I think the most damning thing about porn hysteria is that society as a whole ran the experiment of an open internet for 30 years, long enough for a full generation of people to be fully raised on it and -none- of the things the anti-porn crowd cried about came true. In fact things actually moved in the opposite direction. The whole think is unsurprisingly just as bunk as the hysteria over violent video games and "demonic" music.
It seems plain old social media is the actual damaging thing to come from the internet.
“Damage, difficult to measure” was not what was predicted 30 years ago. Satanic apocalyptic 40k dark elves society, blood orgies and lawlessness was much closer to the messaging. Literal actual Judaic apocalypse was a major risk.
One could make the argument that it has, via political changes. DOGE, for instance, who's cuts have been linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths, would have been very unlikely without social media.
Because of the misinformation that led to DOGE cutting funding on programs that saved a lot of lives, but cost almost nothing. People elected the present government based on the lie that the budget could be balanced by cutting things like foreign aid and the arts, but in fact those things are a rounding error in the overall budget.
This outcome was always obvious. The internet is too big. You can degrade the sites that are legitimate enough to follow the law, but that's just a drop in the bucket in the sea of porn.
They gave up on banning VPNs.
They did a consultation and found that the overwhelming majority of children aren't using VPNs to bypass age checks, they're just going to websites that don't implement them.
What they said is true. The outcome of the consultation [1] states, "We will not ban or age-gate VPNs." It also states, "... children typically circumvent age assurance with less sophisticated methods rather than with VPNs, using VPNs more for security and privacy."
I think the point is that porn is decentralized enough rather than the internet too big. Regulating just a handful of sites would deal with like 95% of social media, but you could regulate hundreds of porn sites and have basically 0 effect.
The logical endpoint of this is that nations campaign on "internet sovereignty" and begin whitelisting the internet with strict restrictions and licensure of who can open up new sites. This is reportedly occurring to a limited extent in russia: https://www.intellinews.com/russia-s-mobile-internet-whiteli...
They're going to build an internet where every device must be attested and logged in with your personal state identification.
They're not just stopping filthy, sinful porn. They're making sure wrongthink will be traced to the source and jailed. You can't be allowed to have a job or be banked if you're saying harmful things.
You exist to work and die and be a good little ward of the state. No stepping out of line. You do not get to live as the elites live.
And something similar will happen with chat control I'm afraid. Make every public messenger scan all messages to "protect the children" and those people that would be affected by these scanners will simply find another way to communicate (or build their own E2EE chat app like EncroChat in the past) and the only ones that suffer are the normal people who are now being surveilled and with no real reason.
These things are all pretences to track and control “normal” people anyway though. It’s not really about protecting children or about reducing porn access or whatever, it’s about control. It’s less important that the people that really want to do this stuff slip through, the key is to tighten the screws on the population generally. This is why there are apparent inconsistencies, which disappear once you realize what’s actually happening.
I don't recall her name, but a past government hired a consultant before implementing the age verification laws, who warned that this would obviously happen, and they promptly fired her.
Good news, the end goal that is being pushed by corporate lobbyists is still in sight.
Give it a few years (months if you're an optimist?) and you will have to use your Google/Apple hardware device to formally tie your real identity with your digital identity for every site that has even the slim possibility of being a small danger to hypothetical children.
I'm sure Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will gladly join this effort to reduce harm to children as well, I'm sure that's high on their priority list. They may even already have the infrastructure in place to handle that digital ID, what an amazing coincidence.
> This is the work of the UK govt, not corporate lobbyists.
This is not an exclusive or. Corporate lobbyists from social media have a real incentive for pushing age verification and attestation. They benefit from public outcry and popular movements for age restrictions online, while also presenting age verification as the only solutions to the problems causing that outcry (which is to say, largely moderation problems on their own websites).
Age verification will be a significant loss for social media companies. It's going to push plenty of people away, and it provides no information that they don't already know to a reasonably high degree of certainty.
And I think the problems with social media for children have little to do with moderation. It's more about the typical ails that even 'good' social media would entail: FOMO, image crafting, amplification/streamlining all typical stuff that happens at all schools - bullying, rumor milling, and so on. To say nothing of the general effect of people becoming zombies to their phones rather than actually interacting in person as much.
The media buzz around the ills of social media are certainly tied to moderation, as well as other problems with the governance of those sites: people are really worried about the kind of offensive content that is easily accessible to, and recommended to, children. There is some recognition that the harmful suggestion algorithms are at fault, but the fact that such content is hosted at all is also a moderation problem.
>Age verification will be a significant loss for social media companies. It's going to push plenty of people away, and it provides no information that they don't already know to a reasonably high degree of certainty.
It may push some people away (though with the centralisation of the internet, I think this is easy to overstate), but the social media companies probably aren't that worried. Their bigger threat is actual legislation and punishment. Age-gating prevents the government from coming down on them for bad moderation, since they can just block users from accessing anything that might need to be moderated otherwise.
The possibility that age verification will actually give them more data or let them track you more easily is a nice little plus, but this is more stick than carrot.
'Harmful content' is one small aspect of it. Overwhelming majorities are concerned about addiction, bullying, mental health, academic focus, real life interactions, and so on. None of those are fixed by moderation or by any sort of regulatory constraints that can be reasonably imposed on social media.
Officially I'm sure. It gets revived in the 2023 Online Safety Act and is followed by strong EU push for Identity Verification, Chat Control, etc. at the same time. I don't think it's wrong to look at them from the same lens.
It's not necessarily nefarious though: the same ideas/fears permeate all society so it makes sense they pop up together. The work may have already been done by some legislators, ready to be used by others.
But the corporate lobbying for weakening online anonymity and encryption is not something new either, and the benefits are clear. It wouldn't be the first issue large-scale lobbying has taken place in their interests, and for something as critical as identify verification I genuinely cannot imagine it isn't one of the most important issue in surveillance capitalism.
A strategy old as time. Implement a weak "foot in the door" measure that pushes people towards incompliance, use the incompliance to justify implementing the strong "break the door and your nose along with it" measure.
Companies can benefit from it but this type of control in some form or another has been the go-to for the state since forever. It just recently became feasible to do it so comprehensively otherwise they would have done it ages ago.
> Good news, the end goal that is being pushed by corporate lobbyists is still in sight.
It's less bigtech corporate lobbying and more evangelical lobbying (exodus cry etc.). This outcome plays along their plans. Create restrictions, which kill off the legal market/actors (good!) and push people into incompliance (excellent!) then push for harsher measures (see what a rampant problem illegal porn sites are). Their main goal is to go full prohibition on adult content.
I'm (unironically) sure it's a multi-faceted issue with a lot of actors having genuinely good motivations to push for this.
That being said I'm also sure those groups are especially vulnerable to fear-mongering [0] and it would not be particularly hard to rile up these bases to work towards the same end goal.
“Good” actor does not refer to ethical, but to lawful.
> ethical porn
Define “ethical porn”? Problem with ethics is that it varies from person to person; at least lawful has the taste of varying only from country to country.
What's a good commenter? I'm sure you eat meat and use fossil fuels.
The discussion is about actors under a regime of universal age checks, not your personal problems. If it helps, change it to be about sites that write about birth control when information about birth control has been ordered to be restricted to married males over 30, and "good actors" complying with this ends up resulting in both unmarried females and married Catholic males over 30 who don't want to identify themselves visiting sites that also contain information about full communism and Zoroastrianism, which have been decreed illegal for anyone to discuss.
Along with it organised crime, which gets richer faster and then tends to branch out into other areas. Prohibition in all its forms has caused an enormous cost to people outside of those wanting the now banned things.
Had they not passed the "ban porn site" bill then the majority of people would be viewing porn on sites which will enforce (or at least attempt to enforce), and consumption of it would reduce.
Instead UK people consume port from places which is quite happy to have choking, bestiality, and child porn.
I think the most damning thing about porn hysteria is that society as a whole ran the experiment of an open internet for 30 years, long enough for a full generation of people to be fully raised on it and -none- of the things the anti-porn crowd cried about came true. In fact things actually moved in the opposite direction. The whole think is unsurprisingly just as bunk as the hysteria over violent video games and "demonic" music.
It seems plain old social media is the actual damaging thing to come from the internet.
There absolutely was damage.
The damage was at a sociological/behavioral level and thus difficult to measure.
Once again, convenient logic swoops in to save the ego.
“Damage, difficult to measure” was not what was predicted 30 years ago. Satanic apocalyptic 40k dark elves society, blood orgies and lawlessness was much closer to the messaging. Literal actual Judaic apocalypse was a major risk.
It almost seems like they might've been projecting.. lol
That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
> It seems plain old social media is the actual damaging thing to come from the internet.
Ah come on man used by billions it should have killed hundreds of thousands by now if what they say is true about it
One could make the argument that it has, via political changes. DOGE, for instance, who's cuts have been linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths, would have been very unlikely without social media.
Just in case you're too young to remember, nutjob politicians with stupid ideas long predate social media.
What, because of the doge meme?
Because of the misinformation that led to DOGE cutting funding on programs that saved a lot of lives, but cost almost nothing. People elected the present government based on the lie that the budget could be balanced by cutting things like foreign aid and the arts, but in fact those things are a rounding error in the overall budget.
Not all damage is fatal
This outcome was always obvious. The internet is too big. You can degrade the sites that are legitimate enough to follow the law, but that's just a drop in the bucket in the sea of porn.
Hence why the UK govt wants to ban VPNs and have our own lil internet firewall
They gave up on banning VPNs. They did a consultation and found that the overwhelming majority of children aren't using VPNs to bypass age checks, they're just going to websites that don't implement them.
Not true, we had change or PM.
What they said is true. The outcome of the consultation [1] states, "We will not ban or age-gate VPNs." It also states, "... children typically circumvent age assurance with less sophisticated methods rather than with VPNs, using VPNs more for security and privacy."
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...
I think the point is that porn is decentralized enough rather than the internet too big. Regulating just a handful of sites would deal with like 95% of social media, but you could regulate hundreds of porn sites and have basically 0 effect.
The logical endpoint of this is that nations campaign on "internet sovereignty" and begin whitelisting the internet with strict restrictions and licensure of who can open up new sites. This is reportedly occurring to a limited extent in russia: https://www.intellinews.com/russia-s-mobile-internet-whiteli...
They're going to build an internet where every device must be attested and logged in with your personal state identification.
They're not just stopping filthy, sinful porn. They're making sure wrongthink will be traced to the source and jailed. You can't be allowed to have a job or be banked if you're saying harmful things.
You exist to work and die and be a good little ward of the state. No stepping out of line. You do not get to live as the elites live.
Books and romsets are the future. Get ready for it early.
In the words of Tom Lehrer
"I've got a hobby
Re-reading Lady Chatterley"
And something similar will happen with chat control I'm afraid. Make every public messenger scan all messages to "protect the children" and those people that would be affected by these scanners will simply find another way to communicate (or build their own E2EE chat app like EncroChat in the past) and the only ones that suffer are the normal people who are now being surveilled and with no real reason.
These things are all pretences to track and control “normal” people anyway though. It’s not really about protecting children or about reducing porn access or whatever, it’s about control. It’s less important that the people that really want to do this stuff slip through, the key is to tighten the screws on the population generally. This is why there are apparent inconsistencies, which disappear once you realize what’s actually happening.
Security services would certainly have an easier time in such a world
https://archive.is/xQiFO
I don't recall her name, but a past government hired a consultant before implementing the age verification laws, who warned that this would obviously happen, and they promptly fired her.
That was 100% obvious that would happen, the law will only be followed by good actors and bad actors now have an additional advantage
Good news, the end goal that is being pushed by corporate lobbyists is still in sight.
Give it a few years (months if you're an optimist?) and you will have to use your Google/Apple hardware device to formally tie your real identity with your digital identity for every site that has even the slim possibility of being a small danger to hypothetical children.
I'm sure Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will gladly join this effort to reduce harm to children as well, I'm sure that's high on their priority list. They may even already have the infrastructure in place to handle that digital ID, what an amazing coincidence.
Everything will be fine!
Snooper's charter ring a bell? This is the work of the UK govt, not corporate lobbyists.
> This is the work of the UK govt, not corporate lobbyists.
This is not an exclusive or. Corporate lobbyists from social media have a real incentive for pushing age verification and attestation. They benefit from public outcry and popular movements for age restrictions online, while also presenting age verification as the only solutions to the problems causing that outcry (which is to say, largely moderation problems on their own websites).
Age verification will be a significant loss for social media companies. It's going to push plenty of people away, and it provides no information that they don't already know to a reasonably high degree of certainty.
And I think the problems with social media for children have little to do with moderation. It's more about the typical ails that even 'good' social media would entail: FOMO, image crafting, amplification/streamlining all typical stuff that happens at all schools - bullying, rumor milling, and so on. To say nothing of the general effect of people becoming zombies to their phones rather than actually interacting in person as much.
The media buzz around the ills of social media are certainly tied to moderation, as well as other problems with the governance of those sites: people are really worried about the kind of offensive content that is easily accessible to, and recommended to, children. There is some recognition that the harmful suggestion algorithms are at fault, but the fact that such content is hosted at all is also a moderation problem.
>Age verification will be a significant loss for social media companies. It's going to push plenty of people away, and it provides no information that they don't already know to a reasonably high degree of certainty.
It may push some people away (though with the centralisation of the internet, I think this is easy to overstate), but the social media companies probably aren't that worried. Their bigger threat is actual legislation and punishment. Age-gating prevents the government from coming down on them for bad moderation, since they can just block users from accessing anything that might need to be moderated otherwise.
The possibility that age verification will actually give them more data or let them track you more easily is a nice little plus, but this is more stick than carrot.
'Harmful content' is one small aspect of it. Overwhelming majorities are concerned about addiction, bullying, mental health, academic focus, real life interactions, and so on. None of those are fixed by moderation or by any sort of regulatory constraints that can be reasonably imposed on social media.
Officially I'm sure. It gets revived in the 2023 Online Safety Act and is followed by strong EU push for Identity Verification, Chat Control, etc. at the same time. I don't think it's wrong to look at them from the same lens.
It's not necessarily nefarious though: the same ideas/fears permeate all society so it makes sense they pop up together. The work may have already been done by some legislators, ready to be used by others.
But the corporate lobbying for weakening online anonymity and encryption is not something new either, and the benefits are clear. It wouldn't be the first issue large-scale lobbying has taken place in their interests, and for something as critical as identify verification I genuinely cannot imagine it isn't one of the most important issue in surveillance capitalism.
A strategy old as time. Implement a weak "foot in the door" measure that pushes people towards incompliance, use the incompliance to justify implementing the strong "break the door and your nose along with it" measure.
Companies can benefit from it but this type of control in some form or another has been the go-to for the state since forever. It just recently became feasible to do it so comprehensively otherwise they would have done it ages ago.
> Good news, the end goal that is being pushed by corporate lobbyists is still in sight.
It's less bigtech corporate lobbying and more evangelical lobbying (exodus cry etc.). This outcome plays along their plans. Create restrictions, which kill off the legal market/actors (good!) and push people into incompliance (excellent!) then push for harsher measures (see what a rampant problem illegal porn sites are). Their main goal is to go full prohibition on adult content.
I'm (unironically) sure it's a multi-faceted issue with a lot of actors having genuinely good motivations to push for this.
That being said I'm also sure those groups are especially vulnerable to fear-mongering [0] and it would not be particularly hard to rile up these bases to work towards the same end goal.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Which site would you qualify as a "good" actor?
It's an honest question. Is there such a thing as ethical porn or are there only sites that pay taxes and those that don't?
OnlyFan is as ethical as porn can get
There are definitely more ethical porn sites, e.g. ones that will take down revenge porn vs ones that won't.
“Good” actor does not refer to ethical, but to lawful.
> ethical porn
Define “ethical porn”? Problem with ethics is that it varies from person to person; at least lawful has the taste of varying only from country to country.
I'd call the ones which have a process for verifying actors and following local laws to be good actors
It's not an honest question. A good actor is one that is not trying to show porn to children and follows the law.
> A good actor is one that is not trying to show porn to children and follows the law.
It's been happening since the 1800s non stop.... I know it's wrong to show kids porn etc but what's the actual damage it does?
That's one (very serious issue) but there are many others.
Pornhub is a company, has an address, pays taxes, and has a history of problems.
What's a good commenter? I'm sure you eat meat and use fossil fuels.
The discussion is about actors under a regime of universal age checks, not your personal problems. If it helps, change it to be about sites that write about birth control when information about birth control has been ordered to be restricted to married males over 30, and "good actors" complying with this ends up resulting in both unmarried females and married Catholic males over 30 who don't want to identify themselves visiting sites that also contain information about full communism and Zoroastrianism, which have been decreed illegal for anyone to discuss.
There are sites which follow laws and those that don't.
when you make something more difficult to access a black market profiting from easier access will always appear
Along with it organised crime, which gets richer faster and then tends to branch out into other areas. Prohibition in all its forms has caused an enormous cost to people outside of those wanting the now banned things.
If only there was a period in the 1920s that could have predicted this outcome...
Who the fuck was actually dumb enough to believe that all these laws are actually honestly intended to ""protect children""?
..the answer is almost everyone, apparently
Another
The UK tried to ban choking porn. Quite reasonable given the realities of monkey-see monkey-do.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/06/chokin...
Trouble is, "nobody in the UK" consumes porn.
Had they not passed the "ban porn site" bill then the majority of people would be viewing porn on sites which will enforce (or at least attempt to enforce), and consumption of it would reduce.
Instead UK people consume port from places which is quite happy to have choking, bestiality, and child porn.
Good job Mary Whitehouse Brigade.
[dead]
Tax and regulations always punish the good actors
The regulation could have been "adult content must be labelled", and then the logic is pushed to the client device.
Like the good actors who ship contaminated food?
>Aylo said last year that traffic to its Pornhub had fallen 77 per cent since the introduction of the Online Safety Act.
So just MindGeek kvetching about a good thing.
What do you think is more likely: they stopped looking at porn or they changed websites?