A House of Commons committee is set to study legislation proposed by Independent Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne that would require Canadians to verify their age to access porn online.
A House of Commons committee is set to study legislation proposed by Independent Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne that would require Canadians to verify their age to access porn online.
At this point there are people in their forties who had access to online porn as minors. Have any actual studies been done to show that a significant portion of the many, many people who’ve grown up in the last 20-30 years have been harmed by having access to online porn while they were younger, or are these laws just something that’s trendy at the moment?
I’m in my 50’s and never had issues finding porn/alcohol/drugs when I was under 18, even though I was in a religious area for part of it.
These people are sniffing glue if they actually think this bill will do anything other than erode privacy.
At best all it will do is lead kids away from normal sites and towards the sketchy parts of the web where things get even weirder.
The goal is to erode privacy, and the pearl clutching about children is always the excuse. There are a lot of groups who want to eliminate privacy online: cops, copyright holders, and religious nuts to name a few. They’re the ones driving this stuff.
I’m kind of disappointed that the Ndp voted in favor of this bullshit plan.
Ugh. I hadn’t heard. I expected better, but the NDP have been a terrible disappointment in the last decade or so.
Ya, it seems every time they take a step or two forward they somehow end up taking a step back again.
There’s a HUGE lobbying effort to convince the people in power that this is a good idea. Lots of tech-surveillance companies bidding for this to go through, so everyone is forced to use their services. You think identity theft is bad now? Wait until you need to put your ID on the internet and that gets leaked.
If age verification is really the intent then it ought to be possible to develop a service these websites can call into that gives some kind of zero-knowledge age check. The age check service doesn’t need to know the identity of the service that’s asking, and the requesting service doesn’t need to know the identity of the person whose age they’re checking. You’d authenticate on a site that only knows someone’s doing an age check, and the verifying site would just get a token indicating that the age check was successful.
Am I missing some reason why this wouldn’t be possible? It seems to be a problem ripe for zero-knowledge solutions.
If it is possible, there’s really no need for an age check requirement to involve disclosing your identity to the site you’re visiting, or to disclose your viewing habits to anyone. And if governments or lobbyists are pushing for everyone to upload their full identity to web sites, it suggests either they’re ignorant or their motives aren’t what they claim.
This bill is a government login that sends an authentication string to the requesting website
Equivalent of CRA now or as an implementation that you’re familiar with “sign in with google”
The worry security wise is less about it getting leaked as it is opening a new string of fake websites (because the government data getting leaked/attacked is already an issue)
“Sex harms the youth” has been established lore since the Victorian age, when hiding it in the first place was a new project driven by religious concerns. Nobody questions it because nobody wants to look like a pedophile (which, for the record, are bad).
Harms the youth isn’t even the best anti-pornography argument. Sexual exploitation and sex trafficking are concerns. But that’s more of an issue with unethical porn (always watch ethically sourced porn folks!)
On the other hand, since the age of internet porn, sexual irresponsibility, teen sex, rape, and divorce have all declined. (Correlation)
Shhh! Don’t mention the actual numbers! The old days were better, and the kids are rotten! /s
It’s not the best argument, but it’s the main one that you can’t directly undercut at this point. If you say it’s exploitative, well, it doesn’t have to be, and many people know it. If you admit it’s about your religion/culture, well, maybe it’s not mine, and I’ll even say maybe it’s not good, and that’s also a position people appreciate.
There are many studies that indicate porn use can negatively affect your brain, sexual performance, and pro-social behaviour.
Porn linked to decreased grey matter
Porn addiction linked to lower executive functioning
Porn linked to negative social behaviour
Meta analysis on research into adolescents porn use discusses a range of negative outcomes such as anxiety, suicidal ideation, social isolation, and academic disengagement
I’m not really sure this law will “solve” the problem, or if it’s a good solution to the problem. But there are real, negative outcomes of internet porn
There seems to be a lot of issues with the methodology used in those studies.
For example, “…reported hours of pornography consumption per week…”. Hours seems excessive. What’s the average duration for all visitors?
And, “Women were excluded from the research, because men more easily encounter such problems due to their frequent contact with pornographic materials.”. That’s an assumption. Women can also have "frequent contact " with porn, so they should have included women.
And one of them seemed to suggest that men who watched more porn had ED. But maybe men with ED first, have had to use porn to help? Chicken and egg situation.
I’m not defending porn, and I tend to make data driven choices.
But I’m acutely aware that methodology can have averse effects on the conclusion, and I tend to be highly skeptical of studies that appear to manipulate the outcome with their selection bias.
I agree some are problematic. The first one is based on brain scans, which is hard to refute. And there are many more like it
The porn industry has a vested interest in suppressing this, and billions of dollars to spend muddying the waters.
Yes, but the participant selection was dubious.
Also, while brain scans are used, it’s impossible to form a conclusion based on it.
For instance, do men with less grey matter watch more porn? Or does watching more porn cause men to have less grey matter?
A similar study was done on vegetarians. I don’t recall the details, but it went somewhere along the lines of “vegetarians have more brain activity associated with empathy”. Does that mean vegetarianism improves empathy? Or do empathetic people naturally gravitate towards vegetarianism?
Behavioral studies are so much harder to do compared to health studies. I don’t envy the study coordinators!
But more data can always bring us closer to answers, so I’m glad that at least some informational gaps are being filled.
There’s also a huge spectrum of consumption between porn addiction and adolescant curiosity. These studies seem to reference several consumption quantities which go beyond the scope of the original question.
Check the financing on those.
It seems to me much more likely that the porn industry is financing studies that say there is nothing wrong with porn use. The means and motive make a lot more sense going in that direction, as they don’t want to be seen as the new cigarettes
Funny how people just down vote when someone actually provide sources
I suspect some of the negativity comes from porn users who are in denial
And big net neutrality advocates who believe that if it’s online it shouldn’t be subject to laws for some reason…
Same with Alcohol for those points you listed.
And the alcohol providers are legally responsible for checking the age of the people they sell it to and can face fines if they don’t.
That’s the crux of the issue, if you provide age restricted material anywhere outside the internet you can lose your right to sell it if you don’t make sure people aren’t underage and now there’s Canadian companies that face no consequences for doing so because they operate on the web.
Fake IDs though, have always been a thing. Banning / Age restriction does not work with the Internet.
Ah yes, the ol’ “we shouldn’t try to control access to something because there’s illegal methods to avoid it.” Why even bother requiring ID for gun/alcohol/tobacco sales when you can just get someone else to buy them for you?
What a silly argument.
Because fake ID for booze ( at least in BC ) is hard to fake and not downloadable to your phone. Somebody coyld buy you a bottpe, the same with a using anothers internet ID. i’m not saying don’t try something, I’m saying don’t expect a result from age block, because a teen can download VPN/Tor in 30 seconds amd bypass it all. The lawmakers may not understand that
I’m sure they do, they may not understand the technical details, but I’m not sure why you think people who make rules or pass laws would think the rules or laws won’t be broken or circumvented. It’s a law, not some magical contract. If your parents say “no Xbox until you’ve finished your homework”, they’re not amazed when they find you on the Xbox 20 minutes later, homework unfinished.
It’s been illegal to sell alcohol and porn to minors for decades now, do you think before the internet and VHS it was impossible for kids to find? Do you think the lawmakers back then were somehow baffled that the law they put in place, didn’t 100% prevent children from drinking and stiffening their socks?
Some people thing the bans stop accesa, but it doesn’t. that was my whole point of the initial comment. Just like Prohibition of Alcohol made no difference for those wanting access. But crusaders think this will save yhe kids. Parenting and knowledge of objectification is a better path for saving the kids
So we should do nothing and let people in their early teens see women choke on a dick while getting one up the ass and just say “What can we do? Some of them will get a fake ID! We can’t make the providers take responsibility can we?”
We.can teach our youth the dangers of objectification. blocking one site out of millions doesn’t stop access to porn. And if it is not age restricted in another country our youth are tech savvy enough to connect to a vpn or tor with an exit node in the countries that don’t care. Prohibition does nothing other than making the item get pushed underground. They might even go back to peer to peer sharing like early computer days
You take control of what you can take control of. Fake IDs aren’t new, bars still need to ask for one. Canadian porn sites need to obey Canadian laws.
Also, our youth is so bad with tech that it doesn’t know how to use a computer when it reaches university, the tech genius generation was the late X and the millennials and they’re all over 18.
You don’t need to be tech literate for a vpn or tor app. Download it from playstore / apple store and click connect.
I fear internet ID is coming whether we like it or not. AI powered bots will pass all captchas and be indistinguishable from humans. The open, pseudonymous internet cannot survive under those conditions. You could spend all day without seeing a comment by a real human.
Have you been playing on Reddit again?
But even that will be spoofed. its going to be a shitshow of garbage
Governments already have systems to handle citizen IDs. They’re not perfect, and fake ones do get created, but they’re good enough. All that is needed is to connect that system to a UBI key or other device. Then websites could use cryptographic tools (signatures, ZK-SNARKS, etc) to verify that someone is over 18 without revealing their identity
Yes we have it already in BC, it is useful for proving ID for Provincial services or CRA login. However UBI for general internet also becomes dangerous should the elected government decide they don’t want trans kids exposed to trans info, or want to limit access to other news for the population.
as a teen my buddy bought a penthouse collection off of two old ladies at a yardsale. Blocking Pornhub will do nothing unless they also block VPN and TOR use
Remember your high school friend that had porn mags in their locker?
In my fifties, saw porn as a minor. Paper was a thing for the last century, at least!