Summary
The Supreme Court’s hearing of Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton signals potential limits on First Amendment protections for online pornography.
The case involves a Texas law mandating age verification for websites with “sexual material harmful to minors,” challenging the 2004 Ashcroft v. ACLU precedent, which struck down similar laws under strict scrutiny.
Justices, citing the inadequacy of modern filtering tools, seemed inclined to weaken free speech protections, exploring standards like intermediate scrutiny.
The ruling could reshape online speech regulations, leaving adults’ access to sexual content uncertain while tightening restrictions for minors.
My earliest memories of the internet was boobs, and then later a helicopter decapitation.
It’s kind of annoying that so many id restrictions focus on porn. Maybe it’s not normal for today’s kids/teens to come across violent content, compared to people that mightve come across rotten, faces, 4chan, etc. back then.
Don’t even act like the SCOTUS upholds the Constitution, they uphold the christian bible now. So unamerican.
The constitution is just the imperial bible.
there’s still porn on usenet.
This is why we gotta ban TikTok!!! \s
Seriously tho I can’t believe the dummies who buy into this authoritarian garbage.
SCOTUS working hard to install Taliban 2.0
Well, here we go. Hold onto your butts, this shit is going to get wild.
it’s so shocking that the right-wing’s commitment to free speech was entirely performative and predicated on no principle whatsoever
Yes… Shocking… I am shocked
Coincidentally, I just rewatched this the other night (for like the thousandth time). I feel like it gets more and more poignant (and TLJ’s acting impresses me more) as I get older…
And it does kind of apply here. In the film, Jones’ character is just at a loss as to “who the hell these people are” after witnessing their apparently nihilistic and seemingly random murder spree.
I feel that in my bones now. Who the fuck are these psychopaths?
You mean like genocide joe banning TikTok?
it’s adorable how you think Joe Biden isn’t right-wing lol
Democrats are just reasonable conservatives, Republicans are just fascist conservatives. All conservatives, still all dogshit, still all love genocide and imperialism.
We’re going to see a lot more of these challenges to SCOTUS precedent in the coming years. The Dobbs decision was them stating loud and clear that they will find any excuse to justify their prefud8ced decisions.
Ain’t the point of a right that it’s protected from the government?
That’s why it goes through the courts
… so your “rights” can be legally invalidated.
Or upheld
Without interpretation there’s no one to say
Noooo haha we we can’t fix your real problems that you want us to fix because of how we think some witch hunter in the 1600s relates to the constitution, and politics is just hard and moves slow :(
Anyway, here, we shitcanned the constitution for something pretty much nobody asked for and won’t actually fix anything. Enjoy <3
You gotta be a really profoundly uncomfortable, nervous human being to think of sex as bad.
What an absolute sign of weakness.
You don’t have to think sex is bad to think porn is bad for children and teens.
This Texas law and others like it are bullshit, but making strawman arguments about them isn’t helping anything.
Or, and hear me out on this one, you’re a member of a group, like various other groups, that want to control every aspect of human lives, including sex, to bind them to our little group forever so we can control them even more?
You gotta be a really profoundly uncomfortable, nervous human being
That’s an interesting way to say “religious”.
Project2025 and it’s evangelical backers are a major driver of this prudishness.
It’s fringe fanatical Catholics on the Supreme Court who are driving this. Maybe they couldn’t find enough fundies who knew how to read.
They’re godsdamned freaks is what they are. Their religion says sex is disgusting and evil. Mine says it’s holy and pleasure is sacred. But neither of us should get to decide the law based on what gods we got. I know that. Jewish Americans know that. Hindu Americans know that. Muslim Americans know it too. And I ain’t seen Buddhists trying to ban alcohol in any city in America, nor shinto folks trying to divert public school money to preaching about amaterasu. Turns out it’s just the Christians round here who don’t get that when your religion says you can’t do something it means you don’t get to do it, but the rest of us are more than free to.
I’m calling it right now. They use this as first amendment cover for TikTok.
Kids are gonna start finding porn the old-fashioned way: randomly coming across discarded magazines at the park. That was my first experience.
Good luck finding a magazine anywhere any more. I assume they can still find it online from random small websites, like in the old days.
I was kind of just pointing out that a lot of kids don’t go out looking for porn. Porn somehow just shows up because adults are irresponsible.
Or torrents… It would be funny if this just ended up teaching new generations how to torrent.
“Woods” or “Field” porn was surprising common. I was honestly surprised to hear that was so many of my friends (and my) introduction to porn.
Most people don’t realize that porn reproduces naturally in the wild if given the proper habitat, etc.
Guess that’s one way to get kids outside these days. Just scater some porn mag pages in the woods, modern-day scavenger hunt.
Do kids even go wandering through the woods anymore, seems like all that land is housing developments now?
If we’re banning content harmful to children why dont we start with Capitalist propoganda and religious indoctrination :3
And those brain washing shows on YouTube
*rotting
Both are accurate
Notice how we’re already asking past the sale with the tacit labeling of “sexual material harmful to minors,” with the presupposed declaration that sexual material is automatically harmful to minors.
The all-consuming mission to look at boobies is essentially universal for all pubescent boys from about 12 all the way to the age of majority. This is well known, and none of us came off any the worse despite widespread availability of older brothers’ back issues of Hustler, Usenet, dial-up BBS systems, and ultimately the world wide web.
If teens weren’t naturally interested in sex where wouldn’t been all them teenage pregnancies. Q.E.D.
The all-consuming mission to look at boobies is essentially universal for all pubescent boys from about 12 all the way to the age of majority.
Not true. Some boys also want to look at dicks.
And some genuinely could care less about looking at either.
And some girls want to look at boobies, too.
This is an excellent observation.
We now no longer have the debate over whether or not this content is necessarily harmful to minors. It’s now automatically bad, and the new framing is: shouldn’t we ban bad things?
Should expect more of this kind of newspeak/doublespeak as the Trump years continue.
Because there’s an underlying implication that allowing teenagers to seek out sexual content on their own is the same as an adult presenting it to them. They want you to feel like they’ll call you a pedo if you disagree with their framing
Just saying, the shit you can find on the Internet does not come even close to what Hustler was. There is instant access to all kinds of weird and fucked fetish shit that just wasn’t accessible in the 90s and earlier.
Bizarre fetish shit was very much available in the 90s and earlier. It just wasn’t in hustler or playboy.
There’s a vid on archive.org of the Spice Channel that must have been off someone’s VHS tape. It flickers a lot and is barely watchable, but I was curious what we were all missing back then.
Turns out, way more softcore than I was expecting. Slightly more hardcore than Skinamax at the time, but not by much.
How else they going to keep up viewership if you aren’t edging for hours?
