What do you think about the UK adding age verification to age-restricted website contents?

@SunshineGirl I don't think physical sex shops require you to identify yourself with an online third party (potentially extra national) that'll pinky-promise not to retain or even sell your details

Besides, if anyone thinks it'll stop at adult sites I've got a bridge to sell 'em. If it was truly about kids we'd have campaigns about setting up parental controls and the standardization of them. But nope, only veiled censorship

Not even Russia(!) has such a law...

@SunshineGirl In my opinion the problem with it is that it attacks the wrong problem. The problem is not that children (whatever that ill defined and shifting term means) are seeing sexual acts but that they are seeing acts of normalized violence and coercion. There seems to be no effort made to reduce the exposure of people in general to such content, many, perhaps most, of the people negatively affected by such content are over the age limit for this legislation anyway.

The odd thing about this whole problem is that it seems to be a bigger problem in the English speaking countries than in others. In Norway pretty much everyone has a smartphone and laptop with internet access yet the moral panic associated with the idea that children might see other people having sex seems largely absent. I don't mean to say that no one worries about what their children might encounter but that it is something that one expects parents to deal with by controlling access if necessary (the telecoms companies provide tools for this) and teaching the children the difference between right and wrong. Schools have their place to play as well and work hard to socialize the children; practical ethics was taught explicitly to my children in school.

Also as @SpudMuffin says, it is easily circumvented.

@Elessar The Russian sites have started a minimal form of age checking for IP's in the USA.

Was on such a ".ru" site yesterday through Yandex (Russian) search engine.

What's notable is the images where blurred until you clicked on the over 18 button. Which is a joke, yet it's there.

Also notice that Google rarely ever lists foreign sites. Why I use Yandex at all.

Other countries really do need to create their own search engines now. Not rely on the USA search engines.

There's simply not many non USA based search engines.

@DeWayfarer To comply with American law? That I know of Russian citizens don't have to get face scanned or worse send a scan of their IDs to private corporations in order to access Russian sites.

@Elessar Yes to comply with American law. It's likely IP based though so foreign VPN probably doesn't have it.

@Elessar We have very strong data protection laws in the UK which are established and do work well.

I can't see the potential for over-reach. The law is specific in its targeting of sites that habitually host adult content that is harmful to children (and often to adults as well).

I am personally more concerned about the government using anti-terrorism law to proscribe groups such as Palestine Action, apparently in an attempt to buy favourable headlines in the right wing press. That to me is an immediate and real threat to personal liberty.

@ninalanyon As I understand it (and I may have only a partial understanding) the main impetus for the law came from the families of three young people who committed suicide after accessing related content online, so nothing to do with pornography at all and not really a moral panic (this has been in the pipeline for years).

I agree that parents should be the first line of defence, but if our government issues advice or guidelines they are immediately accused by the right wing press of nannying, etc, and ignored by the average parent . . so a vicious circle that rarely achieves much.

@SunshineGirl Foreign companies, in particular of a certain country with stripes and stars in the flag, are notorious for using those regulations for wiping their... Also regulations are just as strong as their actual enforcement, and frankly I don't see the UK alone and not even the EU together having any leverage against the US. Look at the "deals" that were recently negotiated.

I can definitely see it. Once the precedent is set it'll be extremely easy to expand the categories of sites "harmful for the children". Maybe not by this government but the next one, or the next after the next one. Besides, isolating children from "harmful" media should be a responsibility of the parents, not the government.

Yeah that too, but it goes hand in hand with this imo.

@SunshineGirl If it's nothing to do with porn why is it that porn sites are having to do age verification?

@ninalanyon Control over who sees and uses what. You think Trump's not a pervert at minimum? 🤷🏻‍♂

Yet he sure stands by billionaires at can afford anything.

"“I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive and more than energy,” Trump

Now what could you reward such a loyal person that doesn't have the money?

And it wouldn't cost him a cent.

@ninalanyon It goes back to my original comment. Most people would agree that children should not be able to access a bricks-and-mortar sex shop. I think the legislation bundles together categories of websites that children ideally should not be accessing and requires a higher standard of vigilance by their operators.

@SunshineGirl Any such control is a two way control street. Those that have money WILL get access. Including children of wealthy parents. And that is proven here in California that has such verification procedures.

@Elessar I appreciate your concerns and you may be proven right. But the legislation is addressing a specific demand from the public and a clear deficit in our laws. In my opinion it is proportionate and resonable.

I would like to have confidence that the average parent is capable of regulating their child's activity. However, in reality, they are barely capable of regulating their own lives.

@DeWayfarer It is not perfect, but for the moment it is the least imperfect system I can think of.

@SunshineGirl there is a way around it. Yet no wants to put a brake on uncontrolled capitalism.

@SunshineGirl It's not, the public is for the most part against it last I checked. Reform is intelligently campaigning on abolishing this law because his party figured it out too it's a point that can win you an election, and Starmer (actually the Tories, but by extension now Labour too as they done nothing) may have just gifted him the next election. I'm sure he'll also know how to make this law useful, rather than abolishing it.

Then the state should help those parents, rather than enacting blanket censorship on everyone else - competent parents and non parents alike.

@SunshineGirl Surely the whole of the effort available to the state should be directed to rectifying this dire state of affairs. Starting with eliminating poverty and providing the same high standard of education in poverty stricken areas as is available in wealthier ones. Anything else is a distraction.

@ninalanyon Make raising children possible with a single salary again, and most of the issues involving children will sort themselves out, simply due to parents being more present in their lives and vigilant about what they consume.

But no, we're in the status quo in which two full-time (8h*5) salaries are barely enough to cover rent and groceries for the three of them, with the kid necessarily parked away most of the time (and guess how much caretakers may care about what they watch, so long as they stay quiet, 8h+ of uninterrupted YouTube is perfectly fine) and seeing his parents barely at night, and everyone's shocked that the kids are growing with issues.

Solution? Let's ban the p*rn lol. As if all the cr#p perfectly legally viewable by the under-18 (see Andrew Tate & friends), that is aggressively pushed to them by ALL the major content platforms, is healthier instead.

@Elessar Well, this points to how difficult it is to govern effectively. When children killed themselves because they had access to suicide material, there was a large opinion in favour of regulating access. When legislation is finally introduced (to which all citizens had the opportunity to contribute their views) and the same people realise that their own lives may be inconvenienced or they may have to pay for it, suddenly they voice an opposite opinion.

Respectfully, I think Reform is cynically exploiting a serious issue for political gain, as they always do.

@SunshineGirl It's not about inconveniencing people (rest assured that those who want to watch p*rn, exactly like those who want to watch pirated movies or sports, WILL find a way, no matter how much you restrict the source material - you may even completely shut down the Internet and you can bet a black market or physical media will flourish), it's about how this will pave the road for authoritarianism. Today it's p*rn, tomorrow it'll be any foreign media. Then it'll be media that aren't sympathetic with the governing party. Look at Hungary for a sneak peek, they arrived to their current situation with similar steps.

If any such law was discussed by a non-western nation we'd be all here agreeing how abysmal it is.

Yup, and both the Tories and Labour has just given him a massive tank of petrol for his fire.

@Elessar It is possible to get there by stages. The majority of women work in Norway which means that most families have both parents working. But in Norway genuinely affordable kindergarten (barnehage) is available everywhere and and all of them have to be run by a person qualified in barnehagepedagogikk. I don't now how to translate that because it's not exactly a teaching qualification because barnehage doesn't have formal teaching. But a barnehage is much more than daycare, it teaches the children both to cooperate and to be independent, to dress and undress as necessary for going out in all weathers, lay tables, etc. My three sons attended half time from the age of about three until they went to school even though my wife was not working outside the home. They learned Norwegian with no formal teaching within six months and after less than a year they were indistinguishable from the natives.

My point is that the provision of such facilities cannot be left to private enterprise; even if a barnehage is privately run it is held to the same standard as those run by the kommunes and the cost to the parents is the same regardless of who runs it.

@ninalanyon It takes a community to raise a child. You know what communities are to conservatives.😔

@DeWayfarer In case some casual reader gets the wrong impression I think I should mention that the Norwegian word kommune translates as local authority or town council in British English. It doesn't have a direct connection with the colloquial English meaning of the word commune.

But of course it is part of the local community.