Comment on The age verification effect: adult site traffic plummets, VPN use soars

• FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  If you want people to believe it’s a different motive then provide some reason to believe that? Noone has.

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  • mang0@lemmy.zip ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    There exists e.g. religious people who think porn is a sin. Saying you’d want to ban porn because it’s a sin would alienate potential voters. Therefore, they can simply take the “think of the children!” position which is a classic approach and that sounds much more appealing while still restricting access for everyone (who wants their identity associated with their porn history? Data leaks happen all the time).

    Similarly, (depending on political climate) far right politicians can’t openly spout hate about foreigners since it would alienate some voters. Yet, time after time they’re revealed to have been doing it e.g. when they thought they were anonymous.

    Of course you can’t know someone’s true intention, but assuming that people won’t lie and anything said by them is undoubtedly true unless somehow proven false is a bit naive.

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    • FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Those people do exist, but almost none of them exist in the UK. So what reason do we have to believe that this applies to UK politicians?

      Look at it this way: you yourself understand that “think of the children” is a popular (summary of a) position among the public. And you agree that “porn is a sin that must be banned” is an unpopular opinion.

      So what reason do you have to think that MPs believe the unpopular opinion more than the popular one? MPs are people too. Unless you can find some mechanism by which MPs specifically are chosen for this highly unusual belief, or manipulated into believing it, this makes absolutely no sense.

      Of course you can’t know someone’s true intention, but assuming that people won’t lie and anything said by them is undoubtedly true unless somehow proven false is a bit naive.

      Luckily no-one here is doing that. Do you understand the difference between “nobody ever lies” and “you need a reason to think that someone is lying”?

      The idea that we should discard the perfectly plausible explanation of “MPs want to introduce age limits because of the reason that they state, which is a common opinion that many people agree with” and come up with some other, secret reason that they’re lying about is conspiracy-theory thinking.

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      • mang0@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Russia says they’re invading Ukraine to de-nazify them. With your logic, this reason is valid because they said so and being sceptical would be beliving in conspiary theories. Go on and continue to be an useful idiot for politicians.

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