>> Serious question: why are people siding with Imgur here, instead of blaming the company that chose to ignore the laws of the country it operates in?
Because if we've learnt anything from the debate around the Online Safety Act, it's that the majority of people are so unbelievably addicted to porn they feel like it's a human rights violation to put up barriers to their access to it. While there are obvious privacy arguments against sharing your ID to access these sites the alternative is just not viewing porn. It's remarkable how unfathomable that idea is to entire generations of people.
Yes. There are legitimate reasons to dislike the law, its implementation, or its impact on privacy. But 99% of people dislike it simply because they are heavily addicted to porn. The fact there have been much more privacy invasive laws introduced in the UK over the last decade which face little widespread outrage is the tell.
I think it's rather that OSA actually visibly affects people in their day-to-day lives whereas other laws don't. I constantly hit age verification pages on Reddit and Twitter and I don't use either for porn. I'm fundamentally against giving Reddit or Twitter or a 3rd party processor my ID just to view content someone somewhere deemed potentially harmful to minors. At least Twitter is done on a post-by-post basis; on Reddit entire subreddits are gated behind age verification.
That's not the point I was trying to make. You believe that almost all people who have issue with the law do so because of porn addiction. You haven't shown any data, it's just your belief, from which you're informing and repeating your world view as fact.
Because if we've learnt anything from the debate around the Online Safety Act, it's that the majority of people are so unbelievably addicted to porn they feel like it's a human rights violation to put up barriers to their access to it. While there are obvious privacy arguments against sharing your ID to access these sites the alternative is just not viewing porn. It's remarkable how unfathomable that idea is to entire generations of people.