One of the big debates over whether pornography should be censored or regulated or otherwise side-lined is that kids might accidental stumble upon it and that it might cause an unwanted psychological impact.
This is slightly complicated as really when people say “kids”, they also tend to include teenagers, who think and behave very differently than kids.
Kids proper to some extent can be kept in line by parents with tools like parent controls, filters, simple supervision and possibly some level of guidance.
It is a lot harder to handle teenagers who may be rebellious and may have a greater tech savvy than even the parents, capable of bypassing parental controls, gaining admin privileges, bypassing filters both local and national and otherwise finding ways to access all the content society does not want them to.
They might even resent over-stringent measures. I’m wondering what the best policy in that sort of area would really be. One reason that societies dislike lolicon and even regular (legal I add) pornography is that quite a significant number of them end up looking at it.
If pornography promotes unhealthy stereotypes, then perhaps some form of extended sex education might be an option? I’m not sure how effective prohibition can really be here.
Slightly unrelated, but in regards to that article, I feel like people were a lot more proactive about providing safer spaces earlier in the internet when things were a lot smaller and it kind of went out of hand as the internet grew out of control and the tech giants assumed their places.
I remember going on sites when I was quite young and some disabled certain features like messaging for younger users and others put little articles in prominent places to help teach people how to stay safe online.
It wasn’t perfect, but to some extent, a lot more people did their part to try to keep people safe. The internet seems a lot colder and more impersonal these days?
It’s funny to think; I found out about online pornography and Hentai through Newgrounds. If I tried accessing it on a public server today, it would just be blocked. Suppression of sensual media due to perceived indecency and corruption only begets more interest in it. It’s difficult to allow people to safely express their urges due to social justice, virtue signalling and such.
What good are these “protection policies”? When you prohibit media in order to “protect” one’s sanctity, wouldn’t it create a rift rather than a binding oath? What good is protection without context or autonomy? Where are the procedures and precedents to creating any sort of plan? (Of course, variables can undeniably change given context, but still…)
A lot of people in Germany don’t mind, because almost everyone did when they were teens themselves. I honestly never met anyone who didn’t. Now if that’s good? Hard to tell, but restricting the internet to unbelievable degrees, because some porn sites have an awful age verification is not going to work due to the fact that it would require an intranet similiar to china (even then it’s very possible to find porn).
Also, 14-17 year olds are allowed to exchange imagery with each other in private since they are excluded from law in that sense.