[HN Gopher] A Utah Porn Filtering Bill Is Back, and It's Stupid
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       A Utah Porn Filtering Bill Is Back, and It's Stupid
        
       Author : WhyUVoteGarbage
       Score  : 11 points
       Date   : 2024-02-04 21:05 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.techdirt.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.techdirt.com)
        
       | pavel_lishin wrote:
       | > _Most cases when minors view porn are primarily instances of
       | "stumble upon" cases meaning that most minors navigate to age-
       | restricted content by accident._
       | 
       | Not sure I believe this part. If we're talking about 8 year olds
       | or 12 year olds, sure, except in weird cases.
       | 
       | But I was definitely consuming pornography at 17 years old, and I
       | didn't trip and fall into it because I typed whitehouse.com
       | instead of whitehouse.gov.
        
       | __salt wrote:
       | > And It's Very Stupid
       | 
       | I wish journalists would stop inserting their opinions in the
       | title like it's their personal Twitter feed.
        
       | ndriscoll wrote:
       | Depending on liability for when the filter lets something through
       | (which anything other than a whitelist would, and a whitelist
       | probably would too), this bill might well be stupid. But the
       | quoted provision seems fine? It's illegal to give minors drugs,
       | alcohol, and porn as it is. Imagining some miracle filter
       | existed, why wouldn't it be illegal to disable it for a minor
       | without parental consent?
       | 
       | I'm big on free speech, but it gets real weird when people are
       | against mandating parental controls _exist_ and claim it 's a
       | form of censorship. Giving porn to children is already
       | illegal[0], but little to nothing is done to enforce it on
       | computers. It seems reasonable that people _want_ to have
       | consumer devices be _capable_ of filtering, even if people more
       | familiar with tech would know why that 's challenging to do
       | perfectly.
       | 
       | Edit: It sounds like they have to ask the user's age on setup,
       | and if the user answers that they're a minor, activate the
       | filter. And liability
       | 
       | > does not apply to a manufacturer that makes a good faith effort
       | to provide a device that, upon activation of the device in the
       | state automatically enables a generally accepted and commercially
       | reasonable filter
       | 
       | So I'm not really seeing the issue. It just says parental
       | controls have to exist on the device, and you can't go turning
       | off someone else's kids' parental controls.
       | 
       | [0] Here's a federal law that carries up to 10 years in prison
       | for knowingly providing porn to someone under 16 using the
       | Internet. The law is almost as old as the web.
       | https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1470
        
       | bettercallsalad wrote:
       | My view on pornography as someone who suffered from addiction and
       | still sometimes fall back to it is, it's a symptom of a
       | underlying societal pathology.
       | 
       | Human beings are designed to crave physical intimacy. That's what
       | make a species successful at the evolutionary stage. If you
       | believe in evolution and science then you must believe that's
       | true. If you go against that, you are doomed as a species.
       | 
       | The problem is in many aspects, we are doing everything we can as
       | a species to counter our evolutionary fitness.
       | 
       | I bet if there was a societal dynamics where people were to find
       | partners in organic manner and have meaningful relationships,
       | worrying about pornography reaching to kids would be less of a
       | thing.
       | 
       | Too many of our personal relationships are polluted with doses of
       | dopamine, coupled with dysfunction in the dynamics in relation to
       | the way people seek their partner.
       | 
       | There is a reason sperm count has dropped 50% just in a
       | generation and 25% of young women are on SSRI. Yet no one is
       | talking about them.
        
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       (page generated 2024-02-04 23:01 UTC)