In related news [1] "VPNs top download charts as age verification law kicks in [...] one app maker told the BBC it had seen an 1,800% spike in downloads."
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays with voters at the next election. Politicians think this censorship is a vote-winner, presumably because on the doorstep voters are unlikely to talk about their love of porn. Yet in online spaces, this policy seems wildly unpopular - especially with the high profile leaks of age validation services' user data; the government's legal battles with Wikipedia; Steam's demand for credit cards (debit cards are more common in the UK); and sites leaving the UK market all together.
I suppose we'll get to see whose polling is more accurate at the next election.
It’s not that the UK government believes censoring porn is a vote winner so much as they really want to use “think of the kids” as a cudgel to widespread surveillance.
In other countries (not least the US) there’s an expectation of privacy which doesn’t really exist in the UK. It’s not seen as a right by any major party or particularly valued by the public at large (“nothing to hide nothing to fear” etc). The government still really wants E2E encryption banned here (as nonsensical as that is).
They don’t see any of this as a vote loser, as none of the alternative parties see it any differently.
Personally I’m kind of happy about this gating even if I disagree on principle, but they’ve already indicated that they have no line. They’ve been very open about seeing everything you say and do.
Despite all this talk about privacy, US would appear to be leading the free world in surveillance and illiberalism right now. It is very reminiscent to me of the radical free speech of Twitter and Republicans, which in practice means censorship.
I'm not saying UK is great, but surely ahead of what the US is doing by a wide margin.
If you look at the UK through the MAGA lens you see that there’s a grain of truth in some of the comments about free speech.
Likewise terminology in the US is sometimes a little turned on its head - in the US “liberalism” means something completely different from actual liberalism (which would be closer to libertarianism).
Also “woke” has been used for so many things that its meaning has been warped from “don’t trust the system” to whatever the right dislikes on a given day, even though they’re ostensibly all about smaller government that stays out of your business.
Politics has always been very subversive but it’s more entangled than ever now.
Well. With the ageing population and the fact that older people are more conservative and they turn out to vote more often I would doubt that anything would change. At least not because of this.
> Yet in online spaces, this policy seems wildly unpopular
That depends on which online spaces you frequent. Ones like HN, which have a higher proportion of male users, will be statistically more likely to have commenters who engage in habitual pornography consumption and are vocally opposed to the OSA on this basis.
These are exactly the types of rhetorical strategy we see from authoritarians.
You don't like our privacy violating laws? Well that's because you're a nasty disgusting pervert. You don't want to be a little pig man do you? Great, then support our law!
See also: you want children to be raped, you're a pedophile, you have something to hide, show me your hard drive...
This is the problem. Adults thinking children are useless. Don't you remember being a kid?
Whenever there's a blocker (one case from my childhood was how to use net send to broadcast profanity across the network), someone will figure it out, and by the end of the day EVERYONE knows.
It's not like they need to `sudo apt install openvpn` and tweak the config file manually and tinker with routes and firewall rules afterwards.
Basically every youtube video for the past decade has been sponsored by a VPN service offering first-joiner discounts. My cousin uses a VPN and has no idea what it is and how it works, just that "he should protect himself while browsing". Those VPNs have invested massively in UX and ease of use so out of that 77% of users, I'd guess more than 80% of it switched to VPNs.
Maybe not all, but kids pickup things fast. When I was young the school tried to block a popular flash games website, one lunch hour later and somehow we all learned how to use a VPN. I'd say I owe a lot of my technical ability to learning how to circumvent restrictions on school computers and whatever my parents tried to setup on the home computer.
I agree. My point is we shouldn't simply open the doors for this degenerate content and make it easily accessible for children. Children who are already addicted to porn will be more inclined to find a workaround. But new children who haven't been exposed yet will be less inclined.
This all or nothing mentality is so disconnected from the real world. Of course some people started using VPNs, of course some children even started doing it. No law can prevent all occurrences of what it tries to prevent. But it can make it more difficult, and heighten the barrier of entry for children that are introduced to the internet.
> At the next election some portion of Labour voters will remember missteps like this and will vote for someone else because of it.
Personally, I think their prosecution of peaceful protestors (Palestine supporters) whilst giving a free pass to right wing violent protestors will alienate their traditional left-wing base.
I don't think the traditional left wing base is too enthused about their intifada brothers to be honest. And a specific subset of those probably would want to ban porn too.
As far as I can tell, the purpose of the law is to push children to use either free VPNs and proxies (which will likely make them less safe using the internet) or to visit less famous porn sites that are too niche to be targetted. So, we're pushing children towards the most dodgy porn sites possible and encouraging people to upload identifying information to the less dodgy porn sites.
This law is not fit for the declared purpose at all.
They exist because they are either proxying networks that resell residential IPs (aka your internet connection) ...or because they are harvesting credentials.
The former will now make less sense as a business model, since UK isn't a good location to proxy traffic through anymore.
2. Yeah, I am regularly irritated by old chestnut of “kids are tech geniuses unlike the helpless adults”. With few exceptions, they think WiFi/the Web/The Internet are the same thing and have no clue how any of it works deeper than the UI (just like most adults). In the UK at least, our “progressive” government shifted the focus in the late 90s from teaching basic CS concepts to using Microsoft Office applications. I hope it is slightly better now.
Come on. Get out of your bubble and go touch grass. There are more restrictive countries than UK/EU/US will become in visible future. And customer-level censorship circumvention technologies have gone so far that most services are just one-button apps. And the children who can't press one button usually just don't have a phone.
> There were so many people saying that this isn’t going to work.
Yes, and we were right.
It was billed as something that most adults would accept. It's not plausible that 77 percent of Pornhub's UK traffic came from non-adults.
It has therefore failed. Obviously a huge number of adults did not accept it, and either went around it or stopped using the site. What they did not do was to comply with the supposedly "measured, reasonable and non-intrusive" AV measures. They accepted costs and inconveniences to avoid that.
It was billed as something that would only affect children. It has in fact affected many adults. That means it has failed.
Of course, many of the 77 percent have probably moved to VPNs (or other sites) rather than actually not using Pornhub... which means they were only inconvenienced, not deprived of porn or even of Pornhub.
But those approaches are just as available to non-adults as to adults. Although the AV nonsense probably did actually deter some number of underage users, you can't know what that number was. It would be possible for literally every single underage user to have simply switched to a VPN. The 77 percent number tells you exactly nothing about how many children have been deterred from watching porn. Probably not very many.
So although this does give you proof of some of the ways it's failed, it does not give you any evidence that it's succeeded in anything at all.
That said, that kind of "success" is not the main issue. The main arguments against this AV stupidity were and are that it's not worth the huge costs in money, convenience, security, and privacy, and that it helps create machinery that can and probably will be abused for other purposes later. All of which are still absolutely true.
Yes indeed, and also worth bearing in mind that, particularly as this is a male-dominated forum, many of the people commenting here will be habitual porngraphy consumers who will have a negative view of any mechanism that gets in the way of their consumption.
This is really surprising. 23% of pornhub users in the UK are willing to identify themselves to access porn.
I guess there are some who really want their porn and either don't know about the alternatives (VPN) or genuinely don't mind handing over identifying info to do it.
You are putting words in my mouth, maybe think about phrasing your points in a less personal way in future?
I don't actually see watching porn as immoral, although I am aware that there are a large number of people who do. Hence my surprise that so many people were willing to tie their identities to it.
Philosophy is real. But if you knew anything about philosophy, you'd know it's not "this is immoral because I say so".
99% of modern morality is "because I said so". If that's the level of thinking you're applying to things, then you are a stupid person. Sorry.
There are plenty of legitimate arguments against porn. "Ughhh sex icky!!" is not one of them. Purity is not an argument. Religion is not an argument. Saying something is immoral is not an argument.
Obviously this is because 77% of all pornhub viewers were underage, and NOT because privacy-infringing age checks create a deterrent effect that reduces all pornography consumption, which totally was NOT the goal all along by the puritanical fundamentalist religious groups backing this expansion of warrantless state surveillance.
It was definitely to protect the kids and NOT to try to quash all depictions of human sexuality due to a fetish for appeasing the arbitrary whims of the invisible sky daddy, as told to us by the people who pinky promise they were speaking on behalf of invisible sky daddy.
I appreciate the humour and sarcasm but often less is more. You should've just written "Obviously this is because 77% of all pornhub viewers were underage" and left it at that.
Imagine bending over backwards for authoritarians and willingly giving up your privacy just so you can feel slightly superior for about 5 seconds online.
That's pathetic, there's really pathetic, and then there's whatever this is.
there are plenty of valid reasons that unfettered access to pornography is harmful - imagine if you had private videos leaked on the net forever , or were exploited , or were trafficked to participate , etc. plz try save vitriol for when its really needed. also the reddit tier religious bashing looks really lame.
Well said. The idea that porn is harmless fun is not borne out. That's not to say it should be entirely prohibited, but the normalisation of degrading and sometimes violent porn among young teens is a real problem affecting real people. While plenty of posters seem to have issues with the U.K. government's actions, they don't present any solutions to the issue of underage people being porn addicted.
I'm not aware of any religious groups in the UK who have significant influence on legislation, perhaps unlike the US.
> the normalisation of degrading and sometimes violent porn among young teens is a real problem affecting real people.
Is there any reliable data showing this? What does "degrading" and "violent" mean? Is it really detrimental, or is it just totally normal kinks that some people don't understand are actually carried out in a healthy way?
The "pornography addiction" model lacks scientific support and is driven by media hype, moral conflicts, and a lucrative treatment industry. High-frequency use of visual sexual stimuli (VSS; preferred neutral term over "pornography") does not meet addiction criteria and is better explained by non-pathological factors like libido, sensation-seeking, or value conflicts.
I just asked my mother if she created an account 3 days ago on Hacker News and she said no. So since you are not my mother you can't tell me what to do.
Transphobic comments from the religious fundamentalist who would prefer porn didn't exist? Color me shocked!
What's next, are you going to propose stoning gay people and bringing back slavery because Leviticus told you that's what magic invisible sky daddy wanted?
Dang, are these kind of hateful, discriminatory comments towards marginalized groups appropriate for HN?
> Dang, are these kind of hateful, discriminatory comments towards marginalized groups appropriate for HN
It's a new account so they are probably avoiding an existing ban. Just flag and move on. From my experience these people lead extremely shitty lives wallowing on fringe political brain rot and negativity. They are not very bright either so when they look around how sad their lives are they tend to point towards a single thing as the source of all their problems as opposed to recognize nuance and their own ineptitudes. Thats why they reach ridiculous conclusions such as "my life is shit because my neighbor is watching porn".
It doesn't, because laws that compelled sites like pornhub to take down nonconsentual porn already existed before the proposal for age verification.
The people pushing the age verification will never admit this to you, often because they're either ignorant of the bigger picture or not engaging in good faith in the first place, seeing themselves as the clear-eyed moral ones bringing wisdom to us heathens who don't know any better.
i said that the other guy's hatred for pornography restriction was a bit extreme considering that there are definitely valid reasons to restrict pornography , at no point did i say that i supported age verification
Does that mean porn is watched by 77% fewer people or does that mean it is watched elsewhere? It may just lead to a greater exposure to malware of the UK.
I think the more striking question is, does that mean 77% of pornhub viewers are underage?
Obviously not, a lot of them just don't want to identify themselves. But having worked in IT for 25 years and knowing how free some people are to use their government e-mail to sign up at porn websites, I wonder even if 50% are underage, that's a huge number.
UK wouldn't need this if their education system and culture didn't produce depraved and degenerate people, not to say anything of the ones they import. Neither the policy nerds nor Reform can fix the culture. It will come from below or not at all.
If nothing else it is an interesting experiment. I'm just not sure what we should expect the result to be, both in terms of teen mentality and industry impact.
Interestingly, Google is still allowed to show explicit search results from these sites, which is absurd, and is a gap in the law, as now "search" sites have appeared which just do the same thing, but use videos.
It implies that 77% of UK visitors were not prepared to upload an id to watch porn. They either stopped watching, used a VPN, or moved to smaller and less regulated sites without age verification. The remaining 23% will also include teens that uploaded a fake id.
I'd like very much to remove moral busybodies from my system but it seems very hard for people who have a grand plan for society to top coercing and leave me alone.
Its none of your business if people voluntarily produce it and its also none of your business if people voluntarily market it between each other.
>Its none of your business if people voluntarily produce it and its also none of your business if people voluntarily market it between each other.
I mean it is no secret a lot of people who produce these things have mental health issues or come from very poor families. That's not even including the illegal activity that might seem legal on the surface.
To me that exploitation in the porno industry and the idea that porn should be restricted is two separate issues. I'm not really oppose to limiting access to porn for children, we did that before the internet, we do the same for alcohol, tobacco and a lot of other stuff. I just don't think we should fool ourselves into believing that adding age restriction for the consumption of porn will do the slightest for improving working conditions in the industry.
Arguing for the ban of porn is easy, because very few will defend it, and if they do, you just pull out the argument that production is also bad. As if the opponents doesn't want porn to produced safely, without trafficking or exploitation.
> I mean it is no secret a lot of people who produce these things have mental health issues
Is this true, or is this a belief that you are forced to believe because it's the only way you can give yourself any worth?
Meaning, do you just view yourself in such a poor light that the only achievement your mind could possibly muster for your existence is "well at least I don't watch porn"?
> I mean it is no secret a lot of people who produce these things have mental health issues
Really? In my experience, people who think they should be in charge of the interests of "civilization", or who are obsessed with other people's vices, have a lot more mental health issues. Mostly weird savior complexes or fucked up (usually guilt driven) purity obsessions.
Given the harms of the pornography industry to both those directly exploited by it and those who consume its output, this is excellent news, even if the statistic only reflects a smaller deterrent effect due to VPN use and so on.
Certainly a win for drafters of the OSA, despite the controversy stirred up over its enactment.
It's great news.
The purpose is to make it as difficult as possible for children to access this type of content. Of course some will find workarounds. But if laws are supposed to be 100% foolproof then no law actually does anything.
Children aren't generating this traffic, people have just switched to VPNs and don't show up as UK users anymore. What do you think kids do all day exactly?
Wouldn't it be just as delusional to think that those kids are not going to just go find it elsewhere? And now those "elsewheres" are going to be places that don't care about things like performer or content safety. Is that really going to help solve the alleged issues, both with the porn industry and with people watching it too much?
(To say nothing of the second order effects of something like this, like the massive privacy intrusion for adult citizens, or the theft/sharing of IDs to get around these laws)
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays with voters at the next election. Politicians think this censorship is a vote-winner, presumably because on the doorstep voters are unlikely to talk about their love of porn. Yet in online spaces, this policy seems wildly unpopular - especially with the high profile leaks of age validation services' user data; the government's legal battles with Wikipedia; Steam's demand for credit cards (debit cards are more common in the UK); and sites leaving the UK market all together.
I suppose we'll get to see whose polling is more accurate at the next election.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn72ydj70g5o