"Adult" Rated Areas Blocked (And Accessed) By Web-Style Content Warning

Evidently I haven't visited an "Adult"-rated Second Life sim since content filtering regulations went into effect in recent weeks, because I was just flying along last night, when this dialog box took over my viewer. It appears when you reach the border of an Adult sim, making it impossible to do anything else until you close the dialog box and back away. Entering the Adult region, however, is easy enough: You just select Change Preference, and assuming you have a credit card or other payment form registered with the Lindens, you can fly right in. It's actually about as seamless an experience as you'd experience on the web, when you come across a site with adult content.

In the months after the Lindens announced the new regulations, last Spring, there was much protest and kvetching from some in the community. Since the rules were put into practice, however, I've observed little sustained dissent -- no new petitions, or march announcements, etc. I wonder if that's due to exhaustion, dull inertia, or if it's mainly an interface issue. If you want Adult content and can get to it with a single extra click, is the idea of storming the barricades as appealing as it used to be?

Comments

[Dale Innis]

Well... Note that having this dialog box pop up is far from the only change, and that for lots of people (mostly, as I understand it, outside the US), the dialog box is not nearly so easy to dismiss (because they can't conveniently verify or provide payment info).

You must have been flying across a set of mixed-maturity estate sims, since there are no Adult regions on the old mainland, and there are only Adult regions on Zindra. That exiling of "Adult" content, and what might result from it in the longer term, is what people are concerned about.

That a dialog box might require a couple of extra mouse-clicks in order to travel is not the main worry! :)

[Adric Antfarm]

Oh Dale...

His point was not so much the pop up (we know there a lot of things like what search will show,etc) but that age verification is not the trauma we expected. I was able to verify as were my alts and their alts (I get banned a lot).

I have spoken to people in the UK who have verified with no issue and I understand there is a manual process where you can mail in documentation.

Besides, hearing a word derived from Yiddish made my day. I have used chutzpah like 20 times and nada.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

Actually, I have been wandering around this evening on the mainland, and was just prevented from entering a parcel; a popup appeared saying "you must be age-verified". (Raindown 97, 1, trying to go south.) So it is not just estate sims.

[Schmo]

Any land owner can make their parcel accessible only to the age-verified just by clicking the appropriate box on the Access tab of the parcel settings dialog. That's not the same thing as an Adult region though.

[Dale Innis]

I don't think most people expected age verification to be traumatic for the average person in the US, or even the UK. The fear (at least the fear that seems most plausible to me) is that the whole Adult Exile thing will have long-term negative effects on the world, in terms of self-censorship, stigmatization of the edgy and the creative, Disneyfication of the non-Zindra mainland, disempowerment of people who don't want to verify (in the US and UK and etc) or who can't (in countries with a less polished information-industrial complex), and so on.

The reason there are "no new petitions, or march announcements, etc", is that the petitions and marches were trying to get the Lab *not to do this*, or to do it differently. Now that they've done it, petitions and marches are (even) less likely to have any effect, and those concerned have turned their attention to other things, and/or begun working in other quieter ways to try to prevent the feared bad things from happening.

At least that's my theory. :)

[Ciaran Laval]

It isn't quite so straight forward Hamlet and this is going to be the issue that bites. On Xstreet if you want to see adult content you click to say you're 18.

Inworld it's not like that at all. Now fair enough, they want to be more responsible than Xstreet and include extra checks, but they could at least make the visibility that there are ways of finding mature content as simple as they do on Xstreet.

In terms of business, reach is being severely hampered by this policy. As for the lack of protests, the cutoff date hasn't arrived and people are still finding adult content freely available all over the grid.

[Jack Abraham]

Dale hit it on the head, Hamlet. The odds of getting the Lindens to reverse a bad decision seem even lower than the odds of getting them to listen to resident outcry. I'm trying to spend my time more productively.

[Archie Lukas]

I did the age verification in the Uk

it took 30 seconds and was painless.

No problemo