Will France’s Porn Ban Actually Work?

"WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!"

It's just a matter of economics that websites will accept getting blocked for a fraction of their user base if the age verification task falls on them, and is too costly to implement (and as a result, more traffic will be driven to sites that aren't yet blocked, because they're smaller, more obscure, or deliberately evasive).
Is there a reason France isn't instead demanding it be done by the ISPs, which are already bound by national legislation? Or are there technical reasons why this would be a bad idea? Something like blocking DNS requests for known adult content from entertaining their network customer-side unless accompanied by some sort of "age verified" token doesn't sound impossible to implement, and would probably be enough prevent most access by minors, and there are no doubt better ways it could be implemented.

They are discussing banning X (Twitter) now, since yes there is porn on X. How convenient.

Way to go France. Mainstream has been blocked so users turn to the fringe. More extreme and riddled with viruses. Well done.

This host is such a coomer

having made it harder to access this type of content like rape for entertaiment should be a nobrainer.. no kids should be exposed to this corrupting and deranged content.. Pornhub should be put down in the 1st place and blocked from all civilized countries as they profit of rape, traffic victims and other harmfull deragatory sex that is about dehumanizing women (and men)..

When the national hobby of a country is sex,who needs pornography,who will watch porn,when their hobby is sex,why do they need such porn videos ,when the society is doing real porn on streets,you don’t need porn movies ,pornography is good business for only those countries,where sex/nudity in society is restricted/banned

Bullish for VPN stock holders.

Ban the filth 100% fk phub and other spreaders of filth

there is no ban, clickbaited.

This is going the same way as the war in drugs. Except the money drain will be on the hiring software devs instead of law enforcement. As a software dev this is good news for me.

Good. Ban it for all of the EU if you can manage France!

"We do not take kids to sex shops".

Are you sure you don't, Macron?

Indeed the 'slippery slope fallacy' is a fallacy (that's a tautology), but not all slippery slopes are examples of the slippery slope fallacy. 'Unintended Consequences' are well documented. In my country, for example, the government wants to 'protect us' by demanding a licence to speak, vote, travel, work, conduct financial transaction, &c..

I wasn't terribly keen on Pornohub et alia, but I have to admire them when they seem to be the only ones resisting the efforts of the State to microchip everyone and tattoo an 'identity' number to our heads

Right off the bat, this video feels refreshing to not see bleeps, blurs, and censors over a bloated 30+ minute video.

This type of law can't actually be at all effective and it's not because of of VPN's.
The focus on VPN's here is a complete distraction, though I should note that there are free alternatives to having to sign up for a VPN.
The reason this type of law will never be effective is that you can't actually check whether every website is porn or not, so this just leads to a game of whack-a-mole involving thousands of smaller porn sites that you will never be able to win. Especially given that forcing the large websites out of the market will hugely increase the number and popularity of these smaller unregulated porn sites. After all I suspect most adults will consider this an undue burden and switch to websites not following these regulations.

We live in capitalism and sex sells, crackdowns, bans and restrictions will just make it more profitable because of supply and demand. It's not exclusive to the internet either it works the same way for drugs. Psychological exploitation via urges, instincts and desires is stuffed down our throats daily and is just business and politics 101 at this point.

The slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy.

I'm of the opinion that kids younger than 14 shouldn't be allowed on most of the internet, including social media, as porn is just one of the dangers that young minds can be exposed to in such a poorly regulated place. Take it from someone old enough to remember an offline (and largely unsupervised) childhood: We had plenty of stuff to do.

It wasn't a good thing that I found a hardcore porn tape that my parents had failed to properly hide back when I was 8. But it would would've a far worse thing if I had stumbled upon some of Andrew Tate's stuff.

I'm also of the opinion that kids 14 and up should in principle be allowed to access... the less rough stuff, let's call it. I'm not a complete libertarian on this, but when a person is less than 4 years from legal adulthood and obsessed with sex as a matter of biological programming, attempts to enforce continued ignorance upon them have a high risk of not just failing but also, from a character growth POV, backfiring. To put it more bluntly, anyone old enough to f**k can probably be allowed to seek out a film of other people doing it (and being filmed with their consent).

"Won't somebody please think of the teenagers?" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "Won't somebody please think of the children?", does it?

France is such a terrible place!

ID verification... that's some CCP levels of bs

This is so stupid, basically, let's not educate children, parents don't want to parent, so we go with blocking, which absolutely never works. Even without vpn's, you have millions of porn sites, they can not block all unless they shutdown the internet completely, and as for vpn's you can just use opera gx for example that has free vpn, so you don't even need to buy that..... beyond stupid. 1984 coming to reality slowly, but steadily -.-

Instead of simply holding the parents accountable for not supervising their own children, right...

TLDR just threw all journalistic neutrality out the window with this one lol sad

why the fuck would someone actually argue against the banning of pornography, if they themselves aren't the fucking consumers

I think we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In that respect, if the goal is to prevent children accessing porn, then the fact there are dozens of (often esoteric) ways to circumvent the ban isn't really a problem, as the vast majority of teenagers won't have the technical ability to figure out these workarounds.

Bear in mind that most adult users barely understand how to pirate movies and barely know what a vpn is. I would guess 80% of under 16s would not be able to figure out how to get around the ban. In this respect, the ban may end up being a success, even if it seems to have more holes then Swiss cheese.


If France is succesful even marginally, then other EU countries will follow and better solutions will take root, or the porn sites will self regulate.

The french are the biggest gooners ong

Honestly, and please hear me out, porn is so destructive in so many ways, there is a discussion to be had whether it should generally be more regulated. We have that for other things that are addictive and have side effects, why not porn? I mean the age thing is difficult to establish but i would argue its necessary to prevent children who are most at risk of harm from using it. Also, many countries require cigarette packaging to have harm advice and contact details for support services. That could be useful here too. Firthermore porn sites should be responsible for monitoring for illegal content themselves. It cannot be allowed that rape and child porn are found on these websites. But i think the most important thing is education. People need to know what porn does to them. It changes you on a neurological level, it impacts your sexual experience and potentially your sexual capacity, it is highly addictive, it interacts with your mood and mental health, and all those things are much more pronounced if youre still young.

Btw this is not coming from some religious perspective or from someone who doesnt know what theyre talking about. I occasionally use porn myself and have done quite a bit of research on it. I also studied psychology and would say i am pretty good at researching accurate information. But i encourage you to look into it yourself. Its a whole rabbit hole of problems that come with us having this extremely intense sexual experience at the ready all the time.

good, porn is a cancer

Sweden is the first country to banned the OnlyFans too

Trying to regulate the internet lmao
Maybe control the access of your kids to the internet or just instal spyware on kid's devices which only the parents can access

I think this is great news, this should be done with gambling too. I think the websites shouldn't be able to be accessed without your internet provider giving you a new daily code to log in too. Most Western countries seem to want to attack freedom of speech, but aren't doing much about porn and gambling which is harming children more.

How long before those supposedly safe personal info will be hacked and leaked with everyone being blackmailed with exposition of their real names and what they viewed?

Honestly this is good. It’ll be bypassed but it’ll be harder than how it is now.

Another Pajaporte idea

If government spending shrank 100x they would have time and people for these kind of retarded things, now would they? Isn't it weird how the government decides how much it is allowed to spend/tax/inflate? Wouldn't they always try to do as much as they can get away with? The world is fucking backwards. Well hey, at least they're not bombing their neighbors with that so I guess the french should feel lucky.

Love you all my fellow humans, bye for now

This is going to be like the probation period in America 😂.

Is the ban antisemitic?

So these sites are mad they can't sell these services to children? Can we get every person working for these companies in prison already?

France behaves like the fascist Donald Trump.....

I think it might decrease the number of kids who watch porn, and simultaneously increase the number of children that develop kinks and fetishes that are so disturbing its difficult to imagine including rape and extreme violence, sadism etc. Im nit entirely sure whats worse. I think instead of this prohibition, we should encourage parents to take control over the content their children consume online - much bettter solution imho

kids need to be kids and log off

Aylo is owned by Ethical Capital Partners hahaha

Protecting children from porn is a good idea

It's very concerning to see TLDR voicing support for this kind of measure