But I also feel that any random kid shouldn’t be able to just go to these sites and see porn freely.
So they will just go to another site that doesn’t have age verification and doesn’t implement any security measures instead. Big sites are required to age check people before they are allowed to upload anything, that is not the case for most of the internet.
All age verification does is aggregate personal information and make it easy target for bad actors to steal. Instead of needing to go thought 100 sites, now that information & identities will be tied to a single database.
It’s also a slippery slope, since the same adult content is available not just on dedicated adult sites, but mainstream social media. Lemmy, Mastodon, Twitter, TikTok, Twitch (just recently wanted to allow nudity). Do you really want to have your identity tied to your online activity?
What? It is not illegal for children to access pornography. It is at best illegal for people to allow children access to pornography. (Outside of countries where pornography is banned outright)
Fuzzy space (not that one), a lot of places it might get squished into the enabling/promoting deliqancy type rules. If you give beer/smokes to an underage kid you can be tagged for it.
On a practical level proving any of the above is near impossible, but it might get you on the local’s radar if it keeps being accused.
I do think we have it backwards in America where prime time crime drama is no problem but everyone freaks out over a butt cheek, but at the same time it’s not healthy to let little kids dig into some things unguided and before they’re ready.
I’m making the assumption that you’re not deliberately daft enough to conflate the two issues of “a cheeky tug looking at some low resolution grot” and “mass casualty attack planning”, but surely you must see the difference between harmful content and porn, and why measures should be taken (however easy to circumvent) to disrupt terrorism or other large-scale atrocities?
Yep. I spent a couple years as a child in a country with country-wide blocks on some internet content. However, google images wasn’t blocked (duh.) Reddit wasn’t blocked (not that I knew the site at the time).
Only thing it changed from a user-perspective was using either shitty and seedy VPN’s or simply going to more questionable sites the authority blocklist didn’t know of yet. And I’ll be honest, I doubt that sites like xnxx (back then) are much better for a developing child than the somewhat controlled sites. There’s so many niche porn sites out there that they can’t all be blocked. You only end up blocking access to sites that are the flattest for access by minors, ironically. (To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s great that minors access that content, either)