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.

  • Nougat
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    1399 days ago

    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.”

    • @ZILtoid1991
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      449 days ago

      They’re the arbiters of what is “harmful to minors”.

      • @Passerby6497
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        329 days ago

        Well yeah, they’re experts in hurting children.

      • @taladar@sh.itjust.works
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        109 days ago

        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.

        • @nyan@lemmy.cafe
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          99 days ago

          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.

          • @taladar@sh.itjust.works
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            49 days ago

            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.

            • @nyan@lemmy.cafe
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              29 days 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’.

      • @ZILtoid1991
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        169 days ago

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

    • @BrianTheeBiscuiteer
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      118 days ago

      Pretty much every social media site would probably count too.

    • @shalafi
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      58 days ago

      “Flood the zone with bullshit” can work for both sides.

  • John Richard
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    819 days ago

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

    • @just_another_person
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      459 days ago

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

    • @TheGrandNagus
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      7 days ago

      That would be hugely illegal, so no, they can’t threaten that unfortunately.

      E: people, tone down your anger. I never said I like these Republican shitheads, I said companies cannot legally publish personal information about their customers without permission. And they can’t. Data protection laws exist.

      Saying “Pornhub should just, like, break the law, mannnn, it would be funny!” is not a serious position. It’s not going to happen for obvious reasons.

      I guess I should’ve seen this coming. It’s far more fun to be angry than to have reasonable discussions.

      Anybody being realistic knows that sites like pornhub cannot legally release personally-identifiable information about their users without consent. It’s illegal, no matter how much dumb-as-fuck people like the person below insist it isn’t.

      Honestly, I feel like I’m chatting to climate change deniers here or something. Companies cannot release personally-identifiable information about you without your consent. This is not news.

      • @Madison420
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        159 days ago

        It’s not illegal at all, what are you talking about.

        • @TheGrandNagus
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          8 days ago

          How the fuck is that not illegal? Companies cannot just release private information about their users.

          The US doesn’t have a full-blown GDPR, but it still has laws about what companies can do with people’s data. They can’t just publish information about specific users without their consent. It’s honestly laughable you think that’s legal.

          • @Madison420
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            48 days ago

            They absolutely can publish non protected information and none of that is actually protected.

              • @Madison420
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                38 days ago

                Membership is not protected status, any company could publish their membership roll unless their agreements specifically say they cannot and that’s very rare.

                • @TheGrandNagus
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                  7 days ago

                  No they can’t. Please stop making stuff up. Please stop the lies. You’re spreading misinformation.

                  Pornhub cannot go around publishing info about specific accounts holders, such as their name and job.

                  It’s actually insane that you think that’s the case.

      • @ZILtoid1991
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        59 days ago

        Just create a hackersona by taking a random Joker card from Balatro, and make it look like a hacker attack.

      • Sabata
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        49 days ago

        They can just do it without threat as there is nearly no privacy laws.

  • @WhatAmLemmy
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    9 days ago

    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.

    • @surewhynotlem
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      129 days ago

      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.

      • Captain Aggravated
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        58 days ago

        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.”

        • @surewhynotlem
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          28 days ago

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

      • @Buddahriffic
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        17 days ago

        And those buying the ads would love to know if who sees their ads are bots or humans.

      • @FarmTaco
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        98 days 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.

      • @WhatAmLemmy
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        27 days ago

        What makes you think your beliefs represent the majority, or have any relevance to what the most successful criminally corrupt predators want?

  • @BradleyUffner
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    449 days ago

    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?

    • @ITGuyLevi@programming.dev
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      278 days 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.

    • @scarabic
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      37 days ago

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

  • @Telorand@reddthat.com
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    269 days ago

    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.

    • @limer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      219 days 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?

  • @General_Effort
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    119 days ago

    “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.

    • @RaoulDook
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      28 days 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

      • @General_Effort
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        27 days ago

        It’s a good analogy for a lot of things. The story mocks the human tendency to go along with obvious nonsense; to conform to expectations.

        Such obscenity laws originate in centuries past, when people unironically believed that masturbation makes you go blind or crazy, rather than helping prevent prostate cancer. Society collectively believed that having sex the wrong way would end with you going to hell. Pornography might make the boys gay or wear women’s clothes. Well, if you look at who passes these laws now, maybe those beliefs haven’t died out.

        The point is simply that there is nothing inherently harmful in being exposed to porn. Sure, some of it is disturbing or may give you bad ideas about how the world works, but that’s true for any kind of media. Whether referring to minors, eg 17-year-olds, as children is appropriate is another matter.

    • @JDCAce
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      77 days 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.

  • @werefreeatlast
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    29 days ago

    Don’t read this unless you’re 18!

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

  • katy ✨
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    19 days ago

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

    • @scarabic
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      47 days 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.