https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/opinion-age-verification-for-porn-sites-makes-sense
An electrician (who might have some knowledge on algorithms) reckons that "age verification" for porn sites "makes sense". That's his entire point. He doesn't really bother to make a real one.

He focuses a fair bit on alleged things one particular company might have done over five years ago (in one case, women "sort of" consented to a film, but didn't understand how widely it would be shared, and they later filed a lawsuit that a third party company (not the platform), had misled them), but this is actually immaterial to the argument of whether porn is intrinsically "bad" (or "harmful" to someone viewing it).

Now, there could be a conversation about whether that case couldn't have been better handled (or other things), but it hardly warrants this framing of "porn being evil". He also talks about a sexual extortion case in the same breath as porn, and while of course, that is a dreadful crime, that case also has nothing to do with porn (or these platforms). It is just there to try to implicitly conflate these things together. The perpetrator has also since been convicted for this crime.

Then, again, he mentions a case of sextortion, even though it is not relevant. In one case, which does involve "Pornhub", the plaintiff admits that she "doesn't know if the content was removed". Also, while it is claimed that Mindgeek does "not do enough" in one particular lawsuit, this sounds like a bog statement someone would put in when trying to claim damages from a company, and it doesn't say much in and of itself. In any case, it only tells us what one particular company might have done in the past, and it is again, immaterial to the point being made here.

"Various options for age verification, such as ID documents and video selfies" The proposed methods in the article are clearly extremely intrusive. They're also likely to have a chilling effect, and could even fuel more sextortion by providing more blackmail material for a criminal to leverage. It's not clear to me what the proposed "tool" ("age verification") has to do with any of these points, and it seems they're inserted simply to try to rile people up.

#canada