Stop being interested in pornography, teenagers. You're causing big problems for the government.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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Teenagers, stop doing activity X. Activity X is very bad for you. Your government wants all teenagers to listen and not participate in activity X.
Heeelllloooo Streisand Effect.
tbf I don't think teenagers generally need the government saying "don't be interested in sex" to make them more interested in sex.
Probably more helpful to say "Stop using VPNs to watch porn"... helpful for VPN providers' sales, I mean.
Yeah, that's more of where I was headed with that one. Teens don't need encouragement to do the deed, their hormones will take care of that for them lol
Similar stuff happening in India lol. They banned like 850 porn sites in 2018 but didn't just stop there. Every year there are waves of "porn bans" and most recently they banned redgifs as well. Almost like certain authorities are fixated on porn.
So how do you go about closing virtual PRIVATE networks that are usually used in business and especially banking? Hmm. Bit of a big brainer isn't it.
I bet they're gonna try and require VPN websites to put age checks on them.
Oh boy, I can’t wait for the thriving trade in VPN accounts made outside of the UK then sold to UK citizens by a third party.
Don't touch my bag!
That seems like a very safe bet:
Dame Rachel told BBC Newsnight: "Of course, we need age verification on VPNs - it's absolutely a loophole that needs closing and that's one of my major recommendations."
I expect Dame Rachel will be subsequently calling for age verification on providers of VPSes and physical servers when she's made aware that anyone might just set up their own VPN server on any of those. And on anyone providing OpenSSH access, since that can provide a tunnel to an integrated SOCKS server. Then the Tor network
and given that that's noncommercial and since US-based nodes aren't doing business in the UK, the US at least doesn't recognize UK jurisdiction over US Tor nodes and isn't going to enforce anything against them.
I expect that there are quite a few others.
Don't get too comfortable with the idea of the US in any way being a roadblock to the UK. Our government is extremely interested in exactly the same kind of bullshit.
Nah, those are individual states.
EDIT: To clarify: the bounds on legal jurisdiction aren't tied to policy on pornography or anything like that. They just state that there are machines that the UK can't make legal rules for. The UK could try blocking traffic to them on the UK's side, but the US won't enforce rules against them.
For that to not be a loophole regarding the UK, the US would have to have identical policy on age verification for social media in all of the US. But in the US, age verification law on social media is something that is set at a state level.
"This tells us how much of the problem is about the design of platforms, algorithms and recommendation systems that put harmful content in front of children who never sought it out," the commissioner said, calling for the report to act as a "line in the sand".
From the report text:
Content warning
This report is not intended to be read by children.
This report makes frequent reference to sexual harassment and sexual violence. This includes descriptions of pornographic content, language and discussion of sexual abuse.
By the commissioner's standard, the commission's report itself should probably be behind an age-gated access method or at least not indexed by Google.
So they installed all this surveillance for no reason... Damn...
Don't VPN services usually require you to pay through means only available to adults? Isn't that age verification enough?