WEBVTT - Should porn sites have age restrictions?

0:00:01.200 --> 0:00:03.520
<v Speaker 1>My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda

0:00:03.760 --> 0:00:08.520
<v Speaker 1>Bunjelung Cargoton woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges

0:00:08.600 --> 0:00:10.800
<v Speaker 1>that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the

0:00:10.800 --> 0:00:14.360
<v Speaker 1>Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres

0:00:14.360 --> 0:00:17.279
<v Speaker 1>Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the

0:00:17.320 --> 0:00:20.079
<v Speaker 1>first peoples of these countries, both past and present.

0:00:25.760 --> 0:00:28.320
<v Speaker 2>Good morning and welcome to the Daily oz It's Friday,

0:00:28.360 --> 0:00:32.120
<v Speaker 2>the first of September. I'm Sam Kazlowski, I'm Zaras Sidelin.

0:00:32.240 --> 0:00:35.120
<v Speaker 2>The government has stopped short of setting an age limit

0:00:35.320 --> 0:00:39.920
<v Speaker 2>for online pornography, saying the technology just isn't quite there.

0:00:40.360 --> 0:00:43.680
<v Speaker 2>This is despite the fact that, according to a safety research,

0:00:43.800 --> 0:00:47.360
<v Speaker 2>more than seventy five percent of Australian adults support the

0:00:47.400 --> 0:00:50.479
<v Speaker 2>idea of the government creating some sort of age control

0:00:50.560 --> 0:00:54.000
<v Speaker 2>for porn. So what's led to this conclusion and what

0:00:54.120 --> 0:00:56.520
<v Speaker 2>will it mean for the safety of young people on

0:00:56.560 --> 0:00:59.040
<v Speaker 2>the Internet. We'll let you know in today's Deep Dive.

0:00:59.120 --> 0:01:02.320
<v Speaker 2>But first, as news from Australia's biggest airline.

0:01:02.040 --> 0:01:05.760
<v Speaker 3>Yesterday, Quantus has scrapped its end of year deadline for

0:01:05.800 --> 0:01:09.480
<v Speaker 3>customers to redeem their COVID travel credits. This is of

0:01:09.560 --> 0:01:12.399
<v Speaker 3>course what we did a deep dive on earlier this week,

0:01:12.480 --> 0:01:14.440
<v Speaker 3>so we will chuck that in the show notes. But

0:01:14.920 --> 0:01:18.399
<v Speaker 3>the decision does follow recent scrutiny over the airline's handling

0:01:18.480 --> 0:01:22.279
<v Speaker 3>of canceled COVID flights. Quantus customers with a credit balance

0:01:22.319 --> 0:01:26.000
<v Speaker 3>can now request a cash refund instead, while Jetstar, which

0:01:26.040 --> 0:01:28.720
<v Speaker 3>is owned by Quantas, says customers can use their COVID

0:01:28.760 --> 0:01:33.560
<v Speaker 3>vouchers indefinitely. It coincides with news that Australia's consumer watchdog

0:01:33.680 --> 0:01:37.880
<v Speaker 3>is suing Quantas for allegedly advertising flights it had already canceled.

0:01:38.840 --> 0:01:41.440
<v Speaker 2>Police are investigating the cause of a fatal crash on

0:01:41.480 --> 0:01:44.960
<v Speaker 2>a Victorian highway yesterday. Four people were killed when the

0:01:44.959 --> 0:01:47.960
<v Speaker 2>car they were traveling in collided with a truck. The

0:01:48.000 --> 0:01:51.040
<v Speaker 2>truck driver was hospitalized with non life threatening injuries.

0:01:52.360 --> 0:01:55.560
<v Speaker 3>Gambling signage outside New South Wales pubs and clubs has

0:01:55.640 --> 0:02:00.240
<v Speaker 3>officially been banned from today. Gambling related signs things like

0:02:00.360 --> 0:02:04.400
<v Speaker 3>VIP lounge or Golden Room, and images of dragons, coins

0:02:04.480 --> 0:02:08.560
<v Speaker 3>or lightning motifs must be removed or concealed. Liquor and

0:02:08.600 --> 0:02:12.119
<v Speaker 3>gaming New South Wales will now begin compliance inspections, promising

0:02:12.240 --> 0:02:16.040
<v Speaker 3>a zero tolerance approach from December one. That's when eleven

0:02:16.080 --> 0:02:18.440
<v Speaker 3>thousand dollar fines will be handed out to venues who

0:02:18.440 --> 0:02:19.880
<v Speaker 3>fail to adhere to the change.

0:02:20.880 --> 0:02:23.600
<v Speaker 2>And today's good news. The eighth season of the AFL

0:02:23.600 --> 0:02:28.600
<v Speaker 2>Women's Competition begins today. Defending aflw Premier's Melbourne will take

0:02:28.639 --> 0:02:32.079
<v Speaker 2>on Collingwood in the season opener tonight. Round one will

0:02:32.120 --> 0:02:36.000
<v Speaker 2>continue throughout the weekend and include local rivalry games in Sydney,

0:02:36.080 --> 0:02:42.799
<v Speaker 2>Adelaide and Perth. According to E Safety Research, seventy five

0:02:42.840 --> 0:02:46.360
<v Speaker 2>percent of sixteen to eighteen year olds have seen pawn

0:02:46.560 --> 0:02:50.840
<v Speaker 2>online now. Of that group, nearly one third saort before

0:02:50.840 --> 0:02:53.640
<v Speaker 2>the age of thirteen, and then another half between the

0:02:53.680 --> 0:02:56.680
<v Speaker 2>age of thirteen and fifteen. So what we wanted to

0:02:56.720 --> 0:03:00.679
<v Speaker 2>look at today is how the government's been considering limiting

0:03:00.720 --> 0:03:04.720
<v Speaker 2>the access Australians under eighteen have to porn.

0:03:04.520 --> 0:03:09.840
<v Speaker 3>Online pornography aside, we know that regulating online spaces is

0:03:10.080 --> 0:03:14.519
<v Speaker 3>extremely difficult, and then when you add the layer of pornography,

0:03:14.639 --> 0:03:18.880
<v Speaker 3>I imagine it's even harder. What's the government been considering

0:03:19.080 --> 0:03:21.960
<v Speaker 3>in this space? How do you even begin to regulate this.

0:03:22.080 --> 0:03:25.360
<v Speaker 2>Okay, So at its most simple level, what's being proposed

0:03:25.600 --> 0:03:29.120
<v Speaker 2>is a process of age verification to stop under eteens

0:03:29.120 --> 0:03:30.840
<v Speaker 2>from accessing porn on the internet.

0:03:30.919 --> 0:03:32.480
<v Speaker 3>How do you do that, Like, what does that even

0:03:32.520 --> 0:03:32.840
<v Speaker 3>look for?

0:03:32.880 --> 0:03:35.520
<v Speaker 2>Well that's where things get a little trickier because the

0:03:35.560 --> 0:03:37.760
<v Speaker 2>how and the what it would look like and the

0:03:37.800 --> 0:03:40.640
<v Speaker 2>back end of it is actually really hard to work out.

0:03:40.880 --> 0:03:44.120
<v Speaker 2>So the government asked the a Safety Commissioner and that's

0:03:44.280 --> 0:03:47.920
<v Speaker 2>Australia's independent regulator for online safety, to kind of figure

0:03:47.960 --> 0:03:48.240
<v Speaker 2>it out.

0:03:48.320 --> 0:03:51.160
<v Speaker 3>You're going there ready to the solutions. I think before

0:03:51.640 --> 0:03:55.640
<v Speaker 3>we've really highlighted what the issue here is. What are

0:03:55.720 --> 0:03:59.800
<v Speaker 3>the issues that we're talking about here in relation to pornography.

0:04:00.000 --> 0:04:02.640
<v Speaker 2>Well, there's a few concerns here. So E safety has

0:04:02.680 --> 0:04:06.480
<v Speaker 2>done some research which unsurprisingly found that exposure to porn

0:04:06.640 --> 0:04:08.680
<v Speaker 2>was one of the top concerns for parents of children

0:04:08.800 --> 0:04:12.240
<v Speaker 2>age two to seventeen. Now, another point brought up by

0:04:12.320 --> 0:04:15.600
<v Speaker 2>E safety is that, while the research into this space

0:04:15.760 --> 0:04:20.440
<v Speaker 2>is complex, some studies suggest an association between adult consumption

0:04:20.640 --> 0:04:25.200
<v Speaker 2>of mainstream porn and gender based violence. E Safety says

0:04:25.240 --> 0:04:28.080
<v Speaker 2>that some of the studies have characterized the nature of

0:04:28.120 --> 0:04:32.720
<v Speaker 2>mainstream porn as normalizing depictions of sexual violence and degrading

0:04:32.760 --> 0:04:36.240
<v Speaker 2>sexual narratives about women. So with all of this context,

0:04:36.480 --> 0:04:39.919
<v Speaker 2>the E Safety Roadmap suggests that limiting access to this

0:04:40.000 --> 0:04:44.080
<v Speaker 2>content before somebody is eighteen would actually make someone better

0:04:44.120 --> 0:04:48.159
<v Speaker 2>equipped with critical reasoning skills and context in order to

0:04:48.200 --> 0:04:51.040
<v Speaker 2>interpret what they're seeing and minimize potential harm.

0:04:51.279 --> 0:04:55.280
<v Speaker 3>You've said them minimize what they're seeing. But you know,

0:04:56.000 --> 0:04:59.000
<v Speaker 3>a fourteen year old logging on somewhere in Australia might

0:04:59.040 --> 0:05:02.080
<v Speaker 3>be seeing something very different to thirty five year old

0:05:02.080 --> 0:05:05.839
<v Speaker 3>logging on elsewhere in the country. And we're using the

0:05:05.880 --> 0:05:09.719
<v Speaker 3>catch all phrase of pornography. But not all porn is

0:05:09.800 --> 0:05:10.200
<v Speaker 3>the same.

0:05:10.520 --> 0:05:14.240
<v Speaker 2>There's a massive spectrum, and in the creation of the roadmap,

0:05:14.560 --> 0:05:17.279
<v Speaker 2>E Safety says they've consulted all sorts of people who

0:05:17.320 --> 0:05:20.560
<v Speaker 2>work to make or publish porn, and the roadmap does

0:05:20.680 --> 0:05:24.320
<v Speaker 2>indeed acknowledge that in a local context, many producers of

0:05:24.400 --> 0:05:29.880
<v Speaker 2>local content are female and LGBTQAA plus. Now on the

0:05:29.920 --> 0:05:34.320
<v Speaker 2>other end of that spectrum, the international porn market is

0:05:34.320 --> 0:05:38.039
<v Speaker 2>fairly dominated by the company minds Geek, which owns porn Hub,

0:05:38.160 --> 0:05:41.680
<v Speaker 2>amongst other popular sites. All of that to say, not

0:05:41.800 --> 0:05:45.560
<v Speaker 2>all porn is the same or even problematic. But one

0:05:45.600 --> 0:05:48.080
<v Speaker 2>of the issues coming through in this report is that

0:05:48.120 --> 0:05:52.800
<v Speaker 2>despite children not actively seeking out pornographic content at present

0:05:52.960 --> 0:05:55.120
<v Speaker 2>in the wild West of the Internet, they are at

0:05:55.240 --> 0:05:57.000
<v Speaker 2>risk of being exposed to it anyway.

0:05:57.200 --> 0:06:00.200
<v Speaker 3>So the majority of sixteen to eighteen year old of

0:06:00.279 --> 0:06:04.640
<v Speaker 3>seen pornography of some description and sometimes without meaning to.

0:06:05.600 --> 0:06:08.600
<v Speaker 3>So what does the roadmap consider as the way forward?

0:06:08.800 --> 0:06:12.000
<v Speaker 2>So, yeah, this roadmap was the e Safety Commissioner's attempts

0:06:12.120 --> 0:06:15.720
<v Speaker 2>to see how the government could go about actually enforcing

0:06:15.760 --> 0:06:18.200
<v Speaker 2>an age limit on porn and what that would look

0:06:18.240 --> 0:06:21.080
<v Speaker 2>like online. Now, my first thought when I think of

0:06:21.160 --> 0:06:23.839
<v Speaker 2>age verification online is when you go to order some

0:06:23.880 --> 0:06:26.679
<v Speaker 2>alcohol and you just asked to kind of input your age,

0:06:26.960 --> 0:06:29.320
<v Speaker 2>and there's a drop down menu and you select your year.

0:06:30.200 --> 0:06:32.880
<v Speaker 2>And the issue in that situation is that you're relying

0:06:32.960 --> 0:06:36.200
<v Speaker 2>on trust, which the roadmap points out is a pretty

0:06:36.240 --> 0:06:39.840
<v Speaker 2>significant flaw because research shows that kids often lie in

0:06:39.880 --> 0:06:41.360
<v Speaker 2>these situations about.

0:06:41.200 --> 0:06:42.839
<v Speaker 3>I was going to say when we all made Instagram

0:06:42.920 --> 0:06:44.840
<v Speaker 3>accounts back in the day, That's exactly what I was

0:06:44.880 --> 0:06:46.839
<v Speaker 3>thinking lately. Thirteen before I was.

0:06:46.839 --> 0:06:49.839
<v Speaker 2>Thirteen, definitely, And you know I also lied about my

0:06:49.880 --> 0:06:52.880
<v Speaker 2>age to Facebook at some point, So we have to

0:06:52.880 --> 0:06:55.440
<v Speaker 2>look at different options, and that's why the roadmap looks

0:06:55.520 --> 0:06:58.320
<v Speaker 2>at a variety of different ways the technology could work

0:06:58.360 --> 0:07:03.760
<v Speaker 2>a bit better, proposals around facial or voice analysis technology.

0:07:04.040 --> 0:07:07.360
<v Speaker 2>There was also some mention of using government issued documents

0:07:07.400 --> 0:07:11.640
<v Speaker 2>to confirm someone's age, but those also raise different issues

0:07:11.800 --> 0:07:14.080
<v Speaker 2>or areas of concern, and these ones are more about

0:07:14.120 --> 0:07:19.000
<v Speaker 2>privacy or bias in technologies. There is one interesting alternative

0:07:19.000 --> 0:07:22.840
<v Speaker 2>model currently being trialed in Europe. It's called EU Consent,

0:07:23.200 --> 0:07:25.680
<v Speaker 2>and the way it works is it issues an electronic

0:07:25.800 --> 0:07:29.480
<v Speaker 2>token based on your age, and that way the verification

0:07:29.600 --> 0:07:34.200
<v Speaker 2>technology isn't actually storing your personal information. It's what they

0:07:34.280 --> 0:07:37.120
<v Speaker 2>call a double blind system. So the site that you're

0:07:37.200 --> 0:07:40.080
<v Speaker 2>visiting doesn't know who you are, and the token issuer

0:07:40.240 --> 0:07:43.600
<v Speaker 2>doesn't know what sites you're visiting. So the roadmap recommends

0:07:43.600 --> 0:07:45.920
<v Speaker 2>that the government trial a lot of these technologies and

0:07:45.960 --> 0:07:48.720
<v Speaker 2>see what's a good fit in an Australian context. But

0:07:48.800 --> 0:07:51.480
<v Speaker 2>as well as all of that technology talk, they also

0:07:51.520 --> 0:07:54.440
<v Speaker 2>insist on the investment in more education measures, which I

0:07:54.480 --> 0:07:55.520
<v Speaker 2>think is really important.

0:07:55.720 --> 0:07:58.040
<v Speaker 3>So you've said there that there needs to be more

0:07:58.080 --> 0:08:02.240
<v Speaker 3>work done to understand what's happening in an Australian context,

0:08:02.440 --> 0:08:04.880
<v Speaker 3>but I think this is one of those issues that

0:08:05.840 --> 0:08:08.360
<v Speaker 3>it is a worldwide issue. It's an international issue no

0:08:08.400 --> 0:08:12.000
<v Speaker 3>matter where you are. Have we seen any similar responses

0:08:12.080 --> 0:08:13.600
<v Speaker 3>from any other jurisdictions.

0:08:14.120 --> 0:08:17.640
<v Speaker 2>There are a few examples. I remember a couple of

0:08:17.680 --> 0:08:20.480
<v Speaker 2>months ago we reported on the fact that Utah in

0:08:20.520 --> 0:08:23.680
<v Speaker 2>the US had passed the law requiring porn sites to

0:08:23.720 --> 0:08:27.480
<v Speaker 2>take what it describes as reasonable steps to verify users

0:08:27.600 --> 0:08:30.760
<v Speaker 2>are at least eighteen years old. In response to that,

0:08:30.880 --> 0:08:35.400
<v Speaker 2>Pornhub actually blocked users in Utah from accessing its content altogether,

0:08:36.040 --> 0:08:41.839
<v Speaker 2>and similar legislation has been passed in Louisiana, Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Virginia,

0:08:41.880 --> 0:08:45.640
<v Speaker 2>and Texas. The UK is also in the final stages

0:08:45.679 --> 0:08:49.319
<v Speaker 2>of considering its second go at legislation that would require

0:08:49.360 --> 0:08:51.920
<v Speaker 2>porn sites to verify the age of its users.

0:08:52.240 --> 0:08:56.360
<v Speaker 3>So, ultimately, E Safety, who works in this space, has

0:08:56.520 --> 0:08:59.560
<v Speaker 3>looked around and seen what they think is the best

0:08:59.559 --> 0:09:02.920
<v Speaker 3>way for But then government actually has to do something

0:09:02.920 --> 0:09:03.800
<v Speaker 3>about it, right.

0:09:03.800 --> 0:09:06.440
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So they kind of put these recommendations to the

0:09:06.440 --> 0:09:08.920
<v Speaker 2>government about how to move forward. It's then up to

0:09:08.960 --> 0:09:12.679
<v Speaker 2>the government to respond, and the government have heard E

0:09:12.800 --> 0:09:16.200
<v Speaker 2>Safety recommends that they go trial different technologies and perhaps

0:09:16.280 --> 0:09:19.199
<v Speaker 2>find the best way to implement them. But they looked

0:09:19.200 --> 0:09:22.319
<v Speaker 2>at the concerns that E Safety raised about the limits

0:09:22.320 --> 0:09:25.800
<v Speaker 2>of the technology available and ultimately made the decision that

0:09:26.120 --> 0:09:29.800
<v Speaker 2>it wasn't really up to scratch. So rather than testing

0:09:29.840 --> 0:09:33.319
<v Speaker 2>any of these technologies itself, the government has been said

0:09:33.480 --> 0:09:36.080
<v Speaker 2>taken a position where they say they're going to hold

0:09:36.200 --> 0:09:39.680
<v Speaker 2>the porn industry accountable to ensure children are kept safe.

0:09:40.240 --> 0:09:42.840
<v Speaker 2>It says it will keep an eye on technology to

0:09:42.880 --> 0:09:46.160
<v Speaker 2>see if anything changes, and perhaps trial it later down

0:09:46.200 --> 0:09:51.920
<v Speaker 2>the line. That's all we've got time for today and

0:09:52.000 --> 0:09:53.959
<v Speaker 2>this week on The Daily Oz. But if you did

0:09:54.040 --> 0:09:57.040
<v Speaker 2>learn something from today's episode, we'd love to hear your

0:09:57.080 --> 0:10:01.520
<v Speaker 2>reflections and thoughts in the questions box on Spotify. We'll

0:10:01.520 --> 0:10:04.679
<v Speaker 2>be back on Monday morning. Until then, have a wonderful

0:10:04.880 --> 0:10:05.840
<v Speaker 2>spring weekend.