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.
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.
“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.
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.
