Parents can protect their children. Source: I’m a parent. My kids haven’t seen porn and can’t access the internet. This doesn’t affect the free exchange of ideas that my fellow countrymen enjoy.
Governments getting involved absolutely, unequivocally will be used to clamp down on the free exchange of ideas.
That wasn't the point i was asking for an argument for. What I wanted to know is how age verification is worse then allowing children to watch porn. To make that argument.
> Source: I’m a parent. My kids haven’t seen porn and can’t access the internet.
Are they above the age of 16? Because then you're either Amish or out of touch.
If you want the logical approach; the premise you're suggesting you want people to argue from is faulty.
The argument kicks in at a slightly deep level. Age verification is unrelated to allowing children to watch porn. Someone needs to make an argument showing that age verification would lead to blocking porn, and that argument seems to be impossible to make (age verification is a much lighter standard than the bans on torrent websites, for example, and torrenting is still as easy as it ever was). To block kids viewing porn there'd need to be a - probably global - system of censorship that exerts total control over what people can POST and GET on the internet. The likes of which we have not yet seen and would likely have catastrophically negative political consequences.
Age verification will be implemented as identity identification. And that means anything you read or write or watch or say will be tied to your identity, registered by the government and other organizations, and used against you as an individual.
Do you understand now? Or will you only understand when you get fired from your job and they won't tell you the reason?
> Age verification will be implemented as identity identification.
Thank you for bringing an argument.
I want to start by tackling your argument head on. What if it's not though. What if it's implemented by attestation and signatures rooted at your local national government? Nobody will be able to tie whatever you watch or write to your identity, because they won't have it. To my understanding, that's what's proposed here, and that won't feasibly lead to any of the spooky consequences you're predicting.
There's another leg to it also. "anything you read or write or watch or say will be tied to your identity" is already true right now. Google is already, at this second, tracking my every move online and using it against me in a targeted advertisement campaign to change my spending habits, but my political affiliations too. If you're truly afraid of that outcome, I believe there are much more prescient and immediate things you should oppose than this.
There are ways to do age verification without tying your identity to the content. A site could direct you through a proxy to the government's eID server with simply the request whether you're over 18. Because it's going through an anonymising proxy, the government has no idea what site you're visiting. You login to your eID, which confirms or denies that you're over 18. The porn site only knows what porn was watched and that the person watching is over 18. The proxy only knows someone was visiting the porn site at that particular time. The government knows who you are and that you were visiting a site at that time, but not which site.
I don't understand why porn is such a problem and an excuse. There is so much genuinely horrifying stuff on the internet - including gore, pictures and videos of all kinds of abuse, but the problem is always with people having sex on camera for money...
>I don't understand why porn is such a problem and an excuse.
Because porn is the most taboo things in public, even if a lot of people use it at home. Nobody will come and defend liberal porn access because then everyone will call you a gooner or a pedo. It'll probably be the end of your political debate.
Which means porn access can be weaponized without any political opposition. It's the perfect scapegoat to remove online anonymity disguised as "age verification".
Yes, I agree, my point was more about why is sex such a taboo, when there are things out there, that are genuinely worse. But I guess it's a bit too wide of a topic to have a productive discussion.
I think the important part is that parents talk with their children about the nature of porn. It's unavoidable that they're going to run into it at some point, and I think it's important that they understand that's not what real sex is like.
I did catch my son watching porn when he was 13. We talked about it, I blocked some stuff at my router (hardly comprehensive, but mostly to make it easy to avoid the thing he was watching), and then stopped worrying about it. He's 17 now. I'm sure he knows how to find it if he wants it, but I also trust he's able to interpret it responsibly. He seems like a well-adjusted kid. I worry more about his gaming addiction, but it doesn't seem to be interfering with school anymore.
I don't have kids yet, but I remember what it was like as a teen. Now from the perspective of the adult, all that stuff about how porn supposedly damages young person's view of what real sex is like was exaggerated. In fact, porn ended up being a pretty decent educational experience for me. Definitely filled the gaps that the "responsible education" left behind. On the other hand, as a young boy I saw some very drastic self-harm pictures online and it's been with me since - almost 30 years later I still remember.
re: gaming addiction - my parents were obsessed with me being "addicted". Now, as an adult, I don't care about games anymore. Everything I have I owe to computer skills and English. What my parents didn't want to see (or couldn't?) was that at the time games were the only interesting thing to do. We were glued to the screens mostly because everything else sucked.
You're the one that needs to argue the presence of harm, given you're the one arguing we need to create a surveillance dragnet to shield certain age groups of humans from witnessing how their species procreates.
The default state is that humans procreate via sexual reproduction. You need to argue why we need to take action to hide this, especially given we let children witness other far more brutal activities from the human species like violence.
The argument I am asking him to make is the one about how age verification is "much worse" than "allowing children to watch porn".
If your argument in favor of that is that watching porn isn't harmful to children, then I don't understand what all that superfluous waffling about china is doing in there.
Surely someone claiming it's arguable should be willing to make that argument.
For me it's not that it's reproduction. Film that shows sex is not an issue as I see it and I don't know anyone that has developed serious addictions to sex in Hollywood film. However I know several people, family members included, that have absolutely obliterated their childhoods and early adult years by becoming addicted to porn. They were groomed by adults online from a young age and, although their parents tried to stop it, kids are sneakier and they got around it, exposing themselves to some truly dark things. It is not easy for families to recover from having dealt with a child with serious addiction issues.
I think it's pretty silly to argue that systemic protections are ineffective and overreach whereas the efforts of one or two parents should be enough and are the correct level of enforcement for the protection of children. The parents of the people I know went to extremes to protect their children and they were mostly unsuccessful.
Sounds like the people you describe were outliers with some preexisting conditions, and probably shouldn't be used as any sort of baseline or point of comparison.
Just to add my perspective, I am one of those outliers who is still going to therapy for porn/sex addiction that started in adolescence. Age verification wouldn't have helped me because addiction wasn't my main or only issue - I also had significant sources of stress owing to my upbringing. I could have just as easily been addicted to drugs or alcohol because of those stressors, or used a VPN. Either way I needed some form of stress relief beyond what any teen ought to need, and those were the options I saw.
Combination of abuse and unfettered access to drinks/drugs/Internet is way worse than either one alone. At the same time I think the issue of bad parenting is a) not one people talk about out loud because of stigma (we can attack tech CEOs all day for pushing addictive products but anyone can become a parent and none of them will stand to be called the "bad" one) and b) not amenable to much change save for a global in-house surveillance panopticon. Yes we can choose to place trust in parents to protect children from Instagram and PornHub, but consider that some parents just... won't. Neither can we force them to. What then?
I wouldn't think that since people who don't suffer from these issues outnumber those who do suffer, that makes this not a real issue. Consider the victims of opiate addiction, alcoholism, or sex trafficking. Are those situations so fundamentally different? How many people does one have to know with tragic childhoods for it to be a problem that people take seriously?
Governments getting involved absolutely, unequivocally will be used to clamp down on the free exchange of ideas.