Porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age

While aew porn sites to be legally required to verify user's age? Presumably so access to porn will be prohibited for the young. Why is such a ban a good thing? Who benefits from such a ban? Why is keeping sexual knowledge hidden, secret, and dirty a good way to build a healthy society? Why do som many people worry about other people's sex lives?

Is there research which studies user's response to porn and sexuality as a function of age where social pressures can be factored out and kids grow up in a state of nature without their preconceived notions about what is "normal"?

Presumably does nothing in regards to social media? Kids easily come across weird enough stuff on YouTube these days (elsagate..) not to mention twitter / reddit being full of porn.

Encouraging tech illiterate people to enter ID / CC details on shady websites sounds like a disaster waiting to happen even when you ignore the other more glaring issues surrounding the government and these sort of things in the past

They already paid MindGeek to go ahead with this kind of thing once, so who knows if the government is actually serious or if a minister just saw it as a convenient time to kill two birds with one stone by wasting some public money and distracting from Boris' ongoing scandals

I think this is going to divide into "has kids, is aware of a concern and loco parentis tends to agree" and "everyone else" -Not that shielding kids works but the concern is there. It takes a lot of fortitude to say no, to the proposition about potential harm to young minds. A LOT of women are now on record saying their first sexual experience is negative, and highly informed by stupid expectations of behaviour in desire, fuelled by porn.

The alternate past choices of "keeping kids offline would be better" not existing, being in denial about the corrosive effects of ubiquitous access to pornography have to be at least discussed.

It may be not dissimilar to the alcohol/cannabis debate: Not harmful to everyone, but harmful enough to a significant minority at risk of lifetime problems we need to talk about it.

The key problem isn't really require-ID. Its who has access to the ID. Thats going to be the primary concern.

Had the whole covid-checkin thing not been royally trashed (many economies report police assumed legal right to check it for location/ID despite government statements to its privacy integrity) perhaps this would have had an easier run in the general public. I doubt anyone believes this data will or can be kept secret/private any more.

For those of you not in the UK, it's worth mentioning that this piece of legislation -- which is popular with conservative voters -- has been dutifully rolled out each time the government is in trouble for the last seven years, and has a history long before that. It is absolutely not proposed in a vacuum.

I don't understand how with all that's happening in the world, with the country & planet going to shit, future prospects for younger generations looking so bleak, someone got up and said "porn! that's where we should focus our efforts".

Meanwhile the VPN vendors start seeing the dollar signs again.

I had my first contact when I was 3-5 yo. Can't remember. grew older without problems. And I can tell you. I enjoy it more, I'm more positive about my body. My Girls are screaming. It's not like "eeewww... it's slippery"

The problem are the people who want to tell what to do and what and how to be.

This is the true problem.