Supreme Court rules in favor of anti-porn law

[Desk trauma]

And Texas requires age verification for purchasing those products.

At those risky grocery stores.

 

[bèlla]

Who would vote against legislation to protect children on a christian website? Pornography is addicting and the court is right to do so. They wouldn’t have access if parents would use the resources available to block access. Which includes network monitoring and special phones.

~bella

 

[Desk trauma]

I agree that those websites will have to do better about protecting against identity theft.
But disagree with the broad brush stroke idea of removing anonymity from the internet, privacy is a necessity in this world, because people are untrustworthy in how they use sensitive information. Anonymity enhances privacy.

If anything this is driving more anonymity as it’s increasing the use of VPN services, until the states come after those.

 

[public hermit]

I understand wanting to shield children from such content and support it. I don't know how effective these kinds of laws will be, and if adults want to look at such material, they'll probably have to give more info than is comfortable, but oh well. Perhaps this will lead to more judges looking at questionable material, which is an odd side-effect.

The hilarious implications of the Supreme Court’s new porn decision

The Court’s opinion has disturbing things to say about privacy, but the biggest losers are likely to be judges themselves.

www.vox.com

 

[seeking.IAM]

They wouldn’t have access if parents would use the resources available to block access

I did this back in the day. I paid for expensive blocking software only to check browsing history and discover sites listed for which I had blocked access. My kid looked at me and laughed, "Dad we got around that in 3 days."

 

[RocksInMyHead]

And Texas requires age verification for purchasing those products.

Right, but that's not why the subject was brought up.

People trading in wares that are prohibited to minors are always correlated with untrustworthiness and risk.

 

[bèlla]

I did this back in the day. I paid for expensive blocking software only to check browsing history and discover sites listed for which I had blocked access. My kid looked at me and laughed, "Dad we got around that in 3 days."

They have better methods now that monitor the server and smartphones designed for kids and teens. You could have installed a key logger that ran silently to catch them. It captured everything including conversations. ;-)

~bella

 

[Jamdoc]

Websites which handle sensitive information, such as credit cards, are required by law to abide by certain security standards.


I don't see a lot of principled reasoning in your sentences here. Anonymity brings with it both good and bad things. That's the place to start. Fear-based anecdotes about China and the Antichrist are not very interesting. This fear-based pro-anonymity attitude is itself the broad-brush stroke. I said that anonymity is not an unmitigated good. Feel free to reply to that idea.

You must not be very knowledgeable about the internet in general. There's a reason why losing anonymity on the internet is feared (Doxxing). People do things with that information, identity theft, swatting (which can get people killed), blackmail, blacklisting from jobs, and that's just on the private sector side before you get into a government doing things once they can connect everything you do online or say online to your name and address to build a case against you.

No, they're not. Americans have a bias against legislation. They are indoctrinated with the strange notion, "You can't legislate morality." It turns out that all legislation is moral in nature, even if it is based on a Rawlsian morality.

They are, because kids who've wanted to find porn, have always been able to find it. In the 90's when internet porn was first starting it was all paid sites, the "age verification" was having a credit card in order to pay for a subscription to the site., but teens found ways around that, hacked passwords, stolen credit cards, and various other sources like IRC, newsgroups, and filesharing clients originally touted for music sharing (generally music pirating) like limewire, and eventually torrents where you could download entire paid siterips.
The problem with this is that the paid sites were regulated and had "legal" porn consenting adults etc, but those other avenues like filesharing/torrenting had on them stuff that was not regulated, child abuse and non-consensual (IE filmed rape and snuff). Children looking for ways around the "age verification" end up seeing more damaging material than what they'd see on regulated sites.
Starting in the later 2000's a lot of sites went free, paid for by advertising, now these free sites were regulated, you weren't going to find child abuse or snuff/rape on them, though there was a time when "revenge porn" became an issue and so some of the sites had to purge a lot of "amateur" contributions These freesites became the goto for kids looking for porn, because it was readily available and easy to find. It's these free sites that are mostly targeted by the legislation. The issue becomes, now that those free regulated sites become harder to access, and for the time being while it's state by state I think most teens that are underage and still looking for porn will opt to use VPN's to access the free sites they know, but as more and more locales basically ban them, it'll drive kids to looking for those other routes again, torrenting is already starting to come back, and with it, will come back some of these worst of the worst, the child abuse, snuff, and rape.

it's in a way similar to drug trafficking, banning the drugs never prevented people from acquiring them, it only drove it underground and made it a lot more dangerous because you were dealing with unregulated stuff where you might not be getting what you're intending to get, things laced with other things, gang violence, etc, like we never learned from prohibition. Right now I can walk into a store and buy marijuana, it's clean, and basically like any other store, with hired staff just selling you a packaged product, that only has what it says it has in it. Before that, had I wanted to, I could still get marijuana, but it involved having to deal with a guy who was paranoid about whether you were a cop while fingering a gun in his pocket, and the stuff you get might be laced, and they'll also have more than marijuana to sell, stuff that is more dangerous. Basically the law doesn't actually protect me from getting things I want but it can make getting those things more risky and not just from a trouble with the law standpoint but dealing with lawbreakers standpoint.

Note how confused your strawman is, even as a strawman: "We don't want to protect kids from pornography. We want to ban pornography! And banning pornography has nothing to do with protecting kids, or anyone else!"

It's like saying:

again just.. ignorance and inexperience.

What these laws will do, is put a minor hurdle in front of someone trying to access the sites. It'll only deter people who don't consider porn to be worth the hassle of those other avenues to get around the hurdles.
It'll deter someone who generally doesn't want to view porn but might have a moment of moral weakness where a free porn site tempts them and they go in, but if there's a hurdle that hurdle might be enough to beat that moment of weakness and they'll not jump through the hoops even though they could.
But it won't deter a person who is actively looking for it and really wants it.

For me personally it works, cause I can have a moment of temptation, but knowing it's blocked and would require jumping over hurdles deters me. I'm kinda thankful for that. But if I really wanted it? I'd jump over the hurdles. It only works because I don't really want it, but too easy of access becomes a temptation.
I don't even pretend to be naive enough to think that it's preventing a child from accessing porn. It wouldn't have stopped me as a teen when I was looking for it. If I could find hacked passwords and siterips when I was 15, I'm pretty sure that 15 year olds now can use a VPN, which is way easier. It's a pretty low hurdle, it only works if I'm unwilling to jump or go around it. Which 44 year old me doesn't want to cause I know what's on the other side of that hurdle is evil, I know that it harms me, and it harmed other people in its production. But 15 year old me? Ran around the hurdle with ease, because I wanted what was on the other side and didn't even think about the evil involved.

 

[Jamdoc]

Oh, so you when you said "grocery store" you actually meant, "a store that sells groceries, alcohol, tobacco, and maybe guns."

That's called sophistical reasoning, namely when you say "grocery store" but you mean something quite different. But yes, a store that sells alcohol, tobacco, guns (and also groceries) is correlated with untrustworthiness and risk. That's precisely why not all states allow a "grocery store" to sell alcohol, tobacco, and guns.

Walmart sells all those things. #1 retailer in America.

 

[Nithavela]

Who would vote against legislation to protect children on a christian website?

Framing things as "protecting children" is a good way to make people accept things that go against their own interest.

Pornography is addicting and the court is right to do so. They wouldn’t have access if parents would use the resources available to block access. Which includes network monitoring and special phones.

~bella

If parents can already prevent their children from porn, why the need for legislation?

 

[Nithavela]

They have better methods now that monitor the server and smartphones designed for kids and teens. You could have installed a key logger that ran silently to catch them. It captured everything including conversations. ;-)

~bella

What a great way to lose the trust of your children.

 

[seeking.IAM]

They are, because kids who've wanted to find porn, have always been able to find it.

That is my point. While legislation gives us a sense of satisfaction that we have done something about porn, in reality I think we have not done as much as we think we have done.

 

[ozso]

It's better than nothing.

 

[Jamdoc]

It's better than nothing.

Not if it drives kids to places with far more harmful content.

 

[bèlla]

What a great way to lose the trust of your children.

I raised a child with standards and boundaries like sensible parents do. I leave experiments to the rest and kept her away from them.

~bella

 

[BCP1928]

Well, I'm not against it in principle but I'm doubtful it can be done reliably, I never underestimate the resourcefulness of teenagers.

Laws like this are just virtue signalling. I live in North Carolina which has had a law like this for a while. In practice, it only effects domestically produced porn. The really raunchy offshore sites are still available.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

In Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Texas law that requires pornography sites to use age-verification in order to prohibit distribution to children (and all minors). The porn companies claimed that this violates the free speech rights of adults by forcing them to verify their age before accessing online pornography. The 6-3 opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas rules that the law does not violate the free speech rights of adults. His reasoning, in short, is that we require adults to verify their age when they buy alcohol, cigarettes, and pornography at brick and mortar stores, so why can't we require adults to verify their age when they access online pornography? As long as there is a compelling interest to prohibit minors, there is a legitimate reason to require age verification.

This is a wonderful and very important ruling from SCOTUS. It not only protects children from pornography, but it also provides legislators with the ability to protect minors from other forms of dangerous online content. Kudos to Thomas and the five justices with good sense.

It's always amazed me that I live in a society where folks are more concerned about the product than they are about the producers of that product or about the advocacy of the philosophies of those producers.

The secret of control is in knowing that if the philosophy and its advocates "dry up," then so does the product, a secret that is intended to be kept safely under wraps as progressive laws since 1969 and 1979 tend to show.

As it is, we live in a legal structure that tries to find a 'golden legal mean,' with emphasis, whether admitted or not, upon the 'gold.' I guess they have to protect the producers at all (social) costs so as not to lose yet another contributor to the ongoing economy.

 

[Jamdoc]

Laws like this are just virtue signalling. I live in North Carolina which has had a law like this for a while. In practice, it only effects domestically produced porn. The really raunchy offshore sites are still available.

ah yes, sites outside of the US's jurisdiction. The former soviet bloc countries have a ton of them, rife with child abuse and rape (there was a big case where interpol finally shut down one site where women were coerced into performing sex acts on camera when they thought they were just going to be doing lingerie/swimsuit modeling).
While a lot of the free sites that these laws target will be harder to reach under these laws, those dicey sites outside of the US's jurisdiction will be easier to access in comparison.

 

[Jamdoc]

Basically here's how I see these state by state laws panning out:

While it's still a minority of US states, these free sites will continue to operate, as long as the ad revenue keeps them running, and just block traffic coming from states with these laws passed in them, and people will use VPN's to get around it or find alternate sites that aren't following the law etc.
When it becomes a majority of US states or there's even a federal law passed, those sites will have a few options:
1. Come up with the infrastructure to comply with the law, and if they don't do it well it'll be a flurry of identity theft and hacking cases, or if they do it right with security, likely it'll end up making the free sites become de-facto paysites in order to "prove" your age by paying with a credit card, basically we revert to how it was in the 90's.
2. More likely, these US/Canadian based websites move their base of operations to somewhere outside of jurisdiction, say Czech Republic, or Ukraine when the war ends there and there's rebuilding. In fact I expect a LOT of these sites to relocate to Ukraine so they don't have to comply with the US regulations. Or even relocate operations to Russia, who wouldn't extradite people even if they were blatantly violating US law. The one "saving grace" that may prevent something like revenge porn from being widespread on the sites again is the fact that payment processors like Visa and Mastercard wouldn't deal with the sites when there was questionable material on them.
3. Least likely, the sites just shut down.

If you honestly want to end pornography websites on the internet, the way to do it is actually to target how they get paid. One of the biggest purges of content had nothing to do with legislation, but rather Visa and Mastercard voluntarily not wanting to do business with the sites because of fears of revenge porn being on them. The largest site in the world purged like 75% of their content in short order as a result. If major credit card processors and paypal just refused to do business with pornography, so people couldn't pay for subscriptions and it's also how ad revenue transactions get done.. the money dries up, the sites close down. Because what are they going to do, have people mail them checks? As long as the government is not involved in it no 1st amendment violations are being done as well.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

His reasoning, in short, is that we require adults to verify their age when they buy alcohol, cigarettes, and pornography at brick and mortar stores, so why can't we require adults to verify their age when they access online pornography?

The key distinction is the way and "transport mechanism" by which the age would be verified.
(both in terms of the data security, and privacy)

When I hand my drivers license to a clerk at the grocery store to buy some beer and they take a quick glance at it, it's highly unlikely that that my data and an image of my driver's license is going to be intercepted and end up in a data dump somewhere.

If someone were to purchase that kind of content at a brick and mortar store, it's highly unlikely that the clerk would be snagging a copy of everyone's information in a way that has the propensity for a massive leak and subsequent "Hey, look up your neighbors on the 'here's who's been watching dirty videos, and what kind they've been watching' published leak"


We live in an era where the propensity is high for both stealing peoples' private details, as well as people getting their hands on "dirt" that they can use to damage someone personally/politically/professionally.


In threads where this has been discussed before, I've noted that while I understand the issue they're trying to solve (which is making sure minors can't access that material...and it's a noble cause), good policy needs to have a reasonable benefit to risk trade off.

Meaning, if a policy in question is going to subject a person to some level of personal risk, then the policy needs to be able to demonstrate that it's actually effective enough to address the thing it's claiming to address. Otherwise you've just subjected people to risk for nothing.

Given that 80% of those types of websites are hosted and operated outside of the US (meaning they're not subject to our laws), that's a practical limitation of this proposed legislation.


In reality, and nobody is going to like this answer, this an issue where the cat's out of the bag and we can't unring the bell.

The internet has become ubiquitous, those types of sites make up a huge portion of the internet, there's already been a plethora of tools developed that specifically circumnavigate the monitoring and restrictions people are seeking to enforce, and most parents have already purchased an internet-capable device that their kids have in their pockets and can access when the parents are not around.

These are questions that should've been asked in the 1990's, not in 2025.

It'd be like asking:
"Hey, we already put a package of cookies in our kid's backpack and sent them out to go play with their friends two hours ago -- and gave them $5 that they could technically use to purchase another package to replace it so it wouldn't look like any where missing if they were sneaky enough...how do we 100% ensure they're not going to eat cookies before they come back for dinner?"

Answer: "Sorry, you don't"