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This is troubling to me from a free speech perspective. I am no fan of porn -- and I definitely don't think children should have easy access to it -- but what w

This is troubling to me from a free speech perspective. I am no fan of porn -- and I definitely don't think children should have easy access to it -- but what worries me is the expansion of the definition of porn to suit political purposes. And more generally accepting this kind of censorship begins paving the road to more aggressive censorship elsewhere. If you disagree with your neighbor, the goal should be able to learn to live with them in disagreement or persuade them over to your viewpoint without coercion or manipulation. Right now there are several movements across the political spectrum as well as the corporate sector to use the government to suppress speech they perceive as threatening. This should be troubling for all of us even when used for things that we might nominally view as good (such as preventing children from accessing porn).

Ajedi32 2y ago
> the expansion of the definition of porn to suit political purposes How would that work? "Hate speech" for example is very easy to define broadly enough to ban basically any opinion those in power deem undesirable. But how would you do that with porn? Is the government going to somehow start classifying news articles criticizing particular political candidates as pornography? That seems like such a ridiculous stretch that it couldn't possibly work. If there's any danger here, I think it's more the potential for collateral damage on human freedoms, like the right to online anonymity. (E.g. Widespread deployment of age verification systems requiring users to provide a government-issued ID.)
- quotemstr 2y ago
  I think the OP might have meant "obscenity" that goes against "community standards" when he wrote "porn". I agree that defining crimechink and crimespeech as "porn" would be a stretch, but defining them as "obscenity" would be less so.

Ajedi32 2y ago

> the expansion of the definition of porn to suit political purposes How would that work? "Hate speech" for example is very easy to define broadly enough to ban basically any opinion those in power deem undesirable. But how would you do that with porn? Is the government going to somehow start classifying news articles criticizing particular political candidates as pornography? That seems like such a ridiculous stretch that it couldn't possibly work. If there's any danger here, I think it's more the potential for collateral damage on human freedoms, like the right to online anonymity. (E.g. Widespread deployment of age verification systems requiring users to provide a government-issued ID.)

quotemstr 2y ago
I think the OP might have meant "obscenity" that goes against "community standards" when he wrote "porn". I agree that defining crimechink and crimespeech as "porn" would be a stretch, but defining them as "obscenity" would be less so.