Summary
Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, all websites hosting pornography, including social media platforms, must implement “robust” age verification methods, such as photo ID or credit card checks, for UK users by July.
Regulator Ofcom claims this is to prevent children from accessing explicit content, as research shows many are exposed as young as nine.
Critics, including privacy groups and porn sites, warn the measures could drive users to less-regulated parts of the internet, raising safety and privacy concerns.
My problem with all this nonsense is that it doesn’t actually solve the problem, while causing many more. You’d need to fundamentally rethink the basic design of the technology if you were to actually prevent children from accessing sexual material with it. That’s something they don’t want to do, however, presumably because they’re addicted to the power it offers them to spy on everyone, and exploit the population for profit.
We’re in this mess right now because the one absolute truth preempting every other decision made by those who wield power is that the solution must first increase their power. Literally everything else is an afterthought.
Oh it does.
Kids have access to phones and data. No matter how good my DNS is, means fuck all if my son can use his data (if he was old enough to have phone) and browse, under UK, he can’t easily access the most common porn sites without verifying.
As open and pro porn internet social bubble might be. I’m not okay with my son gaining access to it easily and too early.
At times, I wish there were more adults and parents online to counter the sea of basically male teenagers pushing what they think isright. And I know I’ll get a “I’m a parent of 3, porn is healthy for them!” Type of response… And that’s irrelevant. We all are raising a human being and we all have different morals and ideas. There’s zero chance I’ll consciously allow a loophole before he turns 12.
Well you see… Despite what people say, the reasons behind these rules has very little to do with children. So they don’t actually care if it solves the “problem”.
I agree, the country is delving deeper into authoritarianism by each second. The children and minors is just another exploitable class to them.
Nah, you just need parents to care about what their kids get up to and to responsibly educate them without punishing them for being curious.
Bwahhahajahhahaa. Like that’s gonna happen.
Absolutely - this always happens with these “save the children” laws.
Jesus Christ… You ever hear the phrase “never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance?” Politicians do this sort of “make the people feel like we’re doing something” shit all the time. They rarely consider the ramifications beside appeasing parents.
Generalities like that can be useful when applied appropriately, but counter-productive when applied blindly. That positions of power are held primarily by those who are motivated primarily by power ought to be the most straight forward assertion possible.
Agreed. I feel we’ve been giving politicians passes on “ignorance” for far too long. First, ignorance is not a defense in any other situation. Second, these people are supposed to uphold our laws and virtues, so they should be held to a higher standard. Third, if you can find a pattern in their “ignorance” which somehow always seems to benefit them personally - they’re not ignorant, but malignant.
Generalities like that can be useful when applied appropriately, but counter-productive when applied blindly.
No u
How would you solve it then? I’m not saying Ofcom are right, but should it be left wholly on parents to police the whole internet?
Nope. Just their kids.
Like always.
They don’t have to police the whole internet, just their kids. Frankly children that age shouldn’t be on social media especially unsupervised.
Parents should be using device level controls to monitor their kids internet habits. All of this should be built into the device and browser, and parents need to take basic accountability.
It could be. Putting adult filters on your routers and devices isn’t difficult.
Whereas if this is implemented, I think it pushes the public towards the dark net…and if your intent is protecting minors, that’s absolutely not the result you want.
At least on pornhub these days I have a reasonable assurance I’m not stumbling into something I shouldn’t. In the dark corners of the internet, that illusion of protection is gone.
Parental Controls have never been easier to enact. All my.kids have tablets with 4 layers of adguards, autolocks, timers, and app restrictions. It took maybe an hour to set all of them up. Are your kids worth an hour of your time? I think so. Especially if it means we dont restrict freedoms for shitty solutions.
Yes. Parent controls have been available for this stuff for ages. It’s not a problem for the state to solve.
If the alternative is not solving the problem while making other stuff worse, yeah.
Understanding that I can’t solve the whole issue right here and now on my own, the very first thing I’d take a look at is changing from having an ‘on my default’ connection to other machines, to having an ‘off by default’ connection. I’d also worry about complicating the entire process to the point where parents can’t reasonably understand/control how their machines are used by their children (the first point assists with that).
One other thing which I believe is important to actually protect children would be to establish and maintain national borders, similar to China’s great firewall. The more automatic systems become, the more opportunity exists for bad actors to exploit them for untoward purposes. Understanding that we can’t conclusively resolve every potential issue, we ought to at least do what we can to ensure that those participating in the ecosystem share similar goals and values with each other, which is really the point of borders in the first place.