I'm going to contradict the rest of the commenters here: I strongly support this change. The ease of producing and profiting from child pornography has risen tremendously in recent years due to the advent of technology, and it's perfectly ethical for tech companies to account for their impact and attempt to mitigate it. There is no slippery slope from child porn prohibition to political censorship, as so many other commenters fear.
> There is no slippery slope from child porn prohibition to political censorship, as so many other commenters fear.
The UK ISPs implemented Cleanfeed, a joint database to block access to child abuse materials, many years ago. Your feelings were pretty common.
Since then Cleanfeed has expanded to censor copyright infringing sites by court diktact, and proposed legislation (which will, in some form pass) will effectively use it to block all sites not suitable for under 13 unless they implement age verification and where the guidelines can be updated at will explicitly for policial purposes by the Secretary of State.
So it is pretty hard to take your statement seriously where such slope exists and many of us are much further down it.
> The ease of producing and profiting from child pornography has risen tremendously in recent years
Have I missed something?
Running a porn site with underage content and receiving big money from big payment processing systems stopped being an option in the early 2000s after some big busts. Then individuals would try it, and would try to use shady payment sites linked to other crimes. Then child porn, and even traces of past discussions of it, simply disappeared from open web (thanks to Google silently sugarcoating the search results, and hosting and ad businesses being increasingly picky about what they want to see). A typical person won't be able to find any of those producers (apart from obvious scams and honeypots) neither on open web nor on anonymous networks. Heck, even I, having some experience, probably won't be able to find anyone “selling child porn” even if I was told to do so and visit every possible place of discussion.
Though I agree that producing all kinds of media with modern technology got easier enormously. A dedicated handheld camera looks like a steam engine today.
