Porn age checks - Surely a good thing?

Kids will do peer to peer and share over WhatsApp. This happened to my then 11yo (over the pandemic) she got banned from having a phone for years. So no, I don’t think they’ll work anyway.

No one with any sense is going to plug their details into a porn site. Age verification means that databases containing or processing this information will be targeted and frankly those sites weren't trustworthy to start with.

Sidestepping it is easy, is the point I'm trying to make. It takes seconds but does require you to use software that hides your point of origin. Pretty much any child old enough to be remotely curious will be able to do it but doing that will put them in close proximity to other unsavoury and unsafe materials.

I'd rather just supervise my kids than have them twatting about trying to access the deep Web. Luckily I've only got one old enough to be interested and I keep a close watch on his activities.

Not entirely accurate re UK being only country with this restriction , Australia has much tougher rules, as for driving porn underground, will it? If you want to watch porn and for an adult that’s a personal choice and not illegal( mostly), then the age verification isn’t difficult, doesn’t cost and won’t really stop them, hopefully what it will stop is those who shouldn’t be accessing it doing so, but be honest, kids accessed porn long before the internet, it’s just become easier and the content far more graphic

I think parents actively parenting their own children is the way forward.

Internet access should be supervised. I never accessed anything inappropriate because our computer was in the lounge and I could have been caught. Restrict and supervise childrens usage. This is your job.

Any child over about 10 is going to be perfectly capable of circumventing the block in minutes. ISP blocks are not going to happen because it would mean blocking legal traffic too.

The web is worldwide. Its just the UK that has this restriction. The Internet cannot and will not revolve around the whims of incompetent UK parents.

Age verification is already failing. It took me about 2 minutes to become irritated with it and bypass it.

All that will happen is it will drive porn and other adult material underground or into the deep web and minors will turn to the likes of Tor to access it. Believe me, that is by no means, safer.

@jasflowers I just googled cute pussy pictures, pictures readily on display, no age verification on several pages.

If those images were banned, how would it be possible for young people to know what genitalia looks like apart from trying to imagine it from medical textbooks?

Yes good point but this is why i and plenty of others against children accessing porn, think blocking at the ISP level is the way forward.

I just googled cute pussy pictures, pictures readily on display, no age verification on several pages.

Well put. I could not agree more.

Fairly recently there were various images of children being sexually abused on mumsnet, they were visible for a significant amount of time. Even more worrying is that MN encouraged users to share the content ffs.

Due to the way the net is set it accessing innapropropriate material isn’t actually that difficult, it wouldn’t be that unusual for a child with poor parents to search something fairly innocent that could bring up porn sites, cute pussy for example.

So are you questioning the sample size and claiming the actual sample size used is not statistically reliable?

Also care to post which cited source of information the papers author used is not correct or you dispute? FYI all scientific papers use cited sources 🙄.

Also what are your opinions on the actual subject of the thread and do you think that the use of VPNs does not negate the implementation of these measures, if not why not?

@skymagentatwo You've literally googled an answer.

What does the paper actually say? Rather than the abstract? They say they used only 1392 people in this survey, that was gathered from a third party. It includes written stuff too? Hardly conclusive...

It's interesting that you talk of censorship by bringing in Tavistock when Banning Adult Content often harms and blocks spaces designed to HELP LGBTQ+ people rather than attack them

You're making the blocking at isp level sound more effective than it is. It isn't 100%

Even with the intro of age verification we're seeing, this will be a long road as we deal with the issue of vpns, and as we find sites that aren't classified as porn, contain porn.

I'm referring to services like steam, xbox etc which are shockingly aimed mostly at children and regularly contain porn..of varying weirdness.

And no amount of 'family safety' settings will block, because filters seem only to hide images if the publisher of the photo marked it as 'adult'..which they don't always.
And removal of the photo takes someone to report the image.. So it's often visible for a good few weeks.
Then the uploader/publisher account is deactivated, and they create a new account to start again.

I've complained multiple times to Microsoft, but the long and short of it is that the parent should be watching their child at all times when on xbox.
OK, that's fine.. But don't lull parents into a false sense of security with parental controls that don't live up to their promises.
Sometimes I spend time reporting images, but it's futile.

Ebay is another culprit.

I'm not sure how it can be dealt with, other than introducing a system where website users can report porn images on sites that aren't age verified, and it fines the website host heavily enough for them to be more proactive about checking the content they host.

On the other side:
I admit that the definition of harmful content is always changing and there's definitely a censorship risk
E.g would discussion around the trans debate have needed you to verify your id via bank details?. And would that have meant a lot of people wouldn't have entered the discussion for fear of repercussions?
Perhaps the Tavistock stuff would never have reached the conclusion it did (that it harmed children) if it hadnt had the level of discussion it had because people felt safer to air their views in anonymity.

Data leaks seem commonplace too

Overall I do feel like kids accessing porn is harmful enough that anyone who's content is wrongly blocked behind a age verification wall should be ok with the ability to appeal the decision and get the restriction removed.
Perhaps receiving compensation for any losses.

Ultimately, if all methods of circumventing the new rules were cut off.. Then the removal of porn from society (perhaps dying out, because no one wants to verify) would be a good thing for both porn consumers and porn products.

The report I saw about this law said that 19% of teenage boys and 11% of teenage girls had viewed porn online

That paper included “written porn” in its definition of porn (which it says women are much likely to use than men).

There’s a massive difference between viewing hardcore videographic porn online which inevitably includes women being raped and trafficked, and someone reading written fanfic or a smutty book picked up at Waterstones.

Science paper any good for you?

"Using all modalities of pornography, 91.5% of men and 60.2% of women herein reported having consumed pornography in the past month."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30358432/

I disagree with it on principle. Adults should be able to access adult content while still having their privacy.

Protecting children from adult content is the job of their parents. Any teen with 2 brain cells to rub together will simply use a VPN. If their parents are not technology literate then it's their responsibility to learn. They can use an ISP block, simply by calling their provider. They could install parental controls on devices.

I don't much fancy giving my card details to some random, sketchy site tbh.

Anyone who doesn’t use porn lives in a “sad little hole”? That’s projection.

I don’t see where I said it’s wrong to masturbate? I pointed out that masturbating to something you wish you weren’t viewing, reinforces the urge to keep viewing it.

Do you have proof of your assertion that most women use porn?

It's not even porn I'm concerned about but well done on showing how the issue is being simplified beyond what is the actual problem

I’ve just seen someone on Reddit say they used a stock example of a drivers license and it was accepted as a form of ID verification, so that appears to be another way round it! It hasn’t been thought through very well at all.

I was an occasional porn user until I worked in a role with vulnerable women, some of whom had been in the porn industry. Their stories were heartbreaking. I have never accessed porn again, and never will. It’s about being aware.

The problem is that it is not the same because when you get age verified for alcohol at a pub they don't store your data.

Laws always have consequences.

Here the question is, does the benefit gained (stopping kids accessing porn) outweigh the consequence (that someone might have their data stolen).

In a situation where the benefit gained is high, people might be willing to pay the consequence.

But here the benefit gained is low, because the access checks can easily be circumvented and the checks will be ineffectual.

So people have to take the consequence for undertaking what is (for better or worse) a perfectly legal activity, and get little or no benefit for doing so as a result of crap policy.

I think it's a great way to gather blackmail material and another overreach.

If teens want to access porn they will one way or another!

I disagree age verification is only putting in place something that should have been there all along. Parents should still be actively monitoring their kid activity online and devices as well as talking to them about and taking action to block content and access to apps like VPN's.

Its a truly ridiculous statement to suggest that age verification is pointless because some kids will find away around it. You know some kids are still able to access alcohol and nicotine products so do you also advocate that we just remove all restrictions for those as well?

You sound like he man in the BBC debate article, more concerned that adult porn users will be inconvenienced than the harms done to children by unfettered access.