So what about Reddit and Lemmy’s nsfw parts? Will they so need age verification for the apps now too, even if you don’t access any of them?

Good grief. Who cares about porn?

Why not address government lobbying, for starters? Or how about the housing crisis/tax incentives that encourage wealth hoarding?

Prove my age?

No thanks

I think I’ll just wait until this thing… blows over

[ funk guitar plays ]

I wanna bet the rich will have some shell companies and lobby so they can anonymously access porn trough those.

“Instead of these crude, circumventable policies that create an infrastructure of private companies effectively doing law enforcement, they should just mandate that every operating system provider has to create genuinely functional parental controls apps that meet a set of minimum criteria,” Lazar said

Uhhhh no.

Let’s all rub one out for our fallen brothers…

now all curious and unsurveilled teens can only watch porn on the darkweb

If it’s illegal anyway, you might as well pirate it.

I wonder how fediverse instances are supposed to handle this.

My jedi powers sense and increase in VPN subscription sales.

So dumb lol

This will only hurt people working in adult entertainment as it will train Australians to steal it all.

This might seem drastic but think of the great benefits to society! Such as…. uhm… uuuh. Hey! Look what I can do! 🤹

If the porn sites just block the country from connecting with a notice as to why, will that piss people off enough to force them to change the law?

Hold a photo of the PM up to the camera?

I am not against porn on any moral or ethical level as long as the content is produced with everyone’s consent and some level of protection for everyone involved, or if it’s material being shared by adults for fun. Fantastic, more of it. Everyone should enjoy the good things in life and that includes sexuality.

That said, porn addiction is damaging not necessarily just because it alters your perception of relationships, but because anything you do that creates pleasure spikes/associations can have negative effects on your ability to derive pleasure from other things. And if you start getting hooked on porn early in life, these changes to your brain become extremely hard to break and you can set yourself up for chronic issues like depression, anhedonia and anxiety. And yes, also fucked up ideas about sex and relationships.

I don’t think a ban is appropriate and I don’t trust the agencies that want to manage our age-verification, but I do think something needs to be done that doesn’t just hand wave it off as “let the parents do their job” because we don’t live in that world. Parents are just children with more bills. Nobody knows how to parent, much less parent properly though difficult topics.

I am admittedly unsure what the right answer here is. A lot of the internet, not even just porn, is very damaging to our minds. Our attention spans are shot, we all just read the worst thoughts from the slimmest margin of people and focus on those edge cases about any idea or topic and it ruins our ability to socialize or engage with others happily. And a lot of young people around the whole world are just deeply stuck in ruts of doom-scrolling, porn, social-media and influencers giving fake advice and selling scams to anyone with access to a credit card.

I feel like with all problems it comes back to capitalism fucking everything up for everyone, but I also know we’re nowhere near a point where people are going to start like, creating effective governments so that services and systems can be nationalized safely. I wouldn’t trust a nationalized trash-can in the USA, not sure how bad it is in Australia but it’s just a matter of time before capital ruins every developed country with a few cents to rub together.

edit: if your impulse is to push back on this, it’s kinda telling bro.