Supremes uphold Texas law that forces age-check before viewing adult material The US Supreme Court has ruled that Texas' age certification law for viewing sexually explicit content is valid, meaning that viewers of such material will have to prove their age. The dispute started in 2023, when the Lone Star State's legislature approved Texas House Bill 1181, which requires viewers of such material to …
No that's obviously not true, you are looking for conspiracies when there aren't any. The VPN companies aren't based in Texas, and since it is a market with low barriers to entry and lots of competition they don't have spare cash to pay for bribing public officials the way say a Meta or Google does.
The reason is because they're a bunch of hypocritical shitbags who want to enforce their morals (the ones they preach, not the ones they live by) on others because it gives them a woody. If they could get away with a ban on porn for all ages they would do it in a heartbeat.
"Sure but somehow a lot of people don't seem to know that, or there wouldn't be so many people paying for stuff like Onlyfans."
More money than internet-fu? I suppose if you are fixated on somebody that publishes media on OnlyFans you'll not want anything similar (let's say one's teacher at school has a side hustle).
The proloferation of VPNs and proper privacy protecting technologies will probably be good for people in the long term, but cursed by law enforcement and ICE (a distinction). Now to deal with the pernicius data sharing/composition that is being championed by Palentir to increase state surveillance.
Or, more probably in this situation, showing is ok, viewing is not.
Interesting thing to consider, that the literalist interpretation of the Bill of Rights might have an unpleasant result. Especially once that concept has been applied in one case and then becomes a pattern for use against other less "obviously bad" targets.
But then, we already know that these State lawmakers allow - encourage - banning books, including taking away privately owned copies (i.e. more than just refusing to make them freely available and for free). So this is all just a natural extension of that thinking, an extension towards controlling the adults as well as "protecting the children".
Yes, creating and distributing porn is "freedom of speech", but there is no "freedom to listen" right, or in that case "freedom to watch" right. At least they did not ban it right away, but requires age check
Bad side: There are already big movements on banning books from libraries, including the adult section, for non-pornographic books. (books, not picture-books, but the evolution is targeted too).
But why would you want _any_ books? Other than The Holy Bible[tm](c)4004BC?
Since that piece of bronze age fantasy contains everything one could ever want to know about everything, obviously every other book is the work of the devil[tm] and should be banned and burned, and as for people who _read_read them...
Oh, but wait. Other religions are available. Um. Well. Since _all_ are right in _every_ respect, we'll ignore the logical contradictions therein and just choose one. As long as it's the _right_ one.
</sarcasm>
<hersey>Which Bible? There are tons of christian variants out there. And the US-variants are even worse, better the original first translation from Martin Luther. What do you mean, German books are banned in this library since they are not written in the only god-given language?</hersey>
"(But then, I was kicked out of the school choir sixty years ago for refusing to sing the religious songs...)"
There isn't a lot of choir music written outside of religious stuff and our high school choir was a rowdy bunch and only a few seemed all that religious. Also a few decades in my past.
There's quite a lot of recent choral stuff written by John Rutter, who describes himself as 'An agnostic supporter of the Christian faith', where does that fit? I'm not religious (and can't sing), but I like some of Rutter's music, although it tends to be a bit saccharine in large quantites.
"Er-hem. And those fifty works are just JSB's contribution."
I haven't sang in a choir for decades. I suppose I must say that the music presented to us was primarily of a religious bent. I didn't care. It was a fun group in school and an easy A. Show up and sing, what's harder than that? My artistic competence in ceramics can be described as Wattle and Daub. I wish I was a painter as good as Jackson Pollack. Singing in the choir wasn't uncool and satisfied the Arts requirement for graduation. I supposed I could have been a "band-o" but that wasn't very cool.
Some (many?) US evangelicals consider the KJV to be the only authentic one intended by God, who inspired the Hebrew and Aramaic bits so that they could later be translated into the Real Thing.
Of course this is nonsense, but then again they believe - to quote Urban Dictionary - that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. Adding a bit of divine foreknowledge of seventeenth century translation does't make the whole weird business much less plausible.
Adding a bit of divine foreknowledge of seventeenth century translation does't make the whole weird business much less plausible.
It's great! One section has been pretty much unchanged in maybe 4,000yrs. So it covers something many people might be familiar with. Planning and building. Want to build a temple? First make sure you've got permission to use the land and aren't in breach of restrictive covenants. If you are sure, and the penalties for breaching those covenants could be extremely severe, then you could start building. Except the architects were both oddly specific, and yet vague. There was no International Standards body around at the time, so nobody is entirely sure what ""applies to the cubit of middle-size" means.
But it's derived in part from palms, but AFAIK does not include their hair length. So viewing habits may not lead to roof collapses.
I still think it's a bit weird that in the Land of the Free, kids can watch people get stabbed, shot, exploded etc but have to wait until 21 to drink a beer or 18 to see someone other than Jason Statham's nipples.
They just need to get the rights to any old video, and offer them up in 30 second episodes. For new uploads, studios and independent creators will simpliy need to upload non-porn content equivalent to 20% of their porn content. Hell, the guy that filmed the 607 minute video of paint drying coutd license it. The same goes for the all of the slow tv videos by NRK, including the Hurtigruten - minutt for minutt, which is 134h 42m 45s long.
Seems to me the cross eyed lion is saying publication is "free" but access to first amendment protected expression might be entirely prevented by any US jurisdiction legislating a requirement of a minimum age 159 years 9 months† for anyone attempting access.
Curious how these law school dropkicks would harmonize this with the right of assembly where protected speech might be forthcoming.
"that no person - adult or child - has a First Amendment right to assemble without first submitting proof of age"
I have never been happier to be a mere "oppressed" subject in a constitutional monarchy entirely deprived of any such constitutional guarantees.
† ie were conceived around the end of Civil War when arguably the nation was aso pretty much as fucked.
The big concern here is probably that phrase "sexual material harmful to minors". In many societies, we might agree that seeing two people making love is not inherently harmful to minors (though it might be uncomfortable). We see films all the time where (gasp!) sex has happened. The fun legal game is deciding where the line is between loving signs of affection and porn.
And the issue with the legislation is that, beyond issues of privacy, defining this phrase gives well funded groups a convenient tool to severely restrict access to sites and content they don't like. Advice on sexual health? Information on sexuality and gender? Commentary on issues of body autonomy? We can kill those.
Sure, it's not actual censorship. Of course you can still access that information. But the reality for people asking those sorts of questions is that the phrase "now please enter your credit card" is pretty much going to kill curiosity stone dead. For techies, VPNs are a sort of answer, but again, it's a pretty effective barrier to someone tentatively exploring such issues.
And besides restricting information and advice on difficult subjects, this also has a chilling effect on the provision of such content. If two thirds of your viewers "go away", that's a revenue stream that dries up. Strangely, in its place the traditional view of sex (as endorsed by Andrew Tate) is still viewed as completely acceptable. What did the president say? "Grab them by the credit card"?
"In many societies" - those societies are bad and evil according to those who want to enforce these laws, remember. A man and a woman should figure it out on their honeymoon, with the aid only of whatever advice they've had whispered to them by concerned family. No meaningful sex ed., no porn, definitely no experimentation. If that doesn't sound like modern society bear in mind the point of this is to change that society.
Unless I'm reading this very wrong, this only applies to websites that are owned by USA companies/people so I think I can see a rather obvious loophole.
Actually, there's another problem: some of the States appear to have used a broader definition rather than limiting it to pron - presumably in an effort to widen the net (example: Kansas (SB 394) ...any commercial entity that knowingly shares or distributes material that is harmful to minors on a website...). Many very popular snack items contain excessive sugar and/or fats which are medically proven to be harmful to health. Some vendors even go so far as to use cartoon characters to promote their wares so we can reasonably assume they're deliberately targetting minors - so does this mean any citizen of Kansas needs age verification before they can view pictures of McDonalds' delicious meal combos? Ironically, the good people of Kansas probably won't be allowed to watch The Wizard Of Oz either because squishing witches under buildings is definitely harmful to health!
I don't think that would be a problem if that were the only consequence. But this a verdict from the Supreme Court with enormous consequences as it effectively codifies the rights of states (and by extension of the federal government) to intercede, ostensibly to protect children (though by extension this could easily cover "citizens"), over the material that is publicly available. In other words, censorship just got the blessing of the highest court in America.
Surely, no-one is going to try and abuse this…
No, they can either ensure that they only include "wholesome" subjects, or close. Some arbitrary politician now gets to decide what is and is not obscene: the ruling doesn't seem to leave any scope for challenge or judicial review.
And that woman is showing far too much skin, she should cover up!
Texas House Bill 1181 requires any commercial website whose content is more than one-third "sexual material harmful to minors" to verify that Texas-based users are at least 18.
And there you go - if lawyers were free and I were running a large porn site I'd change nothing. When they try to stop me, I would ask that they identify which 1//3 of my material is harmful and how they intend to prove that in court? They seem to be working on the assumption that porn is defacto harmful. While I argue it is certainly inappropriate for minors, can Texas prove it is actually harmful?
So basically since it only applies to sites where more than one third of the content is deemed sexual content, that gives Elon a pass for Twitter, which is full of pron yet won't be subject to requiring ages checks since it also has plenty of right wing content, conspiracy theory posts and general toxicity to make up the other 2 thirds of the content, so all the kids can carry on viewing smut by just saying they are over 18 when they make a Twitter account.
Its not gonna make one bit of difference to stop minors seeing sexual content who want to find it, as well as Twitter there are also tons of free website where no credit card is required to view. Just like the similar ill thought out laws brought out in the UK, its will just mean adult content providers will either close or move their operations out of the local area to avoid the restrictions.
I use a VPN on my Android phone and on my Windows PC. On the PC it's simple to show me as being wherever I please, but my Android phone, with all location settings turned off, my phone still leaks my real location despite using the same VPN as my PC. Why can't I disguise my location on my phone?
I'm fairly tech minded, but I haven't been able to fix this issue. I live in Texas, and for now I'm only prohibited from PornHub and a few others, but with this ruling will all porn sites be blocking me?
I haven't used the VPN on my phone for a while. I think it got an update that broke it and wants me to pay for a new package. On the PC, it continues with the lifetime subsciption.
VPNs around geo-blocking do work fine on mobile phones, but applications may already have got location details from your normal IP address and cache them. And, as they're not normally closed, the data may still be around. So you might want to close whichever apps are causing problems, and maybe try another browser: if you're using Chrome, you can be sure Google knows where you really are.
The VPN I use (Windscribe) allows you to create a mock location in the system under Android. Works like a charm - if the GPS is turned off Google maps, Uber et al all dutifully report I am in the middle of the city where the VPN server is.
It's the only one I've stumbled across that has this feature but there are probably others that do it too.
(No affiliation with Windscribe, just a user...)
Specifically, when I was a child, my great grandmother's backyard had an excellent view of the local drive-in theater. I'm wondering how the esteemed legal experts here would rule on a theoretical ordinance to ban the display of "R"-rated movies on that screen? (R-rated was ostensibly for 17+) X-rated? (porn)
But what I has never been clear to me is why this case (which has been covered repeatedly here) should be argued under the First Amendment at all when the interstate commerce clause is available. That should be open-shut. Unless a site is showing content created in-state and viewed by citizens of that same state, there is no state jurisdiction.
SOMEBODY was playing games...
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