this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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At this point there are people in their forties who had access to online porn as minors. Have any actual studies been done to show that a significant portion of the many, many people who've grown up in the last 20-30 years have been harmed by having access to online porn while they were younger, or are these laws just something that's trendy at the moment?
There's a HUGE lobbying effort to convince the people in power that this is a good idea. Lots of tech-surveillance companies bidding for this to go through, so everyone is forced to use their services. You think identity theft is bad now? Wait until you need to put your ID on the internet and that gets leaked.
If age verification is really the intent then it ought to be possible to develop a service these websites can call into that gives some kind of zero-knowledge age check. The age check service doesn't need to know the identity of the service that's asking, and the requesting service doesn't need to know the identity of the person whose age they're checking. You'd authenticate on a site that only knows someone's doing an age check, and the verifying site would just get a token indicating that the age check was successful.
Am I missing some reason why this wouldn't be possible? It seems to be a problem ripe for zero-knowledge solutions.
If it is possible, there's really no need for an age check requirement to involve disclosing your identity to the site you're visiting, or to disclose your viewing habits to anyone. And if governments or lobbyists are pushing for everyone to upload their full identity to web sites, it suggests either they're ignorant or their motives aren't what they claim.
I'm in my 50's and never had issues finding porn/alcohol/drugs when I was under 18, even though I was in a religious area for part of it.
These people are sniffing glue if they actually think this bill will do anything other than erode privacy.
At best all it will do is lead kids away from normal sites and towards the sketchy parts of the web where things get even weirder.
The goal is to erode privacy, and the pearl clutching about children is always the excuse. There are a lot of groups who want to eliminate privacy online: cops, copyright holders, and religious nuts to name a few. They're the ones driving this stuff.
I'm kind of disappointed that the Ndp voted in favor of this bullshit plan.
Ugh. I hadn't heard. I expected better, but the NDP have been a terrible disappointment in the last decade or so.
Ya, it seems every time they take a step or two forward they somehow end up taking a step back again.
There are many studies that indicate porn use can negatively affect your brain, sexual performance, and pro-social behaviour.
Porn linked to decreased grey matter
Porn addiction linked to lower executive functioning
Porn linked to negative social behaviour
Meta analysis on research into adolescents porn use discusses a range of negative outcomes such as anxiety, suicidal ideation, social isolation, and academic disengagement
I'm not really sure this law will "solve" the problem, or if it's a good solution to the problem. But there are real, negative outcomes of internet porn
There seems to be a lot of issues with the methodology used in those studies.
For example, "...reported hours of pornography consumption per week....". Hours seems excessive. What's the average duration for all visitors?
And, "Women were excluded from the research, because men more easily encounter such problems due to their frequent contact with pornographic materials.". That's an assumption. Women can also have "frequent contact " with porn, so they should have included women.
And one of them seemed to suggest that men who watched more porn had ED. But maybe men with ED first, have had to use porn to help? Chicken and egg situation.
I'm not defending porn, and I tend to make data driven choices.
But I'm acutely aware that methodology can have averse effects on the conclusion, and I tend to be highly skeptical of studies that appear to manipulate the outcome with their selection bias.
I agree some are problematic. The first one is based on brain scans, which is hard to refute. And there are many more like it
The porn industry has a vested interest in suppressing this, and billions of dollars to spend muddying the waters.
Yes, but the participant selection was dubious.
Also, while brain scans are used, it's impossible to form a conclusion based on it.
For instance, do men with less grey matter watch more porn? Or does watching more porn cause men to have less grey matter?
A similar study was done on vegetarians. I don't recall the details, but it went somewhere along the lines of "vegetarians have more brain activity associated with empathy". Does that mean vegetarianism improves empathy? Or do empathetic people naturally gravitate towards vegetarianism?
Behavioral studies are so much harder to do compared to health studies. I don't envy the study coordinators!
But more data can always bring us closer to answers, so I'm glad that at least some informational gaps are being filled.
There's also a huge spectrum of consumption between porn addiction and adolescant curiosity. These studies seem to reference several consumption quantities which go beyond the scope of the original question.
Same with Alcohol for those points you listed.
And the alcohol providers are legally responsible for checking the age of the people they sell it to and can face fines if they don't.
That's the crux of the issue, if you provide age restricted material anywhere outside the internet you can lose your right to sell it if you don't make sure people aren't underage and now there's Canadian companies that face no consequences for doing so because they operate on the web.
Fake IDs though, have always been a thing. Banning / Age restriction does not work with the Internet.
I fear internet ID is coming whether we like it or not. AI powered bots will pass all captchas and be indistinguishable from humans. The open, pseudonymous internet cannot survive under those conditions. You could spend all day without seeing a comment by a real human.
Have you been playing on Reddit again?