Here’s how politicians, censorship advocates and hysterical journalists in the corporate media are pushing for a scheme that will encourage Australians to access worse and more violent pornography sites, all for a warm but useless inner glow about protecting kids.
According to the Morrison government-appointed internet censorship body the E-Safety Commission, 75% of people aged 16-18 have “encountered” pornography, often at much younger ages. Access to pornography by young people has been identified by the government as somehow a contributor to male violence toward women — yesterday, after a less-than-fruitful meeting of national cabinet, the federal government announced it would fund pilot programs aimed at “curbing easy access to damaging material by children and young people, and tackling extreme misogyny online”. It defines “harmful content” as “pornography and other age-restricted online services.”
Children in the 20th century were able to access analog pornography as well, albeit usually of a far tamer nature. And the link with male violence is not established. It’s hard to reconcile the significant fall, by more than half, of the domestic homicide rate since the 1980s with the idea that anything on the internet contributes to it (a similar argument applies to terrorism, given we had far more terrorism in the pre-internet 1970s than now). Nonetheless, young kids accessing porn is clearly something any society would want to curb.
The E-Safety Commission — which was heavily criticised in 2021 when it tried to shut down sex worker websites, which would force sex workers back onto the streets — investigated the pornography issue after a 2020 House of Representatives inquiry report, chaired by devout Catholic LNP member Andrew Wallace, recommended age verification be “expeditiously” pursued.
The problem is, 84% of all Australian men and 54% of women also use pornography. In regulating access to pornography, you’re regulating the great majority of the population. The problems of restricting one group of users and not another are significant. They start with the fact that no one — despite extensive effort in places like the UK — has devised a mandatory age verification system that isn’t a deep affront to civil liberties, a huge privacy threat and creates a vast trove of data for identity thieves — and is simple to circumvent.
Even the E-Safety Commission admits “a one-size approach for all businesses is unlikely to work” and that age verification is merely “one method for limiting children and young people’s access to online pornography … it will take a combination of technological solutions to address the issue”.
The government knows that age verification can’t work, and has done little to progress the issue. It’s now been pushed into funding trials of tools to limit under-18 access to pornography by the media and censorship advocates. Ideas like “age tokens” have been advocated, whereby an adult can go to a trusted third-party provider, provide identity details, and receive a token that can then be used on an adult site. But that merely transfers the problems of age verification from, say, Pornhub, to this “independent third party”, which will amass a vast trove of identity information and be able to produce a list of everyone who wants to access an adult site.
The bigger problem, as one international pornography provider told the E-Safety Commission during consultations, is that:
Measures which create too much friction will deter customers or users from accessing compliant sites. They emphasised that this could create incentives for users to follow the path of least resistance and access alternative adult sites, which are non-compliant with any age assurance regulations. It may also be less secure for users, as well as less ethical in the production and distribution of adult content, and is more likely to contain harmful content.
Put simply, if you make it harder to access regular porn sites, users, including kids, will just go somewhere else much worse. The censors, the media and the regulators will be responsible for that perverse outcome.
Alternatively, people will just use a VPN to route around Australia’s censorship requirements, which is what people currently do to access torrenting sites ostensibly blocked by the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s mandatory “blacklist”.
None of this is new. There was a similar moral panic in 2007, forcing the Howard government to rush out an internet filter hastily cobbled together by the Department of Communications. “Protecting Australian Families Online” (PAFO) involved a downloadable filter that parents could install at home, or ISPs could operate on their servers, based on ACMA’s blacklist (WikiLeaks would later leak the list). It was made free, and cost nearly $90 million.
The whole exercise was rendered somewhat moot when a 16-year-old bypassed the filter within 30 minutes.
At least John Howard and Helen Coonan understood controlling what kids see is primarily a parental issue and it was their job to provide tools to help parents do that. Under Labor, then Communications minister Stephen Conroy spent several years trying to put together a mandatory internet filter (Conroy, always happy to argue policy, joined in a debate with some idiot here at Crikey) before giving up in 2012. Ironically, Conroy’s efforts had been fiercely opposed by the Coalition, which routinely warned of a sinister Labor plot to censor the internet.
The Coalition are now the enthusiastic backers of age verification and a “papers please” requirement for the majority of Australians who access pornography, having evidently lost their enthusiasm for internet freedom — and forgotten the lessons of PAFO.
Would having to provide age verification make you think twice about accessing porn? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
