All such laws fail to appreciate one key point - if little Timmy wants titties, little Timmy is going to move heaven and earth to get them.
Credit card for id? Sorry mum, the call of the boobies was too great.
Scanned photo id? Sorry dad, just borrowing your license - you understand.
Facial age estimation? Time to buy a grandpa facerig and voice morph with my pocket money!
On the upside, the next generation is going to be very very very tech literate, for necessity is the mother of invention. Sadly, they’re also likely to be into some dark shit as only non-conforming sites are easily accessible.
This is a really terrible idea and you touched on why, mainstream websites that aren’t compliance with the law do things like make sure there’s no children on their website and other such things but on regulated sites who the fuck knows what’s going on and I don’t even want to find out. It also can’t restrict someone who’s younger finding an adult will verify it and have a place, which could lead them to some dark places if they’re looking for an adult who would Age verify for them on a porn website, or even just any social space online now
Going off the headline alone… wouldn’t that imply that people aren’t using VPNs to watch porn? If they were, the porn sites wouldn’t be seeing a decline. Anyway, just a random nitpick… carry on…
EDIT: Ok, I’m just realizing that the site may only be seeing the same VPN IP address for like 50 people at a time. Sorry, forgot my CCNA.
Please read the article. It answers all your questions.
They’re probably also showing up as non-uk addresses because UK address and points would be just as horrible as coming out in Iran or somewhere like that
Next up: “Why VPNs are ruining our lives/children and how this next law will ban them. Don’t worry, only bad people have something to hide!”
As can be seen in Michigan.
I wonder if that isn’t exactly the goal behind all this shit.
Yes. Anything to extract more data from us and sell it
The UK isn’t doing so well, when did it become so ultra authoritarian as to overtake Russia? Even number of arrests for social media comments online?
Capitalists are doing a way of democracy and implementing outright fascism because nothing short of that will be able to maintain the extreme levels of wealth inequality that we have now and continue to accelerate
There are more cctv cameras per sq mile in the UK than China
It’s absolutely a surveillance state
Doesn’t china have massive deserts that no one lives in? Doesn’t seem like a great comparison
So you can do things and go places more often in china without being tracked
We are allowed to notice dystopian tendencies in western governments as well
China has twice as many cameras per person than the UK
See this here u/Jhex, this is a comparison that makes sense because it is a criticism of the “surveillance state” by comparing numbers of CCTV cameras between a parliamentary democracy with free and fair elections and an authoritarian state which does not and highlights that whilst one has much more political freedoms they both have a large surveillance state apparatus and you’d expect one of them to have a smaller one.
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Please explain how the UK is now more authoritarian than Russia; a country that rigs elections, disappears/assassinates political opposition, and invades neighbouring sovereign nations to ethnically cleanse them?
so you want to wait until it beats Russia in all authoritarian metrics before acknowledging the problem?
No, I think we can acknowledge the problems surrounding digital ID, the surveillance state, prosecuting whistleblower journalists who leak classified information, and many other problematic policies and institutions WITHOUT resorting to a rediculous comparison and insane hyperbole.
so being half way into authoritarianism is “insane hyperbole”?
I have yet to see UK election officials being caught on CCTV stuffing ballet boxes.
I have yet to see the Police arresting people for being gay in public.
I have yet to see the BBC be handed notes live on air and completely change the narrative around an ongoing war.
So yeah, the original comment saying “the UK is more authoritarian than Russia” is insane hyperbole.
Ironically, your comment about the UK being halfway to as authoritarian as somewhere like Russia is more interesting as we can get into the details as how they are currently similar and how much further the UK would have to slide to be there, and presumably how to stop it.
again, so you want to see all the boxes ticked before you call a spade a spade?.. not a great strategy but you do you
I have yet to see the Police arresting people for being gay in public.
No, but there is this:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9vrjkev802o
I have yet to see the BBC be handed notes live on air and completely change the narrative around an ongoing war.
No, but there is this:
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/64534/how-the-government-captured-the-bbc
And so what’s your threshold for calling a spade a spade? Is a trowel a spade? Is a spoon a spade? Is a flat bit of wood a spade?
Do you understand the concept of neuance or shades of grey or do you doggedly stick to black and white?
Must be blissfull to see the world with strict category boundaries and be willingly ignorant of anything on a spectrum that doesn’t fit into your nice and neat categories.
Not my thing, but you do you boo.
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Palestine Action is a terror group. They committed violent terror acts against the UK and got designated as such in response. It doesn’t matter if you’re a senile 83 year old woman, it’s still illegal to support a terror group.
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Wtf is that “prospect magazine” link? Looks like some weird anti-jew conspiracy website. I really hope you don’t get your news from places like that.
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Yes, and then ideally wait some more while i masturbate about the problem. And ideally bit more until i die of old age sucking this sweet delicious boot.
I mean, the UK invented invading and ethnic cleansing.
Pretty sure that was being done for millennia before the UK was around. The UK itself suffered multiple invasions and genocides before the empire was a thing.
mmm my favorite game of pass the genocide buck
maybe because its being pushed by russia
Russia? You think Russia is the reason why the UK, Australia, and other countries’ left-wing governments are all forcing digital identification verification laws?
The right often uses dirty tricks to force a “moral high ground” moment or similar from leftists. Other times said “left-wing” movements are actually liberals trying to win over right-wing voters due to some mythical past event. Yet other times leftists are not safe from the fallacies of conservatism.
It has nothing to do with “conservatism” or “right-wing”. It’s the left wing parties that are leaning more and more towards socialism/communism preparing for what communism always turns into - authoritarian, fascist, dictatorships with a ruling class and a poor class with nothing in between.
Basically every left-wing government in the world at the moment is starting to implement “hate speech laws” that define hate speech as “speech that we, the government, don’t like”, trying to get rid of encryption so they can catch and prosecute people who say bad things about them (see hate speech), and implement digital IDs so they can track everything everyone says/visits/buys and can essentially destroy your life if you don’t obey them, by revoking your access to your bank account, phone, internet, health care, etc via your digital ID.
Ironically enough, the USA is one of the only countries in the world going the other way - trying to reduce government size and dependence, defending free speech, and just getting the government out of the way in general.
I think it’s time there is something like a mainstream TOR and a commercial internet. I hate the censorship but watching the kids get mind fucked is hard to watch.
I mean, isn’t that first part exactly what the legislation was about? They want to ban porn and make people angry and desperate for a revolution. They’re removing the circuses to go along with the removing the bread thanks to SNAP and other funds being frozen. They absolutely must want a violent revolution.
You’re talking about America, which has nothing to do with the UK doing this.
This is about the UK.
And no, it wasn’t about banning porn. You can listen to politicians and ordinary people talk about it and both are generally in favour for the same reason: making it harder for children to access porn, specifically.
They’re lying to you. It’s 100% a porn ban
It’s 100% a porn ban
It’s 100% a play to have positive ID on every single user of megacorp sites so they can be surveilled and controlled.
The best actions are the ones that fulfill more than one goal.
And moving on from this, you’re gonna be amazed at what they can define as “sexually explicit material”
They’re already openly being anti LGBT with it so the slippery slope is 90°
How do you know?
There’s no such big religious movement in the UK, so where would that even come from?
It’s international. It doesn’t need to be based in England.
England
Jeez.
Anyway, I’ll not be watching a random YouTube video but if you have a written link that explains how British MPs are influenced by this international cabal or whatever, I’ll read it.
These people are in too deep.
Oh, if they say so then it must be the true. Politicians would never hide their true intentions to make their policies more appealing.
If you want people to believe it’s a different motive then provide some reason to believe that? Noone has.
There exists e.g. religious people who think porn is a sin. Saying you’d want to ban porn because it’s a sin would alienate potential voters. Therefore, they can simply take the “think of the children!” position which is a classic approach and that sounds much more appealing while still restricting access for everyone (who wants their identity associated with their porn history? Data leaks happen all the time).
Similarly, (depending on political climate) far right politicians can’t openly spout hate about foreigners since it would alienate some voters. Yet, time after time they’re revealed to have been doing it e.g. when they thought they were anonymous.
Of course you can’t know someone’s true intention, but assuming that people won’t lie and anything said by them is undoubtedly true unless somehow proven false is a bit naive.
Those people do exist, but almost none of them exist in the UK. So what reason do we have to believe that this applies to UK politicians?
Look at it this way: you yourself understand that “think of the children” is a popular (summary of a) position among the public. And you agree that “porn is a sin that must be banned” is an unpopular opinion.
So what reason do you have to think that MPs believe the unpopular opinion more than the popular one? MPs are people too. Unless you can find some mechanism by which MPs specifically are chosen for this highly unusual belief, or manipulated into believing it, this makes absolutely no sense.
Of course you can’t know someone’s true intention, but assuming that people won’t lie and anything said by them is undoubtedly true unless somehow proven false is a bit naive.
Luckily no-one here is doing that. Do you understand the difference between “nobody ever lies” and “you need a reason to think that someone is lying”?
The idea that we should discard the perfectly plausible explanation of “MPs want to introduce age limits because of the reason that they state, which is a common opinion that many people agree with” and come up with some other, secret reason that they’re lying about is conspiracy-theory thinking.
Russia says they’re invading Ukraine to de-nazify them. With your logic, this reason is valid because they said so and being sceptical would be beliving in conspiary theories. Go on and continue to be an useful idiot for politicians.
You’re not actually paying attention to what I’m writing. What part of “you need a reason to think that someone is lying” do you not understand, or not agree with? (I mean, if you did agree with it, you would describe your reasons for believing that UK MPs are lying in this case, right?)
With the invasion of Ukraine, you are trying to cheat, because the question there is not really about motivation but about the facts. The fact of the matter is that there aren’t significant numbers of Nazis in Ukraine to “de-nazify” so whatever Russia’s true motivation, its invasion is unjustified.
But I’m not disagreeing with you that the OSA is unjustified; I’m saying that the motivation isn’t some insane religious conspiracy to ban porn. In comparison, Russia’s motivation in Ukraine is to create a buffer zone with a puppet regime. We can see that this is the motivation, because that’s what is consistent with their actions. Zelenskyy has offered to step down as part of a fair negotiated peace, so regime change cannot be Russia’s motivation. Russia has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, so the protection of Russian-speakers cannot be Russia’s motivation.
So we have ample reason to believe that Russia has a motivation other than what it states. Do you see how this works?
What reason is there to believe British MPs’ motivations are what you say they are?
This is about the UK.
You didn’t notice how every western ❝democracy❞ introduced ❝age verification❞ bills simultaneously
as they were losing control of the Gaza narrative?Take your tinfoil hat off, and say something substantive.
The MPs who voted on this made statements about their reasoning - that is substantive, but not definitive. If you doubt their statements then it’s only convincing if you can say why their statements are unrealistic in the light of other facts.
Given that there is a widespread desire to prevent children from accessing porn, their motivations seem wholly realistic. What makes it unrealistic?
It’s also about several us states. Plus why make it harder to access porn? It doesn’t harm anybody. It may make children ask some questions you don’t want to answer but overall… So??
I’m for regulating porn, actors and actresses should be paid, should be protected from sti, should not be forced or coerced. But access? Who cares?
The article is not about US states.
There is reasonable evidence to suggest that children viewing porn is harmful, and even though it’s clearly not a good reason - even if you believe said evidence - for something like the online safety act, people here act like you, as if there isn’t even any evidence, and as if noone actually believes it’s harmful.
If you don’t think children accessing porn is problematic I think you need to give it some more thought. It most definitely normalises some extremely mysogonistic, violent/ non consensual practices.
I don’t think age verification is the answer, but let’s not pretend it’s not trying to address an actual issue.
I’m confused, if VPN use soured for that very reason, wouldn’t traffic remain roughly the same?
Read the article to find the answer to your question.
The article mentions this. They only mention a 77% drop in visits from the UK, but VPNs have seen increased use. So most likely people in the UK are using VPNs to view porn (however, they don’t mention other countries numbers being up or down).
Additionally, they call out that most likely people are also going to sites not following the law. This has always been a big issue with these laws, in that they push people to more extreme/unregulated sites rather than actually curbing the behavior (which is a problematic goal in the first place).
I’ve been worried about that since all these fools started talking about “banning porn.”
The sites that already broke the law (by hosting illegal content) were never going to comply with age-verification laws. If the more ethical porn options are law-abiding, then these laws create a feedback loop - sites that comply suffer from reduced traffic, while sites that ignore the laws become more popular.
I have zero doubt that, right now, there are people wandering onto truly harmful and disturbing material that they never would have discovered if they hadn’t been pushed to explore the fringes of the internet in search of porn.
Among the younger folks, I expect most just turned to Discord or Telegram to get their porn fix. Those that don’t want to bother with messaging groups probably just went to page 3+ of their search result. I wonder whether duckduckgo’s “safesearch:off” is working for brits
Search engines aren’t affected by the law so yeah safe search being off still works
Yeah, I think that’s a safe assumption. While discord and telegram aren’t inherently bad, I think they carry more risks than just going to some site like pornhub.
Some people use VPNs. Most won’t bother. You wouldn’t need many new VPN users to have a big percentage increase.
