I have a young daughter and I live in the UK. I think this legislation is bloody stupid.
Yes, some people might reasonably not want their children to run across pornographic material on the internet. Here are some other things some people might reasonably not want their children to run across on the internet: Anti-religious material. Religious material. Depictions of violence. Any mention of prejudice against racial minorities, women, etc. Websites offering do-my-homework-for-me services. News about upsetting things like tens of thousands of children starving to death every day in poor parts of Africa.
I hope it's clear that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for all those things. I think it's clear, in fact, that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for any of those things.
Yes, I hope my daughter will learn about sex in better ways than by stumbling across porn on the internet. And I hope she'll learn about those other things in better ways than by stumbling across them on the internet, too. It is not the government's, or my ISP's, job to make that happen by making things harder to find online; it probably won't work, and it will probably break other things (as such filters always have in the past), and it's the wrong way to solve the "problem" anyway.
And I also hope that if in the fullness of time our daughter wants to find porn on the internet, she will be able to, and she won't be (or feel) obliged to disclose the fact to her parents, and doing so without telling us won't require her to seek out dubious illegal channels which are likely to be full of stuff much "worse" than she'd easily have found without all the censorship.
> won't require her to seek out dubious illegal channels which are likely to be full of stuff much "worse" than she'd easily have found without all the censorship.
This is one of my biggest fears.
As an analogy (and a true story); they banned selling knives on ebay[1]. Now I have to go to specialist knife-selling websites to buy my knives (I am a collector). Those websites have a much better range and promote knives much better than ebay did.
"Hardcore" porn (anything with penetration or erect penises) was illegal in Norway when I was a child. As a result my generations source of porn was illegal imports sold in shady shops which, because they were already breaking the law, had few reasons to avoid selling anything that was available from their sources.
So if you wanted just "mainstream" porn, you'd get that from places with prominent displays of all kinds of fetishes many of us would never have even heard of otherwise.
Then came the BBS's, and the same was the case - normal mainstream stuff in between every fetish imaginable.
Now I don't necessarily see that as a problem, but it does mean that by adding these kind of restrictions, they are effectively losing all control. They are also likely to massively hasten the move towards technologies to better anonymous, encrypted browsing.
If anything drives "darknets" and systems like Tor to the next level, it will be more extensive porn filtering even more so than piracy, especially because of the amount of money in porn that is legally manufactured and distributed, but that is or may become illegal in large potential markets.
Having kids is no excuse to let your brain check out when someone tells you they're in vague, amorphous danger. When those kids grow up, they'll be inheriting a world where civil liberties can be (and have been) eroded by cynical lawmakers playing on their parents' fears of children seeing things that they consider inappropriate.
It's like how more Americans are killed by police than by terrorists, but we "need" PRISM and more SWAT teams instead of better police training. Children are in far more danger of living in a nanny state than having their lives ruined by online pornography.
Having NO kids puts you in a better position to judge, because you are not emotionally attached. You should however impact the effect things have on your children.
And the only way to do that is to expose them to it ... You are not a bad parent are you?(Fallacy: Attacking the man).
The only ones remotely able to say 'think of the kids' are shrink that deals with children with issues/research.
I have kids, and I was a kid. My parents let me run quite unchecked, and at 12, a friend and I ran a BBS. This helped me learn about interactions and technology.
My daughters, since they've been a couple years old, have had unrestricted access to the Internet via tablets and laptops. Quite frankly, I'm far more worried about the impact of shitty cartoons and crap Disney productions than I am them watching porn. Indeed, if I discovered my daughters were viewing such materials, I'd take it as an opportunity to discuss and find out what's going on.
(1) You know (or can tell) what content your kids are exposed to on the internet. Most kids I know are quite adept at keeping what they are upto hidden from their parents and that isnt unique to the current generation.
(2) Parents have a much better sense of content, kids are exposed to on TV (where content is regulated and rated for the most part) than on the internet.
(3)Even if you are an involved parent with the ability to discuss things with your daughter, you both arent living in isolation from society. There are easily more parents and kids that don't have such a relationship than the number that do. So if boys as young as 8-10, growing up in highly unsupervised environments, are constantly exposed to extreme porn, what do you think their expectations of women are going to be?
(4)Addiction. Everyone has weaknesses. And porn sites are getting better and better at keeping people hooked. Kids are the most susceptible.
Freedom has always come at a cost. And the main cost is equality. If all kids are born equal and all families are created equal sure give them all the freedoms they want. But that is unfortunately not the world we live in today nor is it getting any more equal any time soon.
Kids aren't exposed to anything on the internet. It is not a push medium. I have used the internet for 20 years now and I don't think I have ever involuntarily encountered a porn site.
Where should I have seen it (searching for what)? I also use an ad blocker - but afaik most ad networks don't allow porn ads (Google Ads certainly don't).
Of course I have seen such ads - when I was searching for porn.
One place where the internet turns into a push medium might be specific services, like online chats. That is of course a valid concern, but porn filters wouldn't help with that.
Hi, kid here. A world where I don't worry about the swat busting into my house at 3AM to arrest me for my playboy collection[0] is preferable to the one where I see pop up ads with double penetration in them when I'm 8. (Which I did, I'm fine.)
[0]: Or the government censors whatever they like with their filtering infrastructure.
While I agree with the rest of your comment, this is a frustrating attitude to take to any studies which may have been done. Anecdotal evidence isn't evidence!
I remember an article posted here on HN a while back about how researchers tried to conduct such a study but could not find a control group of people who hadn't been exposed.
I fear a world where my children cannot express themselves freely FAR more I do a world where I have to explain to my children that some people are just kind of weird...
I never said this before on any occasion, but I really hope you get banned for this and the other things you have done in this thread.
> answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6082643
bandushrew didn't ask you a question, nor can I think of a case where mindlessly posting links to one's other posts in the same thread like you did could ever be considered OK. The post you linked to does not answer anything, it's just your way of pointing people to the inane things you already said. Clearly you believe people will have to agree with you if only you repeat yourself often enough.
Furthermore, you posted this exceedingly stupid "Do you have kids?" one-liner at least four times in this thread, simultaneously managing to portray yourself as accusatory, lazy, superior, and spammy at the same time.
This thread has degraded in quality due to your participation, both in form as well as in content. You mastered the invoking of the infamous "won't someone think of the children" rationale and somehow topped it by assuming only people with children should have a voice in these censorship discussions and this voice would somehow automatically be bound to agree with you. While I find your opinion personally disagreeable it's really your (to use the term broadly) discussion style and tactics that are offensive in the extreme.
Saying this is about offended sensibilities constitutes a gross and cheap misrepresentation of my argument, but it's also interesting that you're pro censorship when the government does it for dubious reasons, and at the same time you cry foul when someone complains about your methods on a private forum. Again, this is not necessarily about the opinions you're expressing, it's about your "commenting" style. Filtering such content out is not censorship, it's quality control.
Tell me why people like Sven7 get away with pretty much any lazy rhetoric, including literally repeating the same senseless 4 word question several times in lieu of writing a real post? How is it that when he complained about my desire to "censor" him for spamming the thread nobody reminded him of the irony of being a staunch supporter of government censorship? Honestly, tell me how this works.
Look at his behavior in this thread and tell me it's perfectly fine. I mean this seriously, you're a user with gigantic amounts of karma, certainly more than I'll ever have. If you think it's OK, I'll cede that I clearly had the wrong idea about how this place should work, and I'll apologize for overstepping.
It's not fine, that's why his repeated cheap shots about 'do you have kids' were removed. On the other hand, two wrongs don't make a right - the notion of permanently banning him from participating doesn't make a lot of sense either.
Two wrongs? You're really asserting that stating my opinion was at least as bad as his behavior? Granted, it's probably a good thing I don't have the power to actually ban someone, but I think I did a reasonable job of at trying to explain the rationale behind my wish. And why doesn't the notion of banning make sense in this case? People have certainly been hellbanned for less.
I find it really weird that this is so often an argument. If anything, not having kids and hence not having a vested interest in the matter makes a person's opinion more objective, not less.
