It seems plain old social media is the actual damaging thing to come from the internet.
Ah come on man used by billions it should have killed hundreds of thousands by now if what they say is true about it
Just saying they didn't seems shortsighted when there are obvious harms. Kids go into relationships expecting rough play, choking to be okay. Onlyfans normalised online sex work. Porn's omnipresence enabled its addition. And a whole pile of people have a very odd idea about what parts of the body should look like. Internationally it has enabled a slew of sex slavery mechanisms.
The damage was at a sociological/behavioral level and thus difficult to measure.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...
They're not just stopping filthy, sinful porn. They're making sure wrongthink will be traced to the source and jailed. You can't be allowed to have a job or be banked if you're saying harmful things.
You exist to work and die and be a good little ward of the state. No stepping out of line. You do not get to live as the elites live.
"I've got a hobby
Re-reading Lady Chatterley"
Give it a few years (months if you're an optimist?) and you will have to use your Google/Apple hardware device to formally tie your real identity with your digital identity for every site that has even the slim possibility of being a small danger to hypothetical children.
I'm sure Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will gladly join this effort to reduce harm to children as well, I'm sure that's high on their priority list. They may even already have the infrastructure in place to handle that digital ID, what an amazing coincidence.
Everything will be fine!
Companies can benefit from it but this type of control in some form or another has been the go-to for the state since forever. It just recently became feasible to do it so comprehensively otherwise they would have done it ages ago.
This is not an exclusive or. Corporate lobbyists from social media have a real incentive for pushing age verification and attestation. They benefit from public outcry and popular movements for age restrictions online, while also presenting age verification as the only solutions to the problems causing that outcry (which is to say, largely moderation problems on their own websites).
And I think the problems with social media for children have little to do with moderation. It's more about the typical ails that even 'good' social media would entail: FOMO, image crafting, amplification/streamlining all typical stuff that happens at all schools - bullying, rumor milling, and so on. To say nothing of the general effect of people becoming zombies to their phones rather than actually interacting in person as much.
>Age verification will be a significant loss for social media companies. It's going to push plenty of people away, and it provides no information that they don't already know to a reasonably high degree of certainty.
It may push some people away (though with the centralisation of the internet, I think this is easy to overstate), but the social media companies probably aren't that worried. Their bigger threat is actual legislation and punishment. Age-gating prevents the government from coming down on them for bad moderation, since they can just block users from accessing anything that might need to be moderated otherwise.
The possibility that age verification will actually give them more data or let them track you more easily is a nice little plus, but this is more stick than carrot.
It's not necessarily nefarious though: the same ideas/fears permeate all society so it makes sense they pop up together. The work may have already been done by some legislators, ready to be used by others.
But the corporate lobbying for weakening online anonymity and encryption is not something new either, and the benefits are clear. It wouldn't be the first issue large-scale lobbying has taken place in their interests, and for something as critical as identify verification I genuinely cannot imagine it isn't one of the most important issue in surveillance capitalism.
It's less bigtech corporate lobbying and more evangelical lobbying (exodus cry etc.). This outcome plays along their plans. Create restrictions, which kill off the legal market/actors (good!) and push people into incompliance (excellent!) then push for harsher measures (see what a rampant problem illegal porn sites are). Their main goal is to go full prohibition on adult content.
That being said I'm also sure those groups are especially vulnerable to fear-mongering [0] and it would not be particularly hard to rile up these bases to work towards the same end goal.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
It's an honest question. Is there such a thing as ethical porn or are there only sites that pay taxes and those that don't?
> ethical porn
Define “ethical porn”? Problem with ethics is that it varies from person to person; at least lawful has the taste of varying only from country to country.
It's been happening since the 1800s non stop.... I know it's wrong to show kids porn etc but what's the actual damage it does?
Pornhub is a company, has an address, pays taxes, and has a history of problems.
The discussion is about actors under a regime of universal age checks, not your personal problems. If it helps, change it to be about sites that write about birth control when information about birth control has been ordered to be restricted to married males over 30, and "good actors" complying with this ends up resulting in both unmarried females and married Catholic males over 30 who don't want to identify themselves visiting sites that also contain information about full communism and Zoroastrianism, which have been decreed illegal for anyone to discuss.
The UK tried to ban choking porn. Quite reasonable given the realities of monkey-see monkey-do.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/06/chokin...
Trouble is, "nobody in the UK" consumes porn.
Had they not passed the "ban porn site" bill then the majority of people would be viewing porn on sites which will enforce (or at least attempt to enforce), and consumption of it would reduce.
Instead UK people consume port from places which is quite happy to have choking, bestiality, and child porn.
Good job Mary Whitehouse Brigade.
..the answer is almost everyone, apparently
So just MindGeek kvetching about a good thing.