My kid has recently just quit playing Roblox because of the sketchy facial age check process. She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!) so they're either moving on to other games or just downloading stock photos of people from the internet and uploading those (which apparently works).
What a total joke. These companies need to stop normalizing the sharing of personal private photos. It's literally the opposite direction from good Internet hygiene, especially for kids!
One aspect of this normalization of photo uploading is that, if a platform allows user-generated content that can splash a modal to kids, a bad actor can do things like say “you need to re-verify or you’ll lose all your in-game currency, go here” and then collect photo identification without even needing to compromise identity verification providers!
I truly fear the harm that will be done before legislators realize what they’ve created. One only hopes that this prevents the EU and US from doing something similar.
The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y? Is the harm done significant enough to warrant providing parents with a technical solution for giving them control over which sites their X-aged child signs up, and a solution that like actually works? Obviously pinky-swear "over 13?" checkboxes don't work, so this currently does not exist.
You can work through robustness issues like the one you bring up (photo uploading may not be a good method), we can discuss privacy trade-offs like adults without pretending this is the first time we legitimately need to make a privacy-functionality or privacy-societal need trade-off, etc. Heck, you can come up with various methods where not much privacy needs trading off, something pseudonymous and/or cryptographic and/or legislated OS-level device flags checked on signup and login.
But it makes no sense to jump to the minutiae without addressing the fundamental question.
> The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y?
I suspect if you ask Hacker News commenters if we should put up any obstacles to accessing social media sites for anyone, a lot of people will tell you yes. The details don't matter. Bashing "social media" is popular here and anything that makes it harder for other people to use is viewed as a good thing.
What I've found to be more enlightening is to ask people if they'd be willing to accept the same limitations on Hacker News: Would they submit to ID review to prove they aren't a minor just to comment here? Or upvote? Or even access the algorithmic feed of user-generated content and comments? There's a lot of insistence that Hacker News would get an exception or doesn't count as social media under their ideal law, but in practice a site this large with user-generated content would likely need to adhere to the same laws.
So a better question might be: Would you be willing to submit to ID verification for the sites you participate in, as a fundamentally good thing for protecting minors from bad content on the internet?
I would rather parenting be the responsibility of parents and I resent the selfish individuals who wilfully burden others with the various costs associated with their demands for safety from their own choices over taking responsibility for themselves. No impact to others is too great for those who insist anything they don’t wish to be exposed to is dealt with at the societal level.
If an at risk child’s parent is unwilling to do what they believe is the right thing by their child then they have failed the child and need to get a grip - confiscate the device or change the wifi password or sleep with the router under your pillow if you have to it’s really not that hard.
> Would you be willing to submit to ID verification for the sites you participate in, as a fundamentally good thing for protecting minors from bad content on the internet?
The friction would be sufficient to give up. Arguably no loss to me and certainly none to the internet.
This is what has happened already, I am not giving my id to some shitty online provider. If I lose more sites so be it.
> Would you be willing to submit to ID verification for the sites you participate
I would not. Because there are better options out there if the objective is purely age verification that's as rigorous as the status quo for buying alcohol or cigarettes.
Here's one option: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282 that I proposed. It is by no means the best or only one.
> The details don't matter.
The details very much DO matter.
You can look at all manner of posts here on HN that explain exactly how you should do age verification without uploading IDs or giving central authority to some untrustworthy entity.
The fact that neither the governments proposing these laws nor the social media sites want to implement them those ways tells you that what these entities want isn't "verification" but "control".
And, yes, most of us object to that.
> You can look at all manner of posts here on HN that explain exactly how you should do age verification without uploading IDs or giving central authority to some untrustworthy entity.
That's not how ID verification works. The ID verification requirements are about associating the person logging in with the specific ID.
So kids borrow their parents' ID while they're not looking, complete the registration process that reveals nothing, then they're good forever.
Or in the scenario where nothing at all is revealed about the ID and there is no central authority managing rate limiting, all it takes is for a single ID to be compromised and then everyone can use it to authenticate everywhere forever.
That's why all of the age verification proposals are basically ID verification proposals. All of these anonymous crypto suggestions wouldn't satisfy those requirements.
This is a good opportunity to link to the recent archive of Hacker News, for when this happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435308
> The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y?
This is only an interesting question if we can prevent it. We couldn't prevent minors from smoking, and that was in a world where you had to physically walk into a store to buy cigarettes. The internet is even more anonymous, remote-controlled, and wild-west. What makes us think we can actually effectively age gate the Internet, where even Nobody Knows You're A Dog (1993)[1].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
> We couldn't prevent minors from smoking,
Smoking rates among minors have plummeted and continue to decline.
That's not really a good example because the war on underage smoking has been a resounding success.
Yeah we didn't stop every single minor everywhere from ever smoking at any time, but the decline was dramatic.
I'd argue that the reduction of underage smoking has much more to do with things like social acceptability and education about the dangers of smoking, and not about physical controls on the distribution of and access to cigarettes. There also appears to be a recent trend of younger people not drinking alcohol to the extent that my generation and Boomers did, which is wonderful, but probably has nothing to do with physical access to beer.
This is the right way to reduce childhood social media use: Make it socially disgusting, and make it widely known to be dangerous.
Have you met a horny teenager? The war on porn will not be a resounding success.
But we can do age verification that's as strict as buying cigarettes and sacrifice next to no privacy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282 That should be good enough for anyone, unless their real motive is to force everyone to upload their IDs.
The real solution, IMO, is a second internet. Domain names will be whitelisted, not blacklisted, and you must submit an application to some body or something.
I agree. There were attempts to do something like this with porn sites via the .xxx TLD I believe, but that inverts the problem. Don't force the public to go to a dark alley for their guilty pleasures. Instead, the sites that want to target kids need to be allowlisted. That is much more practical and palatable.
Yeah.. the opposition was just a bad take IMO... "but it will create a virtual red light district" which is EXACTLY what you want online, unlike a physical city, you aren't going to accidentally take a wrong turn, and if you're blocking *.xxx then it's even easier to avoid.
Then require all nudity to be on a .edu, .art or .xxx, problem mostly solved.
> Then require all nudity to be on a .edu, .art or .xxx, problem mostly solved.
Who's doing the requiring here? Sounds like yet another path to censorship dystopia.
In the case of cc-tlds the respective government... In the case of other TLDs ICANN.
edit: .edu provides for educational content, .art for artistic expression, .xxx for explicit content.
Who decides where the art erotica boarder is? There is plenty of content that would straddle that border, I have seen art that could legitimately called pornographic and pornography i would describe as art. Who decides? And then you have prudes Florida Texas red states trying to prevent remove any thing from an .edu and would happily ban the .xxx entirely and would find any .art suspect and probably ban it.
I dont see why phones can't come with a browser that does this. Parents could curate a whitelist like people curate playlists, and share it, and the browser would honor that.
Combined with some blacklisted apps (e.g., all other browsers), this would be a passable opt-in solution. I'm sure there's either a subscription or a small incentive for someone to build this that hopefully isn't "Scam children".
It's not like kids are using PCs, and if they use someone else's phone, that's at least a severely limiting factor.
They do, don’t they? Apple devices have had a robust whitelisting/blacklisting feature for at least a couple of years. I use it to block websites and apps to lessen my phone addiction. I’m sure Android offers similar features
Block -> opt out
Allow -> opt in
And a techie customizing it is v. different than turnkey for parents.
But yeah! Same principle, that's why I'm sure it's been done / will be done.
AOL returns!
sounds like an app store
Nice job of sidestepping the "fundamental question" of whether that can be done and what damage it would do. You do not get to answer the question as you posed it in a vacuum.
It's not a "robustness issue". Nobody has proposed anything that works at all.
But to answer your "fundamental question", no. Age gating is dumb. Giving parents total control is also dumb.
> should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y?
Who's 'we'? The parents? The government? Device manufacturers? Answers should differ wildly depending on who is doing the enforcement.
Can we actually prevent children under 16 from buying beer?
If they are persistent enough, no. But then everyone knows it's not going to stop every child in every situation. It sets a president for what society thinks is a sensible limit though, and society raises children not just individual families or parents.
Do we want kids becoming alcoholics? Do we want them turning up drunk to school and disrupting classes? Do we want to give parents trying to do the right thing some backup? So they know that when their kid is alone they can expect that other adults set a similar example.
Sure, you can't stop a kid determined to consume alcohol. But I think the societal norm is an overall good thing.
The same should be applied to the online space, kids spend more and more time there. Porn, social media, gambling etc. should be just a much of a concern as alcohol.
We can't prevent all children from getting beer, but we can prevent most of them without compromising any adult's privacy. And everyone is ok with that state of affairs and the trade-offs. No one's calling for internet-connected beer cans that make you take a selfie before you can open them.
> we can prevent most of them without compromising any adult's privacy
But we don't. Even with in person age/ID checks the clerk will often enter some of that data into the store's system and then who knows what happens with it.
> the clerk will often enter some of that data into the store's system
I've only seen them enter the date of birth. No identifying information. If they record the ID itself I'd recommend going to a different store. Or ideally, writing your legislators to have the practice banned.
Is there actually a difference between transactions between humans in meatspace (getting a government ID, then using it at a store) and age estimation algorithms?
EFF explains a few differences between showing your ID in person and verifying your age online [1]. With respect to transmission, storage, and sharing of user data by the verifier/website, the risks of age estimation overlap with those of age verification.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/why-isnt-online-age-ve...
It's never been about porn. By marking certain part of the internet "adult-only" you imply that the rest is "family-friendly" and parents can feel less bad about themselves leaving their children with iPads rather than actually parenting them, which is exactly what Big Tech wants for obvious reasons. If I had a child I'd rather have it watch porn than Cocomelon, which has been scientifically developed so that it turns your child's brain into seedless raspberry jam. Yet nobody's talking about the dangers of that, because everyone's occupied with <gasp> titties.
> If I had a child I'd rather have it watch porn than Cocomelon
As a parent that regularly fears who my children will encounter in the world, I’m glad there’s an “if” at the beginning of this sentence.
If your child wants to watch porn, he/she will be able to get it.
Don't worry, most likely your children will come across the normal sorts of bad people - cheating partners, bullying peers, abusive bosses, rude customers, lying beggars, maybe robbers and thieves. It's fortunately unlikely they'll meet a guy who is outspoken about his opinion that scientifically capturing people's attention to get them addicted to screens is morally much worse than showing them "penis into vagina episode 74786". We don't want their innocent minds to be poisoned with ideas that question the status quo.
Every once in a while, eBay emails me out of the blue and asks me to update my personal details, with a link to a web page.
I always assumed they were phishing scams, but I looked closer at one, and it is a real link too a real page on their site. It's like they're training people to fall for phishing scams. One of them even displayed the name of a variable, instead of my user name.
I have had two banks (Lloyds and Barclays) phone me and ask for personal details to verify me over the phone. Again, training people to fall for scams.
Then there are all the links that go to other sites to track clicks or because they have a separate domain for some reason. Again, training people to fall for phishing.
I’m sorry to say that a number of US states have instituted age verification laws over the past year
Aka, morality laws mostly.
> I truly fear the harm that will be done before legislators realize what they’ve created.
Not defending the legislation as I overwhelmingly disagree with it, but if I recall, I don't think any of the age verification legislation specifies a specific implementation of how to verify age.
Requiring photos, or photo ID, or any other number of methods being employed, were all decided on by the various private companies. All the legislators did is tell everyone "you must verify age." The fault here is on Roblox as much as it is on the legislature and they should equally share blame.
How would you suggest they verify age? I am not aware of a good way to do it from a privacy and security perspective.
You can take a look at what Switzerland is about to do:
https://www.homburger.ch/de/insights/swiss-voters-approve-ne...!
> Once issued, the e-ID will be stored in a secure digital wallet application on the user’s smartphone or other compatible device.
That sounds like Apple & Google-blessed Android only, open source gadgets and non-Microsoft desktops not supported. Estonia at least used smart cards where a reader can be plugged into just about anything.
Would be very tough to implement in the US, as proposing any sort of "national ID" is pretty much a nonstarter, at least up to this point.
States could do it, and maybe agree on some protocols so that things like privacy-preserving "age verification" could be done.
Maybe the feds could push it like they did with speed limits: make federal funding contingent upon adopting e-ID. Would still get a lot of pushback.
The problem with e-ID is its focused on identity verification, not just age verification and that's where the problem lies.
We still need the ability to be psuedoanonymous online. We should be able to verify age without divulging any identifying information to the service requesting age verification.
An e-ID registry could work on a sort of public/private key system so long as the services requesting informatino from the registry only receives a yes or no of "is this person old enough" and no further information.
It's a problem for you and me, but a feature for those pushing for it.
If an e-ID can vouch you are citizen number #3223423, it should be able to use the same crypto to vouch that your birth date predates a threshold, without revealing anything else. It's more a question of requirements gathering & UX (and political will).
I'm obviously not going to show my id to Zuckerberg's website or any porn sites, casinos because I don't trust those bastards. They're also not the police, so they lack the proper autoritah to request my an id.
I think the point of the comment you are answering to is that in Switzerland, they are building a system where you can prove your age without telling who you are to the website, and without telling which website you visit to your government.
It doesn't have to be exclusively digital. You can be psuedoanonymous using some form of key as verification. To get a key, you have to present your ID in person at, for example, the social security office or local DOL.
All the key does is attest that "this person is over X years old" with no other identifying information associated with it.
I think blending in person & digital together is going to be the best way forward. Like going to the store and buying alcohol. I have little privacy risk from the cashier glancing at my ID for a second to check my birth date.
> with no other identifying information associated with it
Not possible, the key itself becomes identifying information similar to how an IP address + timestamp is identifying information even though their is no information abut you stored in the IP address or timestamp.
But that would require the government to set up the system that lets you present your ID and get a key. They haven't done that, so it's not valid to blame businesses for not using it.
A digital ID, like someone said below. But people (in the UK at least) go mental about that, despite the government already having all the information anyway. Creating a easy way to securely share that information with a 3rd party for online verification is apparently the work of the devil.
In the real world you turn up in person with a passport, or maybe use snail mail as a way to verify an address which is hard to fake.
Online we have to pretend it is still the internet of the 90s where it's all just chill people having a fun time using their handle...
Making it easier tends to lead to something being required more often so people are right to be wary about that.
i call this slipstreaming, it can even occur during the signup yeah, once the bouncing around to many domains / uploading photos is psychologically normalized havoc can ensue. this is the greater evil.
I'm optimistic actually. I think "Gen Alpha" is gonna be alright and sufficiently wary of Internet sharing and privacy. Unlike the previous few generations, esp. Milleneals and to a somewhat lesser extent Gen Z and Boomers, who have massively over-shared and are now reaping some of the horrible harvest that comes from that oversharing. Today's teens and tweens seem to finally be getting the message.
I also actually think AI might be a savior here. The ability to fake realistic 18+ year old selfies might help put the nail in the coffin of these idiotic "share a photo with the Internet" verification methods.
I otherwise agree with what you're saying, but I think the ratio of conscientious people has fluctuated over time across all generations. It has more to do with what year it is than how old they are.
But I also don't want the alternative, that I have to ID myself. Anonymous and pseudonymous access is the best solution.
The EU tries to introduce age verification, simultaneously it currently talks about sharing police data with the US for the Visa waiver program.
If this verification data is collected and normalised, we will constantly have to fight how much data that is required for auth and it can just be legislated.
My kids also know that as far as the internet is concerned, their date of birth is 1 January 1970.
By an amazing coincidence, that's also my date of birth, as well as my kids'.
I wondered for a while why I got so many ads targeted towards seniors when I made my facebook account as a kid. Then I remembered my birth year was set to 1905. I guess I should let the Guinness World Records know that their listing for oldest man in the world is inaccurate.
> These companies need to stop normalizing the sharing of personal private photos. It's literally the opposite direction from good Internet hygiene, especially for kids!
While I agree with you entirely, it's important to remember that these companies want to mis-educate the masses (and especially children) against their own interest. It's not just unfortunate that they're normalising uploading a photo just to play a videogame: it's an intentional choice to de-normalise privacy and normalise deeper and more in-grained online stalking.
Most of these companies don't even want to add age gates. They get in the way of their normal predatory marketing schemes, the little bits of extra data isn't worth it.
Stupid laws are forcing these companies to implement something. In most countries, there is no privacy-preserving way to verify that you're old enough digitally, so when these companies are forced to get something good enough going, they're going to go with the cheapest offer they can legally get away with.
Governments know this. They want certain websites to disappear entirely, and for certain platforms to just stop existing. Both sides are using weaponised incompetence to blame the other and users end up losing regardless of whose fault it is.
There seems to be a big movement (UK specifically) from governments using age gateing as an excuse to increase surveillance and online tracking. I don't know where Roblox is based or it's policies, but it's likely they are just implementing what the government has forced them to do.
We need to push back against governments that try and restrict the freedom of the internet and educate them on better regulations. Why can sites not dictate the content they provide, then let device providers provide optional parental controls.
Governments forcing companies to upload your passport/ID, upload pictures/videos of your face, is dangerous and we are going to see a huge increase of fraud and privacy breaches, all while reducing our freedoms and rights online.
IMO it should not be hard for large services like Roblox and Instagram to get together with device makers to come up with a sensible solution.
When you create a new profile on Netflix you mark it as "kids" and voila. Devices should have kid profiles with lots of sane defaults. The parent profiles have a thorough monitoring and governance features that are dead simple to use.
As always it's not perfect but it will go a long way. Just getting a majority of parents on sane defaults will help unknot the broader coordination problems.
I see lots of claims about governments using age gating to "track" people, but no evidence. Your last point about uploading ID documents to random online services (which i agree is a privacy risk) would be solved with a government digital ID.
That is never going to happen it seems, as -- in the UK at least -- people go crazy whenever it is mentioned. Despite "the government" having the ability to track whatever they wanted already, should they care to.
Age gating discussions always devolve into some fantasy land were people are arguing for children to have access to porn and other inappropriate material, and happily construct some straw man where age gates lead to censorship for everyone.
If your government wanted to censor the internet they can do it without age gates. As a parent I am happy to have society agree on some basic rules around what children can do online, as there are rules on what children can do in the real world.
Yes, I know all the come back arguments about how it is my responsibility as a parent. Don't worry, I will be responsible for what my children do online when they are older. But in the end a society raises children, and society should agree a limit on what children can be exposed to online.
Having to manage my kids online accounts have been a nightmare. So many different rules, with arbitrary age limits on things that go completely against my own rules for what my kids can do at different ages, with weird methods for linking or verifying or sharing/transferring purchases. I have gotten so frustrated trying to get accounts set up so we can play together.
My favourite is Youtube.
I can get Youtube Family so my kids don't get ads.
But if your kids are under 13, they can't be added to a family account on YT - so they MUST watch the ads.
Can someone explain the logic here?
The funniest case I've seen was somebody fooling one of these tools using Gmod by playing with the face sliders of those stock Half-Life characters.
I think the way Roblox is doing right now separating the users in age groups just makes it easier for predators to find victim.
Governments and corporations are never interested in protecting children - they don't vote, and they don't have money. So making it "easier for predators to find victims" is not a failure of the policy.
People who do care about their children or children in general do vote though. Not that politicians care that much about what their voters want once elected.
> She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!)
it's a video game, it's an aesthetic experience, if uploading a photo of yourself doesn't feel good, it's valid to say, it's a bad game or whatever.
but by some more objective criteria, this photo upload thing that you are saying doesn't really matter. they are uploading photos of themselves to the Internet all the time (what do you think Apple Photos is). of course, with kids, i can understand the challenges of making nuanced guidelines, but by that measure, it's simpler to just say, playing roblox is kind of a waste of time, or suggesting better games to play, rather than making it about some feel-good nonsense i'm-a-savvy-Internet-user rule. it's what this whole article is about, providing real answers, but who under 18 years old is going to read the whole thing?
> they are uploading photos of themselves to the Internet all the time
I worried about this at first, too. But I also check, like a good parent. And to my surprise my kid already learned on her own how to mask/blur faces and even details about the inside of her room when sharing photos. And her friends do, too. They are surprisingly savvy about Internet privacy and risks for their age--certainly more cognizant of the dangers than my generation was growing up with the Wild West Internet.
[flagged]
Age verification on mainstream porn sites does absolutely zilch against teenagers accessing porn. There are countless other ways of obtaining porn. Even DDG with the safety off will provide plenty of it.
- [deleted]
>it might prevent that
On the global internet... good luck with that.
Oh, they'll ban us from looking at other countries net's soon enough for our safety.
>and this seems like it might prevent that
sorry but we're on the internet. You can type the literal words 'hardcore pornography' into any search engine of your choice and find about fifteen million bootleg porn sites hosted on some micro-nation that don't care about your age verification.
In fact ironically, this will almost certainly drive people to websites that host anything.
What evidence led you to believe this, when controlling for heritability?
[flagged]
> combined with studies showing there is zero safe threshold without brain damage markers in the blood?
Are you saying that there's zero safe threshold of choking, or for viewing porn?
(To be clear, choking someone without consent is assault and unacceptable, whether a blood test shows damage or not.)
A. There is zero safe threshold for choking.
B. Choking is inherently, obviously, dangerous.
C. Pornography has caused choking behaviors among youth to go from negligible to over 38%.
D. Brain damage is measurable in anyone who has been choked.
E. As such, pornography does, in fact, have blame for encouraging this kind of experimentation.
F. If "fighting words" and "misinformation" shouldn't be free speech, who is to say pornography does not incite risk, when other things can?
The argument I commonly hear of pornography causing more extreme sexual experimentation is a very weak one. I know, for sure, pornography did not cause me to be a homosexual.
Kinks, BDSM, and what have you, have always existed and will continue to exist. The solution is teaching safe ways to participate, and the importance of consent. A desire to just wipe them out is naive, and will not work.
> Pornography has caused choking behaviors among youth to go from negligible to over 38%.
That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
I have a lot of concerns about your presentation of this.
A. It’s also true that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption and yet we sort of see experimentation with alcohol as a rite of passage.
B. I mean, so is walking out your front door. I don’t see this as adding much to point A.
C. This is a big jump. First, we see more openness about sexual behaviour. While I’m prepared to agree that it has likely gone up, I would not be comfortable with the degree you imply. Second, while I do think it is likely that pornography has indeed contributed to this, pornography has also likely contributed to an increase in experimentation in general, with other sexual behaviours also likely seeing an increase (for example oral/anal sex, water play, etc).
D. I find this very hard to accept at face value. Do you have studies/evidence to support this claim?
E. Yes, I would likely agree, although whether “encourages sexual experimentation” is a bad thing or not is a question for further debate.
F. This conflates some very weird things. “Fighting words” are a specific type of restricted speech (i.e. you can’t go round shouting “I’ll kill you”). Sharing misinformation is broadly not illegal (except in very specific sets of circumstances-fraud, inciting violence, etc.). It’s also broadly speaking not against the law to tell the truth. “Some people like to choke each other during sex” is a true statement, even if it’s harmful.
Do you support a ban on porn all together? That’s quite a radical view.
I don't believe that choking leads to brain damage in every single individual who has been choked, for whatever duration. If that is the case, then holding your breath should lead to brain damage too, no? You really need to back up that claim with some evidence.
Can you explain point A? It seems fundamentally flawed unless there is also brain damage from breath holding, hiking at high altitude, and other normal activities that involve operating at lower oxygen levels.
>and "misinformation" shouldn't be free speech
That worked so well during covid, right?
I'm trying to find the contact for the does-not-imply-causation dept but I think I lost my slashdot account in 2004.
Nobody studying this issue, from the UK government to independent researchers to NGOs, says this anymore. PornHub in legal filings never uses this argument, but instead focuses on rights to expression rather than dispute the claim.
The causation is clear, documented, proven. Increased pornography exposure with dangerous behaviors, causes those dangerous behaviors to be repeated, even when participants are warned of the risk.
At this point, denial is like saying flat earth has merit.
The extreme danger of marijuana and its role as a “gateway drug” was also extensively studied and “proven” by a handful of moralist researchers and groups who had an agenda to push. The highly biased “researchers” who pursued this were often directly funded by the US government.
And now? This research has been debunked. It’s likely bad for people prone to mental illness, especially when taken regularly and in excess, and even stable people shouldn’t overdo it, much like alcohol. But it’s not going to cause lasting harm to most people.
Regarding porn, your argument from authority is extremely suspect. Porn is considered morally suspect due to lingering Puritan values, and if there is a research deficit (which I doubt) then it is likely because reputable researchers avoid the topic due to reputational damage. Sex researchers in general have often faced harassment, targeted government inquiries, and threats. So in short, I don’t believe you here.
I haven’t personally met anyone whose life was negatively affected by porn, except for a couple of people who were in relationships where one partner considered porn to be a form of infidelity. Utterly ridiculous from my perspective.
Edit: Total bunk. After looking into it, reputable meta-studies have showed no link between porn and sexual violence, ED, or mental health issues. It’s trivial to find this research, search for it if you care.
So what? The problem here would be if these activities are nonconsensual. I've seen no evidence of that. If you're just trying to thought police ideas that lead to people doing risky things you better drop your clutching pearls and pick up a pencil cause that's a long list, some of which are probably things you do.
The internet in a nutshell: I’m right and if you don’t agree, you’re wrong. Facts need not apply.
> Before the widespread adoption of pornography, this rate was near 0%
Bullshit. Men and women have been dying of autoerotic asphyxiation long before the internet. And we only hear about the ones that fuck up badly enough to make the news.
I'm puzzled by this phenomenon myself, but there is apparently a significant minority of women who enjoy getting choked in bed:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-025-01247-9
This doesn't excuse people who choke without consent, but there's something going on here waaaay more complex than "see it in porn, do it". Humans are weird.
Nobody is saying that nobody did this before. We are saying now that it is a health crisis, objectively.
You're the guy saying that 110 MPH speed limits can't be responsible for crashes because people also died at 20 MPH.
You did in fact just say that nobody did it before - or very strongly implied it based on how sloppy you want to be with the phrase "near 0%".
Stop pretending you know what that number is.
> Before the widespread adoption of pornography, this rate was near 0%.
Big giant citation needed on that one. How would it ever have been near 0%?
First, I’d like to point out that we don’t make other media illegal or age gated with privacy-compromising tactics because it depicts harmful things. There’s no age verification gate for watching movies and TV that depict murder and other serious crimes. You can watch Gaston drink beer and fall to his death and the Beast bleed in a kids movie rated G.
Watching NFL football, boxing, and UFC fighting isn’t illegal even those sports conclusively cause brain damage.
Pornography is singled out because it’s taboo and for no other reason. People won’t politically defend it because nobody can publicly admit that they like watching it, even though most people consume it.
Over 90% of men and over 60% of women in the last month. [1]
Second, what I see missing from your links is really solid studied link to an increase in choking injuries directly caused by changes in pornography trends and viewership. Were these kinks just underreported in the past? Heck, I read 4 of your linked articles and none of them actually compared the rate of choking injury over time, they just sort of pointed it out as something that exists and jumped to blaming pornography.
I am perfectly willing to accept your hypothesis but I don’t think we’ve been anywhere near scientific enough about evaluating it, and even if that was the case, we don’t really treat pornography the same as other media just like I mentioned.
We need a lot more information. Personally, I think there’s nothing wrong with sexual pleasure and believe it’s stigmatized way too much. I also believe that normalizing sexual pleasure helps people talk about consent and avoids issues like doing a sexual act when you don’t enjoy it.
I was getting a haircut last week and chatting about our kids with the stylist, who said (basically): "I just started letting my 7 year old on Roblox. I know its full of pedophiles. I told him to come to me or his older brother if anyone tries to talk to him."
If the million reports of Mark Zuckerberg enabling pedophiles and scam artists haven't made it clear, the executives of these tech companies just don't care. They will sell children into sexual slavery if it improves next quarter's numbers.
The drip-feed of mindless brain-rot, micro-payments, and cyber-bullying should be much higher up the list of reasons for not letting a 7 year old use Roblox (and YouTube and FaceBook and…)