[mildmotive]

You can’t expect parents in this day and age to have the ability to protect their children from this material where smartphones are owned by almost everyone with unlimited internet access. When something becomes a wide societal problem then using the arm of the state can become a valid option to mitigate the issue. This is not about parenting grown-ups, this is about helping parents fix something that they can’t fix themselves at an individual level.

If a grown-up really wants to watch porn, they can use a VPN. It’s not hard, no ID is needed. By adding a hurdle for children to access this material we can protect them from getting harmed by it at a young age. I think setting up a VPN is a small price to pay for if it means increasing the average age of exposure to porn.

[a4a4a4a4]

We can't expect a grown-up to set up content filters on a child's devices because it's too complicated, but we _can_ expect them to setup a VPN on their own device, and also determine what a trusted VPN provider/application looks like? The group of people who _can_ use a VPN yet _can't_ set up parental controls doesn't exist.

There's even a super nice support article on how to do it all, from Apple: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201304

And if you're talking about kids using other devices which a parent doesn't have control over: well, supervise your kids, build a good relationship with them, ask what they're doing with their friends and try to make sure their parents are on the same page.

The amount of pearl-clutching like this in this thread is shocking. The entire world doesn't need to be a plush-lined playpen for children.

[zirgs]

How would you supervise your kid when he's at school but you're at work? How could you prevent a classmate showing him porn?

Back when I was a kid I had no way to access extreme porn. Porn mags were quite tame compared to modern porn sites where pretty much anything goes.

[a4a4a4a4]

You don’t prevent it, simple. Adding invasive privacy measures that apply to all adults won’t stop the kid who wants to find porn and show it to other kids on his phone. We found ways around the content blockers at school all the time.

[zirgs]

Extreme porn can be found too easily. It wasn't like that when I was a kid. There were no ways around it. We simply could not even think of all the disgusting fetishes that are only a few clicks away nowadays.