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I'm shy, I'll just dm you instead.

Germany had these kinds of laws since before the internet, that is, "are you 18?" questions simply weren't judged adequate to fulfil the pre-existing requirements.

Net result is that there's no German porn sites, and the big search engines filter their results. Which doesn't mean that you can't get porn everywhere, it just means that kids are learning a particular subset of the English lexicon quite early once they seek it out which is perfectly fine under German law as with anything youth protection it's not supposed to stop determined kids, once they're determined they're individually old enough, it's supposed to limit casual exposure.

The distinction Germany makes is "targeted at a German market/audience". So if your domain isn't on .de, if your payment options aren't Germany-specific, ideally if you don't even have a German UI translation, none of that stuff applies to you. Authorities will just ignore you.

Unless the UK is going down the Saudi route of blocking foreign sites, the exact same thing will happen. There's always going to be some jurisdiction with lax youth protection laws where porn sites can set up their legal headquarters.

UK may be taking a slightly different path, but we'll both end up in the same shithole at the end. Incredible.

Majority of people are like that Hank Hill meme about jpegs, they don't know what the hell a VPN is.

Well you see... Despite what people say, the reasons behind these rules has very little to do with children. So they don't actually care if it solves the "problem".

I agree, the country is delving deeper into authoritarianism by each second. The children and minors is just another exploitable class to them.

Oh it does.

Kids have access to phones and data. No matter how good my DNS is, means fuck all if my son can use his data (if he was old enough to have phone) and browse, under UK, he can't easily access the most common porn sites without verifying.

As open and pro porn internet social bubble might be. I'm not okay with my son gaining access to it easily and too early.

At times, I wish there were more adults and parents online to counter the sea of basically male teenagers pushing what they think isright. And I know I'll get a "I'm a parent of 3, porn is healthy for them!" Type of response... And that's irrelevant. We all are raising a human being and we all have different morals and ideas. There's zero chance I'll consciously allow a loophole before he turns 12.

Nah, you just need parents to care about what their kids get up to and to responsibly educate them without punishing them for being curious.

Bwahhahajahhahaa. Like that’s gonna happen.

My problem with all this nonsense is that it doesn’t actually solve the problem, while causing many more. You’d need to fundamentally rethink the basic design of the technology if you were to actually prevent children from accessing sexual material with it.

Absolutely - this always happens with these "save the children" laws.

That’s something they don’t want to do, however, presumably because they’re addicted to the power it offers them to spy on everyone, and exploit the population for profit.

Jesus Christ... You ever hear the phrase "never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance?" Politicians do this sort of "make the people feel like we're doing something" shit all the time. They rarely consider the ramifications beside appeasing parents.

I had the same expectations about love, so maybe we should ban romantic movies for giving people a false expectation of what romantic relationships are actually like.

Every once in a while I hear boomers waxing poetic about the wholesome days of old nudie mags.

Well, I happen know the boomer's own parents were plenty outraged by them, actually. And, have you ever read one of those? The copy is pretty damn disrespectful about the women appearing therein, as were the men running the show.

Yeah, and actually I would say with confidence we are actually better off. It's true that unrealistic expectations is a big issue (well, might be more like, I think most realize that porn is not real after experiencing it so it's not a big problem really for most), but at least we do have a good understanding of the possibilities and what is safe and what is not... At the very least we have a more openminded and informed point of view on sex and relationships. Which doesn't mean either "let's show porn to the kids" of course, but it's such an overblown topic in society.

Let parents be the responsible ones of what kids watch, not the webpages...

And honestly the only negative side effect it had on me was having unrealistic expectations the first time I actually had sex.

And that is what we should be worrying about.

I told my kid that she can watch all the porn she wants, I don't care. Just don't expect actual sex to be like that.

I guess it's harder on them as well since Epstein got killed, the royal nonce is also less dignified nowadays.

You mean like Eastern countries that right out ban and arrest people for making porn, like erotic fiction stories? Such freedom. Such navigation. Such teaching.

*chan, Facebook, Reddit, imgur, xitter, Lemmy, Mastodon...

well...maybe Australia had a good idea...

In the case of Texas and places like that, age verification laws are about being able to call anything they want (like LGBT+ content) “pornographic.” Texas doesn’t care if it works.

Interestingly, Pornhub actually stayed in my state, Louisiana, because — according to their Supreme Court lawyers, yesterday — we have digital IDs and it was apparently trivial to do the checks via some sort of API. Texans would have to upload a photo of their driver’s license or something and there’s major privacy issues.

Also, Louisiana’s law didn’t work. Pornhub, which wants to be mainstream, does ID checks but sketchier sites in other countries don’t. It probably just caused more teens to get malware or be exposed to truly objectionable content (like CSAM).

No, they just want to control the internet because they are afraid of it. To be honest, it's not without reason after the Arab Spring and then the current disinformation wars.

This is not the way to do it though.