But age verification as a concept is a completely separate issue from the implementation of the verification system itself.
The biggest hope I see is that the EU also wants to implement age restrictions, but with a lot more effort to get it right and make it compatible with a strong desire for privacy. Maybe that will make "proper" implementations easy and common enough that many of the downsides will be mitigated
Anyway, there are two questions here:
1. Do we need to verify the age of internet users?
2. How can we do it without sacrificing privacy of everyone involved?
You can't monetise the data you don't store
However, no systems are fault free. Whether we are talking about computing systems, mechanical systems, or societal ones.
Sometimes police can arrest an innocent person before they realize the mistake and release them.
Should we stop policing completely? Or maybe the right question to ask is “how do we minimize the chance for police to make mistakes?”. Note, these are two separate issues:
1. Do we need the police at all?
2. How do we make police to not arrest innocent people all the time?
"When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’"
The same reasoning you use for extortion applies to many other systems we have today. Should we abolish them because they have failures?
Note: Forgot to add, this is going to give some low level data or software engineer access to all of your darkest secrets and what is to stop them from using that to blackmail you? Some guy is going to ring up their local millionaire and say "I see you are into X, give me a 100k or everyone else will know as well" There is no end to how bad of an idea this is.
They are normalising people being asked by potentially shady sites to subject to identification procedures, after all.
If I was inclined to sell such information illegally, I'd set up a bunch of honeypots and "verify" users and just hoard the data to sell.
My current guess is that if things really went to hell with censorship and disjointedness, that we'd re-establish an ancient pattern - magazines. I recall as a child, my uncle would leave his "Big Blue Disks" around for perusing, and it was a magazine in the form of floppy disks, of various media - essays, games, primitive computer music.
The curation of these always struck me as a great favor. Perhaps not compatible with the current attention span, such a provision, in the absence of access, would, I believe, quickly become a surrogate for what we lost.
Of course, these magazines are editorialized, and so we're at the mercy of the editor's perspectives to discern the truth. I appreciate our current access to information, even in its weakening form.
But I suppose I'd prefer if we could not tinker more with censorship. I think I may be looking for a digital magazine in the next decade, or whatever else we can invent to replace our losses.
This genie is not going back in the bottle unless future generations will get fed up with all the safetyism propaganda at the core of internet censorship and unanimously vote against this.
I'm glad I was young enough to see and experience the uncensored and unrestricted version of the internet. God speed for the future generation being subject to this nonsense.
I've decided to deal with it by reevaluating the role of tech and Internet in my life. I certainly don't care about improvements to my residental Internet speed any more, or what the next wireless tech after 5G will be, or what protocols the IETF is working on, or net neutrality, because none of it matters to me any more. It's exciting what's going on with AI but it's all going to behemoths who will be able to tell the rest of us what we can and can't do with it. So... I don't care anymore. I can see myself honestly just not having a wired home Internet connection anymore in a few years and I would get rid of my cell phone if it wasn't necessary for day-to-day life. I don't need symmetric 1gbps fiber to stream the occasional show, text, and do normal-life things on apps.
But when you brought up magazines - it reminded me of that brief period of time of the late 80's/early 90's during the "multimedia" and "interactive" crazes; when BBSes were a thing--there were a lot of interesting CD-ROMs on diverse subjects.
I'm glad optical media hasn't completely died yet. Most new PCs don't come with one installed, but USB ones cheap and easy to find. PCs have come a long way since the early 90's. Fun fact, if your Android phone supports USB OTG I do believe a USB optical drive will totally work with it.
But that's not what laws like these are about. In the US at least these laws are driven by Christian Nationalists are setting up a situation where PII of porn users is able to be leaked. That's what they're counting on. They also want to have political control of platforms by continually holding a Sword of Damocles above any publisher's head.
Not really. China's great firewall has been doing that a long time before these laws. It was only a matter of time till our leaders ask Big Tech "do for us what you did for China, except add a coat of paint over it so it doesn't look evil".
The only thing to do is denounce every bit of bullshit and not try and "find a way to make it work". Just stand for freedom for once instead of bending the knee or pushing for authoritarianism like most people do with every invasion for oil, during covid, when there's an accusation of some -ism or whatever the next label is.
Hilarious, you literally have a president shutting down free speech by getting a talkshow taken off the air so that the owning media company can pass its merger regulations; he’s also threatening to sue or actually suing other media organisations, universities, newspapers,... And on top of all that has built a private militia to grab people off the street and deport them.
All while major corporations have so much money and control over the government and its representatives that individuals have little to no say in how things are done.
And let’s not even start on the electoral system that encourages only the issues of a few states to ever be ‘heard’.
The whole country is indoctrinated to pledge allegiance to the flag and is taught that the constitution is of equivalent standing as the stone tablets brought down from Mount Sinai, leaving you all more vulnerable in a world where anybody can say anything and have it broadcast to billions of people at once. Or, you know, to being shot. You're indoctrinated to believe that the founding fathers were infallible geniuses, when they were just men, with opinions.
Often in these discussions we get quotes like:
"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
That was said by a man, a regular man. He said a thing. It is entirely devoid of nuance, but you will all recite like it's the word of god. It's a form of self-oppression in its own right.
The vast majority of so-called oppressive laws introduced in the UK were well meaning, not done for power (like with your current president). The anti-hate speech laws were brought about because preachers were openly indoctrinating people who went on to commit atrocities like 7/7. I have never fallen fowl of those laws because I don't preach hate and foment violence. But to Ben Franklin that's the thin end of the wedge.
This latest law is for sure misguided, but it came from a desire to reduce online harm for children -- more opposition was needed when it was going through parliament. I get it, they messed up, it's bad law, but we also have a parliamentary system that functions, so it will almost certainly be refined over time.
The goals are right, the implementation is wrong, but that doesn't mean the UK is falling into authoritarianism. We're not trying to overturn elections, or you know, stop them altogether.
The idea that the US is some paragon of freedom and liberty is utter, utter nonsense. It’s more fucked than the UK will ever be.
You wrote: "The UK is an increasingly authoritarian nightmare." - it just isn't. For those of us who live here, nothing is really different. Not being able to access porn without a VPN is not the definition of "authoritarian nightmare".
The UK, for sure, has its problems. Some related to our democracy. But it isn't on the precipice of losing its democracy altogether (like the US).
Linking your real identity to the ability to load text on a computer you own absolutely is. Not being able to step out onto the street without having 50 government-operated cameras take your picture absolutely is. "Knife control" absolutely is.
> But it isn't on the precipice of losing its democracy altogether (like the US).
Good god come on. I hope I remember to come back here after the next election and accept your apology.
Also, as sibling says, you’re simply misinformed about CCTV. There is no centralized government-operated network of CCTV cameras. In fact, all figures you read about total numbers of CCTV cameras are basically just guesses, as there is no accurate way to track numbers of privately operated cameras.
Not to defend the UK too vociferously (it _is_ going in a weirdly authoritarian direction and I certainly wouldn't want to live there), but this is also a thing in many US states: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/11/politics/invs-porn-age-verifi...
> Not being able to step out onto the street without having 50 government-operated cameras take your picture absolutely is.
This is a _bit_ of a myth; very few CCTVs in the UK are run by the government. It does have a very large number of CCTVs but they're generally privately owned and operated; they're largely a product of insurance company requirements.
As someone who lives in neither, the US seems considerably scarier at the moment, in general, and a lot further down the road to Hungary-style authoritarianism. The British government hasn't, as yet, made a serious effort to take over the media, say.
Nor has the US.
> Linking your real identity to the ability to load text on a computer you own absolutely is.
You're responding to something I didn't say.
> Not being able to step out onto the street without having 50 government-operated cameras take your picture absolutely is.
That's not true either. You're just lying. There are police CCTV cameras in trouble areas, sure, but the idea that there are 50 pointing at you at any one time is a lie. Most CCTV cameras are privately owned and they can only be sequestered by the police with a warrant.
But just to be clear, you call that an "authoritarian nightmare". It's an exchange of some freedoms (privacy on a public street) for some safety (freedom from criminal assault/theft/etc.). Because we haven't been constitutionally indoctrinated we can see the nuance in that exchange. Some may think it's gone too far, others not far enough, most appreciate the drop in crime.
> "Knife control" absolutely is.
The last time I bought a knife the Amazon delivery driver just had to check my ID to make sure I was 18 or over. But again, because we haven't been indoctrinated to believe that the constitution was given from upon high, we understand that if kids or young adults are buying knifes to stab each other, then we'll do something about it.
How many school shootings have there been in the US this year? The fetishisation of guns and violence is literally insane. The rest of the world looks at the US and its lack of gun control as lunacy.
>> But it isn't on the precipice of losing its democracy altogether (like the US).
> Good god come on. I hope I remember to come back here after the next election and accept your apology.
You first. You've already lied several times about the UK, so whenever you're ready.
This whole debate is utterly pointless. There's a clear divide between how the constitutionally indoctrinated American sees the world and those of us who live in countries without constitutions. Our system will always seem crazy to someone who only believes in one set of laws written down 200 odd years ago.
The difference with the UK to the US is that we have tended toward freedom for the past 1000 years. We are more comfortable with our system and institutions. It's certainly not perfect, but on the whole it doesn't oppress.
The 'First They Came' poem in the UK would go something like this:
* First they came for the Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers, and I did not speak out because I was not a Islamic fundamentalist suicide bomber.
* Then they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out because I was not a Nazi.
* Then they came for my PornHub access, luckily I didn't need anyone to speak up because I had VPN access
* Then they came for me - and there were plenty of decent people to speak up for me, cos life in the UK ain't as bad as it's said to be on Hacker News.
It kinda doesn't punch quite as hard ;)
I ask this in all seriousness: have you been paying attention to what's happening recently in the US?
Several examples: government employees are being vetted for loyalty instead of qualification; public corps like CBS are not only self censoring political speech but they also have a "bias monitor" to appease the government; normal people are being denied entry to the country for various wrongspeak on socials.
https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2025/07/29/nigel-farage-taki...
>"Nigel Farage ‘on the side of predators’ with Online Safety Act criticism, says Labour"
Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist?
The end goal here is digital ID and censorship. Compare this to the perennial efforts for encryption backdoors. If there is a characterization that accurately encompasses this, it is the illiberal, statist, authoritarian impulse. Sure, they used a sex-panic to advance their agenda. However, this is merely symptomatic of the larger illiberal trend towards authoritarianism and the expansion of the state.
All of our platforms are inundated by an overwhelming amount of well crafted, targeted (specific per person) campaigns of disinformation by foreign actors.
China, Russia, Iran, and others cannot even remotely hope to stand against the West. Yet if you cannot stand against your adversary, you must weaken them.
You promote infighting. You take minor issues which can be cooperatively resolved with compromise, and seek to turn them into issues of great division. You spread falsehoods, creating useful idiots in great numbers.
You find the most radicalized, most loony of citizens that you can, and then secretly fund them.
Understand, any concept of "we do that to ourselves" is like a gnat in comparison. This is a real threat, it's been getting worse, and the common person is not capable of even understanding the concept. The common person, even when told repeatedly, thinks there is no downside to having their Pii stolen, or hacked. They simply read click bait titles, youtube or tiktok videos and 100% believe every word without any skepticism.
You may disagree with any or all of the above.
However! The above is what is actually behind the move for KYC to this extent. It's not about age verification, it's about identity. And it's not even about one westerner talking to another, it's about a foreign adversary seeking to pretend to be a domestic.
Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater.
And I say this as someone that has fought for an open internet. It's already dead. It's dead because foreign interests use it as a tool to destroy our societies. It's dead because soon AI will replace most generated information.
Age verification laws are really identity laws, and any work to provide anonymous verification will fail, sadly, unfortunately, because the perceived threat is so large.
(I do not even necessarily agree with this, but if we don't understand the logic and the why of this, of why it is happening, then we're complaining about the wrong thing...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXqTMwN4MtY
At the time she was the Neocon Presidential candidate.
I've always found it difficult to believe that voters are capable of critically consuming information and voting for wars, regulations or confiscatory taxes, and simultaneously are incapable of thinking critically about propaganda. Under this model, the fact that some deceptive sources may be foreign is largely a red herring. The entire premise of Democracy rests upon the presumption that voters are capable of making informed decisions in an adversarial information landscape.
I don't see the desire to control Internet speech as a novel phenomenon. The rationalizations have evolved over the years. The proliferation of AI, Russian sponsored podcasters and Wumaos are iterations of an appeal to special circumstances.
If the West truly believes that authoritarians like the CCP are immoral and should be opposed, it stands to reason that they shouldn't be seeking to emulate the CCP's methods. That's the surface level, ideologically consistent view.
Beneath that, there is a rabbit hole of fringe theory. Like the above poster, I provide this information to better explain possible motives, without endorsement. In the conspiracy sphere, the PRC is regarded as a trial lab for social engineering schemes. The allegation is that concepts are ironed out there first. Examples would include: social credit scores, digital ID, Internet censorship and the confluence of all three. Whether these theories are true or false, it wouldn't be unreasonable to be wary of these outcomes.
The issue is no one in government would buy into this. You'd prevent them from catching bozo criminals who can't use a VPN.
*For example, you get up to N anon tokens a day you can use for anoning online. Only a count is stored daily to limit generations.
I worked on the latter problem space precisely for the US State Department. Its challenging, esp at scale, and esp if the folks trying to fight back are not given a free enough of a hand to do whats needed.
All of which is the fault of the establishment parties and not of foreign actors.
Even Trump now continues or, in the Middle East, exceeds the existing long term neocon policies. So the foreign online propaganda, which does exist, is completely overrated.
I don't need China to tell me via Tiktok that my life is getting demonstrably worse. I know that. The fact that China gets to tell me and be completely honest whilst doing so isn't something they've "engineered," they're just pointing at reality.
Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties without the intervention of overbearing Civil Servants, Cabinet Office officials or the guiding hand of the BBC. Radical idea, I know.
Mass alienation didn’t begin in a troll farm in St. Petersburg, it began in think tanks, boardrooms, and editorial meetings that decided ordinary people were an obstacle to be nudged, not a public to be served.
The propaganda in Britain isn’t loud or foreign (largely). It’s quiet, domestic, and politely credentialed. It's Otto English, it's James O Brien, it's the BBC. It doesn’t scream at you, it nudges, omits, and reframes until systemic rot looks like unfortunate happenstance.
The message from the BBC and the like is overwhelmingly don't think too hard about why things are the way they are, don't ever question the root causes, and if someone from the credentialed classes says something, they're probably right about it.
It's why the article is never "Wait why have your living standards fallen through the floor?" or "Is lockdown actually working?" but "Here's how to make a meal for £1" or "How to make a really good sourdough loaf".
By setting up a world where people can only access "pre approved" bits of information, you're not lessening access to propaganda, you're just picking winners.
That's not working so well in the US at least. That gave us Trump.
In the US however, this campaign came from the same think tanks and strategists associated with Project 2025 (taking cues from folks like Enough Is Enough), who are pretty upfront with their Christian Nationalist views. In Project 2025 they include a bizarre connection of porn with transgenderism that tips their hand on the religious bent to all this, but elsewhere in the plan outright state their Christian Nationalist ideals.
First we hear that the people behind the push for online identity verification are Christian nationalists. Then, after being informed that the British Labour party is also pushing for the same measure, we hear that the common denominator between those factions is their crypto-fascism.
To call the Labour party fascist, you must be some sort of extreme Thatcherite. To call Christian nationalist fascists is somehow even less defensible, as fascism is strongly collectivist[1] and the American political Christian extremely individualistic.
This entire discussion points to a horrific crisis in civics education, which I believe can explain the increasingly authoritarian policies of modern western governments far better than some crypto-fascist plot.
[1] "Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State", The doctrine of Fascism by Mussolini
So... national socialists and National Christians have a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram... to deny or miss those parallels seems disingenuous or ill informed.
I'm not informed of the British political landscape, so I can't speak to that.
And no, not every Christian is a NACHRIST, and it also isn't a coincidence that NAZI's co-oped and used Christianity opportunistically when it suited them.
And it's near universal because fascism is the major exception as it really doesn't desire any conformity from the designated inferior. That's what distinguishes the policies of NSDAP from prior cases of anti-Jewish oppression - the Nazi party wasn't interested in conversions at all.
As such, you really shouldn't call anyone ill informed on political topics.
I expect the make-porn-illegal crusade is more common in the US than elsewhere.
The law could mandate that retail device OSs ship with a turnkey child safe mode complete with app and extensive site whitelists and run an educational campaign on the subject. But instead they've gone the needlessly invasive route which is telling about the true motives.
The law was passed in 2023 by the tories, and Ofcom has concluded what the tories asked them to do -- write the statutory instruments that implement the law.
The Labour government would have to repeal the law (really unlikely; governments don't usually rip down their predecessors' laws because if they did no progress would occur) or set the statutory instruments aside.
I think the "true motives" are what the law says. I don't think they will ban VPNs (which would support an alternative reading of motive).
I also, again, encourage US readers to understand that your own supreme court has rubber-stamped a law that requires US porn firms to do all this and more for the benefit of Texas, and there are 24 more state laws that have similar impacts.
Pretending this is just something crazy we Brits are doing out there on our own is disingenuous at best and often hypocritical and whiny at worst.
As it happens I am from the UK and have no particular love for the way the US handles things either. In fact one of my biggest problems is that it encourages us to send extra PII to some of the most odiously associated US companies out there.
But in general I don't think doggedly pursuing this route where children get access to the full internet sans some self-selecting sites with ID checks is the way to go. There's too much out there which is outside the realms of accountability. If everyone installs VPNs (which appears to be what's going on, especially given that far more than just pornography is being blocked this way) then guess what happens when the child borrows the shared family device?
People want a magical solution which exonerates caregivers from having to worry about this and shifts the burden elsewhere but unfortunately one doesn't exist and the online safety act certainly isn't it. Education and turnkey child proofing of devices are the only thing that will really help.
Strongly agree. It kills me that nobody is seriously discussing robust, industry-standard childproofing.
Even if you require a driver's license, how hard is it really to swipe your mom's ID from her purse and write down the serial number? There is no solution to this problem that doesn't require parents to actually parent their children a bit and lock down their devices.
Oh yeah? How's that anti-terrorist legislation working out?
Preventing children from accessing porn has broad public support (as we might hope). That is very different to saying the OSA has broad public support though.
The YouGov survey results that have been much discussed in the past week came from three questions - one about age restrictions for porn, one about whether the new measures would be effective, and one about whether the person had heard of the new measures before the survey. The answers were essentially that the majority hadn't heard of the measures, almost everyone supported preventing kids from accessing porn, but the majority didn't think these measures would be effective in achieving that. Probably none of those results is very surprising for HN readers.
What is notably missing from the debate so far is any evidence about whether the public support the (probably) unintended consequences of the actual implementation of the OSA - which are what almost all of the criticism I am seeing is about. As with any political survey the answers probably depend very much on how you ask the questions and it's easy to get people to say they support "good" measures if you gloss over all the "bad" parts that necessarily go along with them.
Mobile phone subscriptions in the UK go the other way: By default they filter some content. If you tell the phone company to turn it off, they do. It's less invasive than this law because you don't need to tell them why you want it turned off, but still more draconian than if we could turn on a child safe mode that e.g. then required a pin or something to disable.
I can't imagine that it would pass as-is since on its face it seems to apply to all computers and all software including things like nginx or nftables that the entire modern economy relies on, but who knows?
[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
There is a conspiracy and it's being rolled out. There was already some country that declared anyone running non-standard OSes on their phones are highly suspect.
Labor during the Corbyn years made Bernie Sanders look like a fascist and the current labor is back to being milquetoast and embracing its social authoritarian roots.
Similarly, Americans cannot understand that the Canadians have an "NDP" and "Liberal" and they don't understand their differences - though these days I don't think the NDP knows their differences either!!!
I mean arguably, Labour could have repealed it or could have decided to disown it and discourage implementation, but the terrible design of the legislation is pretty much entirely the responsibility of the last government.
Of course this just shows the English Dissenters ended up being quite influential on both the left and right over the course of Anglophone history.
Honestly? Yeah, pretty much. It's a little hard to think of them that way since they're the leftmost establishment party in the UK, the same as the Democrats in the US, but historically speaking they're pretty right-wing. And theocracy has pretty deep roots in Anglosphere politics, so it's not necessarily that visible from the inside.
More pearl-clutching "think of the children" nonsense.
And even if it were somehow feasible to control internet access points 100% of the time, do you think most parents could figure it out? I have friends with teenage children, I assure you, most of them would be easily outsmarted by their kids with anything tech related, and they’re above average intelligence.
I’m not necessarily saying this is the correct solution anyway, I don’t know what is, I’m just saying we don’t need to make up dystopian conspiracy theories to explain the motivation of the people who want to do it.
It's possible to do truly anonymous ZKP's of being a member of a set (eg. over 18s) but in practice it would be very cumbersome. It would involve having a setup with a central authority (government) to build a Merkle tree where users would submit hashes of randomness and then a user would generate a token through a ZKP that would decouple them from their real identity with the anonymity dependent on the set size. New participants can be brought in but the anonymity set sizes would fluctuate.
Even with this method it will link together all services utilizing the token. And if you attempt to solve this by allowing to generate multiple tokens the entire scheme becomes somewhat meaningless as durable bypass services would emerge.
(¬‿¬)
Exactly, by protesting and fighting laws like this.
What exactly do you want people to "make sure of" with the law in place? If someone is concerned about this law, what specific action should they be taking in the name of "diligence"?
What needs to be kept in check is the scope. Let's say they try to age restrict sites that are subversive, but not obscene. That's what I'm talking about.
"Children shouldn't view pornography" is fine as an overall goal. A law that suggest the content providers track the faces and passport details of all users is a ridiculous way to fail to prevent that however.
It is however a great way to have an readily accessible log of exactly which citizens are viewing content the government finds questionable.
Read the actual guidance. They in no way require "send pictures of your official identity documents to every site".
There are a bunch of ways (some advisable, some not) where an existing entity that knows you are an adult can extend just that -- we know they are an adult.
Credit card providers know all their customers are adults, for example -- because you have to be an adult to enter into a credit agreement. And credit cards are insured.
Mobile phone companies in the UK block adult content by default and have done for some time; you have to unblock it by telling them you are an adult. But once you've done that, adult content can be verified quite trivially with an SMS.
And there are other methods still. For example a site with longstanding members is allowed to estimate the age of members based on how long they have used the same email address!
It's not a porn filter. It's a set of rules for companies to follow to identify adult users.
Is it the best law? No. But it's not the Texas law, that's for sure, and that law has survived a US Supreme Court challenge.
That's a lot more data leakage than some central authentication for it, and PII going to more places. And it's very optimistic to assume implementations will be good faith and secure.
I'm not sure I would call the USC a mark of quality right now anyway.
Invoking the "slippery slope" fallacy when the country with the greatest military in the world is abusing public records to grab people off the street and out of court rooms is an interesting choice.
How do you not follow the argument that there are problems with this?
So this is a new filter on top of the old.
Maybe by the authorities, furthering policies already in place to deal with people who don't toe a certain line of thought.
Probably by people outside the law, who now have a fantastic system to relentlessly attack. A place to source identity information that can be used for almost any part of a criminal enterprise, from buying credit cards to selling new names to carry.
And when security of government systems fail, in a way where damage is irreversible like this case, it is... Rare... To see fair outcomes.
Who defines what should be censored? The law certainly doesn't; it's purposefully vague to give the most latitude possible to the implementers. There's already been cases with the new UK law where peaceful arrests were censored by the law due to "violence."
VPNs exist, proxy websites are easy to setup, and frankly parents need to take some ownership.
Two alternative laws that'd have been much better: a) Require ISPs to provide a child friendly Internet gateway that would blacklist large weather if the Internet without a login. And b) legally require websites to accurately describe the content on their page and it's age appropriateness in headers sent back to the user, so the ISP or end device can decide whether to age gate a website.
These are much better solutions, the burden on websites isn't so onerous (many small sites have already had to shutdown due to the burden of the UK law). Implementation is distributed, preventing a single state actor from having full control of a censorship machine. Parents are empowered to decide what content is okay for their children. And you don't have to upload your fucking ID to use the Internet.
People who support this crap need to stop believing politicians every time they say "think of the children!"
This. None of this is the state's job, it's 100% on the parents to educate themselves, their children, and be the responsible party for determining and controlling what their kids can or can't do with technology and the internet.
If the state feels like they need to do something, they would be better served providing education and tools to parents. Hell, for the really tech illiterate the state could just offer a managed MDM service that they could enroll their kids devices into if they really can't figure out parental controls themselves.
It's not even that I think this is a good idea, but it does seem a fairly standard extension of existing laws. Potentially I'm missing something? Everyone else seems to be enraged by this.
Honestly, if the way this worked was that you could head over to the Pornhub office and get unlocked access from the bouncer at the door, that would probably be preferable.
(1) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/28/who-likes...
I think the bit that I don't understand yet, is: - Most people are not arguing that all pornography should be accessible to all ages - Most people seem horrified that online pornography isn't accessible to all ages
I think that the second point is a miscategorisation from me. Reading the rest of the comments, people seem more up in arms about the introduction of government tracking into a space where it previously wasn't (obviously commercial tracking already happens a lot in that space, but I don't think that justifies having even more).
I think I need to read some more on the implications of these kind of laws, I suppose I don't really understand too well what the relationship between government tracking and age checking is.
Also, we are up in arms about the introduction of government tracking is 1) it's not JUST government tracking, the age restricted sites will also get your PII and 2) most people get concerned when governments start getting involved in things regarded as private, like sex, porn, etc. 3) What will require verification is unclear "age restricted content" is pretty open.
Think I'm getting why people are so concerned about this, and why it's about more than age verification.
The problem is the surveillance and tracking, not the age verification itself.
I have no idea if that's true, but if it was, I'd be massively concerned about that (compared to non-phased about the general idea of age-verification)
https://www.pcmag.com/news/uk-online-safety-act-age-verifica...
1. Verify the ID without storing it in your system. Someone just looks at it.
2. Visually confirm that the photo on the ID matches the person entering the building.
Neither of these apply online.
Has everyone forgotten how kids operate? They’re not clueless. They’re going to realize that they don’t need to submit their ID. They just need to submit someone’s ID.
At first they’ll just use fake ID generators and submit those photos.
If that loophole gets closed somehow, a market will appear for buying ID verified accounts for trivial prices. People will create ID verified accounts and sell them cheap for side money. The only way around this is to start storing ID information for every account to make sure IDs aren’t used multiple times.
It’s one giant slippery slope of consequences for the adults forced to submit IDs, while the people who want to work around it do so trivially.
The child is not paying for their devices or internet access. Their parents are paying and providing the needed equipment. In a way, it's like giving keys to after hours access to the local mall, where all kinds of stores can be browsed including adult magazine stores, without any shopkeeper to apply the laws.
So one solution is don't give kids the keys. Or, since their online activity leaves a digital trail, even if they did have keys, there's a chance to moderate their activity via seeing what they have done rather than police where they might go.
Children are getting into debt on online gambling sites? Investigate. Suppose we find that half of children saw a betting ad and wanted to play, and a third just really like online poker: banning gambling ads and providing no-money online poker would be good interventions. "Remove computers from the public library" and "require ID verification to participate in pub bets" are not sensible interventions.
Minors shouldn't have unfettered + unsupervised access to the Internet, that's the solution.
The open Internet isn't a kid friendly place, isn't meant to be, and won't be no matter how many laws you pass.
Children grow up to become adults, and spend most of their lives as adults. It's important to weigh the lifetime cost of safety laws.
A child with unfettered access to the Internet at say 8 years (IMO, way too young should be 15+) is only protected for 10 years. Then goes on to spend ~60 years negatively impacted, fighting ever growing censorship and risking extortion/blackmail when data leaks. It just doesn't seem worth it in this case.
I'd much rather laws mandate special child-safe phones/laptops that could only access a subset of the Internet, rather than forcing every website/app to collect PII and inconsistently enforce age verification for all visitors for all time.
And all of this is besides the point anyway. Social media and cyberbullying are the real threats to minors online. Porn access isn't good, but it's not causing suicides and mental health crises left and right.
You don't need to verify your age to enter a bookstore or a library.
And if you really want to control who can access porn then the only way to do that is with a whitelist filter on the device being used. These laws are onerous without being effective.
I do think a standardized requirement for commercial websites to have content rating meta tags (like the existing content=adult and content=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA) would be a good thing though, just to make more lenient filtering easier.
This is what Russia is (semi-successfully) doing.
You either need to firewall the nation (which I imagine would be pretty unpopular) or it's just a waste of resources.
VPNs are incredibly easy to spin up, gambling groups are not. Within a week I could probably spin up a dozen or more semi-legitimate VPN companies. Multiply that by however many hundreds of people are willing to do the same. Add a few thousand more people willing to spin up completely shady 'free' VPNs.
The scale quickly exceeds what you can possibly block, unless you firewall the nation.
The article that our comments are under are about an 18x increase in sign-ups from the UK for one provider, a 2.5x increase for another provider, a 10x increase for yet another provider, etc. in just days.
I'm curious about your stats for China/Russia, though. Where/how do you find out how many internet users in those countries have a subscription to and/or use a VPN? Would those stats continue to hold true if there was not a great firewall in China, and just rudimentary IP-blocking of VPN providers?
Those numbers mean nothing without the baseline. What if before it was 1 person and now it’s 18x more, totaling 19 people?
W.r.t. data about China and Russia, I don’t want to pay for market reports, but occasional discussions about China, for example, show that about 35% of internet users use VPN (https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/i3afnz/how_many_peop..., the thread has some links for more info). However, it is unclear how many of those users are private citizens use VPN to specifically bypass censorship. From my anecdotal experience from work and my PhD, most Chinese I met just don’t care about censorship and lack of access to FB, YouTube, or whatever. Chinese are like western users for the most part, on average they need social media, financial apps, maybe search, etc. they are not actively looking for censored info.
They obviously don't mean nothing. Knowing absolute numbers would be much better, but knowing that the direction of the trend (people previously not caring now care) is informative by itself. It's safe to assume that more than 1 person had a VPN subscription previously.
I appreciate the link and additional insight. The way you phrased it before, I was expecting you to quote sub 10% or less. 35% is not inconsequential, especially considering the environment.
In the end, I'm not convinced you can extrapolate Chinese internet usage patterns to the UK, given the large cultural differences (specifically in regards to internet, history of censorship, etc.). Someone who has grown up their entire lives under the great firewall will react differently to censorship than someone who has grown up their entire lives under a mostly free internet that is now being censored.
Sure. However, without baseline numbers how do you know who are the people signing up for VPNs? This is the whole point: is it the general public en masse, or some of tech people who had no VPN before?
> In the end, I'm not convinced you can extrapolate Chinese internet usage patterns to the UK, given the large cultural differences (specifically in regards to internet, history of censorship, etc.). Someone who has grown up their entire lives under the great firewall will react differently to censorship than someone who has grown up their entire lives under a mostly free internet that is now being censored.
Of course culture makes a huge difference, but you cannot strongly prove the opposite just based on the assumption about cultural differences. I think the the average consumer simply does not care enough. Remember, the expectation on average is that the access to the information is free.
I guess time will tell :)
Maybe pivoting to things like Tor makes more sense.
Ultimately what these laws will end up doing is pushing internet traffic towards the "normie web", create a separation between sites which refuse to implement these measures and those who will.
Ultimately for this filters to work authoritarian countries like the UK will need to ban sites like 4chan which do not comply with their age verification demands despite hosting adult content. As it stands until the UK do this the age filtering may as well not exist because kids (and adults) will just go to other sites.
Additionally search and content aggregators will likely come under increased pressure to blacklist these "rogue" sites so slowly both the ability to access non-compliant sites and the ability to find non-compliant sites will diminish.
Like in the old days when cool sites and blogs spread more by word of mouth than social media and search aggregators, we're likely heading back to a world where those who are savvy enough to work around the filtering of authoritarian states will have access to a new kind of "semi-dark web" or a "rogue web".
I almost like that idea. If the internet bifurcates it might actually become a more authentic place for those of us in know. I suppose the only question then is whether authoritarian countries like the UK will ultimately come after private VPN users as well, but I feel like that would be impractically costly to enforce.
They will not hesitate to do so, the UK has the power to quickly and easily blacklist sites.
We've seen from online bans in recent years that it doesn't really matter if someone is still technically able to access a the banned content, at some point if you make the content hard enough to find its influence becomes increasingly irrelevant.
This new legislation basically gives the UK government an excuse to ban large sections of the internet from UK ISPs since they can say they weren't complying with UK law and shift the blame/responsibility in the eyes of the public – "it's not censorship, they're breaking the law!"
In doing this it will likely be enough to reduce UK traffic to those sites by 90%+. While it might technically be possible to buy and install a VPN to access them realistically most people won't bother.
I daydream about some kind of overlay network, without censorship and surveillance, where only people 'in the know' participate.
These have been getting build for years now, and the rate is increasing. The open, public web is on its last legs and is being replaced by a multitude of private networks.
It's a shame, the previous seasons were kind of timeless, but it feels like they jumped onto a buzzword that backfired before it was well understood. Although I may have dropped it early and it would have backfired on them after their cryptochain is used by criminals or whatever, but IIRC it was very early Bitcoin era and the themes were something like a 51% attack by china, it was way too early to make a comment on Blockchain, they were able to do good satire on the dot com era precisely because it was already dead.
Mesh network powered by walking nerd nodes and shoe leather? Everything TOR-ed and encrypted and super-asynchronous? Radio?
Europeans like to joke about the Americans being fine with gratouitious violence in kids movies as long as there's no blood, but a single female nipple immediately makes it R rated. Now consider that even France and England have different nuances on what is considered acceptable. If you extend beyond Western culture it becomes even more diverse. In some of the more religious Muslim countries a women shaking her full head of hair might be seen as erotic content. A lot of Japanese anime skirts very close to sexualizing children (from a Western perspective).
If every country became serious about enforcing age verification for their value system you could post barely any image or video content without marking it as age restricted for some jurisdiction. And the lines wouldn't neatly follow communities but you really would need a judgement for each piece of content. That's obviously not going to happen, so you will always have people from one place visiting communities in places that are more lax on one specific measure they are interested in.
And that's assuming all software and platform operators want to follow the restrictions, despite the obvious profit motive of not doing so. Restricting the supply isn't completely useless, but also provides huge incentives for those able to meet demand
I rent servers in Hong Kong, Switzerland, Tokyo, and many other places, and route tunnels among them all, and this is just mundane aboveboard stuff, many of the providers happily accept PayPal and crypto as well as CC and wire. I haven't even tried to design a system for evading this sort of thing, I can only imagine the ceiling is pretty high: QUIC and shit are increasingly the default.
I oppose this on principle, very much oppose it. I'm merely noting that until they're willing to start licensing the right to spend money abroad, they're going to have a tough time outlawing VPNs with any effect.
Maybe this pushes everyone to switch to Tor all at once: fucking with people's porno is a pretty quick way to move things around in the App Store ranking.
It would serve em right if this backfired massively by getting everyone to go cypherpunk by default.
My point is that it will cost them a lot of money in lost economic activity to make it happen: we should seek to make that cost as high as possible and make sure that powerful people understand how high it is.
Malicious actors are now harder to distinguish than legitimate actors, since they both will use VPNs. This is because in essence what VPNs are used for is always to evade the law, regardless of whether it is a law with high approval, like CASM, malware, spamming, drug trade; or laws with high approval for breaking them, like pornography age verification laws, or Intellectual Property laws on movies and music.
This is regardless of who is to blame for this issue, some will argue that it's the fault of those that break the laws with VPNs, some will argue that it's the fault of lawmakers for making stupid laws that deserve to be broken, muddying the waters. Undoubtedly, the third party, strong criminals, will make or amplify propaganda to legitimize breaking small laws, so that they can have legitimate alibies for breaking the law.
It’s already done a bit voluntarily. Try to use a VPN and pay for something with a prepaid credit card. Try to make a Steam account. Etc.
Get ready for a verified ID that’s required to access anything online because that’s the end goal.
You can blame the parents for allowing them unfettered access to the internet, but their classmates will show them something while they're hanging out after school or waiting for the bus. This doesn't even include the softer stuff that gets _recommended_ to them every day on tiktok and instagram reels - actively pushing them towards more explicit content.
I don't necessarily agree with the politicians here and I do believe there are ulterior motives at play such as information gathering for blackmail on adults, etc.
What is the solution here? I don't think there is one that satisfies everybody.
Way too many kids are rotting their brains away either becoming gooners or clout-chasers. I thank God every day I was born too early to have access to this stuff as a kid. I can't imagine what this "you must always be online and also sexy" culture is doing to our youngest generations.
"While generalizing about tens of millions of people is always difficult, a series of studies in recent years have reported that teens since the tail end of the millennial generation trend towards being less sexually active; they launch their sex lives later and have fewer sex partners than earlier generations."
This is the first time you're getting dozens, maybe hundreds of hours of watching someone do it arguably "wrong".
Doesn't solve the away problem, which is mainly 5g. I should be able to do that as the account payer.
I agree that children should not have access to sexually explicit material and that it can warp their relationships to sex. I also agree that some people have unhealthy relationships to pornography; there are plenty of psychological and psychiatric factors that lead people to engage in disordered sexual behaviours.
But people NEED to stop bringing medical pseudoscience into these discussions. Statements like "[children] form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button" are neither true nor useful.
> [T]he last 5 years of pornography research is marked by increased attention to the impact of context and individual differences when assessing pornography use effects. Particularly, researchers have provided compelling evidence that differences in religious and moral values regarding sexual behavior can impact estimates of pornography use and perceptions regarding the problematic or addictive nature of pornography. Considering recent findings, a systematic review of recent research (within the past 5 years) on how religion and morality shape pornography use effects was conducted, with a particular focus on findings regarding pornography problems due to moral incongruence.
> Fifty-one articles were included in the present review. Findings demonstrate religiousness, moral disapproval, and moral incongruence as robust, strong predictors of various problems regarding pornography (e.g., psychological distress, relational problems, perceived addiction).
Like they say above, it's hot-button issue and this sort of result is fairly easy to replicate, so a lot of papers have been published along these lines in recent years.
The fact that people need to install vpn to access porn is also a solution. I doubt children younger than 13 could do it.
Honestly seems more fun if you think about it since you could technically trade the goods around
They could publish their IP addresses so that the traffic can be blackholed at the router by the account holder.
The choice would then be down to the person paying the bill whether to block or not.
It won't apply to shady sites, but those sites won't do age verification anyway.
The problem is nobody wants the account holder to have the power.
This is what needs regulated, not pushing “papers, please” Statsi nonsense on the adults.
[citation needed]
> What is the solution here?
The kids who grew up on violent games and unlimited free internet porn are adults now. We're fine. I don't understand what's all the ruckus about.
Unless the real issue is that people are noticing certain societal changes that are very difficult to combat so the politicians blame porn because otherwise they'd have to admit that they have no solutions to more pressing problems. Please note how suddenly the housing crisis, vote manipulation, inequality, fucked job market, mental health crisis, genocide in Gaza, war in Ukraine, loneliness epidemic, unchecked immigration, phone addiction all became irrelevant side topics because right now we're laser focused on making sure that boys going through puberty won't see a naked titty. Truly a clown world we live in.
I went through puberty in the golden age of internet porn. After widespread high-speed internet became a thing, but before we started algorithmically monetizing every second of people's attention. I'm so happy of that. I still have my collection of porn I downloaded as a horny teenager.
Sometimes I feel like both sides are actually just one side playing the long game. IMO the goal is to get verified digital IDs in use everywhere they can so they can lock down the internet to have absolute control. We'll end up paying inflated subscriptions for everything and watching all the ads.
These are the kinds of regulations that are deigned for incumbents because it becomes impossible for new market entrants to satisfy the requirements. I wouldn't be surprised if big tech companies are silently lobbying for this kind of stuff behind closed doors.
With this solution, kids are far safer than under recent UK/EU age verification laws, while adults and their free, open & private internet remain unaffected.
lemoncookiechip•9h ago
Create a better, standardized, open-source parental control tool that is installed by default on all types of device that can connect to the web.
The internet aspect of the parental control should be a "Per Whitelist" system rather than Blacklisting. The parents should be the ones to decide which domains are Whitelisted for their kids, and government bodies could contribute with curated lists to help establish a base.
Yes, there would be some gray area sites like search engine image search, or social media sites like Twitter that can allow you to stumble into pornography, and that is why these devices that have the software turned ON, should send a token through the browser saying "Parental Control". It would be easier for websites to implement a blanket block of certain aspects of their site than expect them to implement whole ID checks systems and security to make sure that no leaks occur (look at the TEA app) like the UK is expecting everyone to do.
Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography. I was once a teenager, every adult was, and we know that it's a natural thing to masturbate which includes the consumption of pornography for most in some way. Repressing their desires, their sexuality, and making this private aspect of their life difficult isn't the way. Yes, yes, there is nuance to it, (very hardcore/addiction/etc) but it should be up to the parents to decide with given tools if they trust their kid to consume such a thing.
As for the tool itself. Of course we have parental tools, but they can be pretty garbage, their all different, they're out of the way, and I understand that many people simply don't know how to operate them. That's why I believe that creating a standardized open-source project that multiple governments can directly contribute to and advertise for parents is the way, because at the end of the day, it should be up to the parents to decide these things, and for the government to facility that choice.
Obviously, besides the internet aspect, the tool should have all the bells and whistles that you'd expect from one, but that's not the topic.
And yes, some children would find a way, just like they're doing now for the currently implemented ID checks. It's not lost of me that VPNs with free plans suddenly exploded in 4 digits % worth of downloads. A lot of those are tiny people who are smart enough. Or using an app like a game to trick Facial Recognition software.
Also, I'd be remiss to not point out a very obvious fact. This, and I'm not just referring to the UK, isn't about children, it's not about terrorism, it's not about public safety. It's about control, it's about tracking, it's about documenting, it's about power over the masses. I know some people will hand wave this away, but we have been seeing a very obvious, very fast, rise of authoritarianism since COVID and later the war in Ukraine. It's not a new trend, but it is one that got accelerated at those stages and has been progressively getting worse world wide.
wizzwizz4•7h ago
I'm against: pornography, as found in search results, is generally quite bad. Sexism, racial stereotyping, misrepresentations of queer issues: and that's just the titles. Page 3 has nothing on porn sites.
Maybe I'm judging a book by its SEO spammers here, but I've not read anything that'd disabuse me of this notion: indeed, people raise concerns about unreasonable body image expectations, normalising extreme sex acts like choking without normalising enthusiastic consent practices, the sites allowing CSAM and "revenge porn" that they've already taken down to be re-uploaded…
That said, I routinely come across nudes / sexualised imagery on the Fediverse, and that's… not an issue? Sometimes I find it a bit squicky (which teaches me not to play lift-the-flap with clearly-marked content warnings – I don't know what I expected), but the only times I've seen something viscerally offensive has been people re-posting from porn aggregation sites. (I've blocked three or four accounts for that, and I don't see it any more.)
If porn sites had the kind of stuff that queer / disabled techies post on main on niche social media sites, then I'd be absolutely fine with teenagers accessing porn. As you say, a safe environment for adolescents to explore their sexuality is unequivocably a good thing. I just don't think commercial porn sites provide that.
This is what concerns me the most about the Online Safety Act. It's shutting down the aforementioned queer / disabled techies on their social media sites, and surely plenty of other pro-social sex communities I don't even know about, but it's not going to do a thing about the large aggregators that are the real problem. It in fact makes the whole problem worse.
sempron64•6h ago
shkkmo•5h ago
wizzwizz4•2h ago
I don't think children should have access to porn, because they should have access to decent sex education, and (most?) porn is extremely misrepresentative of reality. According to https://xkcd.com/598/, exposure to porn can affect people's sexual fetishes. I think it is bad for people to develop an interest in violent, dangerous, or asymmetrically-pleasurable sexual activities before they have have had a chance to… uh, however it is people would otherwise figure out what they're into.
It is better for people to learn about BDSM from actual practitioners (including the background context, such as… uh, safe words? and whatever a "scene" is) than from fictional characters. If the average person (or, heck, the average 16-year-old) attempts to act out a rape fantasy, without proper access to information about SSC / RACK / etc, how's that going to go?
This isn't really the sort of thing you can teach in schools. For one, children mature at different rates: some 15-year-olds are too young to even be thinking about that sort of thing, while others are having sex in secret while their parents pretend to be oblivious. (And some of us never start being interested in that sort of thing.) Teaching anything more than the basics (how reproductive biology works, contraceptives, STIs, respecting consent, enforcing consent, the risk profiles of various popular sex acts, "if you skip foreplay, you might need additional lubricant to avoid injury", "don't use condom solvent as a lubricant", "seriously, don't rape people") in compulsory education fails to respect children's autonomy and is wrong. (Schools don't teach those basics properly, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)
I also do not trust schools to provide decent sex education, because there are even "good schools" that cover up peer-on-peer rape, and place the onus of "getting along" afterwards on the victim. How's an institution that does that supposed to teach a holistic notion of consent? (No environment with such a high child-to-adult ratio where the children aren't allowed to leave is ever going to be safe, but the reputational incentives lead to particularly bad outcomes when these things happen; we don't have strong enough cultural norms requiring that adults act responsibly when what "shouldn't happen" happens.)
For similar reasons, I think any policy based on the assumption that children are innocent little angels we must avoid corrupting, is dead on arrival and bound to fail. Children are young people, with all the autonomy that entails.
There's no particular difference, apart from power dynamics, between exposing a 17-year-old to sexual material they don't want to see, and exposing a 30-year-old to sexual material they don't want to see. Of course, we cannot generally ignore power dynamics, which is why age-based rules are useful; but age is a proxy for things like autonomy, capacity for choice, informedness of choice, and tendency for choice to be respected by others. A 17-year-old at risk of exploitation does not magically become less vulnerable on their 18th birthday. If the rules to protect teenagers from harm don't protect all teenagers, there's probably something fundamentally wrong with them. (Yes, yes, you can move the threshold to 20. Very clever. Way to miss the point.) Furthermore, if the rules don't protect all teenagers, they probably don't even protect all teenagers below the age of 18, because they're not addressing the problem close enough to its source / to the harm.
As should be apparent from my earlier post, I have very little personal experience with pornography. But I have spent a while thinking about this topic, and I'm not sure how this position is parodic. Perhaps you could enlighten me?
Maybe the social ills caused by porn will disappear with proper sex education; in that case, I might be inclined to support the prospect of children who choose to seek it out having the authority to access pornography. But my current understanding of the world suggests that a restriction is more beneficial than access. (It's only, what, four years to wait? During which time children can learn to deal with randiness in ways other than "fire up ye olde web browser" or "shag a friend".)
Computer-mediated ID verification, and the Online Safety Act in general, is obviously bad, and should be opposed. But, being obvious, that goes without saying. (Was that your objection: that I didn't clearly pick a side?)
NoGravitas•5h ago
cooper_ganglia•7m ago
cooper_ganglia•6h ago
CaptainFever•5h ago
cooper_ganglia•24m ago
It’s a parent’s responsibility to keep their children away from that type of content, not to hand them access to it so they can develop maligned, destructive ideas about sex, intimacy, and women.
BeFlatXIII•5h ago
cooper_ganglia•14m ago
Very bold choice to argue the nuance of “But how do we define ‘child’?” in a discussion about showing pornography to kids, though!