Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online
309 comments
·July 12, 2025al_borland
VBprogrammer
The slippery slope from here to banning under 18s looking at websites discussing suicidal thoughts, transgender issues, homosexually and onto anything some group of middle age mothers decide isn't appropriate seems dangerously anti-fallacitical.
conradev
You mean like this?
https://webkit.org/blog/16993/news-from-wwdc25-web-technolog...
It’s a W3C spec led by Okta, Apple and Google based on an ISO standard and it is being rolled out as we speak.
This part
other iOS applications that have registered themselves as an Identity Document Provider.
al_borland
This is interesting, but I’d like to go a step further. I watched the first quarter of the video on where they go over how it works. The site requests data from your ID and they get that data. The site chooses which data it needs and if it will store it or it or not. Sites these days have a tendency to ask for more than what they need, and to store it for profiling purposes. The user can deny the request, but then can’t use the site. They are then left with a dilemma. Give up this personal information or not have access at all? Companies are betting on users giving up privacy in exchange for access.
What I’d like to see is for the site’s request to contain their access rules. Must be over 18, must be in country X, etc. Then on-device it checks my ID against that rule set, and simply returns a pass/fail result from those checks. This way the site would know if I’m allowed to be there, but they don’t get any specific or identifiable information about me. Maybe I’m 18, maybe I’m 56… they don’t know, they both simply send a pass. For a simple age check, a user’s exact birthday, name, address, etc are irrelevant, but I bet companies will get greedy and try to pull it anyway.
I see the monkey paw of the ID spec as leading to more companies seeking to get all our data, when they really don’t need it, and have shown they can’t be trusted with it.
I already see this with Apple Pay. When buying a digital item, some companies are awesome and simply take the payment with no other data. Others pull name, address, email, etc to make a payment when none of that is required.
conradev
The spec is being implemented by Apple, who is sensitive to privacy issues.
The intent of the ISO spec is to allow you to request fine-grained data, like birth year only, but if you read the W3C standard, they explicitly call out privacy as a complex thing that maybe should be regulated.
The spec spells out the complexity: some ID verification processes actually need a lot of info! But some, like an alcohol age check, do not. The spec can do both, but it’s hard to differentiate these technically. The spec does lay out what user agents should do to make it clear which information is going where.
A bad scenario would be designing an API that is too hobbled to replace the invasive “photo of an ID” companies, which this spec seeks to do.
I’d prefer an open web standard that can be abused (with user consent) to a closed App Store-only API or the status quo
alwa
And we could call this way… zero-knowledge proof! :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof
I bet we could even get a major phone OS vendor to support such a thing…
https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...
macawfish
Yet then again how hard is it to just grab your parents' id while their not looking and add it to your phone wallet?
michaelt
Do we expect Apple to implement a special, privacy-preserving age proof for porn viewers? Apple hates porn, when it's on websites like Tumblr.
alwa
At the same time they seem pragmatic about putting their mark on standards. It seems to me like we’re at a confluence: a regulatory tipping point where there really is pressure to bring laws to bear on online harms affecting kids; and a socio-technological moment where “gotta distinguish kids from adults” can realistically happen separately from “…by handing over personal info directly to shady random counterparts.”
Individual smartphones with biometrics are these days a whole-of-society norm, technologists have developed a mature body of cryptographic work to assert ZKPs, the US population seem to have lost their aversion to centralized ID systems… and the periodic moral panic about the kids seems to be at a high tide.
In the same way that Apple don’t prevent, say, Safari from being used for prurient purposes, or Final Cut Pro from being used to edit naughty bits, I don’t see why they wouldn’t want an opinionated implementation as a concept develops of a generic “digital tool to assert your age, and only that.” Especially since Android is doing it and leaning into the privacy angle.
tzs
I expect Apple will implement a general privacy-preserving arbitrary attribute proof, with age proof just one of the things it could be used for, probably using something similar to the library that Google recently released [1].
meowkit
Zero knowledge proof smart contract verification called by the site interested in your age. You provide your public key wallet with its government issued soul bound NFT of your identification.
This can be done, its not that crazy, it just requires a bunch of people to get their heads out of their sand in regards to tech and blockchain, which admittedly might be a harder problem.
——
Additonal thought- if you don’t understand what I’m saying or have a negative reaction just plug the comment + thread context into an LLM and see what it says / ask for a clearer explanation.
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andrepd
Eh. So now I'm forced to have all my IDs stored at an advertising behemoth. Not really a great situation either.
You're practically forced to have a Google/Apple account and a google/apple smartphone to even exist in today's world.
soulofmischief
This goes against the very ethos of the early web. We should not be normalizing any form of this extreme moral overreach.
damontal
The early web died when everything went behind the walled gardens.
CPLX
How did widespread adoption of the libertarian techno-utopianism of the early web work out for society as a whole?
raffael_de
not at all? because it didn't even get to a point where it could have worked out for society as a whole?
dmix
It existed only on the edges, usually in softer pragmatic forms, and stopped a lot of bad ideas as a pressure group.
Characterizing the entire development of software and the internet in 90s-2000s as based on libertarian techno-utopinanism is largely manufactured narrative though. One I keep seeing pop up more and more. Largely by people trying to push poorly though out authoritarian gov-controlled internet by spinning the present internet (and parenting) as a product of some ideological radicalism.
throw0101c
> All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
Kind of unfortunate that PICS[1][2] and POWDER[3][4] never really took off: it allowed web sites to 'self-label' and then browsers (and proxies?) could use the metadata and built-in rules/filters to determine if the content should be displayed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...
Bender
PICS and ICRA were not adopted by many due to complexity. RTA [1][2] is a more generic header that can be used on any adult site or site that allows user contributed content and is easier to implement. There needs to be a law that requires clients to look for this header if parental controls are enabled. Not perfect, nothing is. Teens will easily get around it but most small children will not which should be the spirit of the ID verification movement. It's better than what we have today. The centralized ID verification sites will push many small sites to Tor and bigger sites to island nations and tax evasion in my opinion. More browsers are natively supporting .onion domains.
Congress critters should be opposed to the centralized ID verification systems as their browsing habbits will be exposed to the world when those sites ooopsie dooopsie "leak" the data or just openly sell it or an employee turns that data into a summarized online spreadsheet of who is into what. The kickbacks and lobbying they may be potentially receiving will not be worth it.
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
[2] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-R... [dont follow the links, NSFW]
ai-christianson
The pre-red-tape internet was glorious. Only way to get that back is to decentralize everything.
Eavolution
I am never providing my ID to anyone who can store it indefinitely. I am an adult and have no problem showing it in a shop if required as it isn't stored. Unless it can be proven it wont be stored (i.e. the bytes are never sent from my laptop) I will not provide it.
ivan_gammel
Your ID is effectively stored by the issuer indefinitely. What’s the difference between one and two entities? What’s the difference between two and a hundred?
andrepd
What's the difference between a state agency issuing a document, and sending that document to 100 random websites. This is your question, correct?
al_borland
The more people you give your personal information to, the less personal it becomes.
The servers storing this information have been hacked in the past and it will happen again in the future. The fewer places your ID lives, the lower the risk of it leaking.
Even if you don’t view the data as sensitive, it still associates a person with a website. Depending on the site, that can have negative ramifications in a person’s life. This is especially true when certain websites get associated with various political leaning and when the data leaks, the people who happened to be registered (for whatever their reason) get attacked.
loeg
> Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids.
This is simplistic. I think you'll find parents are not a uniform bloc in favor of this kind of overreach.
everdrive
Others have said this, I'm sure, but this will move past porn _quickly_. Once there is agreed-up age verification for pornography, much of the professional internet will require identity verification to do _anything_. This is one of the bigger nails in the coffin for the free internet, and this true whether or not you're happy with all the pornography out there.
baq
I’d rather have this regulated properly before cloudflare becomes the defacto standard of id checks.
kgwxd
Nothing is going to be "regulated properly" for at least the next 3.5 years, and we'll all be dealing with backwards decline for decades after. That's best case, but i'm guessing It'll be even worse than the "radicals" are shouting about.
fluidcruft
Age verification seems like a subset of human verification so if it gets rid of both bots and captchas then why not?
zeroonetwothree
I don’t agree, at least as far as legal obligation goes. The average voter is far more worried about porn and other explicit content and not so much about anything else.
__loam
This doesn't really track with widespread and normalized use of pornographic materials, including written descriptions, by most adults in this country. There's a pretty wide gulf between "I don't think kids should be able to access this stuff" and "I think we need to supercharge the surveillance state and destroy the first amendment"
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nikanj
And honestly, with the advent of AI spam everywhere, I'd be quite happy to visit a version of the internet where everyone is a certified real person
root_axis
> In fact, under the laws that the Supreme Court just upheld, prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site.
> It's unlikely these interstate prosecutions would happen...
It might wind up being uncommon, but definitely not unlikely - it's basically assured that it will happen eventually, especially if the judge finds the text in question particularly or personally offensive.
I guess now is a great time to start a KYC company.
JohnTHaller
Regressive states are already trying to prosecute across state lines for medical care, so it's pretty likely they'll continue with speech.
giingyui
Yep, medical care.
HideousKojima
[flagged]
kfajdsl
If an state AG tries to prosecute an entity that has no ties to the state other than content being passively accessible, that's probably another supreme court case if it doesn't get immediately decided in favor of the defendant in the lower courts. You open a big can of worms if entities are required to proactively comply with regulations in states they have zero presence in.
If Texas wants to block content from entities that have nothing to do with Texas, they can build their own great firewall.
TimorousBestie
> You open a big can of worms if entities are required to proactively comply with regulations in states they have zero presence in.
It’s true, it would cause a great deal of chaos if suddenly every person and business had to comply with fifty-plus different and sometimes contradictory state laws.
But it seems like that’s where we’re headed?
kfajdsl
As far as I understand it (IANAL), this ruling decides that the speech restrictions imposed by the Texas ID verification law are compliant with the 1st amendment. It didn't touch on whether or not Texas can enforce its laws on entities that don't do business in Texas.
root_axis
IANAL, but it seems like things are already moving in this direction. For example, FL has a similar state law regarding pornography, and the response from many porn sites has been to comply or block FL IPs rather than fight it up to the supreme court. I guess someone will do it eventually, but I suspect there is an assumption that they'd be wasting their time and money to do so.
kfajdsl
Yeah I don't think a business is going to try to force the issue when a geoblock is simple to implement. If it happens, it's probably going to be some kind of advocacy group pushing it.
ronsor
Isn't this covered by the "full faith and credit" clause? [0]
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S1-1/AL...
arrosenberg
Technically anything is possible with the Calvinball Supreme Court, but states can choose not to extradite their citizens. E.g. NY has a shield law for abortion doctors.
https://ag.ny.gov/resources/organizations/police-departments...
bravoetch
Or now is a good time to build privacy tools into everything.
root_axis
Unfortunately, this is the law we're talking about. Privacy tools don't do much to mitigate the hardships of life as a fugitive.
zeroonetwothree
Judges are not the people that prosecute crimes
root_axis
True, but it's a given that prosecutors will do it since that's their job.
ViktorRay
This article is incorrect.
The Supreme Court’s ruling only applied to obscene sexual material. It doesn’t apply to sex scenes within artistic works or sexual content in general.
There’s a test used to determine whether sexual material is considered pornographic. It’s known as the “I know it when I see it” test.
More info on this test here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
More specifically here is what is considered obscene:
The criteria were:
1. whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
2. whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, as specifically defined by applicable state law;
3. whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
The third criterion pertains to judgment made by "reasonable persons" of the United States as a whole, while the first pertains to that of members of the local community. Due to the larger scope of the third test, it is a more ambiguous criterion than the first two.
stego-tech
The article is, in fact, correct.
Community standards vary by community, both physically and digitally. The community standards of a rural town in Utah or ChristianDating.net are likely to be wildly different than the community standards of a major city on the coastlines or PornHub users. This wrinkle is exactly why there's renewed efforts to define what obscenity legally is [1], so that it's inclusive of as much "porn" as possible.
Additionally, you're conveniently ignoring what the author spends most of their piece decrying: the fact that these laws permit "ambulance chasing" attorneys to sue across state lines. That's the real issue, especially given the fact that some state laws can allow civil action to lead to prison time for conviction. Even ignoring the potential outcomes however, these lawsuits are instantly bankrupting for a majority of Americans, and the laws so (intentionally) broadly written that even genuinely innocent parties are likely to fork over money to make it go away given the cost of mounting a defense.
Put simply: obscenity lacks a firm legal definition, the definition of porn is nebulous and variable from person to person, and these laws are written to maximize harm to a maximal population size. The intent is to criminalize as many undesirables as possible, and the current administration and political parties have been transparent that anyone not rich, white, straight, Christian, and cisgendered male are emphatically undesirable.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/167...
MichaelBosworth
Sounds like the article isn’t incorrect? The first two criteria depend on which community is doing the judging. New Yorkers will have à different norm than people from say a quaint 5k-person town where there’s an 8:1 church:supermarket ratio. The third criteria is vague, but vagueness cuts both ways.
Eavolution
Who defines an artistic work? If I produce a porn film, why isn't that my artistic commentary on sex? Laws cant be this subjective because subjectivity implies subjectivity in ruling which is objectively awful.
TechRemarker
The article would seem correct since "obscene" could be twisted to mean whatever they want. As the people making the ruling can say the average person believes x.
dyauspitr
The article sounds very correct.
Anything can be perceived as “obscene” especially when you leave that interpretation open to any particular group.
_bent
We've had kids accessing an Internet without any working age barriers for over 30 years now.
There have been problems, be that grooming, Facebook parties and maybe addiction to TikTok.
But being able to access adult content be that sexual or violent in nature doesn't really seem to have had much negative consequences.
Sure I wouldn't want my 10 year old to see 2 girls 1 cup - but I reckon it wouldn't be the end of the world if he did.
It's good that we have content recommendations. But we shouldn't try to actually enforce them.
Again: with all the options kids have had for accessing porn online in the last couple of decades, if it was actually THAT bad, we'd be having an epidemic. Yet we don't. The kids are alright
ProllyInfamous
Content restrictions should just be an option with the ISP: to make the entire modem/phone disable adult content and/or require age verification. This, I would disable (presuming `on` by default).
>2 girls 1 cup
I still remember showing that to curious ladies in grad school (who'd heard about it); some of my favorite reaction footage.
>10 years old
My generation's equivalent was lemonparty.com
=>O<=
tolerance
> Sure I wouldn't want my 10 year old to see 2 girls 1 cup - but I reckon it wouldn't be the end of the world if he did.
This implies is level of nonchalance toward your child seeing two women have sex and eat turds that demands elaboration.
const_cast
It doesn't - rather, it attacks the preposition at it's source. Pornography is bad, supposedly, but is it actually? It seems to me we all moved on without actually answering that question.
We know it's bad for moral reasons, but moral reasons are stupid and I don't trust them. But is it actually bad - like in the real world, with tangible effects, not made-up ones? I don't know, and it looks like you don't know, and OP doesn't know, and the people who are pushing this age verification don't know either.
Sure, two girls one cup is disgusting. It's vile. It's immoral. But is it harmful? That's a different question.
That's a huge problem. You see, we're attempting to solve a problem which we haven't proved even exists.
tolerance
I have a feeling that this is going to turn into one of those exchanges where we capoeira around theory and definitions and what "real" is and what "real" isn't in a way I have to think that either you've lived a sheltered life, or are in denial or have some kind of resentment toward the disgusting, vile and immoral things that you've witnessed that were "harmful" to you (I'm not a therapist).
Moral reasons are stupid and you don't trust them.
Go find a ten-year-old and show them the video yourself. Then see if they feel up to letting you stick around them long enough for you to figure out whether there were any real-world, tangible effects.
BriggyDwiggs42
I saw that when I was little and it was just gross; I’m fine lol. My generation was the one watching cartel executions at that same time and that’s probably worse.
tolerance
Who is your generation and how do you think they turned out.
No, save it (don't save it, this is rhetorical), because apparently every generation is screwed up in their own way that begets the ills of the next.
And if we happen to be cohorts (which I suspect we may be), then I think we made out as worse as any.
And is it wrong to assume that there isn't any difference between either kinds of footage? That one goads the other in either direction?
landl0rd
> conservative Christians are trying to eliminate ALL sexually-related speech online
I don’t really appreciate this framing. Despite being a very conservative Christian (at least in many ways, if not others) I don’t approve of or agree with the scope of SCOTUS’ current ruling, nor do I approve of all the age- verification laws as written. It seems futile to attempt to make everybody everywhere do this and create a locked-down “second internet” for minors.
But I do understand the impetus. As a zoomer, I’ve heard the problems particularly young men addicted to pornography have caused with some gal friends of mine they’ve dated. I’ve seen the normalization of what I view as degenerate sex acts as the treadmill of endlessly-escalating erotic-novelism spins without ceasing. I’ve watched people become more absorbed in their strange autosexual fixations than their spouses. It doesn’t seem good, or healthy, or sustainable, and I resent the contributions the proliferation of online pornography has made to these issues.
At some level I see this like sixties versus modern marijuana, where a more mild herb (or dad’s playboys beneath the mattress) has been supplanted by THC distilled and bottled into vapes (endlessly-available presence of any outlandish fetishistic stuff.) I wouldn’t like my child exposed to either but I can live with one.
Of course, I see it as primarily the parent’s responsibility to inculcate the virtue to disdain both. The state can’t nanny its way out of this one. But it’s always easier to pick a scapegoat that can’t vote (tax the corporations/rich, make the corporations implement age-filtering, etc.) than to tell people to take a hike and learn to parent.
const_cast
You might not be pushing for it, but certainly your fellow conservative Christians are.
The problem with moralistic thinking is that it's stupid and it blows up, and we've known this for hundreds of years. What you view as moral means fuck-all. I don't particularly care if you think something is degenerate, and in fact by using a term like degenerate I respect you less as a person.
So when morals are used as the sole reason to justify law, we have a problem. Morals were used to justify slavery. To justify a lack of suffrage. To justify legal domestic abuse.
What's changed since then? Time. The passage of time. But time does not stop. Where will we be in 10 years, or 20? Progressing forward, ideally, but that's not a guarantee. We're laying the ground work for abuse.
For a large part of the American constituency, anything containing homosexuals is degenerate pornography. Right now. So if "it's pornography" is our justification, we have a problem.
I think we agree that said laws are bad, but why they're bad matters. The wider-scale implication is that moralistic law making is bad. Listening to Christians and having them come up with laws based on their personal beliefs is bad. Appealing to the American purity culture is bad. This is all ripe for abuse.
landl0rd
No, some of them are. More evangelicals than my crowd.
Morality bears directly on what we consider to be a just society, so I don’t care if you don’t care. You’re broadening the scope beyond this particular issue, where I’m guessing I agree with you.
It’s not virtuous to act right because the state makes you, but the question of what we require and preclude is defined by our moral frameworks at some level.
I’m not sure with whom you’re arguing about the homosexuals point. I view a lot of things of degenerate I wouldn’t ban. Most adults I see are fat, thus gluttons, thus are committing a sin. It’s just not particularly my business to meddle in what’s between them and God and Satan. I didn’t suggest we “retvrn to Comstock” or something.
I don’t see how you can ignore the massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men, particularly if you think about the marijuana analogy and how it’s increased in strength and availability. Novel hyperstimuli are a big issue. Just like supernormal stimuli tend to increase obesity and cause metabolic dysfunction.
A ton of lawmaking is moralistic. Eg the way I grew up I think it’s fine for two guys to settle something with a fight provided it’s clean and nobody’s kicking someone when he’s down. A bunch of people with different morals (“all violence is wrong”) told the cops to start arresting people for that sort of thing. I think stealing is wrong and vote to tell the cops to arrest people for that, while others (because of their morality) say that “it’s systemic factors” and turn people loose for sub-$1k or so, or sometimes don’t believe in property rights the same way I do. I don’t believe that income tax is just, nor federally-administered welfare, but a ton of people voted to tell the feds to take money and do just that.
I’m not sure how you can suddenly flip to “moralistic legislation is wrong actually” in such a selective sense just because it’s movitated by Christianity or right-wing ideology for once.
const_cast
> I don’t see how you can ignore the massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men
I ignore it because I've only ever gotten responses of morality. Which, as I've said, I think are stupid.
My point about morality is that it's the same morality that oppresses homosexuals, or previously black people and women. It's not a different morality - it's the same reasoning.
Some thing is immoral because of our beliefs, so we censor it or restrict actions. Throughout history, this has only gone poorly - no exceptions. I have no reason to believe it will work out this time.
You might say, "well it hasn't always gone poorly, what about murder?" Yes, murder has morality argument, but it doesn't only have morality arguments. It has real-world effects. It denies someone of their unalienable rights, mainly by ending their lives.
Pornography only has moral arguments, which is why I reject them.
boroboro4
> massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men
Can you provide any source for this?
ujkhsjkdhf234
I come from a small town and know many conservative Christians. They are pushing for this. Like you said, it is easier to blame external sources than to accept you need to do better as parent.
rstat1
What people do in their private time is none of anyone's business. Period.
Especially the government.
landl0rd
Did something I wrote read like I disagreed with this? What children do in their private time is their parents’ business. What children do can sometimes be the business of the state; there’s tons of precedent for it acting in loco parentis. I just don’t find this to be the best solution.
stego-tech
Alright, you seem receptive to arguments so I'll take a crack at this.
> I don’t approve of or agree with the scope of SCOTUS’ current ruling, nor do I approve of all the age- verification laws as written. It seems futile to attempt to make everybody everywhere do this and create a locked-down “second internet” for minors.
That's not the intent. The intent from the get-go has been to "Baptise" the internet as "God's creation", and to shove out anyone not worthy of God's salvation - as determined by religious leaders. When the initial argument of "the internet is a creation of Satan" didn't work out, the religious leaders in the USA pivoted towards calling it a gift from God and demonizing anyone who "sullied" that gift in their eyes.
> I’ve heard the problems particularly young men addicted to pornography have caused with some gal friends of mine they’ve dated. I’ve seen the normalization of what I view as degenerate sex acts as the treadmill of endlessly-escalating erotic-novelism spins without ceasing. I’ve watched people become more absorbed in their strange autosexual fixations than their spouses. It doesn’t seem good, or healthy, or sustainable, and I resent the contributions the proliferation of online pornography has made to these issues.
Your observations are completely valid. As someone who creates smut (let's just call it what it is), there's a very real problem with people in general getting caught up in fantasies and ignoring reality. However, my observations suggest that pornography is just the convenient scapegoat for a society that constantly markets escapism as entertainment and penalizes anything that doesn't involve spending money. All forms of entertainment have been perverted to maximize chemical responses in humans, in order to sell more stuff. Your beef isn't with pornography so much as it is with the present consumerist hellscape, and a society that demands both spouses work full-time to have a chance at survival rather than balance the needs of the family by allowing every couple to have a spouse stay at home and make the house, if they so choose. Which brings me to your next point...
> At some level I see this like sixties versus modern marijuana, where a more mild herb (or dad’s playboys beneath the mattress) has been supplanted by THC distilled and bottled into vapes (endlessly-available presence of any outlandish fetishistic stuff.) I wouldn’t like my child exposed to either but I can live with one.
That's...man, I want to argue this, but I got nothing. You're basically describing what I did up above, with the proper analogy. As a cannabis user myself, you're entirely correct about the potency and convenient availability being an issue, and I'd absolutely like to see more penalties for physical distribution of these things to minors while also de-glamorizing some of this stuff. Sell the product, not the experience, basically.
> Of course, I see it as primarily the parent’s responsibility to inculcate the virtue to disdain both.
That's where we align - the avowed democratic socialist and the conservative Christian agreeing that, at the end of the day, it's the parent's responsibility to parent, and it's the individual's responsibility to make better choices - including seeking help for problems they're having. Where we may disagree on approach, however (I dunno, this is kinda speculating here based on other CC's I know/lived with/attended Church with), is that I believe the steps towards minimizing or eliminating harms is destigmatizing these things in the first place. It means getting over our societal aversion to SEX, a natural biological thing we've been doing as a species for millennia. It means getting over our disdain for addicts, and offering help.
If these ghouls (passing the laws) actually cared about children, families, or humans in general, they'd be supporting rehabilitation instead of penalizing consenting adults. They'd be penalizing exploitative employers and creating a tax structure that rewards stay-at-home partners while enabling every couple to have one such partner.
That's not what's happening, though, and I resent being denigrated as some sort of sick degenerate by a government that won't even feed its fucking kids.
perihelions
There was a NYT article a couple weeks ago about Chinese morality police doing mass arrests of erotica authors,
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/world/asia/china-boys-lov... ("Chinese Police Detain Dozens of Writers Over Gay Erotic Online Novels") [note article contains large images of erotica novel covers]
But you'd *expect* that of the PRC; the US, wow, has it ever fallen fast and fallen hard.
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useless_eater
[dead]
_Algernon_
Why is it everyone else's responsibility to keep it out of the hands of 10 year olds by being 24/7 surveilled by the government, instead of the parents' responsibility to regulate internet access for their 10-year old?
Not that gay erotica seems that harmful, even for a 10 year old. They probably don't seek it out as much as you thing they do. If they do, it is probably a beneficial step in their development given what they learn about themselves in a safer environment than the probable alternative.
dyauspitr
Because just like the argument with social media in my opinion it’s better to have governmental regulation on these things so millions of households don’t have to have the same argument with their kids and kids not on social media platforms don’t get left out of a significant percentage of teenage life effectively socially stunting them.
useless_eater
[flagged]
olivermuty
With random lawsuits as a sort of offhand censorship of <thing you dont personally like>..??
Its the parents job to curate access to the inernet. I say that as a father of three.
useless_eater
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TimorousBestie
Yes, I believe that ten year olds should only have parent-supervised interactions with the internet.
zeroonetwothree
There’s no evidence any erotica authors are being arrested in the US.
perihelions
But that is US law, as of literally just this week!
> "In fact, under the laws that the Supreme Court just upheld, prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site."
kurthr
I think that's the point of the article. The Supreme Court has Ruled:
"prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines
and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-
explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states,
facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on
my dinky little free WordPress site."xp84
So, while I agree that this feels foreign and wrong to me as someone who has experienced "The Internet" for so long, I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works.
I'm asking this in good faith.
Given that:
1. The Internet is not an optional subscription service today the way it was in 1995. Every kid and adult has 1,000 opportunities to get online including on the multiple devices every one of their peers owns, which a single set of parents has no control over. So "Just keep them off the Internet/control their devices" seems like a silly "Just" instruction.
2. The Internet is nearly infinite. The author of this editorial says "then install a content blocker on your kids’ devices and add my site to it". This is a silly argument since the whole point is that no one has ever heard of him/her and it's obviously impossible for a filter (let's just assume filters can't be bypassed) can "just" enumerate every inappropriate site even if it employed a full-time staff who did nothing but add new sites to the list all day long.
So given all of that, how do we justify how the Internet must operate on different rules than the offline world does? One can't open a "Free adult library" downtown and allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn. I'd have to check IDs and do my best to keep kids out. It also seems like it would be gross to do so. If you agree with that, why should the Internet operate on different rules?
I'd also like to separate the logistics from the morality here. If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! But then the focus should be on finding a good privacy-respecting solution, not just arguing for the status quo.
_Algernon_
The fundamental problem—and it's a big one—is that in the physical world, age verification does not result in a centralized log of when and where I was, and what I did. If I buy cigarettes I show my paper id to some dude and then buy smokes. It's transient with no record (except the fallible memory of the bloke doing the ID check).
This is not true for the proposed age verification schemes for the internet and that is a big problem. Unless this is solved, these schemes deserve every level of resistance we can muster.
kelnos
That's not even universally true, though. I've been to bars where they scan the barcode on my drivers' license. I assume that's more convenient than reading the data off it, so maybe they're just doing it for convenience and aren't storing the data anywhere, but who knows, maybe they are. Maybe there's a database somewhere with a list of name, date, time, location tuples for some of my bar visits from years ago. Creepy.
2OEH8eoCRo0
If we cannot handle age verification then WTF are we doing as an industry? Seriously? Everyone else is able to figure it out! Why are all the genius innovators so powerless to build a working system? They're either stupid or greedy IMO.
_Algernon_
Age verification is easy. Age verification that leaves no record, is anonymous, and not circumvent-able is difficult. In the physical world it relies on the fallibility of human memory. No such luck with replicated databases.
chgs
We can’t do it because our priority as an industry is to get data to monetise. Anonymity is a bug, not a feature.
danaris
...Who is accurately and reliably doing age verification online?
How can you guarantee that the credential you're getting belongs to the actual person on the other side of the screen?
kelnos
Flip it on its head.
An age verification requirement might stop your 12-year-old from accessing a porn site headquartered or hosted in the US, but it will do nothing to keep your kid from finding porn on any of the thousands (tens of thousands? more?) of websites hosted in various other countries who don't care about this sort of thing.
These sites are (or will be, if US-based sites become inaccessible) just as easy to find, and just as hard to block with normal parental-controls style content blocking.
Requiring age verification in the US doesn't solve the problem. It just stifles free speech and turns us even more into a Christian nanny-state. The people pushing these laws don't care about children, in reality. They care about banning pornography in the US, and this is one step on that road.
> If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true!
That's not the issue. The issue is that it's impossible to achieve the stated goal (making it impossible or even hard for children to access adult content), period. Whether or not the age-verification is done in a privacy-preserving manner is irrelevant.
There are two ways to "solve" this problem. One is better parental controls, but this will always be a cat-and-mouse game, and will never be perfect. The other is to accept that your kids will sometimes see things that you don't want them to see. That's how the world has always worked, and will continue to always work. Be there for them to provide context and support when they run across these things by accident and are confused or upset, and punish when they seek it out against the rules and boundaries you've set for them. You know... be a parent, and parent them.
ndriscoll
Are they actually just as hard to block though? e.g. I don't see much reason to allow traffic to any Russian or Chinese IPs for any reason from my network. To be honest a default blacklist to any non-American IP seems like it'd not cause much trouble for my family, and then if there were some educational or FOSS or whatever sites in Europe, those could be whitelisted on a case by case basis.
Similarly the only expected VPN traffic in my network would be inbound to my wire guard server/router. Everything else can be banned by default.
perth
Nitpick: currently in the US, most public libraries do not regulate anyone, of any age, from reading “adult” books.
watwut
They wont allow minors to take out porn. Simply, they wont and it would be illegal for them.
aaronmdjones
I think the point they were making is that a child can walk into a library, pick up any book, and open it. All without any adults being in the loop. They can do that today.
3eb7988a1663
What public libraries have porn?
Or is it the pearl clutching where a novel with a same-sex kiss is smut? What about all of the graphic acts that happen in the Bible?
mindslight
> allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn
As far as I'm aware, online sites generally don't let children wander in either. One of the reasons being they will make a mess of the cabling.
That's obviously in jest, but the point is that physical presence is the entire crux here. When entering a physical space, you do so with a physical body that society has demanded be able to be identified. And age can often be determined without even fully verifying identification, which is why our society has been so accepting of age checks.
The Internet has flourished precisely because of the foundation where one does not need to be identified. In fact one does not even need to be human, nor accessing a digital service the way the publisher intends. Separation of concerns. This has worked for what, 30 years at this point? An entire generation? If parents are still buying their kids hardcore pornography terminals these days, they've got no one to blame but themselves. And no, I do not care that "everybody else is doing it".
Ultimately, the "logistics" cannot be separated from the "morality" - it is a different type of space, and the moral thing to do is engage with it as it is, instead of demanding centralizing authoritarian changes.
These demands are from a narrow contingent of people that could straightforwardly build their own desired environment (the content blocking you've referenced as a straw man, or more accurately kid-friendly content curation), but yet have not done so. Because ultimately these types of calls are never actually about "the kids" but rather a general desire to insert themselves as morality police into everyone's business.
soulofmischief
I urge all American software engineers not just to completely ignore these unconstitutional laws, but to actively create, distribute and maintain technologies which defend Americans' rights to publish obscene filth without government oversight.
chgs
If the Supreme Court agrees they are constitutional then they clearly are constitutional, unless you think the constitution doesn’t apply
tyre
The Supreme Court considered internment camps and segregation constitutional, until it didn’t.
There are also people who disagree with the Supreme Court’s interpretations. Including members of the Supreme Court! Both current (dissents) and not (overturning past rulings.)
soulofmischief
Let's not pretend that the current federal government isn't completely compromised.
65
Tor might be wildly popular in a few years.
spacechild1
That Tennessee law is particularly crazy:
> (a) Pubic hair, vulva, vagina, penis, testicles, anus, or nipple of a human body
Naked bodies do not harm anyone. This is US puritanism at its peek. Glad the author also pointed out the hypocrisy of treating nudity as more obscene than violence.
poly2it
A bit of a rant on the topic of digital supervision and age verification:
Speaking personally, parent supervision was detrimental to my development as a child. I recently reached the liberation of legal adulthood. While my parents are often sweet, their intents did not always have the desired consequences given how they were enforced. Until I was around 15, I didn't have any computer I was able to freely tinker with, which wasn't constantly supervised and constantly logged my every action. I wasn't allowed to touch a shell. This was troublesome for me, because I was a computer science enthusiast, and my parent did not want me to learn about programming. If I had developer tools open, or if it seemed like I was running a script, I would get questions. I was pretty much restricted to using Scratch (which has a fantastic underground community!). Yes, I spent quite a bit of time on my computer. In my defense, I didn't have any friends where I lived. Not that I didn't want any, I had tried, but at this point I was torted by bad experiences. My computer was my safe haven and where I had my friends. I did try to explain this, but my parent wasn't sympathetic. Expecting a joyous and present individual who should be out playing with friends, I was a failure. My parent never understood my need for digital freedom, even as it in hindsight was all I craved. This is the type of scenario I see playing out again every time I am reached by bills/news/opinions like these. If my parent had put half of the energy they use to keep me bound into supporting my personal development and our relation, things could have been very different. Instead, I became very good at avoiding filters, supervision and going unnoticed. It's quite a sore to me. I sympathise deeply with all the children who had a similar upbringing, who are going to suffer under the regulations in development, both in the US and in the EU.
smallmancontrov
"Party of free speech," my ass.
barbazoo
Virtue signalling Christian values, obviously that overrides free speech.
zeroonetwothree
Neither of the two parties is very much in favor of free speech. The left has cancel culture and policing pronouns while the right has blocking books with gay characters and age verification laws.
JoshTriplett
There is a massive difference between other people reacting to your speech and choosing not to associate with you or propagate what you say, and the government banning your speech and prosecuting you for it. You can exercise your freedom of speech, and other people can exercise their freedom of association to want nothing to do with you.
BHSPitMonkey
There are two common definitions of the phrase "free speech" that I think you are conflating:
1. The Constitutional right to free speech under the first amendment (i.e. specifically that the government may not use its authority to limit or punish its peoples' expression of ideas)
2. The vague notion that others should not be able to criticize you for something you've said or written
In this thread we are more concerned with the former. No one on the left is trying to enact laws to punish anyone's impolite use of pronouns. At worst, maybe someone has asked you to be considerate in some non-official setting (which has little to do with the first amendment).
eesmith
I've noticed that cancel culture and policing pronouns is far stronger on the right. What Democrat has been canceled as much as Liz Cheney by Republicans? Certainly not the sex pest Andrew Cuomo, heartily supported by the Democratic Party leadership.
What Democratic president has issued an executive order anywhere equivalent to Trump's order requiring pronouns match the gender "at conception", and the anti-scientific claim that gender is a male-female binary?
The right also wants to block books which have nothing to do with gay characters, including “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, “Maus”, “The Handmaid's Tale“, “Of Mice and Men“ and “Brave New World”.
archagon
“Cancel culture” is not government policy (and never was).
const_cast
Cancel Culture is actually just the free market, the invisible hand, at work.
What is a boycott but cancel culture? The idea of the free market is that good behaviors and products emerge because consumers "vote" with their wallet. If a company has bad values I don't support then I don't shop there. Enough people do that and the company collapses. So, what remains is an economy where every company acts virtuously.
Theoretically. Then enters propaganda and the GOP. They tell you this invisible hand is bad, and companies should be able to do anything. At a glance this appears to be free speech, but it's not - it's the exact opposite.
You see, they can say anything they want, but we can't. We may not criticize them. Our opinions are not valid, they're "Cancel Culture".
istjohn
No, but it is endemic to American colleges and universities which are government or government-funded institutions.
Furthermore, spend a little time on BlueSky and you will find huge support for the hate speech laws found in other countries.
Finally, the distinction between government regulation of speech and private regulation of speech is key in the court of law, but it is almost irrelevant from the point of view of a philosophy that values open inquiry, debate, and dissent as indispensible to human dignity and progress.
YetAnotherNick
Except it was. It was the government who ordered Twitter to ban or shadowban people like Prof. Jay Bhattacharya.
gchamonlive
Free speech for me, not for thee
istjohn
I worry that young people across the political spectrum increasingly no longer see free speech as a foundational value. Both sides pay lip service and deploy it strategically but are quick to sacrifice it when it conflicts with other values and goals.
The ACLU won our expansive free speech protections defending the KKK in the 1950s. But today, the ACLU has become short-sighted. They are more concerned with social progressivism than the liberal foundations of our democracy which allow social progressives to continue fighting. Young progressives are happy to sacrifice free speech protections to prevent hate speech.
On the other hand, social conservatives have always been eager to curtail speech they consider obscene or liscentious, and now Trump is using executive powers to punish protesters, creating an authoritarian atmosphere unlike anything we've experienced since perhaps the McCarthy era.
There are organisations like FIRE and EFF that give me some hope, but it increasingly feels like all sides would rather cement themselves in power than continue the infinite game of liberal democracy.
ttul
The GOP under Trump has considerably changed from the GOP under Bush. There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives. Perhaps a shift might be coming with the next economic downturn, which seems inevitable given the risk-off investment climate across most industries stemming from Trump’s erratic, unpredictable trade and economic policy. Things don’t look bad just yet, but it takes a while for the full impact of such enormous changes in sentiment to ripple down through the entire economy.
yardie
Reagan and Bush were constrained by much more liberal supreme court justices of the previous era. The current Supreme Court justices were clerks and lawyers during Reagan and Bush presidency. If Reagan and Bush had the current justices in their bench I can almost guarantee they’d be pulling the same stunts.
zeroonetwothree
Bush wasn’t exactly a steward of free speech
TimorousBestie
> There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives.
There is, they just don’t like it for aesthetic and/or historical reasons.
The faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush.
If the centrists and moderate conservatives could make common cause, they would easily shut out both the far left and far right wings of American politics. The demographics are there.
I think the main wedge preventing this unification is still abortion, and to a lesser extent LGBTQ rights. But it’s so weird to see two political factions that agree on 90% of policy get shellacked and overruled by their respective extreme wings. Real tail wagging the dog stuff.
tyre
> it’s so weird to see two political factions that agree on 90% of policy get shellacked and overruled by their respective extreme wings
These parties have primaries and Republicans are choosing—by a majority—the crazies over the “traditional” wing. They aren’t extremists. They are the party views.
toyg
> There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives
That's funny, considering Bush II effectively established the coalition of business interests, religious zealots, and neofascist militias, which then expanded to be the backbone of Trump's support. Cautionary tale about consequences of one's political choices? I wish.
tomrod
Libertarian and Democratic parties ought to feel right at home for any refugees from the GOP who have conservative principles. Democratic party is right of center.
All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID?
If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should), there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18 without sending picture of your ID off to random 3rd parties, or giving actual personal details. I don’t want to give this data, and websites shouldn’t want to shoulder the responsibility for it.
It seems like this could work much like Apple Pay, just without the payment. A prompt comes up, I use some biometric authentication on my phone, and it sends a signal to the browser that I’m 18+. Apple has been adding state IDs into the Wallet, this seems like it could fall right in line. The same thing could be used for buying alcohol at U-Scan checkout.
People should also be able to set their browser/computer to auto-send this for single-user devices, where it is all transparent to the user. I don’t have kids and no one else’s uses my devices. Why should I need to jump through hoops?