Comment on Pornhub to restrict access for UK users from February
flamingos@feddit.uk 6 hours agoThe government absolutely has access to people with the knowledge to tell them that this approach wouldn’t work, Aylo (the company who owns Pornhub) has been advocating for device based age verification for years (Yes, Aylo are a shitty company, but they’re right about this and have been vocal about it). But sure, a piece of Tory legislation, the same Tories who banned porn with bondage and even women ejaculating in 2014, didn’t choose this approach because it’d discourage adults accessing porn.
FishFace@piefed.social 5 hours ago
What makes you think that, because someone will have told the government something, that means they believe them? That’s always the missing link in this argument.
It’s what makes me think it’s a failure to mentalise other people. “It’s so obvious” I imagine you thinking, “anyone can see that it won’t work!”
But no, not anyone can. Some people are dumb. Some people are smart but have a blind spot.
flamingos@feddit.uk 5 hours ago
This is just getting into pure speculation now, neither of us knows for sure. It just lines up too perfectly with the Tories history of anti-porn stances for me to believe that it wasn’t a motivating factor in choosing this approach to others that were pitched to the government (the lobbying from the age verification industry probably helped as well).
FishFace@piefed.social 5 hours ago
I don’t think it’s too much speculation, because opinion polling found that the public was broadly in favour of age verification. It’s a mistake to think that politicians must automatically know (and agree with) things that the public don’t know.
Sure, puritanism means that politicians aren’t going to leap the defence of porn sites and their business models. But that angle is rather different - and I think contradictory - to the one you started with. You said that the government was told that it won’t work; if that really was the solid argument you presented it as, wouldn’t that imply they couldn’t possibly be in favour of OSA for anti-porn reasons? After all, they ought to believe it won’t actually work to reduce access to porn, right?
Obviously it’s not the case that everything popular with the public is popular with politicians for the same reason, but if something is popular with the public you need quite a good reason to believe that politicians are in favour of it for some other motivation, and with all of that, we just don’t have that good reason.
flamingos@feddit.uk 4 hours ago
Sorry I misspoke, when I said it wouldn’t work I was thinking of the negative knock-on effects that make this approach unworkable, not that it was entirely ineffective. What I’m trying to get at is that there were more effective options that the government for achieving it’s stated goals, only allowing legal adults to access pornography, that didn’t require you to send a picture of your ID or face to every website that happens to have nudes on it. But other, more privacy-friendly approaches wouldn’t make adults hesitant to access porn websites and I think this quality of the current approach was a desirable effect.
I think politicians hating the concept of porn and liking the idea of having your real identity linked to your social media accounts are actually pretty good explanations for the government knowingly going with an inferior approach to all this.
Again, I think we’re at an impasse, you’re giving the former government a level charitably I can’t. That’s not to say prospective is unreasonable, I think it’s perfectly reasonable, I just don’t believe it.