On Sept. 11, Michigan representatives proposed an internet content ban bill unlike any of the others we’ve seen: This particularly far-reaching legislation would ban not only many types of online content, but also the ability to legally use any VPN.
The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people. It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.
Main issue I have with this article, and a lot of articles on this topic, is it doesn’t address the issue of youth access to porn. I think any semi-intelligent person knows this is a parenting issue, but unfortunately that cat’s out of the bag, thanks to the right. “Proliferation of porn” is the '90s crime scare (that never really died) all over again. If a politician or industry expert is speaking against bills like this, their talking points have to include:
- Privacy-respecting alternatives that promise parents that their precious babies won’t be able to access that horrible dangerous porn! (I don’t argue that porn can’t be dangerous, but this is yet another disingenuous right-wing culture (holy) war)
- Addressing that vagueness in the bill sets up the government as morality police (it’s right there in the title of the bill, FFS), and NOBODY in a “free” country should ever want that.
- Stop saying it can be bypassed with technology. The VPN ban in this bill is a reaction to talking points like that.
- Recognize and call out that this has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with a religious minority imposing its will on the rest of the country (plenty of recent examples to pull from here).
Unfortunately this is becoming enough of “A Thing” that the left is going to have to, once again, be seen doing “something” about it. So they have to thread a needle of “protecting kids,” while respecting the privacy of their parents who want their kids protected and want to look at porn, and protecting businesses that require secure communications.
NO VPN!
And the corporate world comes to a screeching halt.
These fuckwads don’t even understand anything about what they’re trying to legislate.
When shit starts being monitored, I want to see the legislators’ traffic public first.
Corporate VPNs generally don’t route www traffic, keeping that separate is kind of the point.
So unless you can convince your job to provide you porn, you’re out of luck.
Corporate VPNs generally don’t route www traffic.
Few corporate VPN’s don’t route www traffic. split tunnel in a large corporation It’s an infoleak waiting to happen.
And the corporate world comes to a screeching halt.
In theory, businesses would be required to register their VPNs and… idk, this would limit access to them somehow?
Much like with the Assault Weapons Ban and the assorted online porn bans and strip club bans and dry counties and SEC rules on insider trading, etc, etc, etc a lot of this boils down to “how hard do you want to work in order to enforce this?”
And the short answer is “we only want an excuse to arrest people arbitrarily”. So a VPN can quickly because a “everyone with an Internet connection is a criminal suspect”. And then you just harass the people you want to harass under cover of “we thought you had kiddie porn” as an excuse
I once worked for a banking transaction company (or something like that, I did their network and telecom support, none of the actual business) and they had offices in Russia. I was told that since VPNs are more restricted there, but required for the business, they had to have a special application with the government to be allowed to have the site to site VPN work.
I imagine they’d try to do the same, as well as grant them another way to be in the pocket of or have some control over businesses. If the government has to approve your necessary security software, you’ll want to stay on their good side.
It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.
That doesn’t sound like they plan on any exceptions. That sounds like the end of all business in that state.
When shit starts being monitored, I want to see the legislators’ traffic public first.
Oh my sweet summer child. Of course these laws won’t apply to them.
And if they do, they will make up shit to use the dirt you dug up against them against you.
Kind of like how when a cop shoots a black guy they look for whatever parking ticket they got 10 years prior as proof he is a cracking smoking cap busting gangsta who was itching for a bullet. Never being slightly concerned for the cop’s violent history or misconduct in various police forces.
Now now I didn’t say they were going to allow that.
Can’t do business or government without VPNs nowadays.
Republicans should attach their version of the bible to their version of the First Amendment. Make it official.
both sides are bible thumpers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_affiliations_of_presidents_of_the_United_States
Thomas Jefferson Unknown; possibly Deism 1801–1809
only had one nonChristian maybe
both sides are bible thumpers
There is a huge difference between “being religious” and “being a ‘bible thumper’”.
Where is the difference?
The last president we had was Catholic and stated he would go by what the church said
Roe v Wade fell on his watch but magically was the other teams fault entirely when in reality it took both parties working together at the marching orders of their check writers
Make it make sense
Make it make sense
Honestly if you can’t tell the difference between “person who has religion” and “bible thumper” already then I doubt I’m intelligent and patient enough to explain it to you.
Thumpers push religion on people and people who just have religion do not
Biden said he was going to go by what the church of his faith said
Republicans during and before have stuck to their guns on faith
Now we live in Christiandom
Where is the difference?
I’m really shocked there isn’t a push to go back to Latin Bibles.
When they started translating the Vatican was scared it would lead to commoners being able to not just read/write, but they’d actually be able to see what the Bible said instead of just taking the priest’s word on it.
Most Christians don’t read the Bible by choice, but that’s still different from being literally unable to read it.
Many Americans are already unable to read it in English.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics
https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/literacy-rate-in-the-united-states/
aint need no edumaction to go work them factries BY GOD!
BOOTSTRAPS! MURICA! FUCK YEAH!
It’s called Project 2025. At some point they will rename it to King Trump’s Bible.
Didn’t he already release a bible? I can’t keep up with this timeline anymore…
Holy shit thought you were joking
https://godblesstheusabible.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Bless_the_U.S.A._Bible
Trump Bible wtf
Thank fuck/too bad I wasn’t imagining it. I mean…yay… brain still holding some information…boooooo for the Biff-timeline…
Biff was directly based on Trump.
…fuckme…of course he was…
Someone check the browser history of the 6 GOPers pushing a “morality” bill.
[…] would ban a wide variety of adult content online, [… including] any depiction of transgender people.
Obviously will fail. Not because it blatantly violates the first amendment, or because banning VPNs is absurd: but because it would hinder republicans from secretly jerking it to femboys.
The love to crash grindr. Every convention, they have the servers glowing. Not a gay butthole unfilled. That should be their slogan.
It has been proven time and time again that if you want kids to stay away from something, you can ban it and it just goes away, it doesn’t make it even MORE attractive to them. /s
Ban all use of VPNs …
I guess I’ll be out of work with plenty of time to stew about how to unfuck everything.
Banning VPNs would be an unmitigated disaster and anyone who suggests that it’s a good idea has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about and should never be allowed to make tech policy again because they are a massive idiot.
Businesses, institutions, and even the government itself all require the use of VPNs to remain secure. VPNs are vital to functioning IT infrastructure everywhere.
Additionally, such a move wouldn’t even stop people from accessing porn (which isn’t even what VPNs are for), all it would really do is break IT security everywhere.
Banning VPNs would be an unmitigated disaster and anyone who suggests that it’s a good idea has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about and should never be allowed to make tech policy again because they are a massive idiot.
You’re right. Sadly, this have no bearing on the people actually deciding federal laws in the US, if I am to trust the news cycle from the last 10 or so months.
The damage that would stem from such things is guaranteed to span far and large :(
Take a look at the UK’s current attempts to do similar.
Old bigots completely divorced from reality making the rules everyone (else) has to follow.
I suspect what will actually happen is this bill will go nowhere. If it starts to go somewhere, business interests will step in and squash it because of the many, many, many problems it would cause.
How do you even define a VPN? Is SSH tunnelling allowed then?
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10 hour video of a woman encouraging you to be a better person.
The problem is that influencers have shilled stupid VPN services so much that even legislatures think they know what they are and think the primary use for the technology is circumvention and privacy.
They have no idea about all the IPsec tunnels providing site-to-site VPNs for all their businesses. Or how VPN protocols like GRE, which while providing no security on their own, are still very useful for tunneling protocols through different network stacks.
I want to see one state pass this (not mine ofc) just to see the carnage of an entire state full of companies that suddenly cease operations.
I mean. They’d only enforce the ban on VPN providers that don’t provide logs to the government. I get what you mean from a technology standpoint. But, in actual implementation of the law it would do exactly what they want. They’re not gonna ban your work VPN. They just want to track what everyone is doing online.
Most VPNs do not use a separate VPN provided. What about places that host their own? My employer would never open their logs to the us government (hosted outside the us). I would never willingly open my own logs to the government - they have to not only physically invade my house but have to decrypt my drives, and hope they did it quickly enough that any incriminating logs haven’t been purged
It’s not about stopping random people hosting their own VPN. It’s about collecting data on the majority of the population. You’re thinking too hard about it.
That in itself introduces numerous security problems, still incredibly stupid and all this surveillance data makes for a hacker goldmine. Not like governments have a great IT security track record.
It’s not government. It’s about passing tech infrastructure entirely into the hands of the tech Oligarchs. Forcing VPN companies to sell or integrate Palantir/CIA/FBI backends in order to keep operating in the US.
You’re thinking too much about how the legislation is worded. It doesn’t matter when the actual implementation will just be to increase the ability for tech oligarchs to spy on all citizens. That’s the material goal. Your security doesn’t matter. The oligarchs will implement it to protect their own security and monopoly on data. That’s it. That’s all that this is meant to do. The old fucks in the legislative branch don’t have to actually understand it or write that down. They will just pass it off to tech companies to implement how they see fit. And enforce it on providers when they are told to by the Oligarchs. It’s not smart. It doesn’t have to be. It’s malicious handoff to tech oligarchs to handle and enforce as they see fit.
The wording of legislation is how legislation works?
Might want to look up the Chevron deference. Something that was actually of topic in a recent 2024 supreme court ruling. Can rant about how and why the change to it occurred but that’s a little off topic.
The TLDR is that federal agencies have the power to interpret and defer technical parts of legislation to experts within that agency to enact the “purpose” of the legislation.
In reality this is a good thing in a well operated federal government. The FDA doesn’t have to defer to a judge for every specific implementation. But we are not in a well functioning federal government. We are passing off power tech Oligarchs to control things how they see fit.
WHEN, HOW, and WHO the law is enforced to is significantly more important that how legislation is worded when it passes. I’m trying to explain what the material result of the law will be to my best ability. The law will be enforced in favor of tech monopolies. It’ll be another tool for them to use state power to their benefit.
This is exactly the color of the issue. Everyone should read this.
So what you are saying is this is a fantastic RTO strategy. /s
But yeah, I work for an international company, setting up the IT infrastructure so that each of those individual offices have a standard security policy and connection whitelists, and then requiring an on-site IT person to manage each of those sounds horrible.
VPNs is not just for remote workers. It’s used by corporations who don’t want to pay for a direct connect to federate with their work sites.
The only way a VPN ban is going to work is if they make a carve-out for corporations.
Which, let’s face it, it’s Republicans so there’s a one-to-one chance that language will be there.
Couldn’t a VPN service make a corporation and attain exemption?
VPNs are needed for way more than people working from home. It’s hard to understate how spectacularly stupid banning VPNs would be in terms of business alone, never mind all the other problems it would cause.
Yeah but people are really stupid and the economy is going to implode any day now anyways. It has nothing to do with porn and everything to do with criminalizing privacy and making mass surveillance more easy. They do not care how it affects people, they are rich and completely detached from reality. They will go live on Epstein Island or move to Ireland or something when America explodes. They rather be rich and connected then do anything that would actually help anyone, and Americans for the past 30 years have voted consistently for mass surveillance, destroying the constitution and fiat economics. This is what your average American wants by their voting habbits. People are just too stupid and brainwashed by this point.
I remember walking into work one day and some agitated co-worker wanted to know what I knew about Colorado’s libraries, because he knows I regularly use them. He was listening to hate radio on the way into work and became convinced that it was a huge problem that libraries were not tracking their Internet usage back to individuals. The idea of people doing things untracked (also, on “his” dime, LOL) was driving him crazy.
I had to laugh and try to calm him down by pointing out things like Tor (and i2p) and the fact that at that time anyway, you could wardrive and probably find a few dozen open Wifi connections within a few blocks, and use one of those if you were really up to something “nefarious” (whatever that might be). Not to mention go to some coffee shop.
He was much more annoyed that people might be watching porn at the libraries, though, as if all taxpayers have to endorse every single use of all things [1]…though I’m sure control freaks like this would be positively delighted at having the right people (read: Republicans) able to see all activity of all Internet users…
One guess what religion he is and what party he votes for…
[1] See for another example - how a certain type of person thinks they should get to decide what food stamps are spent on.
One guess what religion he is and what party he votes for…
MAGA and republican…
Because people this obsessed with controlling others sure as heck ain’t Christian by any logical definition.
I usually tell people that, if you think you are such a good person then you are probably not a good person. I also tell them that people are living things, and they deserve dignity and autonomy and privacy and that every culture in history that has been operated by people with their worldview has disintegrated into ashes, because nobody is wise enough to see everything and understand everything, and not be tempted by their own power to do wrong unto others.
I tell them that nature has likely figured out the most optimal path, and that nature is probably far older than even the earth is. Life has discovered that the best path is freedom, no rules, autonomy, and love and wonder for each other.
The only good king is a king of peace, a king of dissolving power, a king of balance. The only good democracy is a democracy of respect for others, a democracy of responsibility, a democracy of ensuring everyone else’s freedom at the cost of your own.
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They also want to control your mind and hack your mind. The sort of secret religion of silicon valley is to hack people’s minds. There are all kinds of weird cults that are all about trying to manipulate people. It seems they are having some success on that front but lack the wisdom to know what to do with it, and hence, our society is dying, because there simply is no better path than to not play stupid games, respect people’s autonomy and privacy, and let things work themselves out. Chaos isn’t just a side effect, it is a necessary aspect of life.
A society which finds a way to stop chaos, to stop revolutions, to stop free speech, to stop progress, those societies die. Human beings like all living beings, cannot thrive unless they are free.
That’s what revolutions are for when the government fails its social contract
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It’s not just the government. It’s almost the entire human race.
Thats what revolutions are for just make sure you dont let the power dynamics of an economy dictate your future again or it is never going to change because you will just become the rich people inhibiting our species.
It’s hard to have a revolution without the global powers interfering and trying to steer you down the path of international corporate pseudocapitalism, or authoritarianism. The history of communist revolutions is very interesting in this regard. The good communists always got crushed by the bad and authoritarian and well funded communists.
yeah a vpn ban would fuck up networks
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What the hell are rocks up to? Whats next, youre gonna tell me stones are up to no good.
For rock and stone!
Businesses, institutions, and even the government itself all **require** the use of VPNs to remain secure. VPNs are vital to functioning IT infrastructure everywhere.
This is the first thing I thought about. Bills like these always allow for vulnerabilities that would affect the entire nation, themselves included. It’s extremely short sided.
Morality aside, have any of these chucklefucks considered the impact on businesses? You know, like how pretty much every business uses a VPN to allow people off site access to their secure systems? And how this bill would essentially end any of those businesses?
Not to mention VPNs between locations, or between on-site vs. things like AWS?
Then there are device manufacturers like Cisco and Fortinet?
Interesting
With all threats that kids face world wide
With all threats that kids face in the USA
You focus on one of the lesser problems that should be fixed by the parents in the first place?
What’s the number one cause of death for children in the USA? I mean, silly me, I would have thought that is a low hanging fruit easy subject to pick up and run with. Fix that, and you will have actually made the country better
Then again, a huge swath of Americans don’t want a better country as they’ve been bombarded for two decades that they actually already live in the best country of the world whereas in reality they live inmonenof the worst
That could spell trouble for VPN owners and other internet users who leverage these tools to improve their privacy, protect their identities online, prevent ISPs from gathering data about them or increase their device safety when browsing on public Wi-Fi.
Is the extent of their knowledge on VPNs just what they heard from a NordVPN commercial? Not once in the article do they mention corporate VPNs.
Unfortunately this is becoming enough of “A Thing” that the left is going to have to, once again, be seen doing “something” about it.
I completely disagree with this sentiment and any Democrat that agrees with this isn’t on "the left, but one more diet-Republican who exists solely to legitimize everything the right is doing at every turn.
they don’t understand it. How are you going to stop people from having a dedicated server outside the country and then setting up their own VPNs? Wireguard is free and easy to access, how do you stop that?
If I want to open up my personal VPN to a bunch of Americans to use for free then what? I’m not American, my server isn’t in America, so why can’t I just give access to a few Americans? Hell my server would be great cause it’s located in a University so…student discounts!
I find this argument fascinating. The point isn’t technological prevention. It’s so they can punish you, if they choose to, if they find you using one. I’d wager they prefer that people doing illegal things do use vpn, so they can a) build and use tools to detect it, since then by definition only criminals will use it, and b) rack up criminal charges. And of course c) ignore it if they want (either for legit reasons, like corp vpn, or because the user is an in-group member or somebody they want leverage on)
“Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something in them to hang him". This just makes it easier to find something.
“Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something in them to hang him.”
A massive database of likely voters with party affiliation + the ability to find something on anybody they choose = easy election interference.
Tor won’t be affected by this.
Tor bridges are virtually impossible for even major governments to detect, much less block.
Unfortunately it works like any other prohibition: when the regulated legal market goes away, the hard stuff takes over
Tor bridges are blocked in China
Source for this assertion?
China blocks old style bridges like obfs-4. They recently managed to detect some snowflake bridges, but again only against individually targeted users – they can’t find “all Tor users in Shanghai” for example.
I suggest some background reading
https://harpia.pages.torproject.net/support/censorship/connecting-from-china/
I was able to access only one webpage before it stopped working, just the google page that said it detected suspicious activity
now nothing is loading
almost half an hour later I loaded the google front page, but after searching for something the next page won’t come up. Maybe not true that it’s “blocked”, but it’s not usable in any way
A lot depends on your Tor circuit. There are lots of very slow Snowflake nodes (FWIW I operate on an a VPS with high bandwidth and ~98% uptime)
The point still applies though. They can pick you up on suspicion of using a VPN or Tor, and if you can’t prove you didn’t they will punish you. It will be used to silence politically inconvenient people and prevent them organizing online. If you organize your left-wing protest online in cleartext they thwart your plans and maybe arrest you. If you organize it using encryption they arrest you and thwart your plans and imprison you and ban you from the internet.
All the “we can find a way around it” arguments duck the main point, which is that they know you’ll be doing that and they’ll have a perfect excuse to arrest you if they think you’re worth stopping.
suspicion of using a VPN or Tor
My point is that using a VPN is trivially easy to detect, and can be en masse, dragnet style
Tor usage (especially with a bridge) is difficult or impossible to detect, even for nation-states, and to the best of my knowledge is only tractable against specific targeted individuals/machines. It’s not possible to “get a list of all suspected Tor bridge users”, even if you are an ISP
They can’t do that because we have the presumption of innocence
If using a VPN is declared as a tag for being a terrorist, innocent until prove guilty doesn’t apply.
That’s not true
Only if configured correctly. Public Tor Exit Nodes are detectible and I got some alerts about a user checking his email from Tor the other day.
Tor Exit Nodes
Good point. The moment you leave Tor, you lose a lot of its protection.
In theory, exit nodes should completely hide the connection between you the end user and what goes thru the exit node. In practice, exit nodes can leak metadata/side channel info. And they are always susceptible to global network analysis that nation-states are able to use (albeit as far as I know only against targeted individuals, not in mass-surveillance mode)
You ever tried setting up such a server anonymously in a way that can’t be tracked by American authorities? It can be done, but they’ve already made that difficult and/or expensive.
Just buy a VPS with crypto? It’s not expensive, it’s a few bucks a month
Yeah it does look like maybe that’s got easier since I looked into it, although the prices I see are maybe 3x the cost of the average VPN and of course being securely anonymous is still beyond the abilities of most of us.
I don’t know about 3x, I run my VPS on $5 a month but there are even cheaper options around even paying with crypto
Bear in mind that paying with crypto doesn’t make you anonymous unless you’re careful about it and use monero or something. If you did that and avoided giving any other identifying info to the provider, I’d be curious to know where to sign up for that.
So… Use Monero and a fake name?
No shit, if you want to use a corporate vpn all you have to do is contact Barron trump, slip him 50k cash and he will have your vpn certified “Christian Morals Approved”
If you can block access to commercial VPNs and render anyone else using VPNs liable to prosecution you achieve what they want.
You can’t block commercial VPNs. I can put a commercial VPN website up right now, it takes like a second. All I need is a crypto payment address and I’ll share my VPN servers
Ok, and how are you going to tell people that it exists? Not through YouTube sponsor slots, because you’ll get deleted quicker than you put it up.
So only a tiny number of people will know that your VPN exists. That’s “good enough” for the censorious.
On Lemmy, of course!
Lemmy doesn’t have that many users… How are you going to reach the people who aren’t arch users ;)
Seriously though, tech enthusiasts live a technological solution but a ban is a societal thing and it doesn’t have to be perfect. Look at China.
I’m using a VPN in China
Jesus.
As far as I can tell, you are arguing that it won’t become impossible to use a VPN. But no-one has said that it will be, and what I and others are trying to point out, is that VPN usage will become more difficult and rare. The vast majority of people will be restricted from viewing the content that the government objects to, whatever that is.
If you have anything to say about that rather than repeating the point that, yes, for the knowledgeable, for the tech-literate, for the people with the will and the spare time and the energy, VPN usage will still be available, feel free to. Maybe you think that actually everyone will use a VPN - why? why won’t a massive reduction in marketed options not reduce usage massively? Maybe you think that actually it doesn’t matter - why? why does it not matter that the average person will be unable to get information censored by the government?
It’s quite possible they will make an exception for corporate VPNs while banning them for the rest of us. There will be a big fee to buy a corporate encryption licence, unaffordable to the peasants.
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I don’t understand how OP can say that second part with a straight face when this bill doesn’t even have the support of more than a handful of Michigan House Republicans and seems to have zero chance of making it out of committee there
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15 years ago it was unthinkable that we would be in the situation we are right now. Don’t wave this away as not having any support today. This is their goal. When they lose this time, they won’t forget. They won’t stop. The goal is complete surveillance, porn is just the vehicle.
That second quote is what OP is saying here. They’re trying to frame this debate in a light most favorable to Republicans, as if internet censorship is the forgone conclusion and it’s just a matter of figuring out how to do it.
Sorry, I didn’t even realize OP was the one who said that. Will edit. And I agree, this sentiment is awful
“work”? Yeah it could “work”.
Good old party of small government
The trans bit is key here. First that, then anything “promoting homosexuality”. It’s in Project 2025 that the porn bans are about criminalising LGBTQ people and allies.
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Sure, but the porn laws are specifically about targeting LGBTQ people.
It actually gets worse than I outlined above, because I was in a hurry when I wrote that.
So, you make porn illegal and you define “porn” as anything “pro-LGBTQ”. That’s all books which feature LGBTQ characters, all organisations which support LGBTQ people, all people who are openly LGBTQ themselves.
Now you’ve got a school librarian who purged the books she was told to purge but accidentally missed one. A student checks it out, his parents see it and recognise it, now that librarian is guilty of distributing pornography to a minor. If the book features an LGBTQ character who is a minor, then that librarian is guilty of distributing child pornography.
And that’s not even as worrying as it gets. Because everything above is in Project 2025, but that’s not the entire limit. Over the last couple of years Republican politicians have been floating (and even trying to introduce bills which would actualise) the idea of the punishment for sexual offenses involving minors to be the death penalty. They’re not there yet (and bills have thus far been defeated), but that’s the direction of travel. That’s the end goal. A pseudo-legal framework to justify executing people for being openly LGBTQ (held hands with your girlfriend in public? A 17 year old saw you holding hands. You are now guilty of a sexual offense involving a minor), or anything other than publicly anti-LGBTQ. Off to the camps with you!
So, yes you’re right that they’ll use whatever weapon they can against whichever group they can - historically, fascists often target LGBTQ people first, and at the moment it’s easier to start with trans people than explicitly going after gay people - yet.
But the anti-porn laws are explicitly about targetting LGBTQ people. And they’re only part of the way down the roadmap.
I think any semi-intelligent person knows this is a parenting issue
Even parents who are actively trying to prevent their children from viewing porn might find it a challenge, given the sheer amount of porn on the internet and the proliferation of Internet connected devices.
But what about the kids whose parents don’t take steps to prevent their kids from accessing porn? Do the rest of us just say, “well kid, if your parents don’t care then neither do I. Watch all the porn you want.”? Or do the rest of us have a responsibility to try and protect those kids, even if their own parents won’t?
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There’s no “protecting” them from porn. That ship sailed 30 years ago. Parents are going to have to do some parenting. If the kid has shit parents, porn is not even going to be on the top 10 issues we should be worrying about.
I actually work in education and this is genuinely a problem. There are children in elementary with unfettered access to the internet, and they are the kids with the most behavioral issues. These kids then grow into adults with issues and it genuinely does have a negative effect on our society. I do NOT want VPNs banned, because that is an obvious play at stopping adults watching whatever they want. What I do want is some way to stem the tide of hardcore porn being watched by young kids, which is currently the case. “Parents need to parent.” Yeah, good fucking luck with that. I’d encourage anyone reading this to reach out to your local educator and ask if too much internet access is fucking up these kids. I’m guessing I already know their answer.
You are seeing symptoms and assuming they are the cause. Porn doesn’t cause behaviour issues; the inattentive parenting that allowed the access does. These kids with behaviour issues existed long before internet porn became widespread.
Im sorry, but are you a psychologist or other mental health professional that works with kids? The typical behavioral issues remain, with new ones now being correlated with unsupervised access to the internet. So let’s just do nothing to try and help our educators and society at large.
Completely agree.
If I can’t smack a parent for smoking in the car with kids or installing a car seat wrong then they can’t tell me how I can use my Internet connection I am paying for. Two of those things pose an immediate danger to the kids and nobody else, meanwhile the other affects everyone. The point is, VPN and porn is the wrong hill to die on if they really cared about kids.
I do NOT want VPNs banned, because that is an obvious play at stopping adults watching whatever they want. What I do want is some way to stem the tide of hardcore porn being watched by young kids
And how to you propose to do that without banning adults?
The issues you’re describing have always existed, unfortunately some parents are shitty parents.
Actually subscribe to a porn site. These problems haven’t always existed either. The internet is filled to the brim with abusive porn that wasn’t just available at your fingertips. Pre-internet you had to find magazines or actual movies. It’s very convenient to just shrug your shoulders when you’re not the one dealing with the actual problems. Fuck me for caring about the fate of kids, I guess.
But what about the kids whose parents don’t take steps to prevent their kids from accessing porn?
What about them? We don’t structure all of society to be kid-oriented. That’s fucking stupid.
We do not have a responsibility to try and protect those kids at the expense of everyone else.
Keeping kids from ever seeing porn isn’t a realistic goal. Educating kids about sex and minimizing their exposure to porn is a realistic goal. This kind of legislation lets prudes avoid accepting the fact that kids need sex education while doing nothing to actually keep kids from seeing porn.
well kid, if your parents don’t care then neither do I. Watch all the porn you want.
FUCK YES! You are not their parent! YOU DO NOT GET TO DECIDE what their kid gets to see! Porn is for adults to look at but if a kid sees it there’s no danger. Kids don’t drop dead because they saw some people fucking on the Internet!
How hard is this to understand‽
