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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Pretty much every social media site would probably count too.
“Flood the zone with bullshit” can work for both sides.
They’re the arbiters of what is “harmful to minors”.
Well yeah, they’re experts in hurting 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.
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.
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.
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’.
4chan
4chan will be okay, it hosts /pol/, a nazi board.
“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.
Can’t they just threaten to release Republican’s porn accounts? We know they got them.
It’s like the pro-democracy version of the Ashley Madison hack.
That would be hugely illegal, so no, they can’t threaten that.
It’s not illegal at all, what are you talking about.
They can just do it without threat as there is nearly no privacy laws.
Just create a hackersona by taking a random Joker card from Balatro, and make it look like a hacker attack.
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.
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?”
Don’t read this unless you’re 18!
You read it, didn’t you? But your 49! Dang dude! C’mon.
Perverts…
Wait, which group?
why would anyone challenge this law to a hostile court so the texas law becomes landmark and set precident
