There are a lot of GOP-controller legislatures in the USA pushing through so-called “child protection” laws, but there’s a toll in the form of impacting people’s rights and data privacy. Most of these bills involve requiring adults to upload a copy of their photo ID.
I don’t see sex as this big monster we have to defend kids from.
Whoa
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It is still very shocking to us in Europe that the United States wants to control pornography before guns. I don’t know many people who have killed themselves by masturbating.
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Doesn’t parts of Europe have stricter laws against porn or is that just UK?
I believe that pornography is illegal in Bulgaria, while in other places, there are no strict laws. There’s a warning banner that you must check if you are over 18 years old. That’s it. On the other hand, we have many gun control laws. Priorities.
Even the UK isn’t this level of strict - the things that are outlawed are those involving lack of consent and those that are very likely to injure people.
I had an interesting experience as a teen looking at porn online and blocking is not the way. Education is the best, basically teaching teens is better than letting them make mistakes when they turn 18 and get their ass fucked
Even if the system works as designed, it relies on parents to teach their kids about porn. That means when they turn 18 (or 30 or whatever) they get unfettered porn access and we’re no further ahead.
as a zoomer who had access to porn at a young age, that shit was not good for me at all. i think it’s pretty fair to suggest that people below the age of 13 should not be looking at porn - but i wouldn’t even know how one could even go about actually regulating it
These bills are intended to make it harder for anyone to look at porn online. There are plenty of tools parents can employ to make it harder for their own kids to see porn – that’s where the responsibility belongs.
it should be their parent’s paroblem ! give them the tools to do it properly without making other people’s lives hell. instead of govs trying to strip encryption and what not
My first problem is that the GOP wants to have people’s private vital information freely given to them and that people would be required to comply. Tying that information to activities of consenting adults will be misused. Blue noses can’t keep their noses in their own business, and the possibility for graft and blackmail is immense.
When did the GOP start to care about children, anyway?
The GOP has always cared about sex
Some principles and things to note:
- Adults’ expression to one another must not be restrained to only what is suitable for children.
- Sexuality is a normal thing that most people are interested in. It is not inherently illegitimate, deviant, or corrupting.
- Children and adolescents who are kept in ignorance and fear of sexuality are especially vulnerable to sexual abuse by adults.
- Anonymous and pseudonymous speech are necessary to the freedom of a free society.
- The chief threat of sexual abuse to children does not come from anonymous or pseudonymous speakers on the Internet, but from family members and acquaintances.
Very excellent points. While I agree kids shouldn’t be looking at porn, forcibly trying to keep all knowledge of sex and porn from them until they hit a magic age where now they can do anything they want isn’t the answer.
Children need to be educated so they can make wise decisions when the time comes. No matter how much people try to stop it, the time will often come before they reach the magic age set by laws, and unfortunately it’s sometimes through sexual assault or their naivety being taking advantage of.
I would combat that by saying I think most pornography is nowhere close to what sex is like. Anecdotally, I hear more stories about men who try to fuck someone like they’re in a porn film, which can result in physical pain to their partner.
I think teaching kids about sex and giving them access to porn that often displays non-consensual acts as normal are two totally different things.
But yes, I think 4 is a very strong point, which is why most of the bills that are being proposed are not being executed well.
Oh sure. Generally speaking, most porn is a terrible sex educator.
However, it’s also a wrong target for concerns about child sexual abuse.
And crackdowns on “porn” tend to end up being crackdowns on sexuality-related speech and sweep in a lot of other speech too.
This nails it right here, #1 and #2 especially.
Sex is fun, sex is awkward, sex is weird and messy and life-changing. Sex is mundane, sex is cathartic, sex is funny and sex is cardio. Also, sex makes people, oh and it feels good. All that is pretty fucking magical if you ask me.
What is done in private between consenting adults is none of your goddamn business, including porn. Don’t use kids as an excuse to control adults’ behavior.
You cannot stop kids from looking at porn. Doesn’t matter how hard you try, they will find a way around it. This is about collecting a database of porn preferences to probably use as blackmail.
None of these politcians who push for all those “protect the children” laws actually gives a shit about child safety. The only thing that such laws mange to do is restrict freedom of speech and expression for everyone including children.
If you are a careless parent, then no law is going prevent your kids from watching porn.
My upbringing in the US shamed all forms of sexuality; I was entirely forbidden from watching porn until I moved out on my own for college. I feel like that upbringing was very very harmful to me as an adult though because I spent my entire 20s breaking away from that shame and guilt. I had a good sex-Ed teacher in 6th-7th grades but they just simply didn’t spend enough time on the topic to educate me at all about anything but very basic anatomy though. The amount of shame I got at home just didn’t let my sex-Ed class information get absorbed in a way that was conducive to a normal sex life; we were never told that sex was normal and healthy either.
Me personally, my interest in animal science/anatomy led me to reading books about sexuality and the missing sex info I needed. I really don’t think it was healthy to have to learn that information alone; I’m lucky and I was reading official textbook material; I couldn’t imagine kids today learning accurate information from uncertified sources.
Like, sex-Ed at the senior HS level should be basically a how-to pleasure yourself and others in a healthy way and pitfalls to avoid. They should go into the anatomy and physiology ad nauseum so every student feels comfortable in their body as an adult.
Children get their own internet. If they get in adult internet, then they get juvenile detention and a criminal file, their parents are arrested for child endangerment and child services take over.
And anyone complaining about what is on the internet gets an helicopter ride to the deep sea from 10’000 feet.
This could work 🤔
Children get their own internet
Which adults, if any, would moderate the children’s internet?
Some extremely restrictive AI and all children provided inputs would not be visible without heavy filtering and anonymization. In fact children’s general ability to express themselves in this children internet would be massively curtailed.
Watch the kids internet have a dark web “made by kids, for kids”
Where a kid can be a kid
Ahh I see the strategy. Put out this trafficking movie, hype dems as pedos (and commies) and stir up a whole terd of doo doo. Classic.
I’m not uploading my ID to shit.
Unpopular opinion, but I’d rather not allow kids on the regular internet.
I’m surprised these issues haven’t been fixed and that the only method I hear about fixing them are ones that break the internet as we know it. Why not think of like some type of sub internet designed for kids that separates them from the chaos of the regular internet…. If I’ve learned on thing living in America it’s that money is wore more than kids or kids futures so it’s hopeless anyway.
Like traffic from a device could be locked down until the users proper age is reached.
Or just try to build better communities where parents take care of their kids.
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This was always the obvious solution to me. It feels like every other year YouTube is jumping through hoops to correct some situation involving children on the platform. Simply make YouTube 18 plus, require an ID upon sign up. Instantly fix everything, except they’d make less money.
That just moves the exact same question to a slightly different place. How do you verify someone accessing the real internet is an adult without destroying anonymity and therefore privacy?
Well now parents have a choice, only give their own children access to the KinterNet
Didn’t answer the question.
Oh I’m sorry. I should be more clear. You don’t. You don’t verify people are adults. the capability to verify that is the same capability you need to oppress.
You enable parents to have the right tools to affect what they want for their children. But it’s the parent’s responsibility to let their kids use cell phones independently without a VPN without internet controls.
It’s on the parents to parent their children. If they want to control what their children sees then the parents need to control what the children’s devices can do. We can’t turn the entire world into Disneyland because a parent doesn’t want to deny their child the internet.
The GOP is also the party of the chronically ill and the criminally insane. They just don’t want to admit that they want China’s great firewall style world wide web after wasting millions of dollars going after TikTok.
