The UK’s Online Safety Act doesn’t just age-gate porn; it blocks material deemed “harmful” to minors. Days after the law went into effect, reports of non-explicit content on social media getting blocked in the region started to crop up. Subreddits from r/IsraelCrimes to r/stopsmoking are now walled in the UK. Video games, Spotify, and dating apps have instituted or will institute age checks.
Given the SCOTUS age verification decision [June '25], Stabile fears that people [in the US] will go “mask off” in the fall and spring, when state legislatures start getting back together. “People are going to attempt to restrict the internet even more aggressively,” Stabile said. “I think people are going to work to restrict all sorts of content, particularly LGBTQ content, but also content that is broadly defined as any sort of threat or propaganda to minors.” Other experts Mashable spoke to agree with him.
“I’m going to jump to the end step,” [Eric Goldman, law professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law] said. “The end step is that most online users are going to be required to age authenticate most of the time they visit websites. That’s going to become the norm.” In a paper he wrote, Goldman called these statutes “segregate-and-suppress” laws.
The stated reason behind these laws is to “protect children.” But as journalist Taylor Lorenz pointed out, in the UK, age verification is already preventing children from accessing vital information, such as about menstruation and sexual assault.
“When we see crackdowns on spaces on the internet, we’re essentially stripping away that potential for self-actualization,” Goldman said. We’ve reached the dystopian stage of the internet, he added.
If parents want their kids to not see porn, they should set up filters on their devices and monitor their computer use. That has been doable for decades.
The internet isn’t a shopping mall where everyone needs to follow some set of rules, it’s more like a neighborhood where you can go up and knock on anyone’s door. If you don’t like what they do at their house, the solution is to not visit their house, not force everyone to follow some set of rules on their own property. Websites shouldn’t have to go out of their way to block traffic that doesn’t follow some set of rules, people should go out of their way to not visit sites they don’t want to see.
That usually equates to removing all technology from kids hands as most are unable to research and properly secure what they give their children. Technology is needed, they can’t grow up without knowing how to use it and making that safer is fine by me.
If you want to look at adults only material prove you are an adult or go about it a different way. The internet isn’t the only place porn exists.
No, it usually equates to parents not filtering anything because that’s the laziest option. That’s not great, but violating everyone’s privacy for an ineffective law is worse.
Commercial products exist for those who want them. Use those instead of asking governments to handle parenting for you.
If personal privacy is that important to you then download your porn from torrents, or just dont watch it. Porn isn’t a necessity. You aren’t owed porn.
But it’s not about porn, it’s about government interference on the internet.
Is it though? Seems funny to me that porn websites had to hang up “no kids” signs and now people are claiming its an issue about freedom and privacy.
The “no kids” signs were fine because they didn’t violate anyone’s privacy. The “scan your face” BS goes way too far.
Considering there are other options for age verification I’d imagine companies using face scan tech will take a huge hit in traffic. I doubt that will be a mainstream way of doing it, as it barely makes sense to begin with.
Any form of identify verification is a privacy concern, since someone is going to be logging that crap. And young people are just going to get that content (or worse content) somewhere else, so it’s not even solving the problem effectively.
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