Comment on Pornhub to restrict access for UK users from February
FishFace@piefed.social 3 hours agoBut it’s like I’ve said before, this isn’t about preventing kids seeing porn; it’s about preventing adults seeing porn because the political class finds it icky.
This is bollocks and lazy thinking.
It is about preventing kids from seeing porn, but the people who support this lack the knowledge and intelligence to understand that it does more harm than good.
flamingos@feddit.uk 2 hours ago
The 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 2 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 2 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 1 hour 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.