this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024

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Blocking Pornhub access in Canada an option, owners say. Here’s why (globalnews.ca)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

68 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A House of Commons committee is set to study legislation proposed by Independent Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne that would require Canadians to verify their age to access porn online.

(page 2) 19 comments

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 8 months ago (7 children)

At this point there are people in their forties who had access to online porn as minors. Have any actual studies been done to show that a significant portion of the many, many people who've grown up in the last 20-30 years have been harmed by having access to online porn while they were younger, or are these laws just something that's trendy at the moment?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (25 children)

There are many studies that indicate porn use can negatively affect your brain, sexual performance, and pro-social behaviour.

Porn linked to decreased grey matter

Porn addiction linked to lower executive functioning

Porn linked to negative social behaviour

Meta analysis on research into adolescents porn use discusses a range of negative outcomes such as anxiety, suicidal ideation, social isolation, and academic disengagement

I'm not really sure this law will "solve" the problem, or if it's a good solution to the problem. But there are real, negative outcomes of internet porn

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

I'm in my 50's and never had issues finding porn/alcohol/drugs when I was under 18, even though I was in a religious area for part of it.

These people are sniffing glue if they actually think this bill will do anything other than erode privacy.

At best all it will do is lead kids away from normal sites and towards the sketchy parts of the web where things get even weirder.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

"Sex harms the youth" has been established lore since the Victorian age, when hiding it in the first place was a new project driven by religious concerns. Nobody questions it because nobody wants to look like a pedophile (which, for the record, are bad).

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 8 months ago (2 children)

There's a HUGE lobbying effort to convince the people in power that this is a good idea. Lots of tech-surveillance companies bidding for this to go through, so everyone is forced to use their services. You think identity theft is bad now? Wait until you need to put your ID on the internet and that gets leaked.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

If age verification is really the intent then it ought to be possible to develop a service these websites can call into that gives some kind of zero-knowledge age check. The age check service doesn't need to know the identity of the service that's asking, and the requesting service doesn't need to know the identity of the person whose age they're checking. You'd authenticate on a site that only knows someone's doing an age check, and the verifying site would just get a token indicating that the age check was successful.

Am I missing some reason why this wouldn't be possible? It seems to be a problem ripe for zero-knowledge solutions.

If it is possible, there's really no need for an age check requirement to involve disclosing your identity to the site you're visiting, or to disclose your viewing habits to anyone. And if governments or lobbyists are pushing for everyone to upload their full identity to web sites, it suggests either they're ignorant or their motives aren't what they claim.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Any law is only as effective as its level of enforcement. I have a hard time understanding how they think they can regulate access to porn on the Internet. If anything, if legitimate, more mainstream sites get more difficult to access, will our youngsters really stop their Google search there, or will they just click on the next link that just won't have age verification, with potentially much "worse" porn than what they'd have watched initially lol? Did any of the countries that implemented age verification already really see any significant impact?

[+] [email protected] -8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

At the same time determining how to regulate goods on a digital marketplace is important to figure out.

Your points are all valid but eventually we’ll need to figure out proper age verification and identification for some things.

Idk if porn is where it needs to start but just because it’s hard and not easy doesn’t mean it will stop.

Regulation invariably always brings “black markets” but it doesn’t mean it’s bad on that alone.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

[...] eventually we’ll need to figure out proper age verification and identification for some things.

I don't mean to be a "specifics sam" but why? In nearly every case I can think of legitimately dangerous activities (like buying radium or a gun) already necessarily require the user to have access to a credit card or PayPal. Porn is weird specifically because the vast vast majority of porn is just advertising to find the few whales that spend massive amounts of money on it.

So, like, what's an example of some other kind of content that's free that we don't want children to look at but we're okay with adults looking at?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Key point in my opinion is the definition of « what things » should be so tightly regulated wrt to age for one thing. I doubt access to porn by minors is a proven societal problem and even more so that the proposal to solve via the verification mechanism is proportionate.

This reeks of puritan religious bullshit.

Anecdotally I didn’t turn out to be a psycho as much as my relatives that piously shy away from porn.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

eventually we’ll need to figure out proper age verification and identification for some things

Don't we already have identity verification for many sites where our personal identity matters - banking, government stuff, etc? For the rest, it's like trying to change the color of the sky cause we don't like blue. Short of a fundamental protocol-level change of how the internet works (won't happen any time soon), or adding a centralized level of control like China's Great Firewall and/or forcing ISP-level censorship on top of outlawing VPNs (you'll probably be hard-pressed to make a good argument for this), controlling what one can access on the internet just won't happen.

Also not sure why anyone would think it's a good idea to hand over our personal information to random websites, even if just for "age verification". I can't even trust my bank with my data, giving it to random commercial sites that have all the incentives in the world to track my consumption habits and link them to my personal identity would be utterly idiotic, porn or not. Hell, we're already doing it with Facebook or Google tracking us across the web, now we want to be required by law to give them our ID as well?

It's a typical reactionary play to attack the surface of an issue without addressing the root problem. For this particular issue, blocking porn access on sites that will comply will just make it that they'll find their porn elsewhere, that's all, while ignoring the underlying education issue. It's a smoke show that literally doesn't address anything.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What I am saying is eventually we’ll need to have a better age verification process than that.

I don’t want to provide my full identity, it would be cool for a zero trust information exchange. This sort of thing is being worked out already with OIDC. Allow the site access to ONLY the information it needs, in that instance age.

I am saying eventually we will have to get there, I don’t have to agree with it and neither do you. But it’s happening.

I don’t mean to argue in favor of what is being done here, I’m saying at some point we will need a better system and these things will have to happen and fighting AGAINST them is probably less beneficial than fighting for the system to be done properly.

These current events are a good place for us to highlight how dumb it’s being done.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

"Better" than what, and how, exactly?

OIDC still needs you to trust one of the parties. Who should I both trust with my age online, and would be fine with letting know where and when I'm trying to jerk off?

There's no doing this kind of thing "properly". One absolutely should fight against idiotic laws.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

@folkrav is right here

And I'll posit that you likely wouldn't like this ability to exist in the first place.

Let me walk you through a thought experiment. Any system that requires a verification step is likely tied to identity and putting up a gate to get in based on the identity or using it to get a token to access it ties you to that activity. Ok great let's not let the kids see porn, but the exact same approach can be used to prevent or put a chilling effect on people seeking lgbt content, anti Vax content, unionization information,church gatherings, crypto schemes,academic research, Israel, Palestine, or anything really.

The internet was never intended to be a secure place it was intended to survive a devastating nuclear attack and keep information flowing. Tacking on arbitrary mortality gates is Orwellian and not how the internet was designed to function. Maybe these guys need to a seperate network (without blackjack and hookers) just for the content you want kids to see and not tell them about the internet till later because these proposed measures are like outlawing the letter q because you don't like that it leads to the word question.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

And all of these laws are disingenuous, wrapped in classic “won’t someone please think of the children”

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