@MargaritaPie
Q for Tom- You are in favour of the age verification thing to try to prevent under 18s looking at porn. Have you anything to say about the fact VPNs and TOR are common knowledge amongst young people now?
As well as the fact what the Government is proposing for the age verification actually requires porn sites to comply and to adjust their site to allow this. Given that there must be tens or hundreds of thousands of porn sites all over the world, they aren't all going to entertain the UK Government. What do we do about all those?
And how would we stop people from sharing porn on forums, or p2p networks, or email/social networking etc?
Hi all, thank you very much for your support on this issue, and for engaging critically with the topic. The above question is a fair one
@MargaritaPie - thank you for asking.
For those who aren't familiar Age Verification was a Government policy contained within Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act, that would have required porn sites to have a form of age verification technology to prevent underage users accessing the sites. Despite the DEA receiving Royal Assent in and of itself, Part 3 was never actually implemented. Without boring you all to tears dealing with the intricacies of Judicial Reviews, there are questions about whether the Government were allowed to not implement this. But in any case, it wasn't implemented, and the upcoming Online Safety Bill (formerly Online Harms Bill) will expressly repeal Part 3 and take that version of AV off the table permanently. So at the moment, the only upcoming regulation will be the OSB, and I personally foresee major issues with that as well, although too extensive to go into here. Anyway, in response to the above question...
First and foremost, AV was never meant to be a silver bullet. It was portrayed as this in the media (as well as being called a "porn ban", which it obviously wasn't). It should be viewed as one piece of the puzzle, in dealing with issues arising from an industry that is currently wildly unregulated.
Whilst I take your point that many people know how to use VPNs etc, equally, what we are seeing within the sector is many young children accidentally stumbling onto these websites, where they wouldn't otherwise be able to if there was a "barrier" (such as AV) in place to initially prevent it. Of course, many young people will continue and find work arounds, but equally, many won't.
The question regarding the global nature of porn sites is a tricky one - you are right that many sites won't entertain the UK Gov, but this is part of a larger conversation that I/CEASE/other organisations are currently having on a global scale. Again, it's about chipping away at an industry that has thus far acted with impunity due to very little legal oversight.
The upcoming Online Safety Bill has afforded an opportunity for us to change the conversation about how people perceive the harms related to porn (more on this in a couple of months hopefully!), but again, it's a work in progress and will require long term strategising and international co-ordination.
Regarding p2p, emails etc - there are many factors at play here. Firstly, we want to see a change in the way people are allowed to upload adult content (again, this will become clearer in a month or so when I can gladly update you in more detail); this will theoretically change the flow of information in terms of the type of content that can be shared at all, as opposed to just vast quantities of unregulated, anonymous content.
Secondly, these larger social media sites need to implement more robust mechanisms to detect/prevent adult content being shared where kids may also be present (eg, Facebook etc). This is a bona fide child protection issue, and not - as some critics like to say - a "moralising" about "icky nudity". Children are suffering enormous psychological and emotional damage from being able to access porn from increasingly younger ages. So when the issue is couched in that type of language, it suddenly becomes extremely unattractive for social media companies not to do something to tackle it, because the alternative is a tacit complicity in propagating extremely harmful and exploitative content. Again, this type of thing isn't a silver bullet, but one part of a larger puzzle.
I hope that provides some answers/clarity around these issues. Thanks for taking the time to engage.