But will the free speech absolutist chime in?
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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How do you work out your Texas age?
It's your regular age doubled, to indicate all the stress effects from living in the state and how they adversely affect the body.
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."
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.
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Pretty much every social media site would probably count too.
4chan
4chan will be okay, it hosts /pol/, a nazi board.
"Flood the zone with bullshit" can work for both sides.
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.
I’m a capitalist, and that’s not what I want.
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.
What makes you think your beliefs represent the majority, or have any relevance to what the most successful criminally corrupt predators want?
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.
And those buying the ads would love to know if who sees their ads are bots or humans.
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."
No one is paying per sale. Click through, sure.
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?
If I were them writing the law it would be based on viewed content. Not files sitting on servers.
That would require digital age competence. We don’t elect that, we like old rich dudes.
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.
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.
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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?”
“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.
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
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.
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