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(LifeSiteNews) — For decades, the pornography industry has taken advantage of laws protecting free speech to disseminate their depraved and highly addictive content. With the advent of the internet and the invention of the smartphone, however, porn addiction among the young has become normative, and governments are finally recognizing that we face a profound cultural crisis.

Our collective sexual economy has been shredded by ubiquitous porn use, and scarcely a week goes by without more profoundly depressing evidence of that fact surfacing in the press, from the prevalence of “choking” to the role of pornography in fueling the transgender movement.

The United Kingdom has been attempting to implement “age verification” for sites where pornography can be accessed for years, and after a series of false starts, the BBC reported on January 16 that the process is finally underway.

“All websites on which pornographic material can be found, including social media platforms, must introduce ‘robust’ age-checking techniques such as demanding photo ID or running credit card checks for UK users by July,” the BBC noted. “The long-awaited guidance, issued by regulator Ofcom, has been made under the Online Safety Act (OSA), and is intended to prevent children from easily accessing pornography online.”

In the UK — as in Canada, the U.S., and most other Western countries — children are exposed to porn, on average, by age 13, with many being exposed much younger (some studies put it at age nine). Melanie Dawes, the head of Ofcom, stated that the protection of children is paramount: “For too long, many online services which allow porn and other harmful material have ignored the fact that children are accessing their services. Today, this starts to change.” While the implementation details are still not entirely clear, Ofcom will be demanding that social media platforms install “highly effective checks” that could mean “preventing children from accessing the entire site.”

Indeed, that seems likely. Instagram is filled with soft-core porn, and worse — and many young people increasingly cite Instagram as their on-ramp into pornography. TikTok is also filled with pornographic imagery, and users can access Pornhub within five clicks without leaving the SnapChat app. One reason that this inconvenient truth about social media is so often dismissed is that the Overton window on what constitutes pornography has dramatically shifted. Content that previous generations would have recognized instantly as pornographic is now so ubiquitous that many no longer see it for what it is. For many young people, however, it is merely the first step on a journey into long-term porn use and eventual addiction.

Predictably — and absurdly — the BBC reported that “some porn sites and privacy campaigners have warned the move will be counterproductive, saying introducing beefed-up age verification will only push people to ‘darker corners’ of the internet.” This ignores the fact that sites where pornography can be accessed are the “darker corners of the internet,” and the fact that we do not recognize this highlights how desensitized we have become to sexual imagery. A survey by Children’s Commissioner Dame Melanie found that at least one in 10 children in the UK see pornography by age nine, and Ofcom estimates that a minimum of 14 million people in the UK watch digital porn.

“The rules also require services which publish their own pornographic content — including with generative AI tools — to begin introducing age checks immediately,” the BBC reported. “Age verification platform Yoti called such technology ‘essential’ for creating safe spaces online.” Ofcom’s legally binding guidance is sweeping, and a “non-exhaustive” list of “technologies that may be used to verify ages” includes:

  • Open banking
  • Photo ID matching
  • Facial age estimation
  • Mobile network operator age checks
  • Credit card checks
  • Digital identity services
  • Email-based age estimation

Ofcom emphasized that “self-declaration of age” is not permissible and that companies must ensure that pornographic content cannot be accessed until users have completed a comprehensive age check. Previously, most porn sites merely asked users to affirm that they were 18 before permitting them to browse the site; many did not even offer that laughable fig leaf.

Big Brother Watch, a privacy campaign group, told the BBC that many of these methods may endanger privacy. “Children must be protected online, but many technological age checking methods are ineffective and introduce additional risks to children and adults alike including security breaches, privacy intrusion, errors, digital exclusion and censorship,” Silkie Carlo said. “We must avoid anything like a digital ID system for the internet that would both eradicate privacy online and fail to keep children safe.”

It is worth mentioning here that even from a privacy perspective, there is no safe way to use a porn site. Porn users should be aware that the sites they have visited, the videos they have watched, and the “dark corners of the internet” they have visited are stored somewhere, and that this information could come back to haunt them. Concerns about adult privacy with regard to porn use are a joke. The only way to maintain sexual privacy is to abstain from digital pornography use — or any porn use, for that matter — entirely. That said, I agree that age verification merely places a barrier to porn use that many young people can, with effort, circumvent.

That is why I firmly believe that the best way forward is to correct the faulty application of free speech protections to pornography is to recognize porn as a dangerous substance that is ruining minds both young and old, destroying our sexual economy, and creating a dangerous rape culture that has transformed the dating scene into a minefield. We should ban pornography entirely.

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Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National Post, National Review, First Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton Spectator, Reformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.

His insights have been featured on CTV, Global News, and the CBC, as well as over twenty radio stations. He regularly speaks on a variety of social issues at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

He is the author of The Culture War, Seeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion, Patriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life Movement, Prairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield, and co-author of A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide with Blaise Alleyne.

Jonathon serves as the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

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