this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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A trade group for the adult entertainment industry will appear at the Supreme Court on Wednesday in its challenge to a Texas law that requires pornography sites to verify the age of their users before providing access – for example, by requiring a government-issued identification. The law applies to any website whose content is one-third or more “harmful to minors” – a definition that the challengers say would include most sexually suggestive content, from nude modeling to romance novels and R-rated movies.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 49 minutes ago (1 children)

How do you work out your Texas age?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 42 minutes ago

It's your regular age doubled, to indicate all the stress effects from living in the state and how they adversely affect the body.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Couldn't the site just host hundreds of test pattern videos, or something else that compresses super well in order to avoid that "one-third" bar?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

If I were them writing the law it would be based on viewed content. Not files sitting on servers.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago

The devs just need to make the top 1/3 and bottom 1/3 of the screen blank bars. Boom, sight never contains more than 1/3 questionable material. As an added benefit, sales of old 4:3 monitors would go through the roof.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Fascism wants an internet where you have to verify your identity to use it at all. Capitalists want the same, and they've already built a turnkey totalitarianism mass surveillance precursor to big brother on behalf of neoliberal "democracies". They will 100% finish the job for fascism. This was always the endgame of mass surveillance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I’m a capitalist, and that’s not what I want.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 hours ago

jokes on you, it doesnt matter what you want as a "capitalist" its what Capitalism as a system wants. Kind of like voting for a politician who doesnt do everything you like.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Capitalists shouldn't want the same. You can't sell advertisements with "a million viewers" if you have to be honest about 990k of those being bots.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

You're applying very 1990s thinking to internet advertising. They have ways of telling which ads lead to clickthroughs and sales. You say "We got 100 million viewers!" They say "cool, we'll run ads on your program and give you five cents every time the unique link in those ads results in a purchase."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

No one is paying per sale. Click through, sure.

[–] [email protected] 130 points 1 day ago (4 children)

The law applies to any website whose content is one-third or more “harmful to minors”

So ... Infowars, Fox News, OAN, Answers in Genesis, JW, Texas.gov ... right?

Or, all the porn sites should just put huge amounts of public domain works and open source repositories on their sites, so that less than one-third is "harmful to minors."

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

Pretty much every social media site would probably count too.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 day ago (2 children)

They're the arbiters of what is "harmful to minors".

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago

Well yeah, they're experts in hurting children.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, they would just say that those public domain works or open source repositories teach minors undesirable knowledge of some sort or compete with commercial software vendors and/or entertainment providers.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That can be weaponized, though. US government publications are public domain. So is the Bible. We'd at least get to watch members of the Texas government tie themselves into knots worthy of a game of Twister as they try to argue that those texts are harmful on a porn site but not anywhere else.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Who says that they would argue that they are not harmful anywhere else? Remember, the bible used to be only read by priests in Latin and interpreted to the masses and many governments would love to have less transparency as you can see in their opposition to freedom of information type initiatives.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

It isn't in their best interests to threaten the loony Christian sects that are one of the right wing's favourite brainwashing tools. Members of those sects rely on authority figures to "interpret" the Bible for them instead of actually paying attention to its content, but if you try to take it away from them, they'll throw a fit like a toddler does when you take away a toy they've been ignoring. Restricting access to the Bible in the present day would make religious brainwashing more difficult and create more people who actually think for themselves, which is anathema to bad governments like Texas'.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

"Flood the zone with bullshit" can work for both sides.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago

4chan will be okay, it hosts /pol/, a nazi board.

[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Can't they just threaten to release Republican's porn accounts? We know they got them.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 day ago

It's like the pro-democracy version of the Ashley Madison hack.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

“harmful to minors”

Indeed, I find that few things have done more to ruin my sense of common decency than HC Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes and that's a story all about public nudity.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

Did you bring that up because it's such a good analogy for the Trump presidency? I feel like I've been inside a version of that story since about 2020

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I guess we're about to see how many favors they're going to give to the fundigelicals. Whee.

My guess is they side with Texas (because they've had too much normal adjudication lately), citing some impropriety statute from the Dutch Puritans circa 1683 as their core precedent, followed by pointing out that there's no federal law that supercedes it, so neener-neener.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago

I guess all the corruption and moral collapse allows me, who has absolutely no clue about law, to actually have educated guesses how important cases are voted.

I simply ask myself “how would a bad person decide?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Don't read this unless you're 18!

You read it, didn't you? But your 49! Dang dude! C'mon.

[–] Amoxtli -4 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Wait, which group?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

why would anyone challenge this law to a hostile court so the texas law becomes landmark and set precident

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

I think you make a good point. Choosing your timing for a Supreme Court ruling is important. But the court is likely to be hostile for a very long time, and the businesses bringing the case are probably reeling from having to block half of the US market, so they can’t wait forever.