To be fair, the citations don't pass the sniff test. The very first citation contradicts statements in the article. Check the summary for it:
> Risky sexual behaviors were not associated with online pornography exposure in any of the groups, except that males who were exposed (deliberately or not) had higher odds of not having used a condom at last intercourse. Bi/homosexual orientation and Internet use parameters were not associated either. Additionally, males in the wanted exposure group were more likely to be sensation-seekers. On the other hand, exposed girls were more likely to be students, higher sensation-seekers, early maturers, and to have a highly educated father. We conclude that pornography exposure is not associated with risky sexual behaviors and that the willingness of exposure does not seem to have an impact on risky sexual behaviors among adolescents.
It was claimed: "However, early exposure to pornography and unregulated/excess exposure to pornography during the formative years of adolescence has been seen to have various long-term deleterious effects on sexual maturation, sexual behavior, Internet addiction, and overall personality development."
Notice that it said:
1. Early exposure
2. Unregulated
3. Long-term
4. May affect Behavior and/or internet addiction and/or overall personality development
Your citation meanwhile disproves one situation for specifically causing one of possible outcomes.
No it's actually worse imo. They used that citation to justify this statement:
> Studies have noted that early intentionally exposure to pornography use in children and adolescents can lead to delinquent behavior, high-risk sexual behavior, and substance use.
Except the citation says the literal opposite. Worse, the "link" to substance abuse sounds an awful lot like the articles suggestion that the male group that wanted porn were typically "sensation seekers", but that doesn't imply causation at all! I don't have access to the full paper to see if there's anything that remotely supports the article's claims, but this is a solid sniff test fail.
Because the citations fail the sniff test so badly and trivially, IMO the article, a clear call to action, has to be called into question.
It's bad enough that I wonder if the link to the article ought to be flagged on HN: if it were a submission, it would definitely be flagged and removed.
P.S.: In my opinion, the person calling out the lack of statistics is also completely correct. It's one thing to claim all of this stuff is true, but if it can't be quantified, how are we supposed to balance the actions we take against the severity of the problem? What if it's close to line noise?
I have a lot of skepticism because the rise of the Internet was a global phenomena. I'm not even sure Internet pornography is even at its peak anymore, but during the rise to prominence you'd be hard-pressed to find a correlation of any kind with an increase in, say, sexual assault, because that just continued to fall sharply with the rise of the Internet. If there is some effect, it's certainly not very obvious.
