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Comment by hhjinks | Hacker News Reader

I think it's perfectly fine to assume that pornography might warp a child's view of sex and intimacy. The solution shouldn't be to force people to identify themselves, though. Parents have all the tools they need to shield their children from pornhub, if they so wish.

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I know HN tends toward the libertarian slant, but this same perspective can be applied to all kinds of ills that are regulated, from smoking to driving.

This falls into the common refrain about "what do we do with kids who don't have responsible parents?"

I'm not sure just letting the chips fall where they may when it comes to kids who got a shit roll of the dice when it comes to parents is a great societal solution.

I'd say that I don't think children should be limited in opportunity due to the circumstances of their upbringing, but with those considerations in mind, protecting them from finding a way to access pornography is pretty low on that list of priorities, especially given that legislation like this will be wholly ineffective at accomplishing its purported goal and will needlessly burden the people who are legally trying to access pornography.

It's just not possible to address this issue without there being an intersection of how adults also access these adult things. A lot of other access controls in society are more reasonable than any proposal that people have come up with in this thread to restrict online pornography access to minors. This is why we place the burden on parents.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to say the risk isn't sufficient to justify this kind of action. But how exactly are you measuring the risk in terms of the higher priority risks you mention?

I think the danger is people revert to their intuition about what is risky, rather than defining it by an objective measure.

Higher priority risks are things that are easily measurable. A child that does not have food to eat or cannot access healthcare they need because their parents cannot afford it is very obviously bad for the child. Educational opportunities are another thing that's pretty easy to measure. Measuring the negative effects, if any, viewing pornography has on children isn't particularly easy to measure. I would say it's not ethically possible.

So ultimately, policy judgments with regards to increasing access controls are going to be dependent on intuition, one way or another, and individuals' political philosophies. I personally don't think there's any case where I think legislation like this is appropriate, though. If it were, it would be overwhelmingly obvious that it is. Clearly Utahan legislators think differently.

So where do you think the current research on the negative effects of pornography get it wrong?

I’m always a little leery when someone says something like

”I personally don't think there's any case where I think legislation like this is appropriate”

It usually means either someone’s mind is closed to considering new information (I.e., they have a dogmatic position) or their mental model isn’t open to nuance (I.e., they have dichotomous thinking)

> So where do you think the current research on the negative effects of pornography get it wrong?

This is a contentious issue. There's no consensus on whether or not use of pornography is harmful. Suppose there was consensus. To what degree is it harmful and is it harmful enough to legislate against it?

There's a very low chance that it'd pass that threshold for me, given that I generally prefer people be allowed to make choices over what they do with their body when it doesn't meaningfully harm others.

>There's no consensus on whether or not use of pornography is harmful.

I think a lot of the lack of consensus is due to an unclear definition of what constitutes "pornography". This makes it easy to muddle the issue.

>given that I generally prefer people be allowed to make choices over what they do with their body when it doesn't meaningfully harm others.

I generally agree when it comes to adults, but the crux of this discussion is risk to children. Do you extend this same logic to minors? If your stance is that it's up to the parents, do you think there should be safeguards for kids with "bad" parents? If so, what would that look like to you?

I agree that -without more knowledge- it's probably best to presume pornography might warp young peoples view of sex and intimacy.

But isn't that all the more reason to research this and educate people in this? So that adults can provide context and background? And to learn which kind of pornography is more dangerous than others in this? So that, with knowledge kids can be shielded from the stuff that's bad from them, and help understand the stuff that isn't?

Some of the world's oldest institutions have already researched this topic significantly and have worked together to compile and provide a common piece of literature that is widely available should you wish to embrace it.

The same book that has clothing rules like "don't wear clothing of mixed material" or food safety guidelines like "it is forbidden to eat animals from the water which don't have fins"? A book that was written way before internet porn existed? Before science existed?

Such a book would help? Thanks, but I'll pass.

I'm not really a fan of the solution (something more along the lines of the v-chip where commercial sites in the US are required to identify their content categories in a standard way so browsers could be configured to block it seems like a better solution), and sites like pornhub are straightforward enough to include in blocking software, but currently sites like Reddit present a problem. Looking at recent dumps[0], it looks like ~40% of posts on Reddit are marked nsfw, but those posts are on the same domain as things like /r/teenagers and /r/roblox. Without a MITM proxy, parents can't really block the porn half of the site unless they block the whole thing.

[0] https://files.pushshift.io/reddit/submissions/

There's also the problem that lots is highly viewed NSFW content on Reddit isn't porn. Check out r/AskReddit. There are questions about how people feel about death that are marked NSFW for reasons I can't understand.

Reddit has an account setting to hide NSFW-marked content from your feed and search results, so people will mark “distressing” content NSFW as a crude opt-in.

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