Pornhub says UK visitors down 77% since age checks came in
bbc.com
bbc.com
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays with voters at the next election. Politicians think this censorship is a vote-winner, presumably because on the doorstep voters are unlikely to talk about their love of porn. Yet in online spaces, this policy seems wildly unpopular - especially with the high profile leaks of age validation services' user data; the government's legal battles with Wikipedia; Steam's demand for credit cards (debit cards are more common in the UK); and sites leaving the UK market all together.
I suppose we'll get to see whose polling is more accurate at the next election.
In other countries (not least the US) there’s an expectation of privacy which doesn’t really exist in the UK. It’s not seen as a right by any major party or particularly valued by the public at large (“nothing to hide nothing to fear” etc). The government still really wants E2E encryption banned here (as nonsensical as that is).
They don’t see any of this as a vote loser, as none of the alternative parties see it any differently.
Personally I’m kind of happy about this gating even if I disagree on principle, but they’ve already indicated that they have no line. They’ve been very open about seeing everything you say and do.
I'm not saying UK is great, but surely ahead of what the US is doing by a wide margin.
If you look at the UK through the MAGA lens you see that there’s a grain of truth in some of the comments about free speech.
Likewise terminology in the US is sometimes a little turned on its head - in the US “liberalism” means something completely different from actual liberalism (which would be closer to libertarianism).
Also “woke” has been used for so many things that its meaning has been warped from “don’t trust the system” to whatever the right dislikes on a given day, even though they’re ostensibly all about smaller government that stays out of your business.
Politics has always been very subversive but it’s more entangled than ever now.
Well. With the ageing population and the fact that older people are more conservative and they turn out to vote more often I would doubt that anything would change. At least not because of this.
>Reform UK's online policy reform proposal is to scrap the Online Safety Act
Everyone that defects to the Lib Dems, Greens or even the Tories stops helping Labour get past the post first.
These are all unforced errors they could have seen coming.
They're so focused on building a surveillance state for themselves that they've stopped worrying about what happens when Reform get control of it.
That depends on which online spaces you frequent. Ones like HN, which have a higher proportion of male users, will be statistically more likely to have commenters who engage in habitual pornography consumption and are vocally opposed to the OSA on this basis.
You don't like our privacy violating laws? Well that's because you're a nasty disgusting pervert. You don't want to be a little pig man do you? Great, then support our law!
See also: you want children to be raped, you're a pedophile, you have something to hide, show me your hard drive...
FWIW the male spaces I'm in are supportive of porn bans.
Whenever there's a blocker (one case from my childhood was how to use net send to broadcast profanity across the network), someone will figure it out, and by the end of the day EVERYONE knows.
Basically every youtube video for the past decade has been sponsored by a VPN service offering first-joiner discounts. My cousin uses a VPN and has no idea what it is and how it works, just that "he should protect himself while browsing". Those VPNs have invested massively in UX and ease of use so out of that 77% of users, I'd guess more than 80% of it switched to VPNs.
Yes. That’s exactly what we believe.
Do you believe that 77% of UK Pornhub users suddenly stopped wanking?
Seems pretty implausible to me.
One of their friends sends them a link. Now they just send them a different link, one that goes via a free VPN.
You don't need any new skills for that and it's not a "speedbump".
All this law does is make it harder for adults to use non-porn websites like Reddit, Spotify or Bluesky.
It’s not a good law.
At the next election some portion of Labour voters will remember missteps like this and will vote for someone else because of it.
Personally, I think their prosecution of peaceful protestors (Palestine supporters) whilst giving a free pass to right wing violent protestors will alienate their traditional left-wing base.
This law is not fit for the declared purpose at all.
So all minors in the UK have their own banking account and credit card? You know, to pay for the VPN.
The former will now make less sense as a business model, since UK isn't a good location to proxy traffic through anymore.
Or just find another porn site that doesn't adhere to the law.
2. Children aren't as well versed with tech as you think, just because they spend a lot of hours in front of a screen.
It's also much more obvious that a taboo/illicit service asking you to, essentially, deanonymize yourself is going to be hit the hardest.
Remember that when discussing any regulation.
The „it’s impossible” and „let’s not bother” people are a scourge and they mustn’t be taken seriously.
Yes, and we were right.
It was billed as something that most adults would accept. It's not plausible that 77 percent of Pornhub's UK traffic came from non-adults.
It has therefore failed. Obviously a huge number of adults did not accept it, and either went around it or stopped using the site. What they did not do was to comply with the supposedly "measured, reasonable and non-intrusive" AV measures. They accepted costs and inconveniences to avoid that.
It was billed as something that would only affect children. It has in fact affected many adults. That means it has failed.
Of course, many of the 77 percent have probably moved to VPNs (or other sites) rather than actually not using Pornhub... which means they were only inconvenienced, not deprived of porn or even of Pornhub.
But those approaches are just as available to non-adults as to adults. Although the AV nonsense probably did actually deter some number of underage users, you can't know what that number was. It would be possible for literally every single underage user to have simply switched to a VPN. The 77 percent number tells you exactly nothing about how many children have been deterred from watching porn. Probably not very many.
So although this does give you proof of some of the ways it's failed, it does not give you any evidence that it's succeeded in anything at all.
That said, that kind of "success" is not the main issue. The main arguments against this AV stupidity were and are that it's not worth the huge costs in money, convenience, security, and privacy, and that it helps create machinery that can and probably will be abused for other purposes later. All of which are still absolutely true.
Instead of large, accountable providers, now three quarters of their customers use vpns or switched to sites without age verification.
I guess there are some who really want their porn and either don't know about the alternatives (VPN) or genuinely don't mind handing over identifying info to do it.
That watching porn is still an immoral act is implicit in your surprise.
I don't actually see watching porn as immoral, although I am aware that there are a large number of people who do. Hence my surprise that so many people were willing to tie their identities to it.
99% of modern morality is "because I said so". If that's the level of thinking you're applying to things, then you are a stupid person. Sorry.
There are plenty of legitimate arguments against porn. "Ughhh sex icky!!" is not one of them. Purity is not an argument. Religion is not an argument. Saying something is immoral is not an argument.
It was definitely to protect the kids and NOT to try to quash all depictions of human sexuality due to a fetish for appeasing the arbitrary whims of the invisible sky daddy, as told to us by the people who pinky promise they were speaking on behalf of invisible sky daddy.
That's pathetic, there's really pathetic, and then there's whatever this is.
I'm not aware of any religious groups in the UK who have significant influence on legislation, perhaps unlike the US.
Is there any reliable data showing this? What does "degrading" and "violent" mean? Is it really detrimental, or is it just totally normal kinks that some people don't understand are actually carried out in a healthy way?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258565076_The_Emper...
How does this apply here?
The people pushing the age verification will never admit this to you, often because they're either ignorant of the bigger picture or not engaging in good faith in the first place, seeing themselves as the clear-eyed moral ones bringing wisdom to us heathens who don't know any better.
Obviously not, a lot of them just don't want to identify themselves. But having worked in IT for 25 years and knowing how free some people are to use their government e-mail to sign up at porn websites, I wonder even if 50% are underage, that's a huge number.
It's not 1999 anymore. Stop going to sketchy sites to watch porn.
Hmmm...
(Also, I'll point out there are parental control settings for Google accounts)
I'd like very much to remove moral busybodies from my system but it seems very hard for people who have a grand plan for society to top coercing and leave me alone.
Its none of your business if people voluntarily produce it and its also none of your business if people voluntarily market it between each other.
I mean it is no secret a lot of people who produce these things have mental health issues or come from very poor families. That's not even including the illegal activity that might seem legal on the surface.
Arguing for the ban of porn is easy, because very few will defend it, and if they do, you just pull out the argument that production is also bad. As if the opponents doesn't want porn to produced safely, without trafficking or exploitation.
Is this true, or is this a belief that you are forced to believe because it's the only way you can give yourself any worth?
Meaning, do you just view yourself in such a poor light that the only achievement your mind could possibly muster for your existence is "well at least I don't watch porn"?
Really? In my experience, people who think they should be in charge of the interests of "civilization", or who are obsessed with other people's vices, have a lot more mental health issues. Mostly weird savior complexes or fucked up (usually guilt driven) purity obsessions.
That's no secret.
Certainly a win for drafters of the OSA, despite the controversy stirred up over its enactment.
(To say nothing of the second order effects of something like this, like the massive privacy intrusion for adult citizens, or the theft/sharing of IDs to get around these laws)