Live data from Hacker News

Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

ellsberg.substack.com

231–240 of 1001 posts

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#231

> 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 lo…

What people do in their private time is none of anyone's business. Period.

Especially the government.

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#232

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…

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.

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#233

"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.

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).

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#234

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…

kissing is obscene :)

In many cultures, it is. Especially kissing in the public.

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it was. It was the government who ordered Twitter to ban or shadowban people like Prof. Jay Bhattacharya.

The government had no capacity to “order” Twitter to do this, in stark contrast to this law.

And yet they did, and twitter did comply.

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#236

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…

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.

In the legal sense, a judge would.

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do booze shops in the US store peoples id's after they've flashed them (pun intended)?

In some states stores are required to scan IDs. I'd be surprised if e.g. Kroger weren't storing that information. All of these porn laws I've read at least ban any storage. As far as I know digital ID standards are also at least designed to allow only sharing "over18" without other identifying information.

Kroger is most definitely storing this information. I rarely shop any Kroger store, but when they started doing IDs scans, I shop there less and no longer buy anything that requires my ID.

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#238
post #149

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 th…

[flagged]

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.

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#239
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ri…

> 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.

> These parties have primaries and Republicans are choosing—by a majority—the crazies over the “traditional” wing.

Elections are by and large not contests of policy, and I think it’s likely that most American voters (across the spectrum, not just the GOP) aren’t voting in their own self-interest anymore.

Re: Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

#240
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

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].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457390

Post reply on HN