On a moral level, I do agree with keeping children from accessing certain content online, especially porn. I think I'd be happier if I porn was less accessible to me until I had the mental faculties to understand it.

On a practical / policy level, I disagree since there is no way to stop children from accessing this content without drastically hampering the freedoms of all people. I see no good solutions. I really feel bad for parents who have to raise kids in the internet age.

It's a well-intentioned goal that's impossible to implement without egregiously privacy violating measures.

In the UK, The Online Safety Bill is almost about to become law. Without going into the full details, the government basically wants to monitor everyone's messages to stop child pornography and protect people (and other stuff too).

The problem is, they want companies to scan messages and photos as they are uploaded and to give themselves backdoor access to E2E encryption services.

It's very likely the UK will lose access to iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp etc as they would rather withdraw their services from the UK than break their promise to their users.

None of those blocks actually work, it’s theater. I think it’s better to prepare your child for the world and how to handle it than to try and lock them in a bunker.

I had an interesting experience as a teen looking at porn online and blocking is not the way. Education is the best, basically teaching teens is better than letting them make mistakes when they turn 18 and get their ass fucked

It should be the sole responsibility of parents or guardians to control any restrictions like this. I'm not a parent myself, but if I were, I wouldn't just let my child have a device with unrestricted access to everything on the internet. To me, it makes more sense to just have content restrictions on children's devices than force all adults to go through extra verification steps to access porn.

It’s impossible. That makes it perfect for building an unlimited enforcement apparatus, which is the real goal.

Didn't South Korea do this? IIRC some kids would steal their parents'/grandparents' government IDs to watch porn.

My upbringing in the US shamed all forms of sexuality; I was entirely forbidden from watching porn until I moved out on my own for college. I feel like that upbringing was very very harmful to me as an adult though because I spent my entire 20s breaking away from that shame and guilt. I had a good sex-Ed teacher in 6th-7th grades but they just simply didn’t spend enough time on the topic to educate me at all about anything but very basic anatomy though. The amount of shame I got at home just didn’t let my sex-Ed class information get absorbed in a way that was conducive to a normal sex life; we were never told that sex was normal and healthy either.

Me personally, my interest in animal science/anatomy led me to reading books about sexuality and the missing sex info I needed. I really don’t think it was healthy to have to learn that information alone; I’m lucky and I was reading official textbook material; I couldn’t imagine kids today learning accurate information from uncertified sources.

Like, sex-Ed at the senior HS level should be basically a how-to pleasure yourself and others in a healthy way and pitfalls to avoid. They should go into the anatomy and physiology ad nauseum so every student feels comfortable in their body as an adult.

Unbelievably stupid.

Personally, I don't like the idea. Government policies aren't good substitutes for parenting. even if they implemented these changes, kids and adults alike would likely move to other websites that don't have the government ID scanning feature in, or kids would use things such as a fake ID or their parent's IDs.

If someone wants porn online, they will find it. It's up to the parents to ensure that their children don't become porn addicts in the first place.

These bills are intended to make it harder for anyone to look at porn online. There are plenty of tools parents can employ to make it harder for their own kids to see porn -- that's where the responsibility belongs.

I'm against it. Parents should be helping their children go online go submit homework or whatever they need to do. You cannot babyproof the internet the same way you cannot babyproof society. Parents in the 90s understood this well. Parents in the 20s do not understand this.

Build safer websites for kids. Don't degrade adult spaces, because the 4chans and fox newses will always exist, but will take down the good sites as collateral.

The internet will always be an open forum of advertisements, ideas, arguing, and little niches of helpful information and nerds.