In related news [1] "VPNs top download charts as age verification law kicks in [...] one app maker told the BBC it had seen an 1,800% spike in downloads."
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays with voters at the next election. Politicians think this censorship is a vote-winner, presumably because on the doorstep voters are unlikely to talk about their love of porn. Yet in online spaces, this policy seems wildly unpopular - especially with the high profile leaks of age validation services' user data; the government's legal battles with Wikipedia; Steam's demand for credit cards (debit cards are more common in the UK); and sites leaving the UK market all together.
I suppose we'll get to see whose polling is more accurate at the next election.
It’s not that the UK government believes censoring porn is a vote winner so much as they really want to use “think of the kids” as a cudgel to widespread surveillance.
In other countries (not least the US) there’s an expectation of privacy which doesn’t really exist in the UK. It’s not seen as a right by any major party or particularly valued by the public at large (“nothing to hide nothing to fear” etc). The government still really wants E2E encryption banned here (as nonsensical as that is).
They don’t see any of this as a vote loser, as none of the alternative parties see it any differently.
Personally I’m kind of happy about this gating even if I disagree on principle, but they’ve already indicated that they have no line. They’ve been very open about seeing everything you say and do.
Despite all this talk about privacy, US would appear to be leading the free world in surveillance and illiberalism right now. It is very reminiscent to me of the radical free speech of Twitter and Republicans, which in practice means censorship.
I'm not saying UK is great, but surely ahead of what the US is doing by a wide margin.
If you look at the UK through the MAGA lens you see that there’s a grain of truth in some of the comments about free speech.
Likewise terminology in the US is sometimes a little turned on its head - in the US “liberalism” means something completely different from actual liberalism (which would be closer to libertarianism).
Also “woke” has been used for so many things that its meaning has been warped from “don’t trust the system” to whatever the right dislikes on a given day, even though they’re ostensibly all about smaller government that stays out of your business.
Politics has always been very subversive but it’s more entangled than ever now.
Well. With the ageing population and the fact that older people are more conservative and they turn out to vote more often I would doubt that anything would change. At least not because of this.
> Yet in online spaces, this policy seems wildly unpopular
That depends on which online spaces you frequent. Ones like HN, which have a higher proportion of male users, will be statistically more likely to have commenters who engage in habitual pornography consumption and are vocally opposed to the OSA on this basis.
This is the problem. Adults thinking children are useless. Don't you remember being a kid?
Whenever there's a blocker (one case from my childhood was how to use net send to broadcast profanity across the network), someone will figure it out, and by the end of the day EVERYONE knows.
It's not like they need to `sudo apt install openvpn` and tweak the config file manually and tinker with routes and firewall rules afterwards.
Basically every youtube video for the past decade has been sponsored by a VPN service offering first-joiner discounts. My cousin uses a VPN and has no idea what it is and how it works, just that "he should protect himself while browsing". Those VPNs have invested massively in UX and ease of use so out of that 77% of users, I'd guess more than 80% of it switched to VPNs.
Maybe not all, but kids pickup things fast. When I was young the school tried to block a popular flash games website, one lunch hour later and somehow we all learned how to use a VPN. I'd say I owe a lot of my technical ability to learning how to circumvent restrictions on school computers and whatever my parents tried to setup on the home computer.
I agree. My point is we shouldn't simply open the doors for this degenerate content and make it easily accessible for children. Children who are already addicted to porn will be more inclined to find a workaround. But new children who haven't been exposed yet will be less inclined.
This all or nothing mentality is so disconnected from the real world. Of course some people started using VPNs, of course some children even started doing it. No law can prevent all occurrences of what it tries to prevent. But it can make it more difficult, and heighten the barrier of entry for children that are introduced to the internet.
> At the next election some portion of Labour voters will remember missteps like this and will vote for someone else because of it.
Personally, I think their prosecution of peaceful protestors (Palestine supporters) whilst giving a free pass to right wing violent protestors will alienate their traditional left-wing base.
As far as I can tell, the purpose of the law is to push children to use either free VPNs and proxies (which will likely make them less safe using the internet) or to visit less famous porn sites that are too niche to be targetted. So, we're pushing children towards the most dodgy porn sites possible and encouraging people to upload identifying information to the less dodgy porn sites.
This law is not fit for the declared purpose at all.
2. Yeah, I am regularly irritated by old chestnut of “kids are tech geniuses unlike the helpless adults”. With few exceptions, they think WiFi/the Web/The Internet are the same thing and have no clue how any of it works deeper than the UI (just like most adults). In the UK at least, our “progressive” government shifted the focus in the late 90s from teaching basic CS concepts to using Microsoft Office applications. I hope it is slightly better now.
Come on. Get out of your bubble and go touch grass. There are more restrictive countries than UK/EU/US will become in visible future. And customer-level censorship circumvention technologies have gone so far that most services are just one-button apps. And the children who can't press one button usually just don't have a phone.
> There were so many people saying that this isn’t going to work.
Yes, and we were right.
It was billed as something that most adults would accept. It's not plausible that 77 percent of Pornhub's UK traffic came from non-adults.
It has therefore failed. Obviously a huge number of adults did not accept it, and either went around it or stopped using the site. What they did not do was to comply with the supposedly "measured, reasonable and non-intrusive" AV measures. They accepted costs and inconveniences to avoid that.
It was billed as something that would only affect children. It has in fact affected many adults. That means it has failed.
Of course, many of the 77 percent have probably moved to VPNs (or other sites) rather than actually not using Pornhub... which means they were only inconvenienced, not deprived of porn or even of Pornhub.
But those approaches are just as available to non-adults as to adults. Although the AV nonsense probably did actually deter some number of underage users, you can't know what that number was. It would be possible for literally every single underage user to have simply switched to a VPN. The 77 percent number tells you exactly nothing about how many children have been deterred from watching porn. Probably not very many.
So although this does give you proof of some of the ways it's failed, it does not give you any evidence that it's succeeded in anything at all.
That said, that kind of "success" is not the main issue. The main arguments against this AV stupidity were and are that it's not worth the huge costs in money, convenience, security, and privacy, and that it helps create machinery that can and probably will be abused for other purposes later. All of which are still absolutely true.
Yes indeed, and also worth bearing in mind that, particularly as this is a male-dominated forum, many of the people commenting here will be habitual porngraphy consumers who will have a negative view of any mechanism that gets in the way of their consumption.
This is really surprising. 23% of pornhub users in the UK are willing to identify themselves to access porn.
I guess there are some who really want their porn and either don't know about the alternatives (VPN) or genuinely don't mind handing over identifying info to do it.
You are putting words in my mouth, maybe think about phrasing your points in a less personal way in future?
I don't actually see watching porn as immoral, although I am aware that there are a large number of people who do. Hence my surprise that so many people were willing to tie their identities to it.
It implies that 77% of UK visitors were not prepared to upload an id to watch porn. They either stopped watching, used a VPN, or moved to smaller and less regulated sites without age verification. The remaining 23% will also include teens that uploaded a fake id.
Does that mean porn is watched by 77% fewer people or does that mean it is watched elsewhere? It may just lead to a greater exposure to malware of the UK.
I think the more striking question is, does that mean 77% of pornhub viewers are underage?
Obviously not, a lot of them just don't want to identify themselves. But having worked in IT for 25 years and knowing how free some people are to use their government e-mail to sign up at porn websites, I wonder even if 50% are underage, that's a huge number.
If nothing else it is an interesting experiment. I'm just not sure what we should expect the result to be, both in terms of teen mentality and industry impact.
Interestingly, Google is still allowed to show explicit search results from these sites, which is absurd, and is a gap in the law, as now "search" sites have appeared which just do the same thing, but use videos.
Obviously this is because 77% of all pornhub viewers were underage, and NOT because privacy-infringing age checks create a deterrent effect that reduces all pornography consumption, which totally was NOT the goal all along by the puritanical fundamentalist religious groups backing this expansion of warrantless state surveillance.
It was definitely to protect the kids and NOT to try to quash all depictions of human sexuality due to a fetish for appeasing the arbitrary whims of the invisible sky daddy, as told to us by the people who pinky promise they were speaking on behalf of invisible sky daddy.
I appreciate the humour and sarcasm but often less is more. You should've just written "Obviously this is because 77% of all pornhub viewers were underage" and left it at that.
there are plenty of valid reasons that unfettered access to pornography is harmful - imagine if you had private videos leaked on the net forever , or were exploited , or were trafficked to participate , etc. plz try save vitriol for when its really needed. also the reddit tier religious bashing looks really lame.
Well said. The idea that porn is harmless fun is not borne out. That's not to say it should be entirely prohibited, but the normalisation of degrading and sometimes violent porn among young teens is a real problem affecting real people. While plenty of posters seem to have issues with the U.K. government's actions, they don't present any solutions to the issue of underage people being porn addicted.
I'm not aware of any religious groups in the UK who have significant influence on legislation, perhaps unlike the US.
> the normalisation of degrading and sometimes violent porn among young teens is a real problem affecting real people.
Is there any reliable data showing this? What does "degrading" and "violent" mean? Is it really detrimental, or is it just totally normal kinks that some people don't understand are actually carried out in a healthy way?
The "pornography addiction" model lacks scientific support and is driven by media hype, moral conflicts, and a lucrative treatment industry. High-frequency use of visual sexual stimuli (VSS; preferred neutral term over "pornography") does not meet addiction criteria and is better explained by non-pathological factors like libido, sensation-seeking, or value conflicts.
It doesn't, because laws that compelled sites like pornhub to take down nonconsentual porn already existed before the proposal for age verification.
The people pushing the age verification will never admit this to you, often because they're either ignorant of the bigger picture or not engaging in good faith in the first place, seeing themselves as the clear-eyed moral ones bringing wisdom to us heathens who don't know any better.
I'd like very much to remove moral busybodies from my system but it seems very hard for people who have a grand plan for society to top coercing and leave me alone.
Its none of your business if people voluntarily produce it and its also none of your business if people voluntarily market it between each other.
>Its none of your business if people voluntarily produce it and its also none of your business if people voluntarily market it between each other.
I mean it is no secret a lot of people who produce these things have mental health issues or come from very poor families. That's not even including the illegal activity that might seem legal on the surface.
To me that exploitation in the porno industry and the idea that porn should be restricted is two separate issues. I'm not really oppose to limiting access to porn for children, we did that before the internet, we do the same for alcohol, tobacco and a lot of other stuff. I just don't think we should fool ourselves into believing that adding age restriction for the consumption of porn will do the slightest for improving working conditions in the industry.
Arguing for the ban of porn is easy, because very few will defend it, and if they do, you just pull out the argument that production is also bad. As if the opponents doesn't want porn to produced safely, without trafficking or exploitation.
> I mean it is no secret a lot of people who produce these things have mental health issues
Really? In my experience, people who think they should be in charge of the interests of "civilization", or who are obsessed with other people's vices, have a lot more mental health issues. Mostly weird savior complexes or fucked up (usually guilt driven) purity obsessions.
Given the harms of the pornography industry to both those directly exploited by it and those who consume its output, this is excellent news, even if the statistic only reflects a smaller deterrent effect due to VPN use and so on.
Certainly a win for drafters of the OSA, despite the controversy stirred up over its enactment.
It's great news.
The purpose is to make it as difficult as possible for children to access this type of content. Of course some will find workarounds. But if laws are supposed to be 100% foolproof then no law actually does anything.
Children aren't generating this traffic, people have just switched to VPNs and don't show up as UK users anymore. What do you think kids do all day exactly?
Wouldn't it be just as delusional to think that those kids are not going to just go find it elsewhere? And now those "elsewheres" are going to be places that don't care about things like performer or content safety. Is that really going to help solve the alleged issues, both with the porn industry and with people watching it too much?
(To say nothing of the second order effects of something like this, like the massive privacy intrusion for adult citizens, or the theft/sharing of IDs to get around these laws)
In related news [1] "VPNs top download charts as age verification law kicks in [...] one app maker told the BBC it had seen an 1,800% spike in downloads."
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays with voters at the next election. Politicians think this censorship is a vote-winner, presumably because on the doorstep voters are unlikely to talk about their love of porn. Yet in online spaces, this policy seems wildly unpopular - especially with the high profile leaks of age validation services' user data; the government's legal battles with Wikipedia; Steam's demand for credit cards (debit cards are more common in the UK); and sites leaving the UK market all together.
I suppose we'll get to see whose polling is more accurate at the next election.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn72ydj70g5o
It’s not that the UK government believes censoring porn is a vote winner so much as they really want to use “think of the kids” as a cudgel to widespread surveillance.
In other countries (not least the US) there’s an expectation of privacy which doesn’t really exist in the UK. It’s not seen as a right by any major party or particularly valued by the public at large (“nothing to hide nothing to fear” etc). The government still really wants E2E encryption banned here (as nonsensical as that is).
They don’t see any of this as a vote loser, as none of the alternative parties see it any differently.
Personally I’m kind of happy about this gating even if I disagree on principle, but they’ve already indicated that they have no line. They’ve been very open about seeing everything you say and do.
Despite all this talk about privacy, US would appear to be leading the free world in surveillance and illiberalism right now. It is very reminiscent to me of the radical free speech of Twitter and Republicans, which in practice means censorship.
I'm not saying UK is great, but surely ahead of what the US is doing by a wide margin.
I sort of agree.
If you look at the UK through the MAGA lens you see that there’s a grain of truth in some of the comments about free speech.
Likewise terminology in the US is sometimes a little turned on its head - in the US “liberalism” means something completely different from actual liberalism (which would be closer to libertarianism).
Also “woke” has been used for so many things that its meaning has been warped from “don’t trust the system” to whatever the right dislikes on a given day, even though they’re ostensibly all about smaller government that stays out of your business.
Politics has always been very subversive but it’s more entangled than ever now.
> how this plays with voters at the next election
Well. With the ageing population and the fact that older people are more conservative and they turn out to vote more often I would doubt that anything would change. At least not because of this.
> Yet in online spaces, this policy seems wildly unpopular
That depends on which online spaces you frequent. Ones like HN, which have a higher proportion of male users, will be statistically more likely to have commenters who engage in habitual pornography consumption and are vocally opposed to the OSA on this basis.
Sorry to burst your bubble but porn use and addiction is a massive problem among women nowadays too.
FWIW the male spaces I'm in are supportive of porn bans.
And France visitors are down by 100%, see https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/04/tech/pornhub-exits-france...
UK visitors not using a VPN down 77%
You believe all children know how to operate a VPN?
This is the problem. Adults thinking children are useless. Don't you remember being a kid?
Whenever there's a blocker (one case from my childhood was how to use net send to broadcast profanity across the network), someone will figure it out, and by the end of the day EVERYONE knows.
Programming VCRs was famously something kids could understand.
It's not like they need to `sudo apt install openvpn` and tweak the config file manually and tinker with routes and firewall rules afterwards.
Basically every youtube video for the past decade has been sponsored by a VPN service offering first-joiner discounts. My cousin uses a VPN and has no idea what it is and how it works, just that "he should protect himself while browsing". Those VPNs have invested massively in UX and ease of use so out of that 77% of users, I'd guess more than 80% of it switched to VPNs.
Maybe not all, but kids pickup things fast. When I was young the school tried to block a popular flash games website, one lunch hour later and somehow we all learned how to use a VPN. I'd say I owe a lot of my technical ability to learning how to circumvent restrictions on school computers and whatever my parents tried to setup on the home computer.
I agree. My point is we shouldn't simply open the doors for this degenerate content and make it easily accessible for children. Children who are already addicted to porn will be more inclined to find a workaround. But new children who haven't been exposed yet will be less inclined.
Based on my childhood memories, I would say kids are the most likely to figure out how to get a free VPN and look at porn that way.
Or just find another porn site that doesn't adhere to the law.
> You believe all children know how to operate a VPN
Yes. That’s exactly what we believe.
Do you believe that 77% of UK Pornhub users suddenly stopped wanking?
Seems pretty implausible to me.
This all or nothing mentality is so disconnected from the real world. Of course some people started using VPNs, of course some children even started doing it. No law can prevent all occurrences of what it tries to prevent. But it can make it more difficult, and heighten the barrier of entry for children that are introduced to the internet.
Kids don’t start out knowing that you type pornhub.com to get porn.
One of their friends sends them a link. Now they just send them a different link, one that goes via a free VPN.
You don't need any new skills for that and it's not a "speedbump".
All this law does is make it harder for adults to use non-porn websites like Reddit, Spotify or Bluesky.
It’s not a good law.
At the next election some portion of Labour voters will remember missteps like this and will vote for someone else because of it.
> At the next election some portion of Labour voters will remember missteps like this and will vote for someone else because of it.
Personally, I think their prosecution of peaceful protestors (Palestine supporters) whilst giving a free pass to right wing violent protestors will alienate their traditional left-wing base.
As far as I can tell, the purpose of the law is to push children to use either free VPNs and proxies (which will likely make them less safe using the internet) or to visit less famous porn sites that are too niche to be targetted. So, we're pushing children towards the most dodgy porn sites possible and encouraging people to upload identifying information to the less dodgy porn sites.
This law is not fit for the declared purpose at all.
> Yes. That’s exactly what we believe.
So all minors in the UK have their own banking account and credit card? You know, to pay for the VPN.
Why would they need any of that when free to use VPNs exist?
20 years ago, kids were using proxies and VPNs to get around forum bans. Kids today are most certainly still using VPNs.
I honestly doubt ipad kids are as tech savvy as 90s or 00s kids. Not only that, I'm sure some kids will figure it out. But not all.
Lot of them do. Especially hormonal teenagers who have both lot of time and energy to find solutions. Not to forgot the lure of forbidden.
Are you suggesting kids are not digitally versed and have no capability of searching and learning?
1. A number of apps have made using VPN a 1-click task.
2. Children aren't as well versed with tech as you think, just because they spend a lot of hours in front of a screen.
2. Yeah, I am regularly irritated by old chestnut of “kids are tech geniuses unlike the helpless adults”. With few exceptions, they think WiFi/the Web/The Internet are the same thing and have no clue how any of it works deeper than the UI (just like most adults). In the UK at least, our “progressive” government shifted the focus in the late 90s from teaching basic CS concepts to using Microsoft Office applications. I hope it is slightly better now.
relevant Dilbert: https://www.flubu.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/wpid-p...
Come on. Get out of your bubble and go touch grass. There are more restrictive countries than UK/EU/US will become in visible future. And customer-level censorship circumvention technologies have gone so far that most services are just one-button apps. And the children who can't press one button usually just don't have a phone.
Operate one? You mean download an app and switch the VPN to "on"?
You don't have children, I take it.
Do you think children are a significant portion of the porn traffic?
You believe 77% of Pornhub UK visitors are children?
Any sort of gating will always lower certain web usage, that's obvious.
It's also much more obvious that a taboo/illicit service asking you to, essentially, deanonymize yourself is going to be hit the hardest.
There were so many people saying that this isn’t going to work.
Remember that when discussing any regulation.
The „it’s impossible” and „let’s not bother” people are a scourge and they mustn’t be taken seriously.
> There were so many people saying that this isn’t going to work.
Yes, and we were right.
It was billed as something that most adults would accept. It's not plausible that 77 percent of Pornhub's UK traffic came from non-adults.
It has therefore failed. Obviously a huge number of adults did not accept it, and either went around it or stopped using the site. What they did not do was to comply with the supposedly "measured, reasonable and non-intrusive" AV measures. They accepted costs and inconveniences to avoid that.
It was billed as something that would only affect children. It has in fact affected many adults. That means it has failed.
Of course, many of the 77 percent have probably moved to VPNs (or other sites) rather than actually not using Pornhub... which means they were only inconvenienced, not deprived of porn or even of Pornhub.
But those approaches are just as available to non-adults as to adults. Although the AV nonsense probably did actually deter some number of underage users, you can't know what that number was. It would be possible for literally every single underage user to have simply switched to a VPN. The 77 percent number tells you exactly nothing about how many children have been deterred from watching porn. Probably not very many.
So although this does give you proof of some of the ways it's failed, it does not give you any evidence that it's succeeded in anything at all.
That said, that kind of "success" is not the main issue. The main arguments against this AV stupidity were and are that it's not worth the huge costs in money, convenience, security, and privacy, and that it helps create machinery that can and probably will be abused for other purposes later. All of which are still absolutely true.
The article pretty clearly states that it’s likely this is at least partly attributable to VPN use.
Yeah, those people were apparently 100% correct and this was a colossal failure.
Instead of large, accountable providers, now three quarters of their customers use vpns or switched to sites without age verification.
Yes indeed, and also worth bearing in mind that, particularly as this is a male-dominated forum, many of the people commenting here will be habitual porngraphy consumers who will have a negative view of any mechanism that gets in the way of their consumption.
What do you mean by worked? Worked to move people to other sources of porn or vpns?
Very true. This all or nothing mentality is disconnected from the real world.
I mean they're all just using VPNs… I'm sure the VPN companies love the policy but other than that I'm not sure what problem they solved.
oh my sweet summer child
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45769504
This is really surprising. 23% of pornhub users in the UK are willing to identify themselves to access porn.
I guess there are some who really want their porn and either don't know about the alternatives (VPN) or genuinely don't mind handing over identifying info to do it.
In any other sexual context you'd be saying "wow such sexual liberty" "theyre so brave being straight up about themselves."
That watching porn is still an immoral act is implicit in your surprise.
You are putting words in my mouth, maybe think about phrasing your points in a less personal way in future?
I don't actually see watching porn as immoral, although I am aware that there are a large number of people who do. Hence my surprise that so many people were willing to tie their identities to it.
Doe that imply 77% of the visitors were underage?
It implies that 77% of UK visitors were not prepared to upload an id to watch porn. They either stopped watching, used a VPN, or moved to smaller and less regulated sites without age verification. The remaining 23% will also include teens that uploaded a fake id.
Is it really down or do they just use a VPN
They don't even need to use a VPN, they just need to find a different porn site.
Most likely a mix. Not all children know how to operate a VPN.
As soon as one of them figures it out, they tell their friends, who tell their friends, and so on until all of them know.
Does that mean porn is watched by 77% fewer people or does that mean it is watched elsewhere? It may just lead to a greater exposure to malware of the UK.
Another significant portion of the 77% will be people who now use a VPN to visit pornhub and are no longer identifiable as UK visitors
This. I still use xnxx but via a VPN now, same for Pornhub users I'd guess
I think the more striking question is, does that mean 77% of pornhub viewers are underage?
Obviously not, a lot of them just don't want to identify themselves. But having worked in IT for 25 years and knowing how free some people are to use their government e-mail to sign up at porn websites, I wonder even if 50% are underage, that's a huge number.
or the 77% user includes underage, and adults who don't trust age verification.
There are literally countless fully legitimate porn sites that aren't Pornhub and that won't give you "malware"
It's not 1999 anymore. Stop going to sketchy sites to watch porn.
... or stop using browsers that install malware just because you visited a malicious site...
Seriously, where did the idea that just visiting a site can damage your computer come from?
If nothing else it is an interesting experiment. I'm just not sure what we should expect the result to be, both in terms of teen mentality and industry impact.
I'd expect teens entering UK industry to more mentally adept at bypassing gatekeeping.
Shockingly, visits from datacenters just inside the EU have more than tripled in the same time frame.
I guess some other places got an increase that summed up are close to that 77% :)
Interestingly, Google is still allowed to show explicit search results from these sites, which is absurd, and is a gap in the law, as now "search" sites have appeared which just do the same thing, but use videos.
At least some grease in the Digital ID machinery.
Obviously this is because 77% of all pornhub viewers were underage, and NOT because privacy-infringing age checks create a deterrent effect that reduces all pornography consumption, which totally was NOT the goal all along by the puritanical fundamentalist religious groups backing this expansion of warrantless state surveillance.
It was definitely to protect the kids and NOT to try to quash all depictions of human sexuality due to a fetish for appeasing the arbitrary whims of the invisible sky daddy, as told to us by the people who pinky promise they were speaking on behalf of invisible sky daddy.
I appreciate the humour and sarcasm but often less is more. You should've just written "Obviously this is because 77% of all pornhub viewers were underage" and left it at that.
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Imagine being this deep into your porn addiction.
there are plenty of valid reasons that unfettered access to pornography is harmful - imagine if you had private videos leaked on the net forever , or were exploited , or were trafficked to participate , etc. plz try save vitriol for when its really needed. also the reddit tier religious bashing looks really lame.
Well said. The idea that porn is harmless fun is not borne out. That's not to say it should be entirely prohibited, but the normalisation of degrading and sometimes violent porn among young teens is a real problem affecting real people. While plenty of posters seem to have issues with the U.K. government's actions, they don't present any solutions to the issue of underage people being porn addicted.
I'm not aware of any religious groups in the UK who have significant influence on legislation, perhaps unlike the US.
> the normalisation of degrading and sometimes violent porn among young teens is a real problem affecting real people.
Is there any reliable data showing this? What does "degrading" and "violent" mean? Is it really detrimental, or is it just totally normal kinks that some people don't understand are actually carried out in a healthy way?
Porn addiction is pseudoscience perpetuated by right wing pundits and known quack charlatans like the late Gary Wilson.
The NHS offers treatment for pornography addiction. It's a subset of a wider category of behavioural addictions.
The "pornography addiction" model lacks scientific support and is driven by media hype, moral conflicts, and a lucrative treatment industry. High-frequency use of visual sexual stimuli (VSS; preferred neutral term over "pornography") does not meet addiction criteria and is better explained by non-pathological factors like libido, sensation-seeking, or value conflicts.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258565076_The_Emper...
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> imagine if you had private videos leaked on the net forever , or were exploited , or were trafficked to participate
How does this apply here?
It doesn't, because laws that compelled sites like pornhub to take down nonconsentual porn already existed before the proposal for age verification.
The people pushing the age verification will never admit this to you, often because they're either ignorant of the bigger picture or not engaging in good faith in the first place, seeing themselves as the clear-eyed moral ones bringing wisdom to us heathens who don't know any better.
how exactly does age verification prevent any of this?
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Civilisation would be better off without porn but this was obviously always a non-solution. In fact Google doesn't even censor its images still.
Is Safe Search not a thing anymore?
you mean the thing you can turn off in a click?
Are you saying that blocks that are trivial to bypass are not very useful?
Hmmm...
(Also, I'll point out there are parental control settings for Google accounts)
I'm so glad there are people like you with opinions about what's best for me and civilization.
I don't know about you but "defending pornography to strangers" wasn't on my bucket list. Glad you got it out of your system.
I call it personal freedom.
I'd like very much to remove moral busybodies from my system but it seems very hard for people who have a grand plan for society to top coercing and leave me alone.
Its none of your business if people voluntarily produce it and its also none of your business if people voluntarily market it between each other.
>Its none of your business if people voluntarily produce it and its also none of your business if people voluntarily market it between each other.
I mean it is no secret a lot of people who produce these things have mental health issues or come from very poor families. That's not even including the illegal activity that might seem legal on the surface.
To me that exploitation in the porno industry and the idea that porn should be restricted is two separate issues. I'm not really oppose to limiting access to porn for children, we did that before the internet, we do the same for alcohol, tobacco and a lot of other stuff. I just don't think we should fool ourselves into believing that adding age restriction for the consumption of porn will do the slightest for improving working conditions in the industry.
Arguing for the ban of porn is easy, because very few will defend it, and if they do, you just pull out the argument that production is also bad. As if the opponents doesn't want porn to produced safely, without trafficking or exploitation.
> I mean it is no secret a lot of people who produce these things have mental health issues
Really? In my experience, people who think they should be in charge of the interests of "civilization", or who are obsessed with other people's vices, have a lot more mental health issues. Mostly weird savior complexes or fucked up (usually guilt driven) purity obsessions.
That's no secret.
Yikes.
[dead]
I'm so glad that the knobs who hate the idea of perpetuating civilization self-select out of the gene pool.
Given the harms of the pornography industry to both those directly exploited by it and those who consume its output, this is excellent news, even if the statistic only reflects a smaller deterrent effect due to VPN use and so on.
Certainly a win for drafters of the OSA, despite the controversy stirred up over its enactment.
It's great news. The purpose is to make it as difficult as possible for children to access this type of content. Of course some will find workarounds. But if laws are supposed to be 100% foolproof then no law actually does anything.
Children aren't generating this traffic, people have just switched to VPNs and don't show up as UK users anymore. What do you think kids do all day exactly?
The same things I did as a kid. If you really believe all children are innocent, and don't watch porn, you are delusional.
Wouldn't it be just as delusional to think that those kids are not going to just go find it elsewhere? And now those "elsewheres" are going to be places that don't care about things like performer or content safety. Is that really going to help solve the alleged issues, both with the porn industry and with people watching it too much?
(To say nothing of the second order effects of something like this, like the massive privacy intrusion for adult citizens, or the theft/sharing of IDs to get around these laws)