32 ms·
Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online
- useless_eater 1y ago[flagged]
- Fraterkes 1y ago[flagged]
- useless_eater 1y ago[flagged]
- linuxhansl 1y ago[flagged]
- kayodelycaon 1y agoYou’re forgetting the entire history of Europe and the Catholic church. We don’t even come close to the bullshit that happened in the past. Not that it makes the present any better.
- chillingeffect 1y agoSo now we can out up porn and harvest IDs? Love it.
- nothrowaways 1y agoDoes it have to be written? Does it apply to video and audio contents of similar manners?
- blurbleblurble 1y agoI don't think it has to be written or even particularly raunchy, just has to be deemed "damaging to children". Looking at banned children's books should fine you an idea of the offline precedent here.
- VMG 1y ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 1y ago[flagged]
- munchler 1y agoI haven’t seen this aspect of the ruling discussed anywhere else either, so I don’t know why you’re picking on HN in particular.
- bryancoxwell 1y agoThis is on the front page.
- jacquesm 1y agoThat's because we're hackers and we're too cool to be bothered with pesky politics. /s On a more serious note: HN tries hard to stay in its lane, but there are quite a few people on here that are engaging in political activism, but that every now and then make a (sometimes even useful) tech comment to avoid the activism ban hammer. Personally I don't really see the difference between 'curious conversation' vs 'click bait' and 'rage bait'. Examples abound, but the balance as it is struck right now picks a reasonable median between 400 hour work weeks for the people involved and some kind of manageable work/life balance. It works, but barely and it is still worth reading but I find myself getting more and more cynical reading HN. Oh, and of course we really don't do humor. And some people here really do care about both privacy and freedom, and some people are not absolutists but rather see that there are reasonable limits to both of these. Another thing to remember is that HN is global, you're going to find a predominantly English speaking audience here but so many people around the world manage to express themselves reasonably well in English that you will find all kinds of cultures represented here, including ones that have entirely different ideas on subjects such as freedom and privacy. And then there are the tech bros who want freedom and privacy for themselves and less of both of those for the rest of us.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- smallmancontrov 1y ago"Party of free speech," my ass.
- ttul 1y agoThe GOP under Trump has considerably changed from the GOP under Bush. There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives. Perhaps a shift might be coming with the next economic downturn, which seems inevitable given the risk-off investment climate across most industries stemming from Trump’s erratic, unpredictable trade and economic policy. Things don’t look bad just yet, but it takes a while for the full impact of such enormous changes in sentiment to ripple down through the entire economy.
- toyg 1y ago> There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives That's funny, considering Bush II effectively established the coalition of business interests, religious zealots, and neofascist militias, which then expanded to be the backbone of Trump's support. Cautionary tale about consequences of one's political choices? I wish.
- tomrod 1y agoLibertarian and Democratic parties ought to feel right at home for any refugees from the GOP who have conservative principles. Democratic party is right of center.
- yardie 1y agoReagan and Bush were constrained by much more liberal supreme court justices of the previous era. The current Supreme Court justices were clerks and lawyers during Reagan and Bush presidency. If Reagan and Bush had the current justices in their bench I can almost guarantee they’d be pulling the same stunts.
- zeroonetwothree 1y agoBush wasn’t exactly a steward of free speech
- 1y ago
- CamperBob2 1y ago[flagged]
- al_borland 1y agoAll these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID? If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should), there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18 without sending picture of your ID off to random 3rd parties, or giving actual personal details. I don’t want to give this data, and websites shouldn’t want to shoulder the responsibility for it. It seems like this could work much like Apple Pay, just without the payment. A prompt comes up, I use some biometric authentication on my phone, and it sends a signal to the browser that I’m 18+. Apple has been adding state IDs into the Wallet, this seems like it could fall right in line. The same thing could be used for buying alcohol at U-Scan checkout. People should also be able to set their browser/computer to auto-send this for single-user devices, where it is all transparent to the user. I don’t have kids and no one else’s uses my devices. Why should I need to jump through hoops?
- alwa 1y agoAnd we could call this way… zero-knowledge proof! :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof I bet we could even get a major phone OS vendor to support such a thing… https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-identity-verifications/ https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...
- michaelt 1y agoDo we expect Apple to implement a special, privacy-preserving age proof for porn viewers? Apple hates porn, when it's on websites like Tumblr.
- alwa 1y agoAt the same time they seem pragmatic about putting their mark on standards. It seems to me like we’re at a confluence: a regulatory tipping point where there really is pressure to bring laws to bear on online harms affecting kids; and a socio-technological moment where “gotta distinguish kids from adults” can realistically happen separately from “…by handing over personal info directly to shady random counterparts.” Individual smartphones with biometrics are these days a whole-of-society norm, technologists have developed a mature body of cryptographic work to assert ZKPs, the US population seem to have lost their aversion to centralized ID systems… and the periodic moral panic about the kids seems to be at a high tide. In the same way that Apple don’t prevent, say, Safari from being used for prurient purposes, or Final Cut Pro from being used to edit naughty bits, I don’t see why they wouldn’t want an opinionated implementation as a concept develops of a generic “digital tool to assert your age, and only that.” Especially since Android is doing it and leaning into the privacy angle.
- ChainnChompp 1y agoHopefully someone kept a snapshot of the country's configs before this year began. I feel like we're going to need it. This is ludicrous - as so much is lately.
- Esophagus4 1y agoUnfortunately, the S3 bucket we use to host the backups is gone... the compliance department complained about it, but now they're gone, too...
- tiahura 1y agoA bit off base. He's basically having a meltdown over what's actually a pretty narrow ruling about age verification. First, he claims the Court "nullified the First Amendment" for sex writing, but that's just not what happened. The Court explicitly said adults still have the right to access this stuff—they just need to show ID first, like buying beer. That's not "nullification." Second, Ellsberg acts like any sex scene anywhere triggers these laws, but H.B. 1181 only hits commercial websites where over a third of the content is sexually explicit material that's harmful to minors. His personal blog with some raunchy stories? Probably doesn't qualify. Third, the whole "fifteen years in prison" hysteria ignores that these are civil penalties, not criminal prosecutions for most violations. And interstate prosecution for a California blogger? Extremely unlikely. Age verification requirements do create real burdens and privacy concerns. But Ellsberg's "the sky is falling" rhetoric makes it impossible to have a serious conversation about the actual trade-offs between protecting kids and preserving adult access to legal content. The Court tried to balance these competing interests—it didn't burn down the First Amendment.
- blurbleblurble 1y agoThis isn't only about H.B. 1181 specifically, it's about precedent for any law like it having teeth across state lines.
- zeroonetwothree 1y agoThe ruling was not about anyone being prosecuted over state lines. So there was no precedent set.
- op00to 1y agoDismissing this as a “meltdown” ignores the real First Amendment stakes. Requiring ID to access legal adult content isn’t like buying alcohol. It introduces surveillance and self-censorship, especially with vague thresholds like “one-third explicit” or “harmful to minors.” That legal ambiguity alone forces smaller publishers to self-censor to avoid risk. Unlike alcohol, speech is a constitutionally protected right, not a regulated commodity. Buying beer doesn’t create a permanent record of your interests or route through third-party identity brokers. Whether or not speech is the explicit target, the chilling effect is the outcome and likely the intent. Lawmakers know these rules shrink the space for controversial content online. The burden and fear do the censoring for them. That’s not hysteria it’s how digital speech is throttled.
- gs17 1y ago> The public library in rural Donnelly, Idaho, at only 1,024 square feet, had no practical way to create an enforceable “adults only” section and no budget to defend against lawsuits. Therefore, to comply with the law, they decided to make the entire library for adults only. The library has banned minors from entering the library (even to use the bathroom) unless they are accompanied by an adult, or holding a waiver from their parents. This is absurd. It does look like they're suing, with help from a lot of publishers, at least.
- soulofmischief 1y agoI spent a lot of time after school in the library to avoid my abusive cult guardians at home. If this avenue hadn't been available to me in my small town, I'd likely have committed suicide. But, I'm an atheist, so me committing suicide would probably be seen as a win for these evangelical freaks.
- TimorousBestie 1y agoYeah, me too. It’s very chilling to see the resurgence of a very broad conception of parental rights, which can in some cases permit the wholesale physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children without recourse. It’s hard to talk about it without being accused of hyperbole, but some of these proposed laws come very close to making children the property of their parents. As someone who grew up in an abusive household, that makes me exceedingly uncomfortable.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoI've talked to enough people who explicitly believe that children are chattel (sometimes in the same breath as complaining about abuse they suffered from their own parents) to know this isn't hyperbole.
- soulofmischief 1y agoI shared this experience before on a recent thread about the role librarians play in counterculture and a user made a throwaway account in order to tell me to kill myself all sorts of creative ways and that he's glad I was abused, etc. etc.
- root_axis 1y ago> In fact, under the laws that the Supreme Court just upheld, prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site. > It's unlikely these interstate prosecutions would happen... It might wind up being uncommon, but definitely not unlikely - it's basically assured that it will happen eventually, especially if the judge finds the text in question particularly or personally offensive. I guess now is a great time to start a KYC company.
- bravoetch 1y agoOr now is a good time to build privacy tools into everything.
- root_axis 1y agoUnfortunately, this is the law we're talking about. Privacy tools don't do much to mitigate the hardships of life as a fugitive.
- zeroonetwothree 1y agoJudges are not the people that prosecute crimes
- root_axis 1y agoTrue, but it's a given that prosecutors will do it since that's their job.
- JohnTHaller 1y ago[flagged]
- giingyui 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- soulofmischief 1y ago[flagged]
- 65 1y agoTor might be wildly popular in a few years.
- chgs 1y agoIf the Supreme Court agrees they are constitutional then they clearly are constitutional, unless you think the constitution doesn’t apply
- tyre 1y agoThe Supreme Court considered internment camps and segregation constitutional, until it didn’t. There are also people who disagree with the Supreme Court’s interpretations. Including members of the Supreme Court! Both current (dissents) and not (overturning past rulings.)
- soulofmischief 1y agoLet's not pretend that the current federal government isn't completely compromised.
- cocacola1 1y agoNot really. The Supreme Court believes some rulings to be wrong the day they were decided: > “The dissent’s reference to Korematsu, however, affords this Court the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: *Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided*, has been overruled in the court of history, and to be clear ‘has no place in law under the Constitution,’” Roberts said, quoting Justice Jackson’s 1944 dissent.
- perihelions 1y agoThere was a NYT article a couple weeks ago about Chinese morality police doing mass arrests of erotica authors, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/world/asia/china-boys-love-women.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/world/asia/china-boys-lov... ("Chinese Police Detain Dozens of Writers Over Gay Erotic Online Novels") [note article contains large images of erotica novel covers] But you'd *expect* that of the PRC; the US, wow, has it ever fallen fast and fallen hard.
- useless_eater 1y ago[flagged]
- TimorousBestie 1y agoYes, I believe that ten year olds should only have parent-supervised interactions with the internet.
- olivermuty 1y agoWith random lawsuits as a sort of offhand censorship of <thing you dont personally like>..?? Its the parents job to curate access to the inernet. I say that as a father of three.
- useless_eater 1y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- _Algernon_ 1y ago
- onetokeoverthe 1y ago[dead]
- xp84 1y agoSo, while I agree that this feels foreign and wrong to me as someone who has experienced "The Internet" for so long, I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works. I'm asking this in good faith. Given that: 1. The Internet is not an optional subscription service today the way it was in 1995. Every kid and adult has 1,000 opportunities to get online including on the multiple devices every one of their peers owns, which a single set of parents has no control over. So "Just keep them off the Internet/control their devices" seems like a silly "Just" instruction. 2. The Internet is nearly infinite. The author of this editorial says "then install a content blocker on your kids’ devices and add my site to it". This is a silly argument since the whole point is that no one has ever heard of him/her and it's obviously impossible for a filter (let's just assume filters can't be bypassed) can "just" enumerate every inappropriate site even if it employed a full-time staff who did nothing but add new sites to the list all day long. So given all of that, how do we justify how the Internet must operate on different rules than the offline world does? One can't open a "Free adult library" downtown and allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn. I'd have to check IDs and do my best to keep kids out. It also seems like it would be gross to do so. If you agree with that, why should the Internet operate on different rules? I'd also like to separate the logistics from the morality here. If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! But then the focus should be on finding a good privacy-respecting solution, not just arguing for the status quo.
- mindslight 1y ago> allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn As far as I'm aware, online sites generally don't let children wander in either. One of the reasons being they will make a mess of the cabling. That's obviously in jest, but the point is that physical presence is the entire crux here. When entering a physical space, you do so with a physical body that society has demanded be able to be identified. And age can often be determined without even fully verifying identification, which is why our society has been so accepting of age checks. The Internet has flourished precisely because of the foundation where one does not need to be identified. In fact one does not even need to be human, nor accessing a digital service the way the publisher intends. Separation of concerns. This has worked for what, 30 years at this point? An entire generation? If parents are still buying their kids hardcore pornography terminals these days, they've got no one to blame but themselves. And no, I do not care that "everybody else is doing it". Ultimately, the "logistics" cannot be separated from the "morality" - it is a different type of space, and the moral thing to do is engage with it as it is, instead of demanding centralizing authoritarian changes. These demands are from a narrow contingent of people that could straightforwardly build their own desired environment (the content blocking you've referenced as a straw man, or more accurately kid-friendly content curation), but yet have not done so. Because ultimately these types of calls are never actually about "the kids" but rather a general desire to insert themselves as morality police into everyone's business.
- caim 1y agoI really didn't expect that from the land of freedom. /s
- everdrive 1y agoOthers have said this, I'm sure, but this will move past porn _quickly_. Once there is agreed-up age verification for pornography, much of the professional internet will require identity verification to do _anything_. This is one of the bigger nails in the coffin for the free internet, and this true whether or not you're happy with all the pornography out there.
- zeroonetwothree 1y agoI don’t agree, at least as far as legal obligation goes. The average voter is far more worried about porn and other explicit content and not so much about anything else.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- __loam 1y agoThis doesn't really track with widespread and normalized use of pornographic materials, including written descriptions, by most adults in this country. There's a pretty wide gulf between "I don't think kids should be able to access this stuff" and "I think we need to supercharge the surveillance state and destroy the first amendment"
- 827a 1y agoThis doesn't destroy the first amendment any more than requiring an ID & background check to purchase a firearm destroys the second amendment. Which is to say that it might, but for exactly the same reason, so The People ultimately need to decide on a consistent choice of interpretation.
- ozgrakkurt 1y agoExcept one person googling and watching porn has nothing to do with other people, very different from buying guns
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago[flagged]
- blurbleblurble 1y agoIn practice this is going to be utilized to shut down sex education and other content deemed "harmful to children".
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago[flagged]
- JoshTriplett 1y agoWe're there. We're long past there. Start solving.
- lurk2 1y agoDo you have any examples of the finding being used to stymy sex education in schools?
- JoshTriplett 1y agoThere are many, many, many examples of every previous round of censorship in the name of "Think of the Children" being used against anything disliked by people in power, and filtered through the lens of the most conservative backwards puritans. Take a look at any banned book list. This is not a slippery slope fallacy, it's basic pattern recognition.
- lurk2 1y ago> There are many, many, many examples of every previous round of censorship in the name of "Think of the Children" being used against anything disliked by people in power Do you have any available?
- lurk2 1y ago[flagged]
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y agoNothing you single out matters here. His background doesn't invalidate his arguments.
- dev1ycan 1y agoAs an outsider seeing the US destroy everything people associate with America in a couple months is sort of morbidly funny...
- Sharlin 1y agoMost people's associations with the US were fanciful and unrealistic to begin with. It's just that now the reality has diverged so far from their mental images that they're forced to acknowledge the disparity.
- chgs 1y agoWhen it comes to nudity and sex America has always been puritanical. Blood and guns, sure. Freedumb
- kelnos 1y agoWhile we do produce a lot of porn, remember that the pre-US colonies were founded by conservative religious people who were too conservative even for Europe at the time.
- browningstreet 1y agoRemember personals and missed connections on Craigslist? Remember when they took those down, and why? This goes back a long ways.
- bickfordb 1y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/business/craigslist-personals-trafficking-bill.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/business/craigslist-perso...
- 123yawaworht456 1y ago[flagged]
- hypeatei 1y agoI'll acknowledge that you mentioned "leftists" here and they do quite a bit of purity testing in their circles, but what laws did they pass to limit speech?
- rpmisms 1y agoOn a sociological level: good. I personally believe that easy-access porn has been detrimental to society.
- jekwoooooe 1y agoIt really hasn’t and there’s absolutely no evidence to support this at all
- cFyrute 1y ago[flagged]
- MangoToupe 1y agoI imagine they were referring to the behavior of cis men Secondly, it's not clear which group you're bigoted over—trans folks or drag queens
- cFyrute 1y ago[flagged]
- Hnrobert42 1y agoTransgendered folks are people who identify as a gender other than how they were born. Drag queens are men who prefer to dress as women sometimes but who identify as men. Like, FBI director Edgar Hoover.
- cFyrute 1y ago[flagged]
- Hnrobert42 1y agoMany cross-dressers don't make an attempt to look like women. They may not shave or wear makeup. Either way, I'm not going to engage your other points. I'm old enough to know a Fox News viewer when I see one.
- _bent 1y agoWe've had kids accessing an Internet without any working age barriers for over 30 years now. There have been problems, be that grooming, Facebook parties and maybe addiction to TikTok. But being able to access adult content be that sexual or violent in nature doesn't really seem to have had much negative consequences. Sure I wouldn't want my 10 year old to see 2 girls 1 cup - but I reckon it wouldn't be the end of the world if he did. It's good that we have content recommendations. But we shouldn't try to actually enforce them. Again: with all the options kids have had for accessing porn online in the last couple of decades, if it was actually THAT bad, we'd be having an epidemic. Yet we don't. The kids are alright
- ProllyInfamous 1y agoContent restrictions should just be an option with the ISP: to make the entire modem/phone disable adult content and/or require age verification. This, I would disable (presuming `on` by default). >2 girls 1 cup I still remember showing that to curious ladies in grad school (who'd heard about it); some of my favorite reaction footage. >10 years old My generation's equivalent was lemonparty.com =>O<=
- tolerance 1y ago[flagged]
- const_cast 1y agoIt doesn't - rather, it attacks the preposition at it's source. Pornography is bad, supposedly, but is it actually? It seems to me we all moved on without actually answering that question. We know it's bad for moral reasons, but moral reasons are stupid and I don't trust them. But is it actually bad - like in the real world, with tangible effects, not made-up ones? I don't know, and it looks like you don't know, and OP doesn't know, and the people who are pushing this age verification don't know either. Sure, two girls one cup is disgusting. It's vile. It's immoral. But is it harmful? That's a different question. That's a huge problem. You see, we're attempting to solve a problem which we haven't proved even exists.
- deadbabe 1y agoHow exactly do these laws work if the servers are hosted outside of the US?
- kelnos 1y agoThey don't, of course. These laws aren't here to protect children. They're just a step on the road to one of their (conservative Christian) goals: banning pornography entirely in the US.
- EasyMark 1y agoSounds like a great reason to set up a Great Porn Firewall and demand ID of anyone attempting to gain access to any IP outside of the USA
- timeon 1y agoThey will try blackmail hosting country with tariffs.
- narrator 1y agoMeh they can take the bottom 64bits of your IP address and then put your biometrics in there. Why do you think they made the address space so big in the first place. I've been saying that's what it was for for at least a decade.
- spacechild1 1y agoThat Tennessee law is particularly crazy: > (a) Pubic hair, vulva, vagina, penis, testicles, anus, or nipple of a human body Naked bodies do not harm anyone. This is US puritanism at its peek. Glad the author also pointed out the hypocrisy of treating nudity as more obscene than violence.
- LocalH 1y agoInterestingly (and I suppose fairly?) the law doesn't seem to make a distinction between male and female nipples. So an image of a shirtless man violates this just as much as an image of a shirtless woman.
- spacechild1 1y agoI also noticed that! Certainly speaks of the intelligence of the people who write these laws :)
- Pikamander2 1y agoI'd imagine that male nipples are exempted due to the line that mentions "applying contemporary community standards". Of course, that wording is deliberately vague for a reason. Judges, especially conservative ones, have often let states use wording like that to get away with female-toplessness bans, blue laws, religious imagery in government buildings, etc, since that kind of wording lets them avoid including discriminatory language in the law itself, therefore supposedly not violating the constitution.
- buyucu 1y agoDoes that also outlaw medical content?
- VerdisQuo5678 1y agoIs there anything we can actually do to combat this? Im short of ideas, tho the 33% rule can be potentially worked around by generating loads of fake content similar to a previous poster who generates fake content for scrapers to eat Im in the UK and they recently passed a similar law banning any explicit _imagery_, which I already thought was bad but the land of freedom beats us out again, the literally surveillance state, at least that's that's enforced top down by ofcom instead of an army of injury lawyers so it works at ofcom's speed
- jekwoooooe 1y agoThis is insane. Literally goes against the first amendment. What recourse is there for this nonsensical decision? Mass disobedience? Leaking verified IDs until they stop this?
- ViktorRay 1y agoThis article is incorrect. The Supreme Court’s ruling only applied to obscene sexual material. It doesn’t apply to sex scenes within artistic works or sexual content in general. There’s a test used to determine whether sexual material is considered pornographic. It’s known as the “I know it when I see it” test. More info on this test here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it More specifically here is what is considered obscene: The criteria were: 1. whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; 2. whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, as specifically defined by applicable state law; 3. whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The third criterion pertains to judgment made by "reasonable persons" of the United States as a whole, while the first pertains to that of members of the local community. Due to the larger scope of the third test, it is a more ambiguous criterion than the first two.
- dyauspitr 1y agoThe article sounds very correct. Anything can be perceived as “obscene” especially when you leave that interpretation open to any particular group.
- kayodelycaon 1y agoA man in drag is considered obscene by some people.
- bdangubic 1y agokissing is obscene :)
- whatsupdog 1y agoIn many cultures, it is. Especially kissing in the public.
- TechRemarker 1y ago
- Sniffnoy 1y agoThis article doesn't really go into any detail about the Supreme Court decision it discusses, instead reserving its detailed discussion for the laws this decision permits. Anyone have a link to the opinion, or an article discussing it specifically?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- landl0rd 1y ago> conservative Christians are trying to eliminate ALL sexually-related speech online I don’t really appreciate this framing. Despite being a very conservative Christian (at least in many ways, if not others) I don’t approve of or agree with the scope of SCOTUS’ current ruling, nor do I approve of all the age- verification laws as written. It seems futile to attempt to make everybody everywhere do this and create a locked-down “second internet” for minors. But I do understand the impetus. As a zoomer, I’ve heard the problems particularly young men addicted to pornography have caused with some gal friends of mine they’ve dated. I’ve seen the normalization of what I view as degenerate sex acts as the treadmill of endlessly-escalating erotic-novelism spins without ceasing. I’ve watched people become more absorbed in their strange autosexual fixations than their spouses. It doesn’t seem good, or healthy, or sustainable, and I resent the contributions the proliferation of online pornography has made to these issues. At some level I see this like sixties versus modern marijuana, where a more mild herb (or dad’s playboys beneath the mattress) has been supplanted by THC distilled and bottled into vapes (endlessly-available presence of any outlandish fetishistic stuff.) I wouldn’t like my child exposed to either but I can live with one. Of course, I see it as primarily the parent’s responsibility to inculcate the virtue to disdain both. The state can’t nanny its way out of this one. But it’s always easier to pick a scapegoat that can’t vote (tax the corporations/rich, make the corporations implement age-filtering, etc.) than to tell people to take a hike and learn to parent.
- DonHopkins 1y ago[flagged]
- rstat1 1y agoWhat people do in their private time is none of anyone's business. Period. Especially the government.
- landl0rd 1y agoDid something I wrote read like I disagreed with this? What children do in their private time is their parents’ business. What children do can sometimes be the business of the state; there’s tons of precedent for it acting in loco parentis. I just don’t find this to be the best solution.
- M95D 1y agoA more effective solution would be to implement HTML tags for explicit sexual content (or any other kind of child-sensitive content) and allow the OS or browser to authenticate the user before showing that content, if parental controls are enabled. Legal obligations and responibilities become very clear: the site has tags - it's ok. No tags - guilty. It also allows for very fine-grained delimitation of sexual content. No need to forbid access to an entire site for one page, or one paragraf of sexual content. Just blur/censor the <adult> ... </adult> content.
- recursivegirth 1y agoI like this, already got face ID built into our devices including PCs these days... tap into that. That curbs the whole issue of sending your identifying information to third party websites.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoThe rub is how you authenticate the user. Most such content is already behind an age verification check. If the risk is that people who shouldn’t be doing so are clicking “yes I am 18” then whatever you need to do to authenticate the user otherwise to counter that sort of circumvention are going to be really ugly from a privacy standpoint.
- M95D 1y agoIt shoudn't be the website's responsibility to authenticate viewers of sexual content, not unless it's paid sexual content. This proposed solution allows the parent to choose whatever authentication he/she wants for the device. Windows login, browser login, 3rd party filtering proxy in the router, etc. I know what you're about to say: What if the child gains access to an unrestricted device? Well, if you put it that way, what if the child gains access to an old stash of porn magazines? What are you gonna do? Sue the publisher?
- dogcomplex 1y agoThe Supreme Court is eroding the credibility of the institution of law faster than they can make laws. They really want to see how the public reacts to overreach?
- tolerance 1y ago[flagged]
- Hnrobert42 1y agoWhat is this maimed in the streets business?
- tolerance 1y agoI imagine that it's a consequence, though not intended, worth resigning toward when it comes to one's beliefs.
- qnleigh 1y agoI'm still wrapping my head around the consequences of this, which almost seem too big to believe. It sounds like there are hundreds of millions if not billions to be made on filing these kinds of lawsuits, which means change is coming hard and fast. What if anything prevents the following? 1. Lawsuits against content "normalizing LGBTQ+ identity," which many conservatives claim is harmful to minors. This creates opportunities for conservative groups to file frivolous but expensive-to-defend lawsuits targeting LGBTQ+ advocacy online. Will this sort of thing get sued out of existence? 2. Lawyers will first go after the largest targets. Does this mean that e.g. large health websites will have to take down articles on sex education? Might they even do do preemptively? 3. Relatedly, will all major US porn websites go behind age gates soon? Has this already happened?
- poly2it 1y agoA bit of a rant on the topic of digital supervision and age verification: Speaking personally, parent supervision was detrimental to my development as a child. I recently reached the liberation of legal adulthood. While my parents are often sweet, their intents did not always have the desired consequences given how they were enforced. Until I was around 15, I didn't have any computer I was able to freely tinker with, which wasn't constantly supervised and constantly logged my every action. I wasn't allowed to touch a shell. This was troublesome for me, because I was a computer science enthusiast, and my parent did not want me to learn about programming. If I had developer tools open, or if it seemed like I was running a script, I would get questions. I was pretty much restricted to using Scratch (which has a fantastic underground community!). Yes, I spent quite a bit of time on my computer. In my defense, I didn't have any friends where I lived. Not that I didn't want any, I had tried, but at this point I was torted by bad experiences. My computer was my safe haven and where I had my friends. I did try to explain this, but my parent wasn't sympathetic. Expecting a joyous and present individual who should be out playing with friends, I was a failure. My parent never understood my need for digital freedom, even as it in hindsight was all I craved. This is the type of scenario I see playing out again every time I am reached by bills/news/opinions like these. If my parent had put half of the energy they use to keep me bound into supporting my personal development and our relation, things could have been very different. Instead, I became very good at avoiding filters, supervision and going unnoticed. It's quite a sore to me. I sympathise deeply with all the children who had a similar upbringing, who are going to suffer under the regulations in development, both in the US and in the EU.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoObviously, there’s a difference between access to programming materials and the unethical majority of the internet. I had access to the former at about 12 but no access to the internet until age ~23. Was about perfect.
- poly2it 1y agoWhen did you grow up?
- MangoToupe 1y ago[flagged]
- howaboutno2312 1y ago[dead]
- scoofy 1y ago[flagged]
- Fraterkes 1y agoIs "this was restricted for centuries" a moral rule of thumb you use consistently? What's your opinion about gay rights, woman's suffrage?
- scoofy 1y agoI’m a liberal. I generally agree with the principle, not the premise. My point again is that these “rights” you’re talking about are built on our social contract. There is no premise that “porn is free speech,” in fact, quite the opposite, again, for centuries. The existence of porn on the internet was the result of legislation, not right. That legislation is changing, we need to organize to make sure it remains legal.
- Fraterkes 1y agoI don’t think you’ve argued your point very clearly: the examples I listed have also only been part of our social contract for a very short time (and are routinely under fire by the same people trying to ban porn). Also: people have distributed some version of porn for centuries (millenia?).
- scoofy 1y agoDistribution of pornography to minors has almost always been illegal during that time. My photos only, go back to the 80s and you can buy porn, but not if you are a kid. Obviously it was a lot easier to enforce because it was physical media, but the principle here is that these laws were not unconstitutional. I honestly think kids seeing porn is no big deal, but again, the folks in this thread comparing distribution of pornography to free speech are really, really reaching for something that just isn’t there. All of the precedents say pornography is not free speech.
- stego-tech 1y ago[flagged]
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- KumaBear 1y ago[flagged]
- anotherevan 1y agoThe Great Bible Battle https://archive.md/60QZV https://archive.md/60QZV
- viraptor 1y agoIt happened a few times https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65794363 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65794363
- khazhoux 1y agoThis is not the gotcha people think it is. Bible thumpers only pay attention to a few sections of the new testament anyways.
- RajT88 1y ago[flagged]
- yndoendo 1y ago[flagged]
- tialaramex 1y agoNope. Phyllis Schlafly's son Andrew (Phyllis is the woman who more or less single handedly ensured the ERA didn't pass, persuading American women that somehow they didn't even want equality) ran (still runs maybe?) a web site where among other things he "re-translates" the Bible so that e.g. Jesus's preaching is "Properly" translated to mean whatever it is suits his worldview. Religion is about believing things you have no evidence for, that's its whole thing.
- ronbenton 1y ago[flagged]
- krapp 1y ago[flagged]
- trynumber9 1y agoI'm genuinely curious. The parent buys the phone/laptop. And when little Timmy logs in to his phone the account should be in a family/group as a child account. What's with the obsession with actually verifying identity? Just make a web API available to determine if the current user is configured as a child account. Why isn't that enough to gate-keep access to adult content?
- mdavid626 1y agoTimmy's friend in school has parents who have no idea about family/child accounts. They just give him a phone and let him do whatever he wants. Timmy's friend is really popular in school.
- lpribis 1y agoTimmy's friend has a big brother that lets him use his ID. There will always be ways to circumvent this. The only functional difference between a simple setting in the browser and requiring ID attestation is how much surveillance it allows the government to do.
- mdavid626 1y agoAccording to this logic, why ban anything? There is always someone who can help you overcome the ban. So, let children buy alcohol and cigarettes, why not also drugs?
- trynumber9 1y agoIdentification verification doesn't solve that either. His friend could still hand him his phone after logging in and verifying, right? Unless they're doing facial scans the entire time the user is reading adult content. It seems more like verification theatre.
- tyingq 1y agoSo no bounty because it's not a security problem. But the MV3 API they are deleting, they say...is being deleted for security reasons. Not at all to hobble ad blockers.
- phendrenad2 1y agoSame as it ever was. The government has been congenitally unable to strike a rational balance between free speech vs indecency statutes. "I know it when I see it" has been a meme since 1964 when it was written by the Supreme Court. In handing control of that balance over to the states, the federal government is just giving up. But it won't work. The issue still needs to be resolved. We're going to see many, many, many more Supreme Court cases on indecency vs free speech.
- Nasrudith 1y agoThat is because the false balance is complete bullshit. Free speech means free speech. Obscenity is just special pleading "but it is icky!". The same thing has been happening for centuries. They came across a good idea as a foundational principle and the dumb fuckers wearing dresses we call judges refuse to see it. They then prove that they are all lawyers by constructing elaborate rationalizations. They also did the same thing to the Fourteenth ammendment's equal protection under the law working as grounds barring corruption and injustice.
- jalapeno_a 1y ago[dead]
- gamblor956 1y agoFTA: "In fact, under the laws that the Supreme Court just upheld, prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site." No, they can't. That's not how jurisdiction works in the U.S. If states could do stuff like that, GOP prosecutors would be charging out-of-state Democratic politicians with made-up-crimes all the time. They're not doing that. It's not because they don't want to; it's because they can't. (And also, the legal justification that would allow them to go after their political enemies like this would allow politically-opposed prosecutors to do the same to them.)
- kayodelycaon 1y agoStates are already trying to police abortions outside of state lines. If you helped someone get an abortion in another state, they want to be able to arrest you for it.
- conartist6 1y agoI feel so bad for the teenager whose mom is parading him around as a permanently defective ruined form of life. Could that be damaging to a kid do you think?
- heavyset_go 1y agoMunchausen's for sympathy and fame isn't new, but it is pretty tragic when you see it.
- TrackerFF 1y agoOne of the goals in Project 2025 is to make teachers, librarians, etc. that purvey "pornography" into felons, and jail them for a long time. That starts with labeling things as pornography. Before you know it, anything that mentions LGBTQ+ topics will be labeled as porn.
- siliconc0w 1y agoIt's a matter of time before the US system crumbles if these assaults on the federal system and civil liberties continue. I live in state with a population of 40 million who gives $83 billion more to the federal government than gets back. It's absolutely insane we have to be ruled by afar by what is effectively a small minority. This will come to a head not only in Censorship, Immigration, Tariffs, Abortion access (banning abortion medication federally), Industrial policy, etc. At a certain point California is going to say, "No Thanks" and peace out.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoSince the civil war it’s been clear no one is getting out alive.
- int_19h 1y agoACW was the minority revolting against the majority.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoWtf is acw?
- int_19h 1y agoAmerican Civil War
- practice9 1y agoA variation of “no taxation without representation”?
- kjkjadksj 1y agoArmed forces aren’t giving up their CA bases without an ugly fight
- int_19h 1y agoFunnily enough, this was pointed out by the very people who established our federal government structure. Hamilton, Federalist Papers #22: "Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Deleware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last." (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed22.asp https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed22.asp)
- crmd 1y agoThe strategic objective here is to authenticate all web traffic.
- rustcleaner 1y agoSolution: build technologies which make government statute effectively irrelevant. It must be uncensorable even by a nation-state adversary, and must hide its users and their activities. The future is software technology designed to thwart the ability of prosecutors to introduce evidence into a court. We must fight against the state's War on Crime with everything we have; the state has abused that war for centuries to justify its expansion. Courts should only bless victims taking revenge or retribution, offer an optional institution of rehabitation and recompense that the convict can voluntarily ascend to, else if the convict chooses to be free then he's at the mercy of the victim and whatever the victim chooses to do to the convict. Court cases should not result in involuntary imprisonment but only voluntary, incentivized by not being assaulted/killed in public as an outlaw. (Elected oath taking office holders excepted, prison should be a real possibility.) It matters more to restrain and limit the state than it does to punish bad behavior. Furthermore the state has committed countless crimes in its treatment of the customers they chose to condemn, and ought to be dissolved entirely down to the office clerk. Unfortunately, the only way that happens is law of the guillotine.
- rustcleaner 1y agoThe government is just another religion, another church. Sometimes they are right, but usually they are just dangerous like any other group of religious bigots.
- ReptileMan 1y agoThat has always been the problem with advocating free speech - that eventually you have to protect the rights of the writers of nazi furry slash fiction and similar fellows. And are really soft and fluffy target.
- geuis 1y agoI can't take a post seriously when it uses AI images. How do I know the rest of the content isn't AI slop?
- emfax 1y agoWhy can’t we just have a meta tag that declares that content on a website is not suitable for minors? Or is it because, as others have mentioned, it’s not really about protecting minors from adult content?
- Aachen 1y agoBecause then: whose computer is it? If it's my computer, it does my bidding. If a child is currently on the computer, should the computer decide and refuse to work as in "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" where the operator (Dave) is deemed a threat to its objective? In this case, the computer's programmed goal would be preventing any minor from seeing content with this tag. It has to decide if you're a minor whenever content is marked as such. If you can't override its programming, it's your computer no longer
- mixmastamyk 1y agoYou could configure the user account to show tagged content or not.
- cFyrute 1y ago[dead]
- rayiner 1y ago> The First Amendment effectively no longer applies if your speech is online, contains sex scenes, and not behind an age verification wall The First Amendment doesn’t apply to obscenity, so I’m not sure what the complaint is.
- Nifty3929 1y agoUnfortunately, these laws are working exactly as intended. If they discourage all forms of sexually-explicit material, the laws are working as intended. They are not really about "protecting the children." They use that as an excuse to make it too legally risky to publish pornographic/sexual material under any circumstances. If I was a publisher, would I trust an age-verification system to protect me from 15 years in prison or an "investigation" that results in nothing but destroying my life? Nope. So eventually the legitimate website operators just give up. Or how about the ISP who now simply refuses to do business with any website that publishes sexual material just to avoid legal consequences for themselves? Working as intended.
- nkrisc 1y agoNext comes continually redefining “pornography”.
- alon_honig 1y agoI think people are putting far too much of an ideological lens on this ruling. As a "matter of law" this seems like the right decision. The supreme court is not a board of dictators making societal decisions based on their flavor of the day. Their job is too see if the ruling is consistent with all other laws we have and the normal function of a modern society. Pushing the envelope one way or another is not their job even if they end up doing that. At the end of the day the (elected) state governments have decided to create a policy that reflects what their constituents want. The supreme court job is not to question the logic of that. They did not run for office or win elections. They just need to make sure that what being done is reasonable and not violating any existing laws. As a tech guy I think these laws are stupid but this case was not the right hill to die on. What needs to happen is that these laws get enacted, costs and unintended consequences happen and THOSE parties sue on the supreme court on that basis
- boroboro4 1y agoThis would be all correct if we didn’t have one particular set of laws above the others – the constitution. And it is unclear if rights guaranteed by constitution (freedom of speech in this case) aren’t infringed by this particular law. There is no such thing here as “if they passed a law let it be”. It can be true if they passed the constitution amendment but they obviously didn’t. Now we can talk about real issue here - how correct the trade off the court is taking between freedom of speech infringement and this law. And as you can see in original post - author there thinks this trade off was taken wrongly by the court. I, personally, think the same.
- justahuman74 1y agoSo which state's ISPs do we need to IP-ban?
- chamomeal 1y agoIP banning Tennessee would be an interesting form of protest. Seems like these laws are usually super unpopular, but the general public doesn’t usually find out about them enough to get upset. If it doesn’t airtime on Fox News, my dad will literally never know it happened. Putting up a big “Tennessee might try to put me in jail if you access this site” would get people’s attention. Not that any business that gets a real amount of traffic would ever do such a thing. Nobody visits my shitty personal site lol
- comex 1y agoPornhub has in fact been doing such a thing. https://www.pornhub.com/blog/age-verification-in-the-news https://www.pornhub.com/blog/age-verification-in-the-news
- chriscrisby 1y agoWho knew giving kids unlimited porn would have negative consequences.
- EasyMark 1y agoany kid that has unlimited porn is a kid with poor parents, and they were gonna get into things much worse than porn anyway since parents aren't around and being negligent.
- chriscrisby 1y agoIf you can’t configure content filters and dns servers then what right do you have to be a parent. You shouldn’t be a parent if you can’t enforce a mobile device policy better than an average Fortune 500 corporation.
- Aachen 1y agoJust to double check, this is a joke right? Because you suggested upthread (if I'm reading the sarcasm right) that consumption must be curtailed, but clearly this comment about not having a right to be a non-tech-savvy parent is a joke...or?!
- chriscrisby 1y agoIt’s definitely sarcasm, expecting the average parent to administer their home network and outmaneuver adult website operators is unreasonable. Plus comparing how to parent in the days when the only internet access point was a desktop computer in the living room vs now when everyone has multiple hand held devices is not helpful.
- Aachen 1y agoThat's an interesting line you're drawing. I'd not say my parents were negligent or that I'm any worse off for having a computer to myself I heard later they talked about porn and decided that if I seek it out, I'm probably ready for it and otherwise, if I find it icky (I remember feeling that way as a child), I'll just not go back to it. Looking back, for me at least, I think it really was that simple: some things are icky to me still today and I don't seek them out, but I don't remember ever wishing I hadn't seen something that I had looked up The second thing is that my mom was concerned about my computer use, but then at some point saw that I also created things (probably HTML pages). She later told me that this was when she decided it could be good for my development to continue down this path and learn more about computers. I now work in IT. I don't think she was wrong Keeping my computer use supervised just isn't feasible when it's most of my free time (after maybe 13 years old, idk). I don't think these considerations mean my parents were "not around". They were 100% there for me when I needed them and then some. You can call this negligent but that's neither their nor my opinion, more than ten years after leaving their supervision and looking back at it and how others are raising children currently What seems harmful to me is the helicopter parenting style that movies and online (news) media portray the USA as doing. Idk to what extent that's actually real though, a lot of it seems really far out there
- globalnode 1y agoSomeone missed the responsibility step: parents are responsible for their kids not rando strangers across the world, and when kids get old enough they're responsible for themselves. Unless they need carers, then the carers are responsible.
- BrenBarn 1y agoIt's ironic that the faction that's usually talking about "personal responsibility" is now saying we can't put this horrible burden on parents to control their kids' device use --- or even just teach them how to make healthy decisions and interpret what they see in a healthy manner. I seriously doubt that reading smutty stories online is going to scar a kid for life.
- mindslight 1y agoIt's not ironic, rather it's hypocritical. At this point it's painfully clear that they only invoke lofty ideals to trick reasonable people into supporting their backwards authoritarian agenda. The real aim is simply for power, and open hypocrisy is one aspect of demonstrating power - rules for thee, not for me.
- stickfigure 1y agoI'm puzzled by this 33% thing. Can I just host two videos of wholesome AI slop for every porn shoot? Like, if Pornhub adds a Christian section they can continue as-is?
- EasyMark 1y agoIt's a foot in the door law, newer laws will only become more draconian. Slow frog boil tactics are not uncommon with fascists. Look what Orban is doing, setting up fascism one step at a time, rather than an overwhelming military coup type of takeover.
- frumplestlatz 1y agoI’m a porn abolitionist, and I still hate these laws. Requiring digital identification online is an incredibly chilling step. It is a direct assault on anonymity.
- EasyMark 1y agoIt's an attempt to get a list of people for a future Gilead like government to prosecute. It's not about protecting children, it's a way to get a list of nonbelievers and sinners in the hopes they can set up their theocracy and punish the non-believers.
- Hnrobert42 1y agoWow. Porn abolitionist. That's a fascinating position. One I can't begin to fathom, so it's very interesting.
- frumplestlatz 1y agoTo be clear, my view is not one rooted in moral judgment, and certainly not directed at sex workers. Rather, it’s grounded in trauma ethics. The statistical prevalence of CSA amongst sex workers is incredibly high — nearly universal. Sex work itself is quite often a form of trauma reenactment, and the degree to which they engage in disassociation in order to perform is staggering. I believe that in a very real and ethical sense, pornography and other forms of sex work entails the commodification of disassociation, and the consumption of maladaptive trauma responses rooted in CSA. In effect, it amounts to taking pleasure in the psychological aftershocks of abuse. I’m not convinced that porn abolition is even possible, but that it is important to be honest about the ethical fault almost universally implicit in sex work.
- rlonn 1y agoIt's interesting that we, as humans, are all so neurotic about sex, and especially about allowing our kids to understand that sex exists, that we rush to outlaw any depictions of it that our kids could potentially see. While at the same time making sure adults are still able to see it, of course. Because everyone knows that when you're 6569 days old, seeing someone have sex will cause life-long scarring, but when you're 6570 days old it doesn't matter anymore. We also outlaw the depiction of any crimes related to sex, and here we find it easier to justify the ban, but in our haste we clump together actual crimes committed against a real victim, and imaginary crimes such as e.g. a cartoonist drawing a rape scene. In the latter case we close our eyes to the fact that we claim to support something called "freedom of speech" and, in our neurotic hunt to ban things sex-related we trample our principles. Same goes for e.g. CSA, but in that case in particular, logic and consistency seems to go out the window and principles are sacrificed in the blink of an eye. It makes me a little depressed to see. As for individual countries trying to enforce their local socio-cultural norms on the rest of the world, that is of course equally silly. The US is great in many ways, but introspection and ability to follow principles is sometimes lacking for sure. I wouldn't be surprised if our sexual neurosis is what makes an AGI finally decide that we're not competent to captain the ship anymore.
- rurban 1y agoNot "we, as humans". Only for we, as third world country
- rlonn 1y agoI'm in Sweden, and we behave the same way. We just don't focus on exactly the same things. The attitude towards sex in general is more relaxed, but when it comes to CSA we would love to impose our views on defining and policing it on the rest of the world, see https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- briandear 1y agoThe EU is far ahead of Texas on this. Spain is launching a “porn passport” system (Cartera Digital Beta) using government-issued digital ID to verify age, and France has already attempted something similar. Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, platforms—including porn sites—must implement age checks for EU users regardless of where the site is based. And this isn’t being led by “conservative Christians”—Spain’s Socialist PM Pedro Sánchez is pushing it. I know we’re talking “America” here, but this isn’t some puritanical American concept. This article overreads the Supreme Court’s decision. It upheld a narrow Texas law requiring age verification to access adult content, applying intermediate scrutiny and emphasizing in-state regulatory authority. It didn’t grant states power to prosecute across borders, nor did it change existing limits on state jurisdiction. The argument relies on a stack of fallacies: Post hoc — assumes the ruling causes harms that depend on future, hypothetical laws. Slippery slope — claims this leads to extraterritorial prosecution, which the ruling doesn’t support. Appeal to fear — frames state level regulation as existential threat without legal basis.
- ringeryless 1y ago[dead]
- SomeOne123150 1y ago"Some people who mourn Alan Turing would continue to kill him if he came back, some Christians would continue to crucify Christ if he came back."
- mdavid626 1y agoQuestion for all the people who say that the government should not do this -- how do you protect your children accessing these sites?
- MasanskY01 1y agoThe land of the free. Where every moron can get and use a firearm and the rest of the world only knows the country even has educational institutes because of all the school shootings. But let's outlaw trans, drags and writings for the poor religious conservative inbreds in the South. Because that's the real danger in the world now. Yikes
- ndsipa_pomu 1y agoIf there's going to be strict rules around sex, then I'd like to see similar laws around distributing violent content. What we need are age verification requirements before kids can see violence on News programmes or be subjected to the threat of gun violence (e.g. in schools).
- jimmydoe 1y agoIf the goal is protecting kids, why not jail the parents who allowed their child to have unlimited access to internet rather than the publisher?
- mathgradthrow 1y agoTome to move to Tor
- devwastaken 1y agoexactly as predicted. you all didnt want online ids back when we could have done it right. now you get the bad version. consequences.
- polski-g 1y agoThis should nudge browser makers to include user age information in the headers.
- kdinn 1y agoYou may find this helpful, it is a non-partisan summary of the decision and its affects: https://sivic.life/free-speech-coalition-inc-v-paxton-no-23-1122/ https://sivic.life/free-speech-coalition-inc-v-paxton-no-23-...
- derelicta 1y agoThat's a great moment to start a company whose only focus is blackmail erotica authors into giving them money
- RS-232 1y agoLoophole to the Tennessee law: a disclaimer at the top of the site that the following is for scientific and educational purposes only. Problem solved. “When taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.”