Internet porn: Automatic block rejected (UK)
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For years, websites that offer a space for young people to talk about sex, sexual orientation, relationships and so on have been blocked because too many of the people making the censorware presume that sex == porn or that LGBT == porn.
That's the cost of our anti-porn prudery: that people can't access sites that have advice on having healthy sex and relationships. Mandating a policy with that kind of side effect by law is a really dumb idea.
I've yet to see a compelling case that teenagers are being harmed by porn. But not having access to advice on how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases... that's really harmful. Whether it's providing sexual health advice or providing an anonymous shoulder to cry on for sexually confused teenagers, the Internet has saved plenty of young people's lives and health. It's helped people discover who they are, how to come out, how to have positive, healthy relationships. Ensuring that the next generation can have access to the enormous amount of good stuff that the Internet provides is precisely why we need to ensure we do not have government-instituted web censorship.
You list the result of bad filtering, and suggest that a national filter would have the same problems.
While I disagree with a national filter it's easy to think it would have been better than the lousy filters already existing.
Does the existing child porn filter prevent access to innocent sites?
Deciding what counts as "porn" is very difficult. Deciding what is illegal child porn is, with the odd exception, pretty easy. But for legal non-child porn, well, what about a 15-year-old girl writing erotic Harry Potter shags Dracoy Malfoy fan fiction and sharing it in the fanfic community on LiveJournal or whatever. Does that count as "porn" in the same way as commercially produced videos does?
And it is trivially defeatable: one kind finds a stash of porn, puts it on USB sticks and sneakernets it to all the other teenage boys in the neighbourhood. Hell, sexting exists.
Why on earth would you assume that? It's a government imposed solution with no competition or incentive to be user friendly. If anything every politician and bureaucrat involved in the project would rather make it more restrictive to be safe than risk their own ass.
I highly doubt that an institution which blocks pornography wants its students having any sex at all.
I have primary-school-age children, and to my mind the best way to protect them is sensible supervision and a good ad-blocker.
Regarding the automatic blocking of porn, I agree that this shouldn't happen, but when it comes to children I believe that good parenting is one of the parents being selective until the child is grown up enough to make their own decisions
I don't think most children really care about porn before puberty. So, I don't think it's really an issue.
PS: Most of the reasons to block porn also apply to adults. Why not block it from everyone?
I'm going to guess that you don't remember much of your pre-puberty childhood. I remember quite a bit from mine (1976-1985), including what the other kids talked about. Porn, and sex in general, were definitely topics we had strong interest in. But without internet access, our options were pretty limited.
PS: Most of the reasons to block porn also apply to adults. Why not block it from everyone?
It's not that anti-porn people think porn isn't harmful to adults. Most of them do. They just think protecting adults from porn is out of reach, while protecting kids from porn isn't.
Nonsense. I'm bloody glad I had access to porn as a closeted gay teenager. Without access to Internet porn, my teenage years would have been far more miserable and lonely.
It was only a decade ago when Section 28 was still the law of the land. Internet porn was giving plenty of gay teenagers the sex education that society and the education system was too prudish and/or fearful to give them.
> striptease, hookers, "bad girls"
Maybe I'm just thinking slowly this saturday, but couldn't it be argued that those all have the virtue of giving social interaction that porn does not give, and giving a realistic view of what sex involves?
The lack of sexual education before sexual encounters is a real issue, not really with porn.
I too believe it is a good idea to make sure 6 years old don't stumple on a inter-racial shemale anal-gangbang site before they are old enough to understand what sex is.
Teenagers are an entirely different catagory.
That said, I think the under 10s probably need parental supervision anyway.
As, I imagine, would the child authorities.
I'm not sure how many kids pre-puberty are looking for porn - I know until a certain age I had absolutely no interest whatsoever. And for kids that are old enough to be curious about porn - you could probably argue that social networks and SMS and whatever else are just as dangerous.
The issue is at what point have the "grown up enough". The law says that porn is only for those > 18 but good look persuading a 16 year old that they aren't allowed a smartphone.
OTOH I can understand why this might be a harder thing for parents than perhaps is acknowledged.
There are so many internet capable devices in households nowadays, including phones and games consoles etc. Sure you can try and implement some filtering but no system is bulletproof, especially when you consider P2P networks, anonymous proxies etc etc.
So I can understand the worries of parents who perhaps themselves barely understand the internet (likely their kids are much more savvy) themselves but want their children to have access to the internet as an education resource.
You might try and not allow any internet enabled device in bedrooms etc but then these days everything is an internet device and they will likely want to play games with always-on DRM etc.
This is the part I don't understand, what are those worries? What do you think it happens when a kid watchs porn? What negative consequences have been demonstrated to happen? And is not like porn randomly plays itself in the browser, you have to use explicit sexual words for Google to respond with links to porn sites.
I've certainly visited sites where I've been exposed randomly to porn without googling for it. Especially disguised links on forums etc.
The issue is social perception, dumbness by the masses pretending there is something evil and inmoral about watching other people have sex.
The issue is that you don't necessarily control which porn your kids would see first. And there is certainly a disproportional amount of "extreme" content available prominently.
I'm not sure it's necessarily just hysteria, I know people who would happily consume porn themselves but would be very mindful of what they expose their kids too.
Not a parent, but I think the problem with kids watching pornography is that you're basically letting a random person teach them what sex is. If a kid who's just beginning to get curious about sex stumbles on hard-core BDSM/rape fantasy sites, it's probably going to have some sort of impact. (I picked an obvious bad-case scenario, I'm not saying it's always like this, or that it'll certainly traumatize them, etc., etc. I just wouldn't want my kid's first experience with sex to be a video of a gagged woman being whipped.)
> And is not like porn randomly plays itself in the browser, you have to use explicit sexual words for Google to respond with links to porn sites.
I was going to come up with an example where little Billy is searching for his uncle Dick, but most of the results are about Dick Cheney, which is arguably more frightening than pornography.
That is certainly not the opinion of the masses because they don't want kids to see porn even years after they have been educated about sex.
If you need to hide something is gore, sites like Reddit are full of it and contrary as porn it can be a little bit traumatic.
Most porn is certainly made for commercial rather than educational purposes though and idealized stuff with giant penises and huge cumshots seems to be more commercially successful.
Effectively it's more about fantasy and than reality.
Then there are also the more extreme cases of family members renting prostitutes for young men, but I think that was much less common (though it still happens.)
That's hilariously old fashioned. Kids have smart phones.