Has sexual content invaded too much of the internet?
Something I have been thinking about lately is how sexual content online seems to be proliferated and normalized much more than it used to be. I'll give a couple of examples.
While I do not use the big social media sites (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok) very often, I've seen questionable content while others are scrolling, as well as conversations both online and offline with others who do use them. Nearly all of these sites contain profiles of people who are primarily there to market an OnlyFans account or similar. And these profiles are pushed to various demographics, seemingly moreso to males.
Reddit has a very questionable history with this type of content. But outside of that, any subreddit that allows submission of photos of people will often include these models trying to promote themselves, and they frequently make it to the top of the subreddit. (Some reddit users make fun of this in subreddits such as r/UNBGBBIIVCHIDCTIICBG, which stands for "Upvoted Not Because Girl, But Because It Is Very Cool; However, I Do Concede That I Initially Clicked Because Girl").
Twitch is a livestreaming platform that primarily hosts streamers who are playing video games. Streaming other events or "just chatting" has grown in popularity, which I have no complaints about. But there has been a lot of controversy about sexual content on the platform. To address this to some degree, Twitch added a "Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches" category for people who are streaming in that specific context. But OnlyFans models do not stick to that category, and can easily be found in "Just Chatting." And I can personally say that regardless of how many times I select "Not Interested" on these streams, I continue to get suggestions for them.
Even generic chat applications (such as WhatsApp and Discord) are plagued with bot accounts that are either representative of an actual model or part of a scam, but in both cases, try to lure users in with sexual content.
I do want to say I have no issue with adult content when it is in the appropriate venue. Sites dedicated to pornography are completely fine for consenting adults. What I take issue with is how this content has expanded far beyond dedicated sites.
Society has reached a point where we hand off internet-connected devices to children at a very young age. Chromebooks are used in schools very early in education, and smartphones are given to kids early in life. It already seems to be common knowledge that social media use results in self-image issues in youth. These issues will likely be accelerated by social media not only showing a false image of how people live their lives but also the lengths they go to appear sexually appealing.
I'm not proposing some overreaching "save the children" censorship legislation is needed. But it's hard to imagine how this trend can be turned around. It produces a ton of clicks, which is all these user-posted content sites (and advertisers) care about. Is there anything that can be done, or is this just the new internet?
Can I ask how old you are? Because the fact that you're seeing smut more now doesn't really click with my experience of the internet. When I was 12 (fucking 30 years ago, what?) I was in AOL chat rooms having cybersex. I opened porn image tabs 50 images at a time, because each one took a minute to load, and I prayed the image download wouldn't fail partway through, leaving me with a picture of someone's hair and a single sultry eyebrow. Smut and other questionable material was broadly available, both on the world wide web and in newsgroups. Before there were rickrolls, there was goatse, an image used for the same basic link tricks, but much more explicit.
I could absolutely understand an argument that the internet should be further sanitized, but please don't come at it from a claim that it's somehow gotten worse recently. This is the internet as it has always been, and in many ways it's cleaner and more polite than at any other time. The problem, such as it is, is that the internet is now much more a part of everyone's life, and so its seedy underbelly is the seedy underbelly of all of life.
There's a big difference between kids actively searching out content, and it being served to them on a platform by an algorithm. Yes, kids will always always always be able to find sexual content online, but never before has it been so widely pushed into their brains by feeds tailored to their personal viewing habits.
Absolutely. It used to be that one could search for, say, manga or cosplay stuff without immediately being served sexual content. Heck, even "person sits at a piano and play music" is flooded with sexually suggestive content
The algorithm is pretty nefarious and I hate its influence on our society, but I absolutely saw very explicit material when searching for very mundane things on Google / Google Images back in the day. Manga/cosplay was one of the topics I remember being flooded by porn (couldn't search for Pokémon without seeing at least one rule 34 drawing).
Yeah, same. And even back before the web really took off, even the most innocuous searches on Usenet inevitably ended up with at least some porn or erotica in the results. alt.binaries was especially rife with it. And half the time you didn't even realize it was actually porn you had downloaded until you extracted the files and loaded them up, since assholes would rename everything to something else they knew people would be searching for instead. Maybe back when only academic institutions had access to Usenet in the early 80s it wasn't like that, but by the time I started using it in the late 80s/early 90s it was.
And the early web of the 90s was absolutely riddled with sexual content too. There were ads for porn sites, boner pills, escorts, and sex chatlines practically everywhere, since the mainstream, sanitized ad networks hadn't yet taken over. So the only way for people to make money from ads on their sites was to allow the more unsavory ads to be displayed occasionally too.
!! Sex chat lines !!
When I was a very young kid living in HK, porn mags didn't need censor bags, they were just all out in the open. (I used to think women grew pink stars on their breasts when they became adults)
And TV or radio would have ads where someone reads out a phone number in a sultry voice. It was back when you could call different phone lines for daily joke or weather or something specific like homework help or directory for noodle places still open at 4am. But the ads for those lines were just sultry voices reading a number to call.
Me: that's silly, they forgot to tell people what the number's for.
LOL, yep. 1-900 was mostly for sex lines and psychics when I was growing up in the 80s/90s, and they advertised on the web, radio, and even on late night TV. It was a wild time, and it all seems so utterly bizarre now, in retrospect. :P
How did they work? Like, someone would call and "operators are standing by" to take credit card numbers? Or are they charged to the phone account automatically? Did kids ring up hundreds of dollars and try to blame their dads? I think it was an actual career, wasn't it, ladies pretending to have sex with callers? It does seem bizzare, and no doubt future generations will find today's OnlyFans quaint one day. "What, so the lady doesn't actually teleport to your location ? Then what's the point?"
The charges would show up on your itemized phone bill. Back in the day there were local (in area code) and long distance calls, with different rates for each, and you'd get your phone bill in the mail with an itemized list of calls you'd made and their costs. 1-900 calls would be charged the same way.
The $X/minute they supposedly charged was more than enough to scare even horny adolescent me away from those kind of services entirely, so I don't know how they actually worked. But I assume they had to take someone's credit card info before they started. I know when texting finally starting getting popular in the late 90s certain services started popping up that could charge your phone account directly after you texted them. However, I honestly don't know if there was a way for services to charge phone owners' accounts directly before that. You could pretty easily spoof outgoing phone numbers back then though, so I doubt it.
But TBH, I never really saw the point of those sex chat services. Why would I pay for something like that when I got plenty of people offering me the same sort of thing for free every time I joined an IRC channel, or went into an AOL chat room. If I had a nickle for every "A/S/L?" I was sent over the years, I'd probably be a millionaire. ;)
At the time, computers were fairly uncommon, weren't they? Also, most people (adults especially) probably couldn't figure out how a lot of internet stuff worked. It would be easier for most people to buy a physical magazine or call those extorbitant chat lines (?)
I also have a curiosity if you'll indulge me: was it really like the "I put on my robe and wizard hat" chat logs, sans the hilarious bits?
According to Wikipedia, "By 1995, AOL had about three million active users" and "[CompuServe]'s number of users grew, maximizing in April 1995 at 3 million worldwide"
So it wasn't super super uncommon, but the net was definitely far far less populous back then. But I was actually online even well before that though, back in the BBS days. My elementary school friend's older cousin ran a multi-phone-line BBS out of his basement with about 300 total users, only 10 of which could be online at the same time. So there being millions of people on the internet throughout the day, and several thousand in the various chat rooms and IRC channels I joined felt like a LOT in comparison to that.
LOL. I wouldn't say it was sans the hilarious bits. The whole cybersex thing was pretty absurd to begin with, not really knowing who you were flirting over text with, and them not really knowing who you were either. And there were also plenty of trolls... myself included occasionally too. So there were plenty of super awkward, bizarre, and hilarious moments. Trying to make people laugh was part of the fun, IMO. ;)
A lot of my early "chatting" was done in Runescape, so there was very much an "I put on my robe and wizard hat" vibe. I got so many free tiaras.
That sounds hilarious. Why tiaras in particular? Was it a wanted or unwanted RuneScape item, I can't tell.
They were definitely wanted by me. I think they were highly prized by most people, but my memory on that aspect isn't as clear. You had to have several high level skills to make them, and they sold for a lot in the marketplaces, so if you were wearing one it meant you either had a lot of money or worked really hard to make it. Or you were like me and had a lot of Runescape boyfriends. :P
Enterprising young lads (and lasses, but they were exceedingly rare) could gain access to unsecured, unencrypted phone network transmission of credit card transactions.
Yeah, phreaking was pretty cool and super interesting, but slightly before my time. I remember watching a documentary when I was a kid on phreaking in the 1960s-80s, but I can't remember its name, and can't seem to find it via google. :( And I remember hearing about Joybubbles, a blind phreak who could mimic phone system signaling tones by whistling, and used that skill to make long distance calls for free. Fun stuff!
Oh rest assured, computers have been used for porn since even before gui’s existed, with countless mainframe cycles and 100 baud bits devoted.
You’re bringing back fond memories of searching for rain to see boobs on the school computers.
I’m still surprised it took the bronies flooding the internet with clop to get Google to rework how safe search worked, when the permeating predominance of poképorn predated the ponies by a whole decade.
:D ..... I was talking about days of yore well before google, unfortunately..... Unless of course it was equally easy, but I didn't stumble upon it. Once upon a time it was possible to stay on say, your local ISP's hand curated and hand HTML coded directory of links because things just didn't link to stuff. Although I must also admit I've never once tried to type in [term].com and tried my luck, so perhaps there's heavy selection bias here and most kids immediately navigate to that section of the web (?)
But yes absolutely by the time one could search for things Pokemon was absolutely not a safe search term. Nor was Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball, oddly enough.
My first experience with internet porn was in the late 90's, using Yahoo Search for information on the country of Jordan for a school report and having one of the top results being for a porn actress with the same name. In Jr High we were explicitly warned by our teachers to go to whitehouse.gov for the government page and not whitehouse.com, which was a porn page. Needles to say that warning had the opposite effect. To say nothing of the amount of hentai that my prepubescent eyes got exposed to on countless anime forums. Shit was just out there in the open and moderation was largely limited strictly to illegal content.
I mean, hell, the commentor above really glossed over the whole hyperlink bait-and-swith phenomenon. Not just goatse, but meat spin, tubgirl, and of course who can forget 2girls1cup. And that was just the sexual content; no mention of the gore content like Happy Birthday, pain Olympics, or 1guy1jar. Or how about trying to download LinkinPark-InTheEnd.mpeg off Limewire and getting actual child porn. Yeah, at least torrents are largely vetted by the community.
Say what you want about Elsagate, sponsored influencers, or girls marketing their OF, but at least the major platforms try to moderate content, if only as far as will keep their shareholders happy. "Personalization algorithms" have their own issues, undoubtedly, but the prior landscape wasn't one curated by humans. It wasn't one where the filth was kept in the corners. It was an unfiltered wasteland, a Wild West where you got the good and the bad in equal measure.
Edit: Like the commentor above, I'm curious how old everyone is who remembers a more moderated internet. I suspect it's mostly younger millennials and older gen Z. It feels like the internet really started becoming mainstream in the late 00s and 10s, especially as cell phones with internet access became ubiquitous. Companies really started making an effort to more actively moderate around that time too.
Oh heck, you just reminded me of the day I got a goatse link for the first time with my (very nice, but very Christian, Mr. Rogers-esque) boss looking over my shoulder.
The Internet was not a safe, family-friendly, tidily segregated place by the late '90's; it was full of landmines even for the relatively experienced. We had to police IRC #bookz carefully to keep out disguised porn content so it didn't turn into alt.binaries.
It's still not. The nature of its nastiness has been glossed over by all the corporations, but it's still all there lurking below the front page.
Othereise Reddit wouldn't need untold hoards of moderators.
Which is why so many think the internet is so much safer now. They don't scroll past the front page.
I can't believe I'm nostalgic for the days when you'd get flashbanged by Tubgirl or force someone into installing a popup blocker by sending them Last Measure.
"oh advertising is harmless you say, let me show you the power of the dark side"
Successfully avoided half those as a teen (elder millennial)but you're missing lemon party. Which I absolutely linked and was linked to repeatedly. It was a "fun game"
I managed never to click on 2 girls 1 cup through luck and outwitting my peers by watching my links carefully. But I agree that the "old days" only were safer from sexual content if someone's old days were after that timeframe and/or because they were a kid and weren't looking for/really engaging with stuff like that. Some people came out of the AOL chatrooms unscathed.
Ah yes. One other moment I can't shake was the discovery of ass eel porn.
Every one of these I don't know personally is a victory.
Not having peers who would send stuff like that must've also been a huge part of my inadvertent success.
Edit: probably the reverse. I got a fair amount of anime links from friends, sometimes with specific instructions to not snoop around, or just directly shared on DVD-Rs with me.
Yeah I definitely found a lot of porn on places like limewire, and despite having an interest in it, but also realizing it wasn't really for me, I was mostly annoyed it wasn't the song I was trying to download.
It's easier to find the porn you want now, generally but I don't feel like I get more questionable links that might be porn.
Yeah that must have been supremely irritating to not get the song you're looking for. Doesn't matter if it's another maybe even better song, let alone surprise porn.
I do like that tags became a standard search feature. Even for fanfiction, it's really handy for doing a quick glance to see if something is what I'm in for today vs oh, okay, yeah no thanks. What an enormous amount of trust or aptitude for risk taking that we had, for clicking on and downloading unknown "this link probably has some of the things you wanted", before tags were a thing.
Absolutely, AO3 would be absolutely unusable for me without tags. When I want an explicit fic, I want to make sure I'm getting what I want, but also, like, sometimes I want to read a bunch of Wayfarers fanfic because Becky Chambers isn't writing anymore and the world is so wholesome and cozy.
For the limewire stuff it was about 50% virus, 10% random porn, 40% the song you want in my experience. But that's a real rough estimate. You could tell a lot from the file size. (But at the time that was not common knowledge)
50% virus sounds crazy high! Heck even 5% :/
Speaking of viruses I guess modern day virus scanners are doing a really good job? I haven't had to think about it for a long time now. That, or the ones that make a bunch of dialog boxes to be annoying, or plays your ding sound, or generate porn pop ups....maybe that kind gave way to ones that just run quietly on your computer mining bitcoins or something?
This is full anecdote but there were a lot of tiny .exes running around at the time.
Modern antivirus is way better but personally I’m downloading executables much less frequently than I did in those days. Back then there was a culture of PC personalization, there were so many programs to customize icons, fonts, scrollbars, cursors, sound effects, etc. Not to mention little “desktop toys” and interactive screensavers and animated wallpapers and bonzi buddies and the like.
Maybe it’s just because I grew up, but I used to spend loads of time fiddling with that stuff and it just doesn’t interest me in the same way now. I think the market for it has largely dried up. OSes have locked down a lot of the APIs that enabled those things, so they’re not even possible on modern systems. So now, if I’m downloading an application it’s one that actually does something I need, from a trusted source. Most people probably don’t vet their software that thoroughly but just that broader change in culture protects them from a whole class of malware that doesn’t exist anymore.
There's still an active market for Mac tweaks, but they're significantly more subtle (and often sold commercially for Apple prices) than the poweruser-focused Windows ricing we enjoyed back in the day. Bring back Rainmeter and the Windows Compiz knockoffs!
No I agree, I think the market has changed. A lot of those things were probably way more questionable in how good they were to have on our computers in the first place (so many cursors and toolbars for the browser...)
Oof. 1guy1jar scarred me. I still know the first frame of that one perfectly decades later so as to know to avoid it. It's such a comparatively innocent first frame, too. But at the same time, it taught such a valuable lesson, so it's not all bad.
Oh good heavens how did I manage to avoid all of that ?? I've been online since '95 and I've only heard of some of the shock photos you mentioned years after the fact by asking my dude friends. I totally believe you guys, I'm just really surprised and not sure how I got by without ever stumbling into violent imagery for example. That sounds terrible
I'm impressed and surprised you managed that. Even sticking to small numbers of reliably safe websites it was easy to stumble into the "weeds" as it were.
Reading this whole thread, I'm entirely out of my depths here. My mid 90s internet experience was apparently a rare unicorn in a walled garden. Never had anything weird happen on IRC chats (except that one time but I told the man I have to go for dinner, was slightly disappointed he left an hour later lol) nor anime share groups. Friendster, MySpace, live journal, Facebook, NeoPets, Napster, WinMX, Kazaa.....am I missing a bunch? I said in a different comment it might also be because I get a lot of my links and media through my friends group instead of random browsing - we'd share something funny and talk about it for a few days among many other topics. I didn't do a lot of internet stumbling around nor did I seek out I guess keyworded things on the internet.
Probably the sketchiest searches I've done on the internet were English language anime fandoms, but it didn't take more than maybe once or twice to nope out of the search results and go back to Chinese/Japanese language sites with better content or discussions (???)
Maybe this is part of it: if I searched for something and say, cartoon boobs or sketch sounding words turn up in the results, I U-turned out of there instead of following the rabbit trail. Can't encounter tall grass Pokemon if one doesn't even leave the towns I guess (???)
Honestly, nothing ever nearly as terrible as what @genuinelyCrooked described, by a large margin, to this day. What a terrible day to have eyes.
I didn't come across much negative content directly in my youth, but it was a pretty common "joke" to send someone to an innocent-seeming url that was actually gross porn. I was enough of a goody-two-shoes to not want to investigate, but even I knew some of the names of the offending sites.
I was warned off of albinoBlackSheep and new grounds, along with the -chan type forums. I'm sure they also have a lot of fine and actually fun content but I'm more risk adverse than I am good.
For better or for worse, I spent my very young childhood with very limited web access, basically only being able to play games on PBS Kids dot org. Once I was old enough that that wasn't tenable, my Internet experience was mostly text roleplay on tiny "run by a kid for her 5 friends" type forums. Definitely not completely free from risk but in my case it worked out well.
Albino Blacksheep and the Homestar Runner forums were my preteen hangouts. Newgrounds and eBaum’s World both had seedy vibes. (Also, the ABS locals had a hate boner for eBaum and kept their real edginess to Newgroungs)
Apparently, it's weird that I (an elder Millennial) managed to avoid all that as well. I wonder if it's because virtually all my "web browsing" was just CompuServe forums until the late '90s...?
The fact that I was always trying to be a "good Catholic boy" may have helped, too. But it sounds like a good half the exposure people had to those was inadvertent, do probably not.
By the late '90s, in high school, I had friends that would look up rotten.com for fun. But I never looked at it. (I vividly remember an incident where I was looking away and they described what they were looking at to me anyway. Good times.)
I'm a younger millennial ('92) and I remember everything you've described in this comment. Except Happy Birthday, I missed that one.
That tracks. I think it also had to do with normies preferring the sanitized nonsense internet over the minefield us maladjusted nerds enjoyed.
However, I'd credit chasing after Facebook's user count more than cell phones as the immediate reason why so many websites (reluctantly at first) cleaned up.
As a kid using the internet in the 90s, I didn't have to actively search out sexual content.
You just go online and it's just there. You try to go to a regular website and you get pop ups of giant dicks.
Really, then there was Newgrounds at some point for free games, but so many of them were violent or sexual maybe? I didn't go there for violent content at first. I stumbled into it and then thought it was funny and played more.
I remember a game where you were the school shooter or something.
I learned so many things from clicking misleading links. Like people sending others to lemon party or things like that. Even then, I think lemon party wasn't that old. Was it in the early 2000s?
There's a reason the internet is for porn song is a thing. But that was also quite late.
I really developed quite a twisted sense of humor from learning all these ridiculous things online without searching for them. They happened to me.
I didn't mind it though. As a juvenile, I just thought it was hilarious. I couldn't expose that to my offline classmates in school who didn't have access to a computer.
Imagine my dismay when I went "Hehehe. Search for blue waffle." Only to find actual waffles coloured blue.
As an adult, I still don't mind it. I think of those times fondly. It was ridiculous. But because of it, I learned a lot about how to manually remove viruses and things like that.
I'm very wholesome now though.
However, I would still be for a less sexual internet. The internet before was not at all like the internet now. It's far more dangerous with people sharing their actual information and life online. It's so prevalent in everything we do.
Whatever happened to online stranger danger? I've been 22 years old ever since I turned 12. More people should LARP and make alter egos online.
When I was 12 or 13, before MySpace was even really a thing, I'd made an email account to sign up for ElfTown. I got a spam email in that account with pictures of a bald man shoving his entire head inside of a woman's vagina. She had long red fingernails holding herself open and that looked like the most painful part.
That probably wasn't an algorithm or a common experience, but it was certainly not sought out. I didn't even know that was a thing someone could seek out.
Sexual content was often unavoidably served to you when I was a kid, even if you never sought it out or engaged with it. And I'm not even that old. In almost every respect, the Internet now sequesters sexual content (or outright bans it) far more than it did even 10 or 20 years ago.
I’ve been at this as long as you and it’s absolutely, definitely more prevalent now. Those 50 images you opened at once were 480x360 if you were lucky and like you said, it took an eternity to download them, praying the whole time that mom wouldn’t pick up the phone and kill the dialup connection. That’s nothing compared to instant-loading 4K livestreams of today. Hell, you can pull up a grid of them all running Brady Bunch style if you’re so inclined. Every fetish imaginable. You want pics? Vids? Full 360° POV interactive VR? Whatever, dude. The ‘90s had nothing on this.
But I think what OP is really talking about is (largely, but not entirely) the spam moderation problem. Adult content is being peddled at scale on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Discord, Reddit… mainstream, ultra-popular sites where people of all ages congregate. It’s at such a volume that containing it all is impossible. The spambots are blasting it faster and wider than any system is capable of responding to. It’s “obfuscated” to blend in with legitimate content and circumvent automated detection.
I am slightly optimistic that we’ll soon see better automated moderation through LLMs and image recognition models. This will be capable of looking at user-posted content like a human would, analyzing its contextual connotations and relevance, and determining whether it’s NSFW, spam, or both. I think that is basically possible today but doing it instantly at a scale that can withstand the firehouse of modern social media, that’s probably a couple years away at least. But I bet it’ll help get this situation tamed somewhat.
So many subreddits are drenched with softcore marketing of OnlyFans accounts. It's one of the reasons /r/mylittlepony banned people sharing their cosplays: too many of them were an OF recruitment funnel.
Even when you're seeking out some softcore porno, the OF spammers ruin the vibe at Reddit's once-thriving ecosystem of niche porn subs.
Moderation is certainly a part of it. But so much of the content on these sites is advertising. Sometimes it's an ad with a disclaimer, sometimes it's "organic" marketing by influencers, and sometimes it's a sneak preview of sexual content for sale. And people eat it up.
I'm less optimistic than you are with the use of LLMs for moderation, especially in the context of this topic. But I would love to be proven wrong.
I'm zero optimistic. Technology has been constantly evolving and this is still an issue.
If there is money to be made, it will continue. Such is capitalism.
Hmmm disagree.
Back then, pedophiles asked kids A/S/L and I guess the worst one could lose was a few hours and some text based innocence.
Smartphones with video and camera capabilities have made it possible for kids to send/receive sexually explicit materials that predators are absolutely using to extort for worse. The escalation time is far shorter. It's gone from a 1:10 slippery slope to a sheer cliff.
Edit: when it comes to other forceful sales tactics like time share, they absolutely know that if they let people go home and do normal things and think about it, they're far less likely to be hooked. Same thing here: if it takes a kid 30minutes to get one photo, and it takes a bit of time to type and establish some sort of repport, they'll get more time to check with their friends or an adult and back out. If predators can snag and get/send something within the first ten minutes of discord or snap, it's that much harder for kids to get away. Difference between sleeping in a haunted castle vs falling into a Croc pit.
And with adults, porn use has for sure sky rocketed from ease and prevalence. It was harder to amass terabytes of material once upon a time.
Nah the worst that happened was kids next used the phone line to talk to predators who then got their addresses and they were victims of grooming or worse.
An AOL chat room monitor accused of grooming a teen. This girl's only a few years younger than me.
This study (PDF) asks college students from 7 years ago about their chatroom experiences and though it says the number is small 12 percent of the sample size reported an in-person sexual encounter with an adult from a chatroom. That's not small at all IMO
"Text based innocence loss" is "Soliciting a minor for sex"and absolutely can be traumatic.
I really disagree with blowing that off as no big deal.
Hmmm that's fair, people have absolutely been luring since Krug offered shiny rocks to kids. I haven't thought that much about what the ultimate goals of predators are: to lure kids into the same physical space, eg, 90s predators were not satisfied with staying within the relatively "safer" text based environment either. I'll admit I somehow thought online predators means they're engaging in illegal sexually activities through whatever internet tools are available at a given time: text chat a kid, get what they want from the text, move on to text the next kid or text the same kid some more.
Its really hard for me to think about what regular healthy people who are sexually motivated usually do or would be driven to do, let alone unhealthy sexually motivated people. This thread has been in turns fascinating and mindboggling and funny and off-putting.....how are people this motivated?? Like, that it makes good money makes sense to me, but how is it possible for sex to be this profitable? And then clearly illegal stuff still has a ton of profitability/market and people risking life time prison terms!
It does make me feel pretty unsettled, to be honest.
By the way I really appreciate you linking that study, especially the introductory parts about how this all works.
Some predators do stay in virtual spaces, some very much do not and that's part of the difficulties in stopping the behavior. Plus kids want to please adults and adults can manipulate kids rather easily. The definition of a vulnerable population essentially.
Getting into the motivations is obviously like a whole other topic I think, but it's enough to know this does happen and frequently enough to get the numbers above.
If you don't think teens could get groomed online before smartphones, it just means you either weren't in the right spaces or weren't paying attention. My sister got in trouble for racking up her cell phone phone bill talking to guys she met in tiny forums with me, and this was the flip phone era. Only by the grace of fate or some higher power did she manage to get through her minor years without being physically taken advantage of, because my parents were not equipped to recognize or prevent what was happening and she now openly acknowledges that she was being groomed all over the place.
The way it went in the Roblox case in that thread is actually very similar to how it went back then. None of the grooming that led to the victim in that case meeting the perp in person in another state required the existence of smartphones. Change the names of some websites and that story could've happened when I was a kid.
This is how I see it. Explicit material per capita could even be lower than what it was in the beginning for all I know. With how many people there are now compared to before, if it was higher now, I feel like we'd see even more.
Hard disagree. Sure, let's say you could easily load up jpegs of boobs on the family computer back in the day, as you said you've done. Shit, I did it too, I get it. But not every person had that kind of access to that content, and they certainly couldn't do it whenever they wanted.
Nowadays? Every kid has a computer in their pocket that is programmed to feed them sexually suggestive content. It takes them 10 seconds to reach for their phone in class, on the bus, wherever, and start flicking through video after video of skimpy dances and OnlyFans ads. There literally isn't enough time in a person's life to view the entire feed that has been queued up for them.
Of course it's worse nowadays. I'm sorry, but this reads like such a terminally online take.
Perhaps you didn't make it to the end of my comment before replying? I said as much:
The Internet isn't worse, it's just so much more accessible.
I find it really interesting, because both sides have loud advocates. I see an equal amount, if not more, complaints that big internet companies are deliberately pushing down adult content, in a purportedly unfair manner.
You will absolutely get demonitized on Youtube. Twitch is liable to ban you. Advertisers hate adult content. Mastercard and Visa are liable to stop processing your charges.
Trust me, advertisers DO NOT like the porn.
I think the biggest issue is credit card companies being puritanical and refusing service to adult sites.
Apparently the biggest issue with adult sites is the higher chargeback rates and fraud making it higher risk for the CC companies, due to the puritanical nature of the consumers more than the companies
Don't forget to add in the grifters who believe in brand equity instead of "a dollar is a dollar" and, more so in the case of payment processors, execs who don't want their wives being hounded at the country club for being associated with a business that facilitated some unsavory transaction.
This brought up a mental image for me that feels relevant: the internet as a sheet of pegboard, and porn as a non-compressible fluid underneath. The more holes advertisers (or anyone, really) try to plug, the more the slime spreads out and finds new holes to squeeze through with more force, relative to the amount of force applied by the plugs.
For this analogy let's assume that the rate of growth of both the internet-board and the porn-slime is equal, so there is effectively the same amount of porn as there ever was, and it has to go somewhere, by nature if its being. It'll pop out plugs, make new holes, or do whatever it has to because physics.
Idk what the answer is, or if this was even a worthwhile comment, but there you go I guess lol.
I've thought about and discussed this quite a bit with friends over the last few years of watching the internet go down this path. It honestly is just a little depressing to have every platform just devolve into thirst traps and onlyfans spam bots.
I work in education technology adjacent to school device filtering software and I get to see a lot of what kids are watching these days online. Young kids, like 7-8 years old are watching weird fetishy YouTube videos pumped out by AI and designed to drill into their brains and attach hooks. Older kids are on tiktok all day watching girls and boys (sometimes of questionable age) flaunt their bodies, engage in faux sexual acts, and in some instances even flash the camera.
It's the unfortunate truth that sex sells, and no one does it sell better to than kids who have no idea what the hell is even going on. Platforms are playing naïve and say they're doing the best they can to keep kids from being exposed to this shit. But of course they're making money hand over foot by serving that content to them so at the end of the day as long as they have plausible deniability; they're incentivized to keep doing it.
Great comment and I agree with pretty much all of it! I don't think any of this is new, but it is accelerating and broadening faster and farther than it ever has before. Our puny brains are not built to contemplate the vast number of people that the internet serves us, and we just can't cope anymore, it's so easy to get lost and lose perspective.
BTW: ...foe-sexual... should be "faux sexual".
I honestly though foe-sexual was just another term I wasn't on board with.
Oops, you're right haha. Damn those pesky French origin words they always mess me up with their weird -"ux"s.
Its wild to think about too, I feel like I can't even handle what's going on with the internet these days and I've been chronically online for 2 decades now. I can't imagine how much damage its doing to kids brains. I hope I'm just doing the same thing every generation does and panicking over the next generation but this time it honestly does feel a lot different.
It's depressing to hear how much of this content does indeed reach kids. Does the filtering software you work with only support blanket bans on domain names? Or does it get more granular than that?
It can be a lot more granular than that, filtering software has come a long way since our days in school. That being said a lot of that is dependent on school configuration of the filters, so a lot of things slip through the cracks, especially on YouTube.
Kids are also just as smart as ever and constantly discover and share ways to get around filters on their school devices, which we never really can keep up with. On top of that, most kids have smartphones these days which usually don't have any filtering software whatsoever.
The joy of strolling through the network drives and deleting BESS.exe to liberate the school from her tyrannical control. Then some Novel NetWare update added proper permissions to the shared drives, and we moved to other methods.
I don't think the trend you are describing is really about more sexualization, but more the inevitable result of the so called "social media" that are being increasingly gamified for algorithmic optimization that leads more of such content. I believe every site that has its content controlled by algorithms is simply just getting worse and worse as it tries to optimize for our attention and money, and this trend you describe is just one of the results.
The answer of course is really to stop giving attention to services where you are not in control of what you consume, but an algorithm is. We need to put our own intent back in front of our internet usage. Go to a porn site for sex content. Go to a proper news site for news. Go to a good forum for quality discussion. Then it is pretty easy to avoid most if not all of that crap. The challenge of course is trying to keep your kids away from the algorithmic controlled internet.
I agree with your comment but seems to me OP is less experiencing internet users being more sexual and more internet users trying to increase their income. Bots trying to drive traffic to Onlyfans are there because those users expect to make money when someone visits their Onlyfans profile. Twitch streamers get money per viewer showing more is only done to get more viewers.
I think it's more the fact that with sexual content it's a relatively easy way to earn that money, both from the cost of creating it (It's moderately easy for someone to do even if they're not super attractive) as well as from advertising (Human eyeballs are immediately attracted to this type of content, even if you aren't). Then you add the context of companies trying to keep engagement up at all cost which results in what OP described.
If everyone loved could and loved doing woodwork we'd probably be invaded by everyone peddling wood related content.
There's a sexualization of "ordinary" spaces, but there' also a reorientation or commercialization of deliberately sexualized spaces. They're both developing a definite lean as they are graded to serve as portions of thousands of people's OnlyFans funnels.
OP is complaining about this happening to otherwise SFW social media feeds. People sort of running around Instagram in swimsuits or whatever to try and attract attention to them personally, which they can then get paid for (either by Instagram or through some kind of individual sex work subscription service).
But the same phenomenon has swept through spaces designated for sexual content, and dramatically reshaped the sexual content being produced. If you had a bulletin board of butts in 2009, you now have a bulletin board of people threatening to show you their butts on their OnlyFans page, and here providing butt previews designed to attract the attention of butt enthusiasts while not actually asuaging any butt-viewing desire they might have. Solving the customer's problem before they pay you is bad for business.
The material appearing in both places is doing the same basic thing, adapted to the required level of pants on each platform.
I hesitate to allege that doing this is "easy": I'm sure it has the same attention economy power law problems as anything else, where you work as hard as you can and you get exactly two subscribers, versus the people you are looking at with millions. Plus you are sure to have to deal with absurd verification requirements that are impossible for some legitimate people to satisfy, randomly reject you for no good reason sometimes, and also don't work to stop whatever they supposedly prevent. And if anyone you meet finds out what you are up to they might set about causing you trouble.
But it doesn't need to be easy when there are so many people trying to do it. Perhaps they are insufficiently supplied with other careers? Perhaps OnlyFans is conning people into thinking that they will make any money in the same way as the rest of the gig economy?
That's a new angle I haven't thought of: the decline of wanted ready quality content behind a deluge of advertising. Maybe it's now as bad as searching for yarn or craft ideas or recipes, but for butts?
I have no data for this and probably the least qualified person on the subject, but I imagine that OF work is the same as the rest of the gig economy: very few make anything like good money, and meanwhile their main profit is from the data users are generating for them. It's probably fairly easy to rotoscope live people performing actions that earn money, and eventually replace the faces with AI and bam, unlimited content they no longer have to pay creators for! Or at the very least be used as a threat to severely reduce payouts to human performers.
Thanks for the reply, you've put it in much better words than I could and were able to hit some points that I couldn't articulate. I just want to clarify that when I wrote easy I didn't mean it didn't take any work at all, I was more referring to how accessible it is, almost anyone can attempt to do it. That doesn't mean that you can give it a half assed try and be successful, you definitely have to put in the work for that.
In both cases, the moderation team ought to be proactive about banning the spammers, ban message of "back to poverty, idiot" optional. The problem is that then you'll get braindead users who enjoyed viewing the ads complaining about a lack of new content to updoot.
I think society has thrown every mode of politeness and modesty out the window and replaced it with "consent". It's an overdued correction from prudishness and public shame, which is great and all, but I do think we need to collectively admit this freedom is being used by greedy scumbags to push sexual advertising for an extremely lucrative industry. Consent now means we'll keep shoving sexual adverts in your face, and invade all the algorithms of your internet life, but hey feel free to say no for the 1000th time, it's all up to you.
I feel like a similar sentiment was expressed by women: yes we're free to ignore whistles and sniggers and offers of sex and "compliments" and flashes of trenchcoats all day, but dammit I just want to go about my day without having to say NO 50 times an hour.
Ironically, I didn't consent to be in an internet space full of malicious fake news and sexual advertising. It feels like harrassment, honestly.
I do think that when one has criticisms about the sexualized landscape, one is presented with a false dichotomy: hey, look at this guy over here trying to drag us back into the stone age and witch trials! Boo! Stop shaming sex!
No. I want consentual sexual content to be available for allosexual people who are looking for sexual content. But I also want to walk and run and click and do life in general without sexual content when I'm not looking for it.
It's the difference between making sex work legal and safe, vs having to say no to 50 young women standing around trying to sell their bodies on my way to the train station.
So what do we do? I think one solution is to put the cat halfway back into the bag. (1) Extremely high punishment for grooming and coercion tactics like host club scams, loverboy schemes, romeo pimps etc. (2) have sexual corners of adult only society and the internet where sexual content* is allowed. (3) Have non sexual corners of society where sexual content is not allowed and unsolicited sexual anything is considered harrassment.
And let adults choose where and how much time to spend on either space. Have people freely and without shame spend all the time here and there. Keep your identities separate between the two realms and never the twain shall meet: if you tell anyone your alt from the other space, that's considered advertising and you have to nuke either of those identities. Repeat offenders have to nuke both.
Maybe it's not just sexual content that I'm tired of. Maybe I just want a corner of the world where we can be free from algorithms and enshittification and be marketed to and having value extracted from my engagement/existence.
Note re: dancing. This one time, I was visiting my in law's friends, who have two teenaged boys raised very prudishly. The boys suggested we watch a boring sort of family film and I thought they were weirdly a little too enthusiastic....until there was a scene where a fully clothed teen girl did a (by today's standards fairly tame) dance number. The looks on their faces was.... embarrassing to me as an adult. :/ I felt like I got dragged into someone else's underaged fantasy hour and it felt gross. I looked over at my spouse and we exchanged a look of understanding....I wasn't the only one reading the teens' expressions that way. So, I guess I have no idea how feasible or desirable my proposed corner would even be: people are very sexually driven it seems, and when push comes to shove they'll find table legs or chicken breast alluring, I guess.
I think you're romanticizing the past a bit. In reality, there has always been sexual advertisement. Or at least as long as I can remember. The only difference is that now it's actually advertising pornographic materials, whereas in the past it was being used to advertise everything else. I remember spending countless hours waiting through sexualized advertisements for movies, Carl's Jr. restaurants, and Axe body spray. It was really common in video games; conventions would have "booth babes", and we probably wouldn't still be hearing the name "Tomb Raider" so much if Lara Croft wasn't designed to be sexually appealing.
If anything, the amount of sexualized advertising seems to have gone down. But then again, that's from me not paying attention to the social media sites where this seems to be a problem.
Edit: while responding I've come to agree with you.
It's entirely possible I'm unwittingly romanticizing the past: even today I'm really out of sync with pop culture stuff that generate buzz based on sex appeal or some kind of sexual scandal. I just wasn't part of that corner of the internet back then.
Where did you encounter that quantity of ads while waiting for movies? :/ like, theatre trailers, or online somehow? My pipeline was Blockbuster --> IRC groups --> torrents --> modern day browser steaming with adblock , so I can't say I experienced ever having to wait for ads.
With regards to booth babes, I'm still happier seeing those once a year at a con rather than on a daily basis via YouTube video recommendation queues full of red/yellow shock text and thighs and cleavages. If I'm choosing to play Nier: Automata where I'm staring at 2B's bum while she goes up step ladders, at least that is as advertised via trailers I clicked on. It's still better than being suddenly surprised while watching a video about cute cats or someone playing an instrument or introduction of food or tourism or whatever.
Sex sells, but I want to be able to choose to buy it instead of having it snuck in everywhere.
Actually, sorry, let me dial this back. While typing this out I've come to realised my biggest problems are NOT with today's movies or games or heck even the internet, but with YouTube and Twitch and Discord and Meta. You're right, I don't see any of that garbage when I'm not on those garbage platforms.
You just reminded me that sometimes I hear shouted from across the house "Hey, do we have any chicken tits in the freezer?"
A very large elephant in the room is the literal business of selling relationships/sex to minors, which twitch and onlyfans profit a ton from, and arguably insta/tiktok/etc as well.
I'm not sure what the laws on this are/were, but i'm pretty sure if it turned out your phone sex line made money hand over fist from 13 year olds calling with their parent's credit card, or hell even their own, you'd be fined and shut down fast.
These days you see people on twitch who are ROLLLING in donations, literally selling "if i get to X i'll do Y" sort of deals, or DM's, or whatever, and yet this is all above board somehow? That's before you even get into the fact that some of these people are literally underage themselves.
I don't blame people for succeeding/choosing to do this. I think it's a hard fucking thing to ignore the fact you could be making decent to OBSCENE amounts of money by selling your looks/behavior, and it's expected to see that category of business explode with the ease to which you can do so now (and with the stigma of being found out much lower).
I think it's fucking insane though that twitch is still allowed to operate as is. I'm pretty sure if a seductively dressed person went in front of a high school and said they'd do squats if enough people gave them $50 that'd violate a whole shitload of laws, and yet somehow that's basically what's happening?
I feel I have a different experience than others in that I don't get served porn bots all day long. My Tiktok and Facebook and YouTube feeds don't have any OF hawkers. With the caveat that I absolutely deliberately follow a couple of people who I know have OF, but one for their sex educator/ADHD content and one because he's a nerdy paralegal. But I'm not even getting OF pitches from them or thirst traps.
I choose to follow a few people that do thirst trapish content, but uh, we're talking more women with swords and armor or in suits, or a rugby team.
My ads aren't weird and sexual, though I use an adblocker on Firefox, I also use the apps for all three of the social media I list above. When I'm on Reddit I don't see any of the weird stuff folks are talking about.
I came into this thread wondering if it's really about the content that's out there or is it about the consent. Because everything I'm seeing is consensual 98% of the time. But now I'm wondering if I'm the person not interacting with the ads. As someone else said in another thread, they're attracted to women so they're "going to look".
I am also attracted to women but have zero desire in ogling the sorts of material described here. So perhaps, I'm not lingering and clicking on it? Or I'm being filtered out by demographics on ad buys? Idk.
Yeah, OP's description not track with my experience at all, but I do also have almost zero engagement with any of that type of content, since I'm asexual. My Tiktok is one of the cleanest social media feeds out there, and ads with scantily clad women were much more of a problem when I was a teen than they are now.
If anything, I've found the internet has gotten less sexual as major websites and credit card processors shy away from adult content. Surely we all remember the Tumblr "female presenting nipples" memes, or the brief period where OnlyFans said they were going to ban explicit content?
I'm allo so it can't be the whole story, but being uninterested in the male gaze targeted advertising clearly does quite a bit in the algorithm(s). Good adblocking goes a long way but so does, apparently, exclusively being on text based subreddits or clicking not-interested on ads served on Facebook.
I did think of the closest to sexual content I've been served in an ad in a while and it was for apps for less than fanfic quality paranormal romance literature. I wasn't interested and haven't seen them for over six months or probably more, but I guess they count.
My feed is incredibly clean too. It's just lots of art and animals. The ads I get aren't sexual either. It's a lot of "buy this very niche thing from our shop or we'll die soon."
My current Facebook ads are
Kamala Harris*
Tactile fidget
Rollacrit bag of holding (I own one already)*
(Refreshed)
Max*
Democratic Party*
Pebblebee
(Refreshed)
A 5e compatible RPG
WhatsApp
Cat feeder
Dice
Backerkit for an RPG tool*
Solar company
Coyote and Crow games
Cat toy/furniture
Kitnipbox*
I started companies I've purchased/donated to in the past.
There are also a bunch of the "you don't follow this but you might like it" that are also not sexual but are often dumb.
I constantly get ads for therapy services which is a little concerning but only because it's accurate lol
Lol "what does the algorithm know about me that I don't know?"
Reminds me of urban legends about seeing diaper ads before someone has even taken a pregnancy test.
I don't use Tiktok, but I see a ton of sexualized content in the Reels section of my Facebook feed. I use a browser extension to prevent FB from tracking my activity and serving tailored content, so instead they just serve me the lowest common denominator Reels, which are always sexualized. Here are the first examples I see in my feed today. It's so blatant.
Unfortunately, there's no way to block the Reels section in my feed. I click Hide every time, but it doesn't seem to be having an impact.
For the record, there is a reason people compliment the Tiktok algorithm. It's a lot easier to curate a very clean timeline very quickly there compared to Facebook or Instagram. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook is just genuinely much worse about targeting users, but I don't use Facebook for anything but messenger these days so I only see reels when family members send them to me directly.
I don't get sexualized stuff there but I specifically don't engage with them. I get frosting and slime and stuff.
I don't engage with it either. This is just what Facebook shows when they don't know what else to show you based on tracking your activity. Very telling IMO.
In contrast this is mine
Recommended reels on mobile app
It's literally "how scoopable is the slime" rating... It's not even niche fetish stuff. (Or if it is, it's very niche I guess)
What, pray tell, is the *thwock quality of slime? The scoopability is listed a a different quality so related but not the same I guess? Is the onomatopoeia related to when a scoopful of slime breaks off from the main body? How'd you get into slime? Man, it's a big world out there ! They look so fluffy and marshmallow-y!
....is this niche hobby related to those translucent water pearls popular a few years ago? (Orb-bees?) Maybe an ASMR thing? I can understand maybe a handful of channels specializing in slime, but enough of it to warrant recommendation reels seems bigger than I'd thought
It's a sound thing and how satisfying of a... "thwock" it makes when scooped, BUT I'm not really into slime, I just get the occasional slime video served up to me.
Maybe tailored content isn't so bad. My Facebook reels are 100% hair bleach fails and color tutorials. 80% of which are Brad Mondo specifically.
Ha, right? If anything though, the situation has just made me use FB less, which is a good thing. It's limited to chatting with a few people internationally over Messenger and keeping up with my neighborhood group at this point. Most people on my friend list are dormant nowadays.
I guess they really do have standards documents for everything!
I think there are two separate issues.
In my opinion sex is a normal healthy part of life and im fine with it being on any platform. Anecdotally, Ive felt that there is less sex in popular culture lately, or it's less gratuitous. In pop music, movies, and the internet too. At least as compared to the 90s and 00s.
On the other hand the Internet continues to become more driven by algorithms that will use anything, including sex, but also outrage, envy, etc. to get peoples attention. This is the larger issue, as I see it. I'd like to see more thoughtful, authentic content of all kinds, including sexual content. But I don't know how we incentivise that kind of content.
That is a choice parents make. If they dislike what happens if they do that, they can not do it. Of course, they'd have to more closely monitor their children, and a non-zero percentage of parents often prefer to largely ignore their children most of the time.
Your entire post seems to basically resolve down to wanting government (and businesses) to censor and restrict legal content. Here, "adult" content, sexual content, and of course pornographic content.
Such content is either legal, or not. If it's legal, what's the problem? That kids can stumble across it? As children (usually teenagers and pre-teens) enter puberty and their hormones begin encouraging them to notice and consider sexuality, they seek out sources of sexuality. This is not new, and has been happening since there were humans who entered puberty. Well before the invention of computers.
This desire for sexuality doesn't lessen as children become adults, obviously. Driving adult markets to seek out adults with money to spend on adult content.
Governments throughout history have used the excuse of "protecting the children" to engage in all sorts of oppressive and abusive action. American history is littered with governments from local to federal who used such excuses to savage and brutalize marginalized and vulnerable communities. That's what happens when you give people power; they use it, and some will abuse it.
Right now, Congress is trying to pass the latest in a series of "child protective laws". One of the results will be to eliminate anonymity on the internet, since they want to require online service providers to prevent children from being able to access "adult" content.
Putting aside how incredibly problematic (and prone to abuse) the definition of "adult" content can be (reference MAGA and other Conservative classifications of LGB or Reproductive Health groups and activities as "adult" as a very easy and current example), to do what the proposed law demands means you won't be allowed to move around online without being validated with both the sites and your ISP. Legally validated. Verified.
Sure, right now, your ISP knows who owns the account, but that has no bearing on who might be using the account. And sure, lots of people have verified themselves to all sorts of online entities, but that's voluntary.
What if I don't want to be 100% identified online? I just can't click on certain sites, can't engage with certain content? That's a First Amendment violation, it restricts my ability to engage with speech as well as restricts those speaking that speech I wish to engage with.
To comply with the law, they'd have to know it's me at that computer. So I'd have to be verified in some way, which means there would have to be records. The ISP would have to database all of my online activities. Which makes that information available to the government since they're who demanded (legally required under threat of force) the ISP maintain such records.
Putting aside how incredibly problematic, how grave of a privacy violation such action would be, just the "adult content" aspects are bad enough. What happens if Texas or Utah or Iowa decides human reproductive health information is "adult content"? Which they pretty much have already. But right now, they can't go after, say, Wikipedia for hosting encyclopedic information on the body, on sexuality, on all sorts of "adult" subjects. Even though they're already going after libraries for shelving books on those subjects.
With the proposed law, backed by the sentiment you seem to be projecting, those regressive states would be able to declare open war against adults and sexuality. They'd be able to not just require that any website or other online entity comply with the law, but they'd be able to use the Power of the State to go after those sites. That adds costs, and opens them up to legal action. Including criminal action; reference places like New York City in the 70s, for example, where adult bookstores and adult movie theaters would often be raided and clerks (not just owners, basic employees working the registers there) would be arrested.
The power that law will give to bad faith actors in government is tremendous. It could literally be read to be enforceable against, say, a forum. Like this one. What if someone shows up wanting advice on a sexual topic? Presto, adult content is now happening. Same for any forum, comment section, and certainly website.
Some teenager wants to open a forum thread somewhere, or (gasp) even start a website to offer a community where other sexually curious people like him or herself could electronically gather to talk and learn ... now they have to figure out how to "stay legal." Which means they have to have the money buy or build a system to verify IDs well enough to meet the legal requirement.
And of course, by doing it, they have to prove that to the state. What happens when a local attorney general investigates a site, finds out it's operated by someone in that district, and uses the law to demand records? They look further, and however the legal stuff plays out, now that kid has been outed to his or her parents. Opening that child, who was just trying to learn and perhaps find other like minded children, to punishment, abuse, and worse if the parents disagree with the child's interests or choices. It could even open the child to criminal action by that abusive AG.
Those records out each and every visitor or user of the site. Now they're building lists of people who do things, or engage with things, certain people in government might decide are unwanted. You're a swinger, into BDSM, gay, poly, or any of dozens upon dozens of other examples? Presto, you're on a list because they required you put yourself on it, and can target you.
The law is a violation of the First Amendment on so many levels. Of course, that won't matter because we don't have rule of law anymore. But the principle still stands.
Parents who want to protect their children need to protect their children. Themselves. Don't hand over phones, don't hand over laptops, don't hand over computers. Monitor use. If the parent cares so much that their precious snowflake might encounter (gasp) adult oriented content online, then that parent has the authority (societal as well as legal) to manage their children to prevent such an occurrence.
Penalizing the adult population, opening them up to dangerous legal and criminal prosecution actions (and worse), simply because some parents can't be bothered to manage their own child, is an abuse of the government's power. A violation of the trust society places in government. It's unreasonable.
Especially when you consider how widely varied the world's view of sexuality is, and how different cultures around the world engage (or don't) with sexuality and the human body.
Maybe people should live and let live more, and meddle in the morality of others less. Living and let living includes the right to manage how one's children live; that's part of the rights and responsibilities of being a parent. Offloading those responsibilities off on society is incredibly problematic.
The Chromebook that my kid used daily in Kindergarden says otherwise.
It's really bad since several of the educational games are plagued by scuzzy freemium monetization tactics.
Example 453,682 why technology in the classrooms initiatives were such a major mistake. IMO, students don't need their own computer until they're expected to write a complete essay at the very earliest.
Kids getting their own computers is so weird to me. I didn't have free access to a computer at school until 8th? grade. I didn't have my own computer until I bought a cheap laptop at 17. Wtf are 6 year olds even doing with a Chromebook?
Getting their entertainment through YouTube? Learning how to type in Google Docs? Learning that technology = Google?
I mentioned how I don't believe legislation is the answer in my post. And I agree with everything you're saying regarding how all legislation attempts are, in short, bad in one or many ways.
I also agree that parents should take an active interest in their kids' internet usage.
While I didn't say this part, after reading through many of the comments, I suppose my question is really "is there any way a cultural shift could change this? And what would that look like?"
I don't visit most of those places, but I do play Genshin Impact and, uh, yeah. Playing with my niece, I do sometimes try to point out that the clothing isn't normal. ("Why are they fighting and climbing mountains in party outfits?") There was one sidequest that I hope she never finds.
Which is funny because Genshin Impact actually has very mild and censored designs due to Chinese regulations!
I have mixed feelings about this. On a site level, yes, sex is everywhere. On a community basis we do pretty well at having non-sexy spaces, and the trend continues.
A bicycle subreddit I was on once posed the idea of allowing NSFW content. Seeing what was happening with self-promotion for many individual hustles, as well as the hobby-as-fetish thing, I, and I think many others, opposed it and fortunately won a vote to stop it.
I don't oppose OnlyFans or similar things, but feel a lot of spaces that were created for consensual exhibitionism have also been used as marketing platforms, and this has become the march of sexually-charged content on the Internet by and large. I also think that it's fairly well compartmentalized with "sexy" and "non-sexy" communities on the same sites being fairly well-defined in the cases I've seen.
I consume a lot of porn, and don't think I'm a prude, but I think sex and the rest of life should be somewhat separated generally and don't generally feel most sites have been failing in that.
I miss Reddit's once-thriving amateur porn ecosystem. It went from being powered by genuine exhibitionists to being used for OF recruitment funnels spamming their tangentially related photos (or it's a photo staged to fit into as many niches as possible so the same post can be re-used across communities without being removed for being blatantly off-topic).
I have no issue with sexual content being present, it’s been around since I was a kid in the early 90s. Kinda became normalized over time. “Sex sells” is something I heard pretty early on and it made sense so that was it for me really. I will say I was completely caught off guard by YouTube allowing full topless nude “breastfeeding tutorials” with what seems to be a large selection of childless onlyfans models. No age restrictions, just a disclaimer at the start and you’re good.
No. The internet doesn’t have a definitive size to invade “too much off”. Do I come across too much porn unintentionally? No, I really don’t. I don’t know how you use the internet, but the way I use it, I don’t come across porn unless I intend to come across porn. And believe me, I intend to come across porn every now and again.