Porn site traffic plummets as UK age verification rules enforced | Hacker News Reader

Porn site traffic plummets as UK age verification rules enforced

bbc.co.uk

25 pointsrdrd22 comments

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The historical data is that porn usage is inversely correlated with sexual violence: the countries with more access to porn have less rapes.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201601...

If I had to guess at a reason, it is presumably because cohorts of socially undeveloped adult men are sexually sedated by porn and are less motivated to rape.

I'm not a psychologist but some of these extrapolations seem insane to me.

> Using Czech police records, American and Czech researchers compared rape rates in the Czech Republic for the 17 years before porn was legalized with rates during the 18 years after. Rapes decreased from 800 a year to 500. More porn, less rape.

> In addition, the legalization of porn was associated with a decrease in another despicable sex crime, child sexual abuse. Under Communism, arrests for child sex abuse averaged 2,000 a year. After porn became legal, the figure dropped by more than half to fewer than 1,000. More porn, fewer sex crimes.

The country's entire foundation shifted from underneath it; an empire collapsed around it. How could they possibly isolate the legalisation of pornography specifically as the cause of decreased rape? Why not the legalisation of private enterprise? Is it not feasible that living in a repressive, controlled, surveilled society caused men unrest?

Perhaps the studies cited went into more detail, but "Lots of rape in 1985, less rape in 2005. Porn was legalised between then, ergo porn caused this." does NOT convince me.

It seems more likely that sexual offenses were used as an excuse to arrest and defame political opposition and activists.

> It seems more likely that sexual offenses were used as an excuse to arrest and defame political opposition and activists.

Or sexual offenses were more tolerated.

Fair enough although that's not the only statistics they cite.

More importantly I think they're trying to point out the converse of maybe what you're pointing to, which is that as porn availability increases, if it caused sexual assault, rates of the latter would go up. But it doesn't, you see the opposite trend time and time again.

This is one of those cases where you'll never be able to do a RCT, so any study will be flawed in some way (even RCTs have their issues).

Major correlation/causation overreach here.

Also, if 'sexual sedation' were a premise you'd propose as having some societal-level impact you'd start very quickly getting into other effects, many of which might not be desirable.

Maybe it's for the best. I think new generations are way too passive. We've been trained to live our lives passively and vicariously... Engaging in the cheapest possible alternatives to various life experiences, quantity over quality.

Do you suggest that there are not enough sexual assaults with this statement?

No but more aggression and assertiveness is needed. I hope this won't correlate but I really think our generation will end up in a place worse than we can imagine if we don't grow a backbone. Already millennials are being coerced into various kinds of sexual slavery.

”millennials are being coerced into various kinds of sexual slavery”

I hope you have a source for that claim.

Yes but the coercion is so powerful psychologically that it won't even be recognized as such. The victim is violated and then conditioned to think it was all 100% their own decision. It's both mental and physical.

E.g. OnlyFans.

Accelerating inequality built into the system creates poverty, poverty leads people to sell their bodies, then they tell themselves it was all their own decision and in fact they love it... They'll tell themselves it's empowering even. Meanwhile they become extremely distrusting and develop all sorts of personality issues till they become a shell of their former selves... But it's all fine, no violation took place because they chose it 100%.

The conditioning is so strong, people might get deeply upset at this particular framing because it's too painful to accept.

And it's just the typical mental tricks the system plays on people; never blame the system, always look for individuals to scapegoat, blame yourself if you must but never blame the system.

That’s a very glib interpretation of the message, bordering on the malicious.

Or countries with higher access to porn have lower reporting on their sexual assault stats.

Sexual assault and abuse are one of the most unreliable stats in the world because there are so many disincentives to report.

Further, it’s also a foolish stat to compare across jurisdictions because what constitutes sexual assault and abuse is wildly different across jurisdictions.

These stats tend to punish the countries that have the best environments to reduce sexual abuse and assault because they will also have the highest reporting.

It simply isn't about protecting kids. The sources aren't entirely reliable, but it is plausible that the head of government even hid the problem of children getting raped by migrants to "not rock the boat". Not sure how much of that is true, but I don't see the ability to take responsibility to protect kids here if political convenience is that important.

This is useless as the Brit will just use VPN's/Tor or anything else connected to US servers where the main language interface will be 100% the same. This will just give free money to US services and probably generate a big hole in the UK economy. I remind you all that porn does far more money than tons of services. They were pioneers on online commerce with credit cards.

People can tell otherwise, but these services are widely used by the population in disguise, from both women and men.

Meanwhile, hetzner/digitalocean traffic increases ten fold.

Just means more VPNs are being used to bypass this stupid piece of legislation.

It's interesting that simple Javascript can be used by e.g PornHub to predict VPN usage by Brits: "What is the browser's timezone, and what is it's language?"

If the connection is coming from New York, but the browser says it's UTC+1 and en_GB...

This is what the Australian Government wants to implement (unfortunately) for social media.

They want the websites to take "reasonable" action to prevent access. They suggested snooping on EXIF metadata to determine the location of the image to Meta.

Good chance they'll use stuff like browser fingerprinting too.

To be clear, I'm thinking PornHub can do this and show us the data, so we can laugh at the UK government about how effective their policy is.

Then again, it might mean the UK government might ban commercial VPNs next...

In other news, a massive spike in BitTorrent traffic has been detected in the UK. Experts are calling the rise "unprecedented".

What are they going to do with this amount of freed hands now????

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