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SIXTY PERCENT OF people in Ireland believe people should be required to provide official ID to access adult porn websites, a new poll has found.
A Claire Byrne Live/TheJournal.ie by Amarách Research of 1,000 adults on Monday found that just 26% of people believe you should not need official ID to access pornography websites, while 14% of people surveyed said they didn’t know if they’d support such a requirement.
Under radical new laws being introduced in the UK, people who want to view pornography online could require official ID to do so from July.
Websites which primarily host porn will be required to carry out age-verification checks to ensure anyone visiting the site is over 18 years old in a bid to prevent children from accessing pornography.
It’s a world first. Because of that, it is not clear exactly how it will be implemented or if it will even be effective in preventing children from accessing pornography but the Irish government has said it will consider a similar system to the UK’s so-called ‘porn block’ law as part of new legislation on online safety.
In this week’s episode of our podcast The Explainer, Caroline West, a doctoral scholar in sexuality at DCU, and TheJournal.ie’s Senior Reporter Michelle Hennessy join us in studio to examine all aspects of the new law.
The Explainer / SoundCloud
Find a full list of where the podcast is available here.
Ideas, thoughts, or feedback? Email podcasts@thejournal.ie
This episode was put together by presenter Sinéad O’Carroll, executive producer Christine Bohan, producer Aoife Barry, assistant producer/technical operator Nicky Ryan and contributors Caroline West, a doctoral scholar in sexuality at DCU, and TheJournal.ie’s Senior Reporter Michelle Hennessy. Design by Palash Somani.
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Are they trying to tell us that 6 in 10 people agree with censorship of the internet? I do not believe that is true at all. Mind conditioning to accept the thin edge of the wedge.
@Dave Doyle: This seems to mre about panic than anything else. There’s a perception of panic, largely among a certain generation, that there’s porn everywhere on the internet – and that it can be stopped. Both of these statements are wrong.
Obviously, like everything else on the net, the user must go looking for it, and the last person it will stop is a tech savvy teenager. So why create the perception of panic?
It is possible for anyone to use their modem to lock their computer down, in as much as it can be done, however this requires a certain degree of knowledge or of taking the time to learn it. (yes, I know the terms I’m using)
This then leaves a certain amount of suspicion that the entire debate has been created in order to begin ‘locking down the internet’, we’ll just have to wait and see if this turns out to be correct. Of course by then it’ll be too late.
@Arch Angel: i doubt somebody is trying to lock down the Internet. But i can see moves like this accidently becoming a stepping stone to further denials of personal freedom. Porn blocks would be used as precedent to take restrictive actions in ‘the public interest’.
@Arch Angel: Porn + children are the excuse. The reality of what they intend is something else.
Toxic 6.9/10!!!!
@K Lawlor: I don’t mean literally ‘locking down the internet’, what we’re discussing isn’t my particular cup of coffee. However if I were forced to have to give up my anonymity because of adverts or cookies from elsewhere, would I take steps to circumvent it? Yes, in a heartbeat.
@Dave Doyle: Enough people are now recognising and accepting that heavy exposure to pornography is doing an inordinate amount of damage to the human psyche. That’s aside from how despicable the industry is and the awful treatment of the performers. Alongside an attempt to censor young impressionable children from exposure to this world of unreality we must also start to properly educate them on it!
@Dave Doyle: Helen Lovejoy comes to mind!
@LD: Censorship just breeds interest. Have you tried telling a child or teenager not to do something?
Porn does negatively affect tennagers perception of what a healthy sexual relationship should be but its up to the parents to not shy away from teaching their kids properly. It’s not the government’s responsiblity to put up ineffective walls.
How about better and more comprehensive sex-ed in school? You can’t hide sex from kids forever. That’s impossible. You can give them the tools to recognise unhealthy sexual dynamics and how to avoid recreating them though.
Stop being frightened and start being proactive.
@David Rogers: genuine question. Can pornographic magazines be bought by children in shops
@David Rogers: I agree entirely about that educational approach and believe that should be the prime focus when it comes to porn. I do not believe in attempting to censor porn entirely from the internet because it would be a waste of time but I don’t see any problem with putting restrictive measures in place around age.
Another case of Ireland trying to copy everything the UK does.
@Paula Mackie Senior: Are the people in the UK a different race to us?
@Paula Mackie Senior: Are the people from the UK a different race to us?
@Paula Mackie Senior: how in the hell could it be anything to do with racism?
@Paula Mackie Senior:
Are you saying he’s racist against Irish people for being lazy and uncreative?
Or
are you saying he’s racist against UK people because everything they stand for is shit so we shouldn’t be copying them
Or both
Or do you just not have a clue wtf you’re talking about and just be presumptuous and fire out the racism card and appear to be morally outraged.
Look at *yourself* perhaps
@Jazz Buckler: she hardly the first person to mistakenly use the term ‘racism’ when they meant ‘bigotry’, it’s practically a typo
@Alan Brazil: I’d prefer to copy the Dutch, sex and weed for everyone (over 18 of course)
@Paula Mackie Senior: He’s British himself. He won quite a few caps for Scotland in the 1980′s.
Again this has nothing to do with porn and everything to do with the start of net neutrality, it’s only the beginning of it and people need to wake up to the facts of what the government is doing
@colm connolly: I think it’s somewhat more subtle and insidious than that, the threat regarding this is will be twisted into the worst thing any of us can imagine, not just porn but child endangerment and paedophilia.
Whether real or imagined, we’ll be told of children at risk and it’ll be difficult to stand up and counter such a powerful threat, few men would risk publicly doing so. The result is a threat we may doubt and question but more or less have to accept because of it’s nature, few will be seen to publicly question it for fear of how society may judge them.
The result is that polls like this and media campaigns won’t get an accurate picture of the situation, they’ll just reinforce a predetermined image.
6 in 10 people are grannies
@joyal sojan: can there really be that many grannies? It sounds a little high. I think you might be spending too much time on the wrong sites there.
@joe: Careful! That’s not a work appropriate link!
@Earth Traveller: it is until the ban is introduced
@joyal sojan: It is a link to a porn site. It is not appropriate for the workplace; unless someone works in the porn business, I suppose.
This is not good for data privacy. There has to be another solution.
Something needs to be done. Kids nowadays are being thought one in the hand is worth two in the bush.
6 in 10 people are stupid and dont understand this “ban”wont work and is incredibly easy to get around with vpns which children will very quickly learn how to use
@Ian McNally: Ian you are 100% correct. The government should consult the internet providers of this country, broadband providers, mobile phone providers, and internet specialists on how exactly this will work.
Asking someone to verify their age is easily worked around with a VPN which will trick the website into seeing the person accessing the website is not from Ireland, the VPN would be routed from any number of countries, and the host website will see the request coming from a country that does not require age verification.
This would be highly in their favour to allow VPNs to access their websites, as they make a heckuvalotamoney from adverts. In fact, these websites could double agent it and charge the Irish government for putting up these blocks, but sell VPN passes on the side as part of the membership to the porn sites. Get money from the Governments, and get money from the residents of that country to access via VPNs.
Win Win Win for the porn companies.
@Ian McNally: 6 out of 10 people who know nothing on how the internet works. I can tell you 100 percent of kids do these days and they will use a vpn to get around this silly idea, poor policy but the agenda whats really driving this is all about net control.
It’s not that I don’t support it. It just won’t work. There’s already free VPNs out there that will circumvent it straightaway. And kids know how to do this already.
It’s a total waste of time and money.
4 in 10 people here support porn
Anything that can be done to protect children is good.
6 out of 10 people are clueless about how the Internet works.
It’s a meaningless law. Kids will always find a way around it. What we need is parents taking an active role in their child’s online activities. A good idea might be no smartphones until they are 16. Plenty of the Nokia 3310 types of phones out there again which are sufficient for secondary school children until they are mature enough to access the web unsupervised. Also why the hell have some primary pupils smartphones? That’s ridiculous parenting.
@Windom Earle: The internet is an essential aid for education and an important part of day to day life now. I think it’s a bigger problem than you realise if you believe having all 16 year olds to be computer illiterate to be some sort of solution.
Probably journal staff reporters need something to watch from behind their desks when their board that’s were the 4 per cent comes from ha
PornCurb!
60% of the survey candidates were priests
@this_is_ireland: I think at this stage everyone knows that the celibate men in black dress with high morals aren’t all that celibate, nor are their morals that high.
This is a slippery slope to wank tax
@tweetforjunk: it could lead to a sticky end
It’s nothing to do with this topic whatsoever, it will soon be common that each country has restrictions in place on the internet. In many places this already exists China for example have one of the craziest internet setups, everything is logged and monitored thus giving the government control on what every single user does.
If the government controls the internet they control the users deciding what adds to show / not show blocking all sites they want to access, this argument will only back the wanting of this which is a joke any government that needs to control there network to this extreme in such manner has problems in my opinion.
You have no privacy on the internet only via a secure VPN not a free one one that has a strict no logging policy.
Our poor teenagers will go off the rails. They’ll end up with permanent twitches. Porn Speakeasies you name it!
Polls are useless
What’s to stop little Johnny grabbing his Dad’s passport and signing up? Stupid idea.
It’ll be interesting to see the details on what sites are blocked and I think Irish people should wait and watch on this one. I’m in strong favour of an internet where porn and disturbing content isn’t easily accessible for children although I hope this isn’t being used as a “save the children” facade to also block torrent sites, download sites or open forums like Reddit which technically may include porn.
Is this not a GDPR issue
Good idea, I don’t want the younger kids stumbling upon something they weren’t looking for, the older kids will use a VPN but they were probably ready if they made the effort. ISP can see everything as it is so there is no extra privacy concerns that I can see.
And what will happen is people will have to try harder to find it using proxy servers and end up stumbling across god knows what.
I’d like for ISP’s to block porn and have it as an opt in. You would have to specifically ask for it to be unblocked.
VPN for the win!
To And all my friends who mocked me for keeping my Jazz DVD collection from Amsterdam ha hah.. who’s laughing now? Oh wait..
Vpn. All the way the kids will cop it before the politicians
600 people is hardly 60 percent of the people of Ireland.
have your say