A Utah Porn Filtering Bill Is Back, and It's Stupid
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
Not sure I believe this part. If we're talking about 8 year olds or 12 year olds, sure, except in weird cases.
But I was definitely consuming pornography at 17 years old, and I didn't trip and fall into it because I typed whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov.
My view on pornography as someone who suffered from addiction and still sometimes fall back to it is, it’s a symptom of a underlying societal pathology.
Human beings are designed to crave physical intimacy. That’s what make a species successful at the evolutionary stage. If you believe in evolution and science then you must believe that’s true. If you go against that, you are doomed as a species.
The problem is in many aspects, we are doing everything we can as a species to counter our evolutionary fitness.
I bet if there was a societal dynamics where people were to find partners in organic manner and have meaningful relationships, worrying about pornography reaching to kids would be less of a thing.
Too many of our personal relationships are polluted with doses of dopamine, coupled with dysfunction in the dynamics in relation to the way people seek their partner.
There is a reason sperm count has dropped 50% just in a generation and 25% of young women are on SSRI. What is going on in America?Is it the food we are eating, garbage we are consuming in our phone everyday that cause us to live in a dysfunctional reality where porn becomes the mean to release your evolutionary urge? Why is every millennial and GenZ choosing to delay family and relationship formation? Is it rent seeking class choke holding an entire other class of people? Ultimately is that too a class war issue?
no one is asking these questions. Our beloved journalists are busy studying the Russian aggression on Ukraine more than corporate invasion on every aspect of American soul.
Yes, I am going to continue to call this brain-fart of a policy “stupid”.
Or is it stupid that it's illegal to turn off parental controls for someone else's kid without the parent's consent (the article author is upset about this one for some reason)?
Or what part of the policy is stupid?
It is trivial to enforce. Realistically there are two operating systems for these devices. Do they prompt for the user's age during setup? Do they enable parental controls by default when the age is under 18?
No one thinks it will prevent people from seeing porn. That's not a goal. The part of the law I quoted specifically says you just need to make a good-faith effort to enable a generally accepted, commercially reasonable filter when the user is a child. Likewise, no one thinks turning children away when they try to buy alcohol or porn in person will keep them from getting those things. But it's an easy, reasonable step to cut access, and as far as I know everyone agrees that we want to restrict access to those things to children.
The bill might be about virtue signaling if phones already meet the requirements anyway. But then it's not a bad policy; it's just codifying what's already done. Or phones aren't meeting the requirements, and it's not a virtue signal. Asking trillion dollar software companies to have a parental control prompt is not unreasonable.
What about for kids/parent combinations where the parent isn't technically adept and just gives the kid devices to setup as is the case 99% of the time, lots of parents have their technical kids do the tech setups on devices cause they don't have the time or desire to learn to deal with it.
The issue with laws like this are that it's not going to be a rich guy getting in trouble for his rich son watching porn, it's going to be some poor kid getting his parents in trouble because the parent was busy working 3 jobs and didn't have time to screw with their kids parental controls, and end up screwed.
I don't know what can be done. There's many healthy ones among the groups but I dunno, I despair at times.
Hang in there. Focus inwardly and be sure to maintain your overall health.
> no one is asking these questions. Our beloved journalists are busy studying the Russian aggression on Ukraine more than corporate invasion on every aspect of American soul.
Plenty of people are asking this question, but at the same time, sperm count dropping is probably not quite as urgent as a potential outbreak of World War III.
I wish journalists would stop inserting their opinions in the title like it's their personal Twitter feed.
This is techdirt ffs, it's literally a blog about news stories, not journalism:
> Started in 1997 by Floor64 founder Mike Masnick and then growing into
> a group blogging effort, the Techdirt blog relies on a proven economic
> framework to analyze and offer insight into news stories about changes
> in government policy, technology and legal issues that affect
> companies’ ability to innovate and growDoes the OP know what happens in band camp, in classrooms and basically and other setting where kids wit smartphones are left on their own?
I'm big on free speech, but it gets real weird when people are against mandating parental controls exist and claim it's a form of censorship. Giving porn to children is already illegal[0], but little to nothing is done to enforce it on computers. It seems reasonable that people want to have consumer devices be capable of filtering, even if people more familiar with tech would know why that's challenging to do perfectly.
Edit: It sounds like they have to ask the user's age on setup, and if the user answers that they're a minor, activate the filter. And liability
> does not apply to a manufacturer that makes a good faith effort to provide a device that, upon activation of the device in the state automatically enables a generally accepted and commercially reasonable filter
So I'm not really seeing the issue. It just says parental controls have to exist on the device, and you can't go turning off someone else's kids' parental controls.
[0] Here's a federal law that carries up to 10 years in prison for knowingly providing porn to someone under 16 using the Internet. The law is almost as old as the web. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1470
I was a teenager before the internet and it is not like you could just go to the store and browse Playboy and Penthouse when you were 15. If a store had magazines with nudity it was behind the counter and obviously illegal to sell to children.
The people talking about free speech and censorship are obviously full of shit.
The reason things like porn aren't regulated like drugs and alcohol, is because drugs and alcohol can't be consumed with a simple google search and a click to a website run somewhere else in the world.