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Just to add my perspective, I am one of those outliers who is still going to therapy for porn/sex addiction that started in adolescence. Age verification wouldn't have helped me because addiction wasn't my main or only issue - I also had significant sources of stress owing to my upbringing. I could have just as easily been addicted to drugs or alcohol because of those stressors, or used a VPN. Either way I needed some form of stress relief beyond what any teen ought to need, and those were the options I saw.

Combination of abuse and unfettered access to drinks/drugs/Internet is way worse than either one alone. At the same time I think the issue of bad parenting is a) not one people talk about out loud because of stigma (we can attack tech CEOs all day for pushing addictive products but anyone can become a parent and none of them will stand to be called the "bad" one) and b) not amenable to much change save for a global in-house surveillance panopticon. Yes we can choose to place trust in parents to protect children from Instagram and PornHub, but consider that some parents just... won't. Neither can we force them to. What then?

To me the question is more who is going to nanny me, and ideally its myself (the mature option), but in my experience starting as a child and going into adulthood, mental health can break this down to where people can't nanny/take care of themselves. In that case, the question at hand is: who is going to protect you from yourself? The state? Your family? Your friends?

Oftentimes the answer is "nobody". There's just nobody you can rely on to get the level of care you require. There are lots of arguments like Bowling Alone for how the breakdown of community has contributed to this separate issue.

In my view, by constructing and supporting legislation like this, people are implicitly admitting that parents, teachers, schools, communities, and all the rest are failing at their job of keeping moderation local and raising the next generation.

But the thing is, unfortunately this is a true statement in too many cases, including mine. My parents failed to parent me well enough, and my counselors were either instrumental in my own trauma or failed to address my issues soon enough, and as such I developed a sex addiction in adolescence fueled by persistent ongoing stress from my upbringing that I continue to seek treatment for to this day. Could content moderation laws have cured my parents' narcissism? Nope. Could they have prevented me from needing to act out to relieve the stress of my early relational trauma? Nope. Could they have helped match me with more competent therapists? Nope.

Could they have caused me to go to rehab for alcohol abuse instead of porn? Maybe. For all his statements I disagree with, I subscribe to Gabor Mate's view that traumatized individuals are compelled to be addicted to something. At that point, there are a lot of things to become addicted to other than the ones you can content moderate, given the (false) assumption that it's possible moderate enough of it.

Pornography was necessary but not sufficient for me to have it that bad coming out of childhood. Early exposure to it was only incidental. My upbringing was far more significant a cause in this. But unlike which websites I was allowed to visit as a child, a 100% chance of having emotionally involved parents isn't something you can legislate into existence.

What I feel isn't being talked about enough in this discussion is that this implicit realization that the world just sucks sometimes leads to justification that someone else needs to step in to protect children's fragile minds if the formerly trusted institutions aren't. The big option left is the platforms and systems hosting the tech themselves so they're targeted instead.

My opinion? If your parents aren't able to raise you to be free of significant trauma spawning "hungry ghosts" that you will need to turn to your unfettered internet access to feed, whether TikTok or LiveLeak or elsewhere, lest you are bombarded by stress every waking moment... then the situation was hopeless to begin with. You can't fix that problem with laws. You should have just had better parents, as awful as that sounds. And because of nothing more than bad luck, you're just going to have to unpack that problem with the healthcare system for years/decades, because there's not much else we know of that can meaningfully address childhood trauma that severe.

Thanks for responding, and I don't disagree.

The issue with any parent's narrative, including yours, is that it's one-sided. We'd need the story told by the children-turned-adults to make any fair judgement. Some people are going to say what their family wants them to hear and only open up to professionals or a neutral third party.

Plenty of porn exists for free, posted online by models or digital artists. It's archived in places that circumvent copyright, don't require payment or accounts, and are easily accessible.

I don't think it would have helped, given the outcomes for foster children are near universally worse except in the most extreme cases of abuse. I did threaten to call CPS but I was, of course, berated for it and threatened that I would be taken away, so that shut me up. Since I was never assaulted I doubt it would have reached the standard for foster care anyway, yet the consequences still endure to this day.

I was told over and over by in hindsight unqualified persons that emotional abuse wasn't real abuse, so after a few years I was disinclined to seek help.

If I had had even one person that supported me unconditionally instead of none at all, even if that person wasn't a parent, I'm fairly certain I would have turned out differently. That was just a matter of luck, and I came out empty-handed. I never felt comfortable talking about what I was exposed to online with anyone, and that only hurt me further, but I was a child and couldn't see another option.

A monitoring solution might have worked for my case if my parents had monitored my Internet history, if they always made sure to check in on what I thought/felt from what I watched and made sure I felt secure in relying on them to back me up in the worst cases.

But I didn't have emotionally mature parents, and I'm sure so many children growing up now don't either. They're going to read arguments like these and say they're already doing enough. Maybe they truly believe they are, even if they're mistaken. Or maybe they won't read arguments like these at all. Parenting methods are diverse but smartphones are ubiquitous.

So yes, I agree that parents need to be held accountable, but I'm torn on if the legal avenue is feasible compared to the cultural one. Children also need more social support if they can't rely on their parents like in my case, or tech is going to eat them alive. Social solutions/public works are kind of boring compared to technology solutions, but society has been around longer than smartphones.

I'm going to state that at one point I was one of the young people this kind of legislation is meaning to protect. I was exposed to pornography at too young an age and it became my only coping mechanism to the point where as an adult it cost me multiple jobs and at one point my love life.

I don't think this legislation would have helped me. I found the material I did outside of social media and Facebook was not yet ubiquitous. I did not have a smartphone at the time, only a PC. I stayed off social media entirely in college. Even with nobody at all in my social sphere, it was still addicting. There are too many sites out there that won't comply and I was too technically savvy to not attempt to bypass any guardrails.

The issue in my case was not one of "watching this material hurt me" in and of itself. It was having nobody to talk to about the issues causing my addiction. My parents were conservative and narcissistic and did not respect my privacy so I never talked about my addiction to them. They already punished me severely for mundane things and I did not want to be willingly subjected to more. To this day they don't realize what happened to me. The unending mental abuse caused me to turn back to pornography over and over. And I carried a level of shame and disgust so I never felt comfortable disclosing my addiction to any school counselors or therapists for decades. The stigma around sexual issues preventing people from talking about them has only grown worse in the ensuing years, unfortunately.

At most this kind of policy will force teenagers off platforms like Discord which might help with being matched with strangers, but there are still other avenues for this. You cannot prevent children from viewing porn online. You cannot lock down the entire Internet. You can only be honest with your children and not blame or reproach them for the issues they have to deal with like mine did.

In my opinion, given that my parents were fundamentally unsafe people to talk to, causing me to think that all people were unsafe, then the issue of pornography exposure became an issue. In my case, I do not believe there was any hope for me that additional legislation or restrictions could provide, outside of waking up to my abuse and my sex addiction as an adult decades later. Simply put, I was put into an impossible situation, I didn't have any way to deal with it as a child, and I was ultimately forsaken. In life, things like those just happen sometimes. All I can say was that those who forsook me were not the platforms, not the politicians, but the people who I needed to trust the most.

I believe many parents who need to think about this issue simply won't. The debate we're having here on this tech-focused site is going to pass by them unnoticed. They're not going to seriously consider these issues and the status quo will continue. They won't talk with their children to see if everything's okay. I don't have many suggestions to offer except "find your best family," even if they aren't blood related.

Digital media use is easier to conceal than weapons. My parents did not protect me from it growing up because they were not responsible, and I was harmed as a result. To this day they still do not realize I was harmed, because I did not tell them and we are not on speaking terms. Trying to be honest would have resulted in further rejection from them. This was on a personality level and I had no way to deal with this as a developing human.

I could not control how my parents were going to raise me, I was only able to play with the hand I was dealt. I hate the idea that parents are sacrosanct and do not share blame in these situations. At the same time, if this is just the family situation you're given and you're handed a device unaware of the implications, who is going to protect you from yourself and others online if your parents won't? Should anyone?

Some people would argue though that if the friend group is on Facebook/Discord or whatever, and they aren't going to move off to cater to the person rejecting those services, then those services are at least essential to maintaining those social ties. They decided that giving up their data was a tradeoff worth it.

What remains to be seen is if the outcome of teenagers becoming social pariahs is really worse than the alternatives.