Comment on The Age-Checked Internet Has Arrived
Naia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day agoRealistically, no one should love how easy it is for anyone of any age to go to any search engine and search for “boobs” and just get a million images of boobs.
First. let’s not pretend the idea of a kid seeing “boobs” is in any way shape or form actually harmful. Pushing that taboo is why there is any issue in the first place.
Second: This is always a slippery slope. Even if we gave the benefit of the doubt that these things are done in with honest intentions, someone will abuse the system eventually. At least in the US the fascists have already laid out intention to classify LGBTQ people as “porn” in an effort to both silence us online and ban us in public. And what of the countless queer kids in an abusive home?
And even without someone explicitly exploiting it, there had already been instances where kids who were being actively sexually abused by the adults in their life were blocked from resources that could get them help because of content blocking like this.
Thirdly: People can take responsibility for their crotch spawn and be a fucking parent.
hansolo@lemmy.today 14 hours ago
Saying “boobs” was trying to be subtle about it - any child of any age is at all times, unless their parents filter their device, 3 clicks and 3 letters (autocomplete could even oopsie that for them) away from seeing very explicit images. It’s absurd to think that it’s “puritanical” to have nothing in between 10 years olds (or younger) being able to so easily access pull on porn. This isn’t about what you personally want or care about, this is also about the fact that every country in the world has this same issue. Taboos are cultural, but you don’t set the culture of Honduras, or Gabon, or France, or India. So each cultural context needs to be respected, not only your personal cultural context.
It shouldn’t need to be a slippery slope is the thing. In technical terms, this isn’t even a heavy lift. To my original point, it’s the in theory part of this I support because, in a perfect world, giving everyone the tools to effectively accomplish this isn’t hard. But it’s a lot of work that is actually fairly technical or fairly terrible from a privacy standpoint to place adult content filters on a child’s devices. Not every parent has the skills to do this, and so when a blanket option is available that is sold as a solution like this, of course they’ll go for it. But, as I said before, in our current shitty reality, we only have the worst of all worlds - a system that exists to exploit trying to limit a system that exists to exploit, all baked into a system that exists to exploit, and kids still able to see porn online easily.
I’m very much a staunch privacy advocate, and I won’t fucking touch a digital ID system because it’s nothing but a surveillance state level at this point to persecute specifically trans people and brown people - for now. I see the writing on the wall with this, and it’s terrifying. And no one is going to force this into the working system category, so it’s just going to be the shitpile system designed to victimize added to the systems of exploitation.