[flagged]
Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online
91–100 of 1001 posts
Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online
#92"Party of free speech," my ass.
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.
Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online
#93> The public library in rural Donnelly, Idaho, at only 1,024 square feet, had no practical way to create an enforceable “adults only” section and no budget to defend against lawsuits. Therefore, to comply with the law, they decided to make the entire library for adults only. The library has banned minors from entering the library (even to use the bathroom) unless they are accompanied by an adult, or holding a waiver…
The Republican party has worked to kill public libraries and public education for years, so this fits right in line.
Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online
#94There 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.
[flagged]
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."
Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent a lot of time after school in the library to avoid my abusive cult guardians at home. If this avenue hadn't been available to me in my small town, I'd likely have committed suicide. But, I'm an atheist, so me committing suicide would probably be seen as a win for these evangelical freaks.
Yeah, me too. It’s very chilling to see the resurgence of a very broad conception of parental rights, which can in some cases permit the wholesale physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children without recourse. It’s hard to talk about it without being accused of hyperbole, but some of these proposed laws come very close to making children the property of their parents. As someone who grew up in an abusive househo…
I've talked to enough people who explicitly believe that children are chattel (sometimes in the same breath as complaining about abuse they suffered from their own parents) to know this isn't hyperbole.
Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online
#96All 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…
> 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.
But there won't be.
Because the ultimate purpose of laws like this isn't really to prevent minors from accessing porn. Ultimately, it's to
1) outlaw porn for everyone, because it's "sinful", and
2) outlaw discussions and depictions of queer—and more specifically, nowadays, especially trans—issues, because according to them, anything queer is automatically pornographic, no matter how tame the actual content is.
Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online
#97So, 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…
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 i…
[flagged]
Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online
#98All 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…
Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device. I run a pi-hole that blocks ads and porn, but that’s way beyond the technical capability of probably 95% of people. There are some commercial products but they are expensive and also take time and at least a little tech ability to set up. … and of course…
> but that’s way beyond the technical capability of probably 95% of people.
It really isn’t, and even if it were an ISP could offer it. Indeed I believe most ISPs do (I chose one which is unfiltered, I do my own filtering at a router and dns level, the biggest threat is DoH)
Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online
#99> 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 the…
Judges are not the people that prosecute crimes
True, but it's a given that prosecutors will do it since that's their job.
Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online
#100A bit off base. He's basically having a meltdown over what's actually a pretty narrow ruling about age verification. First, he claims the Court "nullified the First Amendment" for sex writing, but that's just not what happened. The Court explicitly said adults still have the right to access this stuff—they just need to show ID first, like buying beer. That's not "nullification." Second, Ellsberg acts like any sex sce…
Dismissing this as a “meltdown” ignores the real First Amendment stakes. Requiring ID to access legal adult content isn’t like buying alcohol. It introduces surveillance and self-censorship, especially with vague thresholds like “one-third explicit” or “harmful to minors.” That legal ambiguity alone forces smaller publishers to self-censor to avoid risk. Unlike alcohol, speech is a constitutionally protected right, n…
The "chilling effect" argument here is pretty weak. You're basically saying that because some small publishers might get confused about legal requirements, the whole system is unconstitutional. That's not how First Amendment analysis works. Courts don't strike down laws just because some people might overreact to them.
If this really created such massive chilling effects, we'd see data showing widespread site shutdowns or self-censorship. (Checks pornhub). Instead, we mostly see compliance.