throway11

> because if you say anything about it, you can be smeared for being pro-porn and anti-child, regardless of the truth.

Fair, I agree that it can be seen as a shrewd move by government for exactly this reason.

They both provide stimulus, I don't think the physicality of the stimulus is important?

But I agree with you on education, and maybe I now have to concede my original point, since you're right to say that if children received better education there would potentially be less of a problem...

Generally I don't respond to comments on hn, but I've created this account solely to respond to this.

The availability of hardcore porn to young adults is a genuine problem, there's isp level filtering but it doesn't work, part of the problem is image search, which embeds content into the page which means that it doesn't get picked up by the ISP's filter.

I think the situation could be greatly improved by not embedding explicit content into image searches and instead fetch explicit content from a separate cache which could be easily blocked by ISP level filtering. I'm no expert though, I suspect there's a performance penalty if you stop embedding the content, but maybe that would be a reasonable sacrifice.

As for protecting kids, I think we can agree that now that every kid has a smartphone with unfettered web access it's certainly more difficult to protect them from porn than it is to protect them from, say, alcohol where you generally need to prove your age etc.

I am by no means saying that state imposed filtering is an appropriate solution, but I'm not entirely certain what other effective solutions are available - it's a genuine problem.