* https://news.ycombinator.com/active
I am a huge fan of your links. Here's another:
https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
More info about this feature from resident cool HN person minimaxir:
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/#secon...
[dead]
[flagged]
What honestly blew my mind was the whole Cookies debate.
- EU introduces law, making thirdparty tracking cookies illegal
- Every advertisement tracker switches to CNAME based first/secondparty cookies
- EU judges decide they are illegal by default, too, without explicit consent
- Google pushes out Federal Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) prototype, and essentially saying they track so much of the internet, they don't even need cookies to get beyond 98% accuracy.
- Nobody on the internet seems to care. Wtf?
I'm not sure that's right. I thought it was:
- Google pushed out FLOC.
- The Internet freaked out.
- Google withdrew FLOC.
Once in a while you should run a host firewall and look at the data that Google Safebrowsing receives.
Thinking Google backs off easily given their history is a pretty naive take on how the world works.
Not to mention the fact that someone would want to cover their entire body and face with tatoos... It points to an underlying social issue; people aren't happy with the body they were born in and/or not getting the attention/validation they need as individuals. Extreme body modification is a symptom of that. I think this struggle to accept one's self has systemic roots. People shouldn't have to go to such lengths to feel special. I suspect related to inequality dynamics and hyper-centralization of attention.
You shouldn't have to be an extreme world-class outlier in any area in order to feel valued. It's ridiculous how everything has become an all-or-nothing deal. This is not healthy.
There's this Deep Space 9 episode called Past Tense.
The crew goes back to 21st century earth to find that being unemployed is illegal and they quickly get put in a ghetto with other indigents.
At one point they're trying to get on the internet (the show was aired in 1995 so they predicted the 21st century internet) but they can't login because you have have a real identity and be a citizen in good standing (so nobody in the ghetto).
It's really the most prescient episode of Star Trek ever made.
If I remember correctly, that time point in those double episodes was a turning point in Start Trek lore that changed Earth's history for the better.
It was a turning point, but Star Trek lore also had Earth go through World War III before things actually got better
And the self-descriptive Eugenics Wars...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_wars
Also probably the most unrealistic. Why would not people in ghetto create their own version of internet? They would have all the resources in a nearest scrapyard you just need gear what works. Then use few stolen IDs to copy the controlled internet and they could have it public just for themselves. Next step would be to connect other ghettos and what is the real internet at this point? The controlled one or this ghetto one where people can create freely without being hindered by the government?
I'm still confused about the purpose behind these laws. Are there still adults stupid enough to think that watching porn will mess a kid up? Because there's now two whole generations of kids who have grown up watching porn (my generation, and the one after). So far younger people don't seem any more fucked up than people were before, only the older people seem to be getting worse.
There's quite a few accounts on here that will argue in good faith and bad faith that people enjoying oral, anal, gay, bi, or any kink has already ruined society, whether it's solely via porn or real life.
The argument usually starts with an assumption that nobody did those things before and it's obvious that life was better before for everyone when those things were viewed as shameful.
Personally I think it's been known for centuries that sex is a pleasurable activity and controlling pleasure is a good way to control people.
Mostly agree, but oral is good.
> Are there still adults stupid enough to think that watching porn will mess a kid up?
This absolutely is a real problem, especially for younger kids. Have you talked to a teacher? Think things like "a kindergartner runs around grabbing teachers' tits and saying "I want to ..." lines you'd expect from a rape work like 50 Shades of Gray. It is neither in the child's interest nor in the interest of society at large to let that happen. And for every case that's as obviously bad as that one, who knows how many come off as creeps or even manage to appear normal from the outside, while suffering the trauma internally?
Remember, the status quo on the Internet is no control at all. Real-world sex businesses aren't allowed to get away with that, why should the Internet be exempt from laws? Just because the government is slow and incompetent to get started doesn't mean we can stick with "self-regulate, aka no regulation at all".
We can argue about exactly what the law should be, and we can argue how it should be implemented, but there absolutely must be something.
What you're talking about is internalized normalization of abuse. The kid was probably molested. Very unfortunate, but these things happen without porn. I'd talk to experts about this rather than assume "porn did it". And in any case, if a kid is behaving like that, you can then educate them on how to behave properly; the same would be true if the kid was punching other kids in the face. (and by the way, the "porn make kids bad" argument was the one used against violent video games years ago; turns out kids don't mimic everything they see in a screen)
If you absolutely must have a barrier to entry, let it be a credit card or other form of payment (everyone likes free porn, but sex work is real work and deserves to be paid). It's something not a lot of kids have access to (a bank account) and you don't have to track people's identities anymore. (Kids can steal their parents' cards but that's on the parents.)
Kid can also cut itself with a knife, let's ban knives, even if it saves one child from getting cut...
Maybe problem is not a knife. Maybe problem are parents who are expecting that state will baby sit their children.
I'm not sure that comparison makes the point you want, here in the UK you already get IDed to buy knives: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sale-of-knives-vo...
Knives are useful. What's the the benefit of porn? Before I discovered porn, I just used my imagination and got the same level of "entertainment" as you now must get from porn.
Porn does harm some people, as it's easy to get addicted to it, and there's a lot of bad things happening on the supply side of it. I'm sure porn has also changed how people behave and what people expect in relationships, but it's hard to study such things. The amount of sex we have has decreased recently. I don't know if it's due to porn, but it'd be worth studying. If sexual satisfaction is easily available, there's less reason to seek the real thing.
It's beyond parents to fix these things, at best they can delay the discovery of porn for a few years, but that doesn't fix anything.
What is a benefit of a video game? People can get addicted on gaming, let's ban it. What is a benefit a of a good steak? It is not healthy, let's ban it.
You don't like stuff other people enjoy and then you will go out of your way with ludicrous excuses to destroy it for others. Like a religious bigot.
Well sure, there's entertainment value. But there's plenty of harmful things that people enjoy that we ban because the entertainment value is not worth the downsides. I enjoy driving very fast, but I'm not allowed to do it (except in very limited areas) because the negative effects outweigh the positive ones.
> Have you talked to a teacher? Think things like
This is just an anecdote with no way to verify it or the cause.
Bad influences come in many forms, and remedies aren't always laws.
Very well said, and true. However, the post the parent was replying to said, "Are there still adults stupid enough to think that watching porn will mess a kid up?", which represents an unreasonable absolute.
Then why has nobody proposed an alternative remedy in all these years?
Sure, a law won't automagically fix everything. But it provides the starting point that almost every individual or group action must rely on.
A lot of people proposed alternative remedies, shitty parents shouldn't let their kids see porn.
(Then of course the trick is that older kids will show porn to younger ones just to mess with them. Of course ID requirements won't fix this.)
> Are there still adults stupid enough to think that watching porn will mess a kid up?
Not only this but there seems to be no one on mainstream platforms putting forward the argument that what will mess kids up is a lack of access to sex education, which the bill also restricts.
The fact that you believe there simply is no argument on the other side regarding porn (not censorship) - implied by the assertion that one must be "stupid" to believe that watching porn can be detrimental for children - is exhausting.
It's that people are so stupid as to ostensibly outsource parental responsibility to a dystopian, dysfunctional government to encroach on the rights of everyone because "think of the children".
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin
>Are there still adults stupid enough to think that watching porn will mess a kid up?
Is there anyone stupid enough to think that it won't?
I started watching in my early teens. It did, in fact, mess me up. I overconsumed, would explore increasingly more intense material for the dopamine hits, and couldn't stop. It fucked years of my life.
That said, these laws are bad and counterproductive. They create more (worse) problems than they solve. What I went through could have been averted if I understood the health impacts and risks. Back then, no one knew, and no one talked about it. I also don't know how representative my particular case was. I endured many years of chronic insomnia, anxiety, self-loathing and depression.
Not sure if youd find me me smart or stupid, but in my immediate experience a youth in my circle was influenced negatively by porn. It won't be every kid, and yes his parents should have watched him, better, but they have little influence over him from the grave.
>So far younger people don't seem any more fucked up than people were before, only the older people seem to be getting worse.
If you look at levels of depression, sexual disfunction the steep drop in relationships and dating among younger people and other metrics you could argue the exact opposite, although obviously there are other factors (social media, ect) in how "messed up" generations are besides the widespread watching of porn by children.
> there are other factors (social media, ect)
"Other factors" is doing a heavy lifting here. I don't have a skin in this game, but politicians are scared to touch the elephant in the room (smartphones + social media), because they know they'll get a flack instantly. I don't think porn consumption among teenage girls are high, yet their depression rates are high as well.
IMO social media is far more damaging than porn
If you go one level up in "abstraction" for what these platforms include, then e.g. Instagram immediately springs to mind. But since they've long since washed their hands, having banned nipples.
No skin in the game here either. I'd agree that smartphones and social media are also very damaging.
>I don't think porn consumption among teenage girls are high, yet their depression rates are high as well.
That isn't what the data says.
>Seventy-three percent of the respondents (75 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls) said they had watched online pornography. The average age they started was 12. Many began younger.
>Seven in 10 who admitted they had watched porn intentionally said they had done so in the past week.
>Four in 10 said they had watched pornography, including nudity and sexual acts, during the school day. Almost half said they had done so on school-owned devices.
>Of those who watched the past week, 80 percent said they had seen “what appears to be rape, choking, or someone in pain.”
>Fewer than half (43 percent) said they had discussed pornography with a trusted adult. (Robb and Mann, 2023).
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/raising-kind-kids/20...
I'm certainly no puritan, but it seems absurd to me to suggest that this early and mostly ubiquitous exposure to (often violent) pornography doesn't have a significant negative effect on the developing minds of children.
Edit: Just to be clear, my contention that children watching pornography is harmful to their development is in no way an endorsement of the crusade to force users to link their IDs to their online accounts under the fig leaf of "protecting children" (the universal trope used to deprive people of their rights).
> had watched online pornography
This is very broad, we both know what "being too much into porn" means. I doubt that an average girl watches as much porn as an average man. And let me put it this way, most of my friends (guys and girls) are far from being puritan. Consumption type between these two groups is significantly different.
But I might be making stuff up. I just think social media is more damaging, because kids start comparing themselves to everyone else. In this case, everyone else became "global everyone else" rather than "local everyone else" (which was the case back in my middle school days). I feel like that's the biggest problem, because you people see what they're missing out on, which is basically unavailable to 99% of population. That simple thought process would bring down any kid.
>I doubt that an average girl watches as much porn as an average man.
If you are talking about men and women, perhaps that is true. I'm not of the opinion that watching pornography as an adult matters much one way or the other once your psyche is fully developed. The original OP regarded children and their development, and the study I cited was taken among children aged 13-17. These aren't my numbers, this is a peer-reviewed study.
>Seven in 10 who admitted they had watched porn intentionally said they had done so in the past week.
>Seventy-three percent of the respondents (75 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls) said they had watched online pornography. The average age they started was 12. Many began younger.
I also think social media is more damaging to children, but it isn't a zero sum game. With or without social media, I don't see how anyone can credibly argue that child exposure to (often extremely violent) hardcore pornography isn't a contributing negative factor.
The UK seems terrible at this whole "free society" thing.
I don't think that being a free society is a core "civilizational virtue" for the British in the same sense that it is for Americans, or even, say, the French.
They never have been one.
> The UK seems terrible at this whole "free society" thing.
Did you mean "Airstrip One"?
Which of course is from a British novel arguing in favour of free society with the dystopia based on Stalinism and nazi Germany.
> The King of Ink Land, who is now considering using a VPN, …
> At the moment, he feels stuck with no clear solution.
Hm.
The havoc this idiotic law will bring is about to snowball.
The UK has always been obsessed with controlling what they deem "indecent behavior". The rich have always been able to ignore this and the poor have always been forced to pick up the tab.
You think members of the government are entering their ID before going to pornhub? Not a chance. They are all circumventing this system themselves while endorsing it in public.
If he were buying liquor at a gas station, I wonder how many employees would mistake him for a child and insist on age verifying him.
Clearly drawing this much on your face is the act of a child.
>newly rolled out age-checks for p*rn sites
This website doesn't even want to say "porn" out loud.
It's kinda pathetic that this news outlet literally self-censors the word 'porn'. I've noticed that some of the loudest online moral entrepreneurs crowing about freedom of speech are also the quickest to self-censor and demand others do the same.
As for the story itself, it's depressing but sadly unsurprising that the whole population of the UK seems to accept being infantilized in this fashion in a country notorious for letting politically well-connected people evade any consequences for actual sex abuse.
That poor man...
To think of so many difficult problems a person in the first world has to deal with…
I mean...if the system accommodated that appearance it would have been one of the best designed systems in the world. There are a lot of edge cases here.
Welcome to government work - that dude’s not an edge case, he’s a constituent.
Moreover, I've known a few people with extensive facial scarring due to burns. I suspect that they're treated the same as this guy, but the story isn't nearly as "fun."
Imagine needing to say p*rn when reporting on this
A rather famous cryptographer has a last name of Pornin. I wonder how often his name trips filters.
Yes, this is a very weird development for a millennial like me. I think this is a GenZ/Gen Alpha thing born out of steep surveillance enforced by the policies of streaming services chatrooms and TikTok. It really seems like the younger generation has really kowtoked to advertisers and self censor words I would consider benign. It honestly disgusts me.
Not necessarily, it's desirable for articles to be accessible from work and corporate firewalls, and lists of banned words exist. This was already the case before streaming services or TikTok existed.
I think the existence of a corporate firewall filtering words like "porn", or any word actually, is part of the steep surveillance he's talking about.
I understood what he claimed, but it's neither a GenZ/Gen Alpha thing, nor did it start with streaming services or TikTok.
Late GenZ and GenA censorship is to substitute the word entirely -- porn is "corn", dead is "unalive", ass becomes "ahh", sex worker is "accountant".
Asterisking is old-fashioned.
Those are, as I undersand, mostly TikTok-isms (designed around actual and perceived TikTok censorship) more than generational patterns that have escaped (but somewhat attenuated) to other contexts ("unalive" is particularly common in other social media, the rest not so much.)
> sex worker is "accountant"
The others are understandable enough, but what's up with this one?
Its substituting a job you can't talk about without risking repercussions on some platforms with one you can. I don't think its a lot deeper than that, and that the substitution is essentially arbitrary (though I do think it was chosen because it has an extreme opposite social valence, with accountant being among the jobs with the most laced-up, boring, vanilla perception available.)
Punctuation, numbers-for-letters (L337) and strategic misspellings are also your friend.
Too bad the self censoring is really making censoring harder.
I love that "pdf file" is used in place of pedophile.
This really kind of highlights that not only is the “age check system” not at all about children, it is also about conditioning the adults into total control.
If it were about children then it would be the children that would need to be restricted from accessing the open internet, not adults of legal age who are supposed to have the rights needing to gain access to their inalienable rights … at least in America.
I also want to protect children from pornography, especially since I know people who have been deeply harmed by it, but it should be that any device that is for or used by children, people with curtailed and subordinate rights, are restricted by white-lists, not the other way around.
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Could not he just use heavy makeup?
Do you really see this as a reasonable thing to ask this person to do, just to prove their age to a robot?
As a reasonable thing to ask a citizen to do? No.
As a reasonable form of civil disobedience? No - better to use Garry's Mod or whatever to bypass it entirely.
It is beyond reasonable to put on so much tattoo on the face. (How did he go through all that pain)
If tā moko strikes you as painful you're not ready for women's moko kauae tattoos on the lips.
https://www.newzealand.com/int/feature/ta-moko-maori-tattoo/
You expect this guy to spend time putting on makeup every time he wants to crank his hog?
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