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Comment by Aeglaecia | Hacker News Reader

there are plenty of valid reasons that unfettered access to pornography is harmful - imagine if you had private videos leaked on the net forever , or were exploited , or were trafficked to participate , etc. plz try save vitriol for when its really needed. also the reddit tier religious bashing looks really lame.

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Well said. The idea that porn is harmless fun is not borne out. That's not to say it should be entirely prohibited, but the normalisation of degrading and sometimes violent porn among young teens is a real problem affecting real people. While plenty of posters seem to have issues with the U.K. government's actions, they don't present any solutions to the issue of underage people being porn addicted.

I'm not aware of any religious groups in the UK who have significant influence on legislation, perhaps unlike the US.

Porn addiction is pseudoscience perpetuated by right wing pundits and known quack charlatans like the late Gary Wilson.

The NHS offers treatment for pornography addiction. It's a subset of a wider category of behavioural addictions.

The "pornography addiction" model lacks scientific support and is driven by media hype, moral conflicts, and a lucrative treatment industry. High-frequency use of visual sexual stimuli (VSS; preferred neutral term over "pornography") does not meet addiction criteria and is better explained by non-pathological factors like libido, sensation-seeking, or value conflicts.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258565076_The_Emper...

> the normalisation of degrading and sometimes violent porn among young teens is a real problem affecting real people.

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?

> imagine if you had private videos leaked on the net forever , or were exploited , or were trafficked to participate

How does this apply here?

It doesn't, because laws that compelled sites like pornhub to take down nonconsentual porn already existed before the proposal for age verification.

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.

how exactly does age verification prevent any of this?

i said that the other guy's hatred for pornography restriction was a bit extreme considering that there are definitely valid reasons to restrict pornography , at no point did i say that i supported age verification

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