(Adam Goldberg) According to recently published research from the Oxford Internet Institute, parental controls and Internet filtering tools are for the most part, completely unsuccessful at preventing young people from viewing online porn.
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by Adam Goldberg, July 16th, 2018
As with anything that a human being has the will to do, they will find a way to do it if they really want to.
“It’s important to consider the efficacy of Internet filtering,” said the co-author of the study in a statement, Dr Victoria Nash. “Internet filtering tools are expensive to develop and maintain, and can easily ‘underblock’ due to the constant development of new ways of sharing content.”
While young people who aren’t adults yet viewing the unlimited, completely insane and boundary-less pit of filth that is modern Internet porn is a serious problem, which can lead to problems in life when it comes to procreating and having a normal relationship, the government stepping in is not in the best interest of anyone.
The UK government would love to jump at any opportunity to regulate anything, because it means more power for them, so not long before this study was published the UK government announced that they were “exploring options to filter and block online porn.” As if we need a government that bombs Syria with torturous weapons known to rupture the lungs to censor what content people can and can’t see online.
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The thought that government should censor Internet porn to solve this problem is so ridiculously laughable, it’s actually sad.
This study was published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, and it examined self-reported data from about 20,000 boys and girls between the ages of 11 and 16, who were asked whether or not they had looked at porn before on their computers at home. Also keep in mind, any smartphone is just as capable of looking this up now as a home computer: that in itself is drastically different from 15 years ago.
The study reports that the kids say about half of them are restricted by some Internet filter, like a parental filter at home, but they watched about the same amount of porn as the kids who didn’t have a filter. So they concluded that “filtering tools are ineffective and in most cases were an insignificant factor in whether young people had seen explicit sexual content.”
You know what else this proves? Government regulations would do nothing but disrespect and humiliate people, because people would get around those to watch porn exactly like these parental Internet filters, but on a larger scale. People think that government regulations wouldn’t be bypassed just the same as parental regulations? Maybe they need to take a closer look at what happened with the drug war. Regulations don’t work, ever.
So these researchers found that between 17 and 77 households would have to use filtering tools to prevent their child from accessing porn, and even then that filter “showed no statistically or practically significant protective effects.”
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But why do young people really want to watch porn?
It’s because they are starved of affection, and forced to be put in a box every day, to go to school and be a part of this system that they probably, intuitively know to be not right. When I say affection, I’m talking about normal stuff between teenage kids, like your first kiss, innocent regular stuff like that.
Innocent, regular teenage stuff like a “first kiss” is becoming increasingly rare nowadays. It’s like a chicken or the egg type situation: what caused this lack of innocence, lack of affection? Was it the accessibility of porn, or are kids watching porn because they don’t have any regular, innocent affection between each other in the first place?
As a person in the first years of their 20’s writing this, I can tell you from firsthand experience that simple, innocent affection and love between teenagers and kids is not what it used to be, and it wasn’t what it used to be 10 years ago either. I personally saw kids become less and less interested in real, innocent relationships between each other, and those lonely kids who have no affection, no prom date, no first kiss turn to things like this.
The root of this problem is not some ability to stomp out the ability for people to access porn: it’s the fact that people don’t have regular, normal affection in the first place. Just like the problems that lead people to do drugs, there’s a deeper root here.
(Image credit: nopeporn, findatopdocblog, iflscience)
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