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UK's Tories Promise To Enact Age Limits For Viewing Online Porn
An anonymous reader writes with this news from the UK: The Conservatives say they will force hardcore pornography websites to put in place age-restriction controls or face being shut down if they win the election. The culture secretary, Sajid Javid, said the party would act to ensure under-18s were locked out of adult content after a recent Childline poll found nearly one in 10 12-13 year olds were worried they were addicted and 18% had seen shocking or upsetting images. Experts welcomed the move – targeted at both UK-based and overseas websites – but warned it would take hard work to implement in practice.
nearly one in 10 12-13 year olds were worried they were addicted
I would say this is more likely to be a problem with their social / religious upbringing making them think that it's messed up to want to look at porn more than a couple times per week.
Without knowing more about their definition of "addicted" we can't be sure, but introspection is socially accepted for things like "being offended" and whatnot, so I see no reason not to take their concern at face value.
Also, feel free to make as many kid-friendly whitelists as you want but proposals to rate/blacklist the entire thing are horribly insidious. Why are we still falling for this old scam? In addition to being insanely hard to do effectively, this sort of censorship is ALWAYS stealthily aimed at adults, not children. Case in point: NC-17 ratings for movies and AO ratings for videogames. Both are on their face completely redundant (R rating and M+ rating), but their real use is to prevent certain content from being produced through self-censorship pressure by retailers/theaters refusing to carry the highest rating.
No, they're not redundant. R/M+ are intended for adults, and children with parental consent. NC-17/AO are intended for adults only and not children, even with parental consent. It's not legally enforceable in most jurisdictions, but bowing to public pressure most mainstream cinemas will enforce as a matter of corporate policy the relevant age restrictions. In the US, "NC-17" was specifically created to allow it to be used for movies that warranted the restriction but weren't "pornography" in the sense associated with the previous rating, "X".
The main reason more "mainstream" movies don't come out as NC-17 is simple... They're likely to make more money the more people are easily able to see them. Frankly, this is why a fair number of movies try to end up as a strong PG-13 instead of an R rating -- bigger audience, and less worry for the parents about having to decide whether they really want their kid seeing the film before they accompany them.
Ironically, it goes the other way for 'G' films. Especially nowadays (morals and community standards change over time, naturally), there are plenty of films that could and would be rated 'G', but unless you're making an animated feature it's considered something that will keep the audiences away (what teen wants to see something G rated?). Often studios and producers will put some sort of slightly-unnecessary smack or violence, or a mild curse, or something exceedingly brief *just* to nudge a film up into the PG category, so it brings in more revenue.
Goes both ways.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
British culture has always seemed the most paranoid in the world about children and sex. I once found a website claiming that the world's most innocent cartoons that have young girls in them (for instance "Kiki's delivery service" - and no I'm not joking) should be banned because a pedophile could gain enjoyment from watching the girl in it.. It was a British blog, but I could tell that before checking because of the insane paranoia.
But, here's the odd part, they're also the country least successful in preventing the sexual exploitation of children. Look up "grooming gangs" in a google news search. They're paranoid about this stuff, but not willing to confront Pakistani or Somali or whatever immigrants over actual abuse.
The American version is to make it legal to refuse selling Pizza to gays.
To answer your questions: No, politicians are not stupid; I'll explain below. Yes, voters are often stupid; they could make the effort to understand what is going on, but they choose not to - that, in my view, is the very essence of being stupid.
If somebody want to watch porn, he will say "yes I have 18" to any question. This is a stupid waste of everyone time. Don't vote this retarded people even if you agree with their ideas.
The point is not to stop those who actually want to see porn, but to protect those who don't want to, but feel pressurised or otherwise intimidated into it, or who stumble across it. It may be difficult for a hard-core wanker to understand, but to many, not least children, porn is genuinely off-putting, and to 11 year old, it may be something they find it very hard to talk to adults about. After all, they were not supposed to look at it, on one hand, and on the other hand, they now speculate that most adults, including their parents, engage in the sort of alien activities illustrated, however poorly, in pornography. It is easy to feel alone with those thoughts in those circumstances.
The point of this kind of legislation is to force a deliberate choice: if you proceed, it is because you have chosen to; and by requiring the ISPs or whoever to take responsibility, they make it illegal to just sit by passively and make money out of it; you now have to do something to ensure that your audience is old enough to legally make that decision. It won't stop young people from lying about their age, but it will now be possible to go after those that exploit this particular vulnerability, if and when it is deemed necessary.
Politicians are not necessarily stupid; certainly not as stupid as people who have nothing to have their opinions in tend to make out. I would argue that politicians are also quite often genuinely motivated by what they believe in, rather than simply being greedy bullies. I don't agree with much of what David Cameron stands for, and I certainly don't agree with his party's ideologically motivated privatisation at all costs, but I do respect him for being competent and for genuinely seeking to do what is good for UK; the same goes for Labour, the LibDems, SNP etc. They are principled and they have certainly made more of an effort to understand thing than you seem to.