[gkfasdfasdf]

I understand the HN crowd may take issue with this, but the ease at which a child can stumble onto pornography or adult content is really scary. Even with google safe search, etc enabled. Growing up watching television in the US, you couldn't see topless women on public broadcast TV, let alone hardcore pornography.

[mywittyname]

Parents have lots of tools to prevent children from accessing harmful content.

Government-mandated filters are the worst way to tackle this problem. It gives parents a false sense of security, and everyone will focus on bypassing it. So all the parents think their kids are "protected" when they aren't, since every kid has a friend who can show them how to bypass it. And then it kills the industry because everyone is forced to use the government-monopoly program, so there's no incentive to innovate.

[gkfasdfasdf]

The problem is there are no good tools to filter internet content. They are a) imperfect and b) filter out lots of perfectly good content or breaking parts of the web. Using twitter with the Google safe search dns for example is a pain, certain image hosting domains are blocked all together.

It seems there is really no strong disincentive for sites to censor themselves or be amenable to censoring.

Surprisingly though, reddit seems to actually be leading the way with stricter nsfw tagging and requiring login to enable. Maybe a trend others will follow.

[darkwizard42]

Yes, sure, I understand the concern of having children be protected from things they aren't ready for...

...but is the government mandating this the best way to go about it? Is this implementation even sound?

[Mertax]

What's the alternative? There seem to be obvious negative externalities which the promulgating industries seem disincentivized to address...seems to be a legitimate basis for government intervention.

*Not necessarily agreeing with the proposed solution here of a mandated approach. Just saying that this may be a situation where government intervention is necessary even if it's just to sponsor public education of options that parents have to protect children.

[darkwizard42]

The alternative is to take advantage of tools already out on the market developed privately to help people lock down and filter content from the internet. Content and privacy filters have been out forever...use those instead of the government heavy handedly imposing something.

My opinion (and strictly an opinion) is if diverse types of information are more readily available you can either lock down your child's access to that information OR you can prepare them for what they might encounter. Separately its also good to guide them on access and responsible use of the world's knowledge (good, bad, moral, immoral) which is literally at their fingertips

[x86ARMsRace]

It's additionally odd given that the GOP is (allegedly) the party of "personal responsibility" . You would think this translates to expecting parents to supervise children, rather than have "government interference" do it for you. Regardless of what you think of the law, it's effective at highlighting that the GOP isn't really the "small government" folks that pundits want to make them out to be.

[lallysingh]

I have filters for my kids at home. They block a lot more than smut. I'm the parent, and the government has no business here. There's no good definition for what this is, and there are a lot of things I'd consider not smut that I can imagine a virtue-signalling Utah politician calling smut. Like regular beaches. I remember talking heads complaining about some types of bikinis when I was young.

More importantly, this is the government controlling what we can see. If something's blocked that's not porn, say about Utah politicians, how will Utah citizens know? It's honestly unlikely that people in other states will make a fuss.

[Pet_Ant]

...because in most of the rest of the world you could and the internet made the world flat. Don't worry, if the last couple of years are anything to go by they fared much better.

[ReactiveJelly]

Sure, children exist.

How will it affect adults? Are they trying to make a list of registered porn watchers?

Why isn't it left to parents to teach their kids about using porn safely?

I don't like this censorship. It's very 1984-ish. This is where it crosses the line from "Twitter, a private company, won't let terrorists plan acts of terror on their private website" to "The government wants you to be embarrassed for liking sex."

[scrollaway]

> Growing up watching television in the US, you couldn't see topless women on public broadcast TV, let alone hardcore pornography.

Yes, and look how the US turned out. Immensely sexually repressed, zero sex ed in many states, and throwing a fit any time they see people who don't fit their perfect idea of what a couple looks like.

Ask yourself why you're so scared children might find porn.

[nexthash]

I'd say it is the responsibility of parents and users of digital services to protect themselves, not the government's. When the government imposes such a rule on everything unilaterally, there are two consequences:

1. It sets a precedent for future "regulatory creep": if we can force tech companies to filter porn, why not filter other things? Who will stop us?

2. When the government makes a law, it impacts everything. There is no discretion, because everyone is under equal risk of liability if the law is violated. What would the consequences of this be for modelling, legitimate sexual services, and other fields? Would the damage this does be amplified by how it meshes with other laws? There is so much ambiguity that making such a sweeping and damaging action will have reverberative consequences everywhere that nobody thought of beforehand.

[vinger]

I remember all of the late night movies with breasts showing.

It's a little scary they are all gone from tv.

Back then you could see some hardcore stuff at the corner store if you reached up to the nudity mags.

I remember the nudity cards.. the older ones where the women had hair everywhere.

Kinda of sad everything is repressed to a point where nothing is shown anymore but people are still worried that nudity and sex will jump out at your kids and scare them.

[mzkply]

Growing up in Europe and Quebec, there was (is) softcore on public broadcast TV.