Minors accessing porn on their own is not a real problem, and hurts no one.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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Teenagers beyng addicted to porn is a real problem.
Teenagers being addicted to anything is a real problem. Prohibition doesn't work.
What a second. Pornhub is in US. This is like UK trying to force 4chan into age verification
*Canada
And that's how it begins. Soon they'll start asking everyone to provide ID to access the internet.
I suggest that instead of age verification for kids, we do parenting verification licences for anyone wanting to have kids, before they have kids and then don't raise them.
So yeah tor doesnt require a ID... So have fun I suppose? And be careful
And then it pushes people into darker areas. I just sw a post about a horrible rape ring and it hosted videos on sites that I saw on 4chan over the years.
How about parents be parents and monitor kids.
For real. This is like saying all underage drinking is the alcohol companies fault rather than the parents that leave their alcohol easily accessible to their kids, basically providing it for them. Underage kids say 16 or under should absolutely not have unmonitored access to the internet, and that is solely on the parents to enforce. You don't have to buy your kid a smart phone or tablet or computer. When you do your providing then access to the internet and hoping they make the right call.
But the parents are doing it wrong! Most don't even disown their kids when they come out as gay or trans; which is the fault of social media anyway.
Why do children have to ruin everything?
Because most adults are incompetent parents.
I’m reading and odd headline about the EU and wonder if it’s the Commission again. Then I‘m reading EU Commission and think lobbyist groups, foreign think tanks and the filthy rich.
And what do you think happens when big platforms have to introduce age verification? People will just go to smaller unregulated sites which may inadvertently be worse because of malware risks and unregulated content. You just can't take the porn out of the internet, people always find a way
This is already happening with Pornhub in The States.
I wonder why the EU didn't find the parents of the kids to be in breach of whatever relevant child "protection" laws there are? I guess they are okay with the porn websites raising the kids. Maybe the EU can make PornHub to start a chain of day care centers?
So let me get this straight:
When I was 13, I managed to figure out the router password, disabled child protection for myself, then watched porn on my Android 2.3 phone that I had managed to put a custom ROM on because I liked the way it looked and had no idea what a "launcher" was yet.
This is not a hypothetical btw.
My parents were smart enough to enable appropriate blocking and secured access to those settings. I'm not sure something on-device was available at the time, but I included the bit about the custom rom to demonstrate that, even though I didn't know WTF I was doing, I was more than capable of fucking around with the tech to get it to do what I wanted.
So were my parents in breach of their duties on child protection?
I don't think they were. They actually did educate themselves (visiting a course / parent meetup to discuss and learn how to protect me from the Internet), and implemented everything they learned.
I was just a little shit and found a way around this.
And this is NOT an edgecase. Because guess what. It takes one kid in the friend group to figure out a way to circumvent parental controls, and then EVERYONE knows how to do it.
It simply does not fucking matter how well intentioned, knowledgeable, and present the parents are (mine were all of that).
Going "this would not be a problem if parents parented" is the LAZIEST fucking excuse, and I'm sick and tired of reading about it on here.
(Because I probably have to make it clear: I'm not advocating for photo/passport scanning, third party age verification,... and all that bullshit. What I think would be a FANTASTIC idea would be privacy-preserving age verification. There are two good ways to do this: 1) on a login attempt, prove that you are of age by presenting a fresh, signed token from a government service proving that you are over 18, and nothing else; site does not get any info, government does not know what you were trying to access; 2) a device-level age field. Proof here comes from the device itself, and can be 100% privacy preserving; just a "yep, is of age". In this scenario... GUESS WHAT, PARENTS GET ENABLED TO PARENT "PROPERLY" BY PROVIDING THEM WITH A GOOD, SIMPLE, PRIVACY-PRESERVING TECHNICAL SOLUTION.)
I really should remember to put a huge "THIS IS NOT A VERY SERIOUS COMMENT" on most of my comments. I find I'm way too snarky for text based communication.
Anyways. I'm not saying parents should be punished because their kid managed to watch porn. I was just making a joke about how stupid everything is.
I didn't grow up with routers and android phones. My equivalent of breaking into the router and changing the password was to climb into the paper recycling container to find Donald Duck comics but ending up finding porno mags.
The fact is, kids are always going to find porn. There's just no way around it. If they put ID proof protections on the websites, they just gonna figure out torrents or some other way of downloading stuff.
In that case: sorry to blow up on you. I have seen to many comments on here claiming these things while being 100% serious. I just saw your comment and incidentally had time to write the above for once, so, here we are.
I agree that there's no way to completely cut teens off from porn. Your torrent example is perfectly demonstrating this.
But I also do not understand the current outrage at anything trying to improve the situation, even when it's not some stupid "scan your face" scheme.
It's mostly just that I don't want the government to know precisely which websites I visit. Nor do I want the the porn sites to know exactly who I am.
Let me have my privacy. I've been watching porn since I was 12 or 13 and absolutely would've figured out a way to do it even if there'd been age restrictions because I was horny af. Nothing bad has happened to me because of it. Perhaps a mild addiction to masturbation unless I'm having sex but that hurts literally nobody. Worse case scenario I last a little too long occasionally.
Block pornhub and teens will find much seedier sites.
Id say your parents managed to get you to educate yourself in lots of useful skills by giving you a motivation. Good job.
I'd also like to think so. In this case though, this was clearly not what was intended, and also involved a lot of porn.
While I agree that your situation isn't an edge case (I found dads locked porn collection of VHS tapes and learned that that lock could be circumvented with a fridge magnet) at the age of 9?
But on the other hand, let's say you post something to the internet that may be considered not okay for children. And let's say that thing is about gun powder (which you absolutely can make from foraging natural ingredients). It's your personal website, it's labeled as not intended for children and you aren't a big company so you don't have the ability to just hire another company for things like age verification.
Then you get sued by a regulatory body in another country because you didn't adhere to their laws? Does that sound reasonable to you?
If a parent or guardian is taking every precaution to keep their kid safe that is reasonable within the law and that kid still gains access to something that can harm them that's an accident. If the parent takes no precautions and allows their child that they are legally responsible for the well being and safety of to raw dog life with no precautions whatsoever because that's too hard, or they don't care or whatever, then it seems reasonable to me that they be held responsible under the law.
Their right to have a third party protect their children ends at my right to privacy which to me extends to my right to anonymity specifically because it has already been shown that without anonymity privacy just doesn't exist in this age of the internet.
What does that mean? It means that companies that collect your data but promise "privacy" cannot be trusted to uphold that promise, which means the only option left is to be as anonymous as possible.
I want you to understand that I do agree that when one kid figures out the loophole, that loophole spreads like wild fire.
But on the other hand, if a child figured out how to turn off the security system to the family car, grabbed the keys and went for a joyride with their friends, is it the fault of the parents or the fault of the car manufacturer? Because one of them is legally liable under the law.
Would it be acceptable to have to send your thumbprint to BMW every time you wanted to drive your car?
Fuck this
And so it begins. How long until Lemmy will be forced to verify age?
I'll run VPN through Djibouti for everything once that happens.
Connect to Djibouti to see the booty
I went to early elementary school with a girl from Djibouti. I went home to look up Djibouti in an ancient encyclopedia program. Probably one of the earlier Microsoft Encarta versions, and earned that Djibouti has the best national anthem.
From this morning https://www.wired.com/story/using-a-vpn-may-subject-you-to-nsa-spying/
What are they gonna do? Tell the cia and regime change me?
Fuck nsa. I'm talking about hoping someone takes tRump put every day around the net, so can't be bothered.
Can't have shit in Detroit.
Despite stating in their Terms of Services that their services are for adults only, all four platforms allow minors to access their platforms by a simple click confirming they are over 18.
That's weird, I wonder why they did that? They've blocked traffic entirely from age-gated states. But in the EU they're taking a stand of some sort?
Won't someone think of the children
They did the best they should have to do.
First they came for the porn...
...and no one gave a fuck
Then they came for influencers ...
Any society that prioritizes getting rid of porn before influencers deserves to be buried in rubble.
... And we still didn't care
Then they came for the cat videos ...
And we took up arms because they can pry my cat videos from my cold dead hands?
Let's do a hot take though - zoomers or whatever newer gen is are so out of natural touch and wired into their doom scroll that they won't even bother looking for porn.