@Gally - Will the site be introducing age verification tomorrow to comply with the OSA? I'm aware a lot of other forums are either shutting down or removing elements in order to comply, particularly those with user-to-user direct messaging.
Gally has been ringing members individually to get their credit card numbers as proof of age - my call only came through last night. He also needed my CVV number, mother's maiden name and PIN which I wasn't aware was part of the OSA but I'm glad I'm now compliant with the regulation.
It’s one of the stupidest laws i’ve ever seen and it shows a complete lack of how the internet works. Even at a base level it’s not going to stop children looking at porn. All it’s going to do is push children and adults who want to watch porn but don’t want to hand over their ID towards unregulated, extreme and in many cases illegal content as that will be the only thing they’ll be able to access. It’s insane short-sightedness.
I don’t agree. It’s like the gun law argument. Americans will argue that people who want them will get them, and it’s true, you’re never going to stop people who are willing to go to extremes. It will stop people who are never going to put that time and effort into it through not caring that much, not being willing to break the law or just not knowing how. If you worked in a secondary school and knew just how prevalent it is, you’d change your mind. Something has to change, it just has to. I’m not saying this is perfect, I don’t know if anything can be, but we absolutely cannot go on as we are. Statistically, basically every single kid has watched it, many of them very regularly, many of them have been sent things they didn’t ask to receive. Kids as young as 9 are regularly watching. I wish I had a book with me that we have at school that has case studies and interviews etc. in that is extremely shocking. It’s hugely damaging to children and it’s a disgrace that it’s gone on this long just because some adults are embarrassed to put in their credit card details.
I’m sure it is, but do 9 year olds know how to use a vpn? Some will and will use one, most won’t. If a kid has been sent a link on snap and tries to click it not knowing what it is, and gets prevented from seeing it, are they going to go through the process of using a vpn? Almost certainly not. There’ll be kids who feel pressured to watch things they don’t want to who will be relieved that they can now use this as an excuse to their mates to not. It’s like saying that ‘top shelf’ mags shouldn’t be out of reach or ID’d as people could easily steal them, or borrow a mates’ or distract the shopkeeper and look inside so we might as well just hand them out to kids like sweets. There will always be ways around anything.
If a nine year old has access to it that's on the parents. At 11 then I'd guess a lot of them will have heard of VPNs and the ones who haven't will learn from those who have. And it's not just porn, it's Bluesky, Wikipedia, even this forum. Something needs to be done but this is just a bizarre way of dealing with it. When the age verification databases begin to be compromised the fallout is going to be huge.
9 year olds are not allowed to have Snapchat/TikTok/Facebook/Instagram, etc. accounts. The terms of service are generally 13+. I know that kids get around it. But it probably does need more verification of created accounts to limit access to those underage. And we were finding porn mags in bushes every time we went for a walk in the woods at 9-10. We didn't really turn out too badly*, did we? *25% of working age adults in the UK have a criminal record.
You’d be surprised how many parents are creating social media accounts for their kids. They shouldn’t be but they are and whether it’s their fault or not, more needs to be done to protect kids, regardless of their parents. I think your last paragraph is the main problem with people grossly underestimating the issue. People are thinking that kids seeing p0rn is them seeing boobs and knowing that they shouldn’t but it’s not that big of a deal and we all saw them when we were kids. There’s some really depraved stuff online, things you would never ever have seen depicted as a child and certainly not in video. The book I referenced above had a survey that showed the majority of teenagers feel like they have to participate in choking because that’s apparently completely normal and expected. It’s traumatising both sexes with the lasses not wanting to but not knowing how to say no (or it happening to them without them expecting it) or lads feeling like they need to do it to be manly or because the lass asks them to and them being terrified of it going wrong. Men are growing up with unrealistic expectations of what women do and should look like and the things they should be expected to do. We’re now at the point where new adults have grown up in a time when this has never not been available to them. They don’t know any different to what they have watched. It’s easy for us to know that some extreme and dangerous acts exist in online videos and separate it into a thing of that’s just what some p0rn actors do online with scenes set up for a camera with multiple takes and people around if anything goes wrong and almost everyone faking their enjoyment of it. We were already having sex before these videos became almost mainstream and know that’s not the sort of things that everyday people are typically doing and that the ones who do know how to set boundaries and be respectful. People who’ve been exposed to that, and only that, think it’s just what people do and they’re having a really unrealistic opinion on what sex is. If you think it’s the same as finding a magazine in a bush you should have a click around some of the sites before this rule comes in tomorrow and see what kids are actually watching.
Instead of now sending a link to pornhub those kids will be sent a link to a dodgy site that has unregulated content and full of illegal content. Or if they’re really curious they’re going to go to page 200 on google and again find the obscure links. I’m not going to argue anything you’ve said, it’s obviously a problem. But this law is not only going to not solve the problem, it’s going to make it infinitely worse. You say does a 9 year old know how to use a VPN and while the answer for most is probably not yet, they will know soon because there will be guides going around and links to proxies and VPN apps which will get them access in 1 click and also expose them to even more dodgy stuff, have them install potentially infectious third party software etc.
As I said, if they try to seek it out they’ll find it, but it will stop people from almost accidentally stumbling upon it and it will hold a certain level of ‘wrongness’ in their mind rather than them thinking it’s just a normal thing that everyone does and it’s fine. We’ll have to agree to disagree but I don’t think it will make the problem worse as it will hopefully stop the vast majority of kids from ever seeing it, or at least before they are an adult or older teen. It’s like the argument against making drugs illegal as people will get dodgier batches from dodgier people. It doesn’t mean that we’re letting kids (or anybody) take coke willy nilly though.
