There's a cognitive dissonance to the opposition to this:

a) Content controls don't work, what are the government thinking? b) This is parents' problem, they should use content controls.

Individual action doesn't work because it only takes one kid in the class who doesn't have parental controls then everyone loses. There's also obvious workarounds such as VPNs and a teenager walking into a pawn shop with £50 for a second hand smartphone without parental controls.

It also makes no sense that parents can't be bothered to turn on parental controls yet can be bothered to run a national grassroots campaign for this stuff (see e.g. http://smartphonefreechildhood.org)

See also- I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway: https://www.thefp.com/p/why-are-our-fourth-graders-on-pornhu... 8-year old watches violent porn on friend’s iPad: https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/32857335/son-watched-viole...

Although your idea of an OS-level age flag is also being pushed by the Anxious Generation's Jonathan Haidt, so definitely has merit/traction as an alternative.

> Individual action doesn't work because it only takes one kid in the class who doesn't have parental controls then everyone loses.

The response to this, of course, is that many kids will be educated by their responsible parents.

They will know Santa isn't real or what sex is or why sometimes girls and boys kiss other girls and boys.

Are we going to outlaw teaching your own children about life next? Because they might "spread" the knowledge of... The real world they are about to experience and navigate?

I like to point out in these threads that my first exposure to "pornography" was a cunnilingus scene in Al Franken's political tirade Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. I was eleven.

I don't think my parents had realized that scene was in the book. But I don't think it matters that much. Kids are going to encounter sex. In a pre-industrial society, it's pretty likely that children would catch adults having sex at some point during their childhood -- even assuming they didn't see their own parents doing it at a very young age. Privacy used to be more difficult. Houses often had one bedroom.

I don't mean to say that content controls are useless. I think it was probably for the better that I wasn't watching tons of porn in middle school. But I don't think that content controls need to be perfect; we don't need to ensure that the kids are never exposed to any pornographic content. As long as it isn't so accessible that the kid is viewing it regularly, it probably isn't the end of the world. Like in the one story, PornHub didn't even have a checkbox to ask if you were eighteen. Just don't do that. I didn't end up downloading porn intentionally myself until about five years after reading that book.

Is there better evidence to the harms of porn than “dopamine” and “lost innocence”? That article written by a 17 year old, I’m old enough to be her parent and I saw hardcore internet porn in 5th grade. This isn’t new. Personally I don’t think it harmed me. But I’m open to hearing studies showing otherwise, not just hand waving.