But I also feel that any random kid shouldn’t be able to just go to these sites and see porn freely.

So they will just go to another site that doesn't have age verification and doesn't implement any security measures instead. Big sites are required to age check people before they are allowed to upload anything, that is not the case for most of the internet.

All age verification does is aggregate personal information and make it easy target for bad actors to steal. Instead of needing to go thought 100 sites, now that information & identities will be tied to a single database.

It's also a slippery slope, since the same adult content is available not just on dedicated adult sites, but mainstream social media. Lemmy, Mastodon, Twitter, TikTok, Twitch (just recently wanted to allow nudity). Do you really want to have your identity tied to your online activity?

The good old "Think of the children" argument again... This is an attack on online privacy, again. I hate it.

It is the parents responsibility to keep their kids safe. We don't ban knives either just because a child could accidentally get hurt by one. And apart from that the regulations are not even well thought out, they will not stop a determined teenager with a lot of time on their hands.

In the worst case a privacy nightmare, and in the best case useless.

Absolute waste of tax money and resources, anyone advocating for this policy is an idiot and psychotic control freak that should never be allowed to opine on public policy.

Outdated values are driving this country back into the stone age. The body was designed to be horny as we go through teenage years. It's nature. Rather than guide kids on the safe path, fools would forbid, outlaw, prohibit until they can't control them after age of 18.

Here's how this plays out... Kids are going to masturbate, regardless. They will dive deeper into the Internet into places with no restrictions and be exposed to really messed up stuff. Hey at least the parent can pat themselves on the back, right, they were good partners that did everything right by the book, even paying the kid's therapist.

I don't want any company putting my identity into a database along with my sexual interests. Just consider what's been done to the gay++ community.

It won't work. Ever. VPN's free and paid exist, File sharing exists, Torrents exist, AI pornography generators exist, freenet, tor, I2P all exist. There is no action a government could take that would have any true impact in this regard unless they made the use of the internet illegal, and even at that, it would create a black market in which such things could still be purchased as physical media.

All this does is allow government entities to infringe on privacy rights further by doing what they have always done - hiding behind children.

Electronic ids can provide the age verification without giving out any personal information. This is a solved problem at least for a lot of ids in the EU.

But no i still find it a stupid idea. It is the parents job to parent them.

I think we should stop, as a society, to try (and fail) to handle problems by imposing limits and obligation and start doing it with some fuckin large-scale massive education planning.

In this context: a smart boy/girl, with sexual/emotional education and good critical thinking can have access to all the porn in the world from teenage and be fine 99% of the time

Might be a stupid question but is there any peer reviewed research that shows that porn is harmful to minors? Early humans didn't have clothes so minors were seeing nudity for centuries. Of course, there's the issue that porn gives men unrealistic expectations about women & sex, but that's an issue regardless of age.

Let's be real, teens, especially males, will actively search for porn. Blocklists can be pointless, because even if you can blacklist 160k pornhub clones, they can just join a discord or telegram server instead.

Frankly, I think parents should just make them aware that just like cinema, those videos are for show, not for "trying at home". Parents should tell them that if they ever expect sex to be like in the porn they consume, they'll be sorely disappointed. Most of it is faker than reality tv. Oh, it can also make boys get really fucking insecure, especially about their own size.

But I also feel that any random kid shouldn’t be able to just go to these sites and see porn freely.

At some point, you have to ask - why?

If that's the alternative to spying on everyone, I'm still opposed to spying on everyone. Unsupervised internet access leading kids to pornography certainly would not be new. It's not the end of the world.

Just throw your warnings and have a click-through. It'll be just as effective, much cheaper, and not leave bastard politicians salivating about their social control fetish.

Kids are smart. Horny teenagers even more so. They will find loopholes or ways to circumvent these kind of things - speaking from experience. At age 13 I installed a keylogger on my PC to get the password for a parental control software my parents installed. Roughly one year later I also exploited a vulnerability in iOS 4 that allowed me to see the parental controls password in plaintext so I could re-enable Safari.

My first exposure to porn was through sprays in TF2. Kids are gonna see this shit regardless of how much you invade everyone else's privacy

Is it the responibility of any government to enforce a parental policy? What if I, as a parent, support my kid to view this stuff?

At home, I was allowed to have alcohol with supper at family meals from about 13.

I feel like the regulations should be to give parents control over their child's activities if they so choose. While we're at it, make it illegal to collect information about a person, parent or child, without their express concent. I don't know how, but there are many smart people in the world that can probably figure it out.

I think there are a host of problems including equity, efficacy, privacy, etc.

We don’t need morality police, we need education and better health care. If parents have an issue, they need to parent better.

It is an absolute privacy nightmare. Nothing should be asking for your identity that doesn't have a DAMN good reason to be asking for your identity.

Age verification is not a damn good reason. Especially since any number of free VPNs can circumventing it with just a few clicks.

Snake oil salesmen never had it so good. Without the layers of abstraction provided by computers, nobody would've believed their magic elixirs would protect children from getting interested in sex until their parents approved of it.

Sites should empower parents to control that. Have a sign in by default and an option to ask the site to block ips associated with you to be able to sign up for more accounts.

Are there ways around it? Sure. It's a just a lock to keep honest kids out. If your kid doesn't feel comfortable about asking about stuff like this or feel like they have to around you, you aren't going to win, they'll find it, and it'll be a blast for them. If you talk about it, at least acknowledge the issues with it, say when it is and isn't appropriate, etc it'll do leagues better then all bans and censorship attempts in the world.