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> Exposure (regular or casual) to porn at a young age has some long lasting consequences. Survivorship bias. These things don't exist in a vacuum, they shape our culture.

The same could be said for Facebook or vaping or mobile phones in general. New forms of stimulating the brain always have interesting side effects. If we knee-jerk banned this kind of stuff because it’s unknown and might be dangerous, we’d still be living in the dark ages.

I think that the GP comment that kids are smart enough to get porn stands. Kids are social, so even if one kid isn’t technically inclined, some of their friends will be. I recall that access to porn was a bragging point amongst my friend groups in mid 1990s, before Internet porn was even that common.

If you are a parent and you have Internet access you are straight-up naive if you think anything the government can do will “protect” your child from online porn. Just get over it.

> The same could be said for Facebook or vaping or mobile phones in general. New forms of stimulating the brain always have interesting side effects. If we knee-jerk banned this kind of stuff because it’s unknown and might be dangerous, we’d still be living in the dark ages.

Well... the same is said about Facebook and mobile phones (attention economy, media addiction, etc.) and vaping carries long lasting consequences if you use nicotine and or other substances.

We are far past the point of knee-jerk reactions regarding mobile phones and facebook usage.

> I think that the GP comment that kids are smart enough to get porn stands. Kids are social, so even if one kid isn’t technically inclined, some of their friends will be. I recall that access to porn was a bragging point amongst my friend groups in mid 1990s, before Internet porn was even that common.

Which makes it harder to type pornsomething.com into a browser. So not "kids" but "one of them". And his methods might not be the safest/easiest (see my comment about pirate streaming website).

> If you are a parent and you have Internet access you are straight-up naive if you think anything the government can do will “protect” your child from online porn. Just get over it.

You are calling me naive and claiming I believe the government will protect child from porn and that I support the whole thing. All things that are wrong. Then you proceed to tell me to get over something I am not endorsing or promoting.

That's uncalled for.

I’m actually not calling you anything, my statement was a general statement regarding the efficacy of government regulations on Internet speech as a means of “protecting children” which always end up being 100% ineffective and 100% disingenuous. I apologize if it came off as a personal attack; that was not my intent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocal...

Okay, I did took it personally but I shouldn't have.

The average Joe today can't even type facebook.com in the address bar, let alone anything else. One day Chrome will remove the address bar and few will notice.

Currently telegram is becoming place for movies and porn.

>Exposure (regular or casual) to porn at a young age has some long lasting consequences. Survivorship bias.

[citation needed]

Fair enough, I thought about changing `can` to `may` but I forgot it wouldn't fly on HN ^^.

> Research into associations between use or non-use of condoms and consumption of pornography among adolescents varies. Some studies found that the use of pornography was associated with non-condom use for both gay (Arrington-Sanders et al., 2015) and heterosexual (Braun-Courville & Rojas, 2009; Luder et al., 2011) male adolescents, yet was not the case for female adolescents (Luder et al., 2011). One study from the Netherlands, which asked adolescents about their sexual practices and pornography use repeatedly over time, did not find an association between pornography use and condomless sex (Peter & Valkenburg, 2011c). These associations may differ depending on the content of pornographies they consume, particularly between gay and heterosexual male adolescents, as gay pornography has a much higher rate of condom use (condomless sex represents a substantial minority of gay pornographies) than heterosexual pornography (condomless sex is the overwhelming majority of content). In addition, the relative cultural context of sexuality education and condom use is also important here (i.e., in the Netherlands sexuality education is more comprehensive and attentive to issues of gender and consent in general than in Australia, see Bell, 2009).

https://aifs.gov.au/publications/effects-pornography-childre... and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6352245/

I let you follow the trails from there, just stay away from netnanny like and sexual addicts support websites as they are promoting a very specific agenda and framing things in a certain way.

So your evidence for the "lasting consequences" of pornography is that there are some studies indicating a correlation to a reduction in condom usage. This indicates to me a need for better sex education.

This doesn't justify the ominous phrase "some long lasting consequences".

If porn had no consequences then there wouldn't be a need for better sex education.

If you disagree with the fact that not using a condom can have long lasting consequences (as in getting pregnant or getting an std) then I don't think we should debate the subject any longer.

This is disingenuous.

> If porn had no consequences then there wouldn't be a need for better sex education.

This is ridiculous. We'd need comprehensive sex education whether or not anyone watches porn. Before porn was trivially available online, teenagers still had plenty of sex. Sexual consent was still widely misunderstood too (and still is).

Of course pregnancy is a long lasting consequence, but if it is addressed by a program we need even without porn, it's irrelevant to porn.

> Exposure (regular or casual) to porn at a young age has some long lasting consequences.

If all you had in mind was condom usage and pregnancy, this is a bizarre choice of phrasing.

> This is ridiculous. We'd need comprehensive sex education whether or not anyone watches porn.

I don't follow. Of course sex ed is need and I believe it should be updated to take porn into account (if it's not already there).

> If all you had in mind was condom usage and pregnancy, this is a bizarre choice of phrasing.

Of course not, but I can't go around citing every publications or experts under the sun that points to cultural changes and implications on the children's upbringing.

Now I believe the debate is wrongly framed from the beginning. Children aren't teenagers, some culture have varying definitions for children, teenagers, adults, etc. and “porn” is way too generic (softcore, bdsm, gonzo, mutilation, etc.) to encompass the whole situation. Saying it's fine for children to watch porn won't fly when you hear about some kind of porn some people are consuming.

AFAIC I believe parents should take care to protect children from porn watching/accident, explain things sooner than previous generations (this is a change brought in by the total availability of porn content) did. There should be a mention in sex education about porn and how and why it paints some very specific sexual intercourse behaviour in specific ways and why it's not necessarily what's expected from a partner, etc.

I do agree and believe a government filter won't have any meaningful impact though.

We should acknowledge it's not a widely studied field, especially as exposing minors to hardcode pornography is not legal in most places. Having any evidence of studied effect is already pretty good in my book.

Outside of this specific question, current pornography landscape is already controversial regarding its effect on society regarding exploitation of the actors, gender bias projection affecting a range of fields including rape trials.

If adults can be ill affected by current porn production, is it a stretch to apply the same conclusion to children ? I'd argue it should at least be vetted as appropriate, the criteria for that being left to the parents.

Social bullshit around private life is much more destructive there. I once bought an antiseptic and the cashier gave me a weird look. Guess why. Because as an antiseptic one of its uses was treatment of STDs and the cashier obviously knew it.

Wouldn't the solution here be encouraging condom use in heterosexual pornography! The cat is out of the bag, so to speak.

Everytime it gets on the table you have a strong backlash from the industry though.

I think the burden of proof should be the other way around. The desire for sex is one of the most fundamental instincts that we have. Who can really say that their first sexual encounters don't stick with them for life? Internet porn is a radical shift in how young people are experiencing sex during important developmental years. Why wouldn't it have a long lasting effect?

No, there have been claims for decades about the harms of pornography. There should be enough evidence for detractors against pornography consumption to use. The burden is proof is on them.

You can personally believe in mythical consequences, but it's not a good enough reason to write sweeping laws at the cost of infocalypse.

Have you looked at Pompei? Honestly between that and "fertility relics" not having access to pornography may be the unhealthy anomally.